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My sense is that the creative conception phase of a project (and subsequent definitional shaping) is most weakened by remote collab. Most open source work is about execution, maintenance, incremental improvement—which can more easily happen remotely.

The creative conception in OSS often happens solo, or in a small tight-knit group, prior to the apparent “main” lifetime of the project.

Balaji Srinivasan

@balajis

Is that true, or is it that open source projects tend to be CLI-driven...and so what you're creatively collaborating on is text vs images, and so that's easier to work on remotely? If can identify the active ingredient here, that might help with "remoting" existing cos.

I’m sure there are exceptions, but it’s hard for me to think of examples of OSS where significant creative conception is being done with many people remotely. Even in crypto, the conceptual work is often driven by solo individuals and coworking meetups.

Your question about text vs images is a good one. My instinct is that it’s more about creative-vs-execution than medium: highly creative co-authoring of prose *also* sucks to do remotely.

Balaji Srinivasan

@balajis

Why is there more creative work for a tech company than an open source project, though? A big project like Django or Ethereum is as complex as a tech company. Maybe it's because the customers are the creators, so there is less market research, no sales process, etc? Hm.

8:43 PM · Sep 10, 2020TweetDeck

Replying to

@balajis

Good question. May just be survivorship bias: you are aware of OSS which achieved product–market fit and growth via its conception—but most OSS dies silently, not useful enough to attract growth. Tech companies are noisier, can use $ to leverage creative collab during conception.

Replying to

and

Or to put it another way: Django isn’t analogous to a startup (anymore)—it’s closer to something like Intuit maintaining and supporting Mint.

@mikeydoubled