A self-described mediocre student in the Berkely Computer Science department, Brian Behlendorf was fascinated by the pre-Web Internet and an active member of various communities online. At 21, Brian found himself reading the HTTP working group boards where Sir Tim Berners-Lee and a young student named Marc Andressen were arguing over standards. Very quickly Brian realized he was learning more about computer science from his online communities than at school. He began to make his own suggestions and learned that he had joined a highly meritocratic community built around the power of peer review (or flaming) as opposed to credentials.

Brian regaled us with stories from two decades as a founding member and active participant of the open source community. As a Unix Sherpa for Wired Magazine, he found himself spending time writing patches the web server software that the NCSA had created. This lead to what he calls his role “co-birthing” Apache among the most important open software products ever created and widely used throughtout the world. Apache first resided on a Unix box at Wired that Brian owned. He named the product in honor of the Native American Tribe and others later pointed out that the unintentional pun given the community’s emphasis on patches.

After 20 years and countless projects, Brian has developed a cogent theory about how Open Source communities begin, grow, and achieve what he calls “steady state” — a maturity in which enough users of a given piece of software contribute back the improvements required by that same software’s broader community of users. Sensitive to the political dynamics of these individual communities, Brian articluated the community manager’s role as engineer, traffic controller, curator, and, very occasionally, judge and jury. In particular, we reviewed the case of the Direct Project, a medical record messaging standard that he championed during his tenure at the Department of Health and Human Services. He estimated that perhaps as few as 40 contributors and 15 core programmers contributed code to this project. But the email community that formed around the software numbered 1500 and today this standard is being embraced by many providers around the country that can more easily share medical records.

Those of us working on evolving institutional models to be more open have much to learn from the open source movement. At the GovLab, we want to research how the cultural, procedural, and community processes that form organically to support these efforts can be transported into non-technical modes of collaboration. Brian and his colleagues have an important role in distiling and translating what has made open source so successful and sustainable. Sometimes the engineering community’s broad ability to create and scale technological solutions distracts us from studying the emerging new organizational dynamics that have helped drive so much innovation. Engaging experts of Brian’s caliber allows the GovLab to glean insights and adopt methodologies that better address the challenges we face across the public sector.