Social Architecture: Building On-line Communities

by Pieter Hintjens

This book is an all-in-one primer for anyone aiming to build on-line communities. It covers the theory of Social Architecture, and the tools you need to build a community. It explains the ZeroMQ community in detail, including its collaboration process (C4). This is a powerful book for anyone building an Open Source community, or an on-line community in other areas.

Genres: Leadership, Philosophy, Business, Psychology, Unfinished, Nonfiction, Software

138 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2016

About the author

a software developer and past president of the Foundation for a Free Information Infrastructure (FFII), an association that fights against software patents. In 2007, he was nominated one of the "50 most influential people in IP" by Managing Intellectual Property magazine.

Reviews

[Luca · Rating 5 out of 5]

Underlined a lot of sentences which I consider a very good sign (I'm lazy, I don't do that as often as the quality of the book I'm reading would require).

Love the tone, the brutal honesty and the refreshing view on such an interesting emerging topic. Must read for those interested in community building.

[Sergey Shishkin · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book provoked me to review my stance on OSS licenses and different trade offs when the sheer number of contributors is the goal of the project. Unfortunately the book didn't cover the most interesting (for me) question of collective decision making.

[Siarhei · Rating 3 out of 5]

First third of the book is good. Pieter explains some ideas of how to make a community grow, how to make is stable. The basic principles. Closer to the half the book is mostly a description of ZeroMQ community and process. The only true and "right" process according to the author. Too much time is dedicated to the trademark, copyright and licensing. Am I reading a legal book or a community building book? If I'd want to choose a proper license I'll read another, about licenses, not about communities. Why is this information here?

[Bjoern Rochel · Rating 4 out of 5]

The central ideas behind the Collective Code Construction Contract (C4) and ownership resonate quite well with me and I'm tempted to try them out in the future. I also learned quite a bit about Software licenses while reading the book.

[Kathrin Passig · Rating 4 out of 5]

Ich habe aus Faulheit die Kindle-Ausgabe eingetragen, tatsächlich kann man das Buch aber gratis hier lesen: https://www.gitbook.com/@hintjens

[Dimitrios Zorbas · Rating 5 out of 5]

There's so much wisdom in this book, I wish I'd read it earlier.

[Jindřich Mynarz · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book is about building online communities that do useful work. Although some of its lessons seem eccentric, such as the extreme optimistic merging, the book made me want to try working in a community that follows the lessons. What I read between the lines were echoes of Why Greatness Cannot Be Planned: The Myth of the Objective and Algorithms to Live By: The Computer Science of Human Decisions, which I take as a good sign.

[Ben Blaine]

Immensely useful read for someone like me who is working on building communities of software developers. I read slowly and highlighted this book like 10 times (because my Kindle kept dropping the highlights 🤣)

But I’m super glad I did.

The depth of man’s experience with both the technical and psychological aspects of open source community building make this a killer title IMO.

Sad to hear he has passed on 😢

[Claudiu Lodromanean · Rating 4 out of 5]

Very interesting book. It's more about building on-line communities around open source software development than it is about building on-line communities in general, but there are a lot of good ideas that work for all situations.

Hintjens provides a good framework for sustainable open source software communities. Highly recommend.

[Jared Davis · Rating 3 out of 5]

Not the best piece of social science, not the worst either. Granted, Hintjens was a computer scientist. Good guidelines for OSS communities. Too bad he didn't have enough time to do a more thorough monograph. Hintjens did a fine job with the time he had left, and, more importantly, was an significant practioner in building open communities online.

[Ruslan Diachenko · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book is a great guide for learning how to build and manage open-source communities. It offers a structured framework, accompanied by explanatory notes for each step, making it easier to understand and implement.

On a side note, I've never thought about using GPL license, this book explains why you should consider doing this.

[Julian Stecklina · Rating 4 out of 5]

I don't agree with everything in this book but there is a lot of food for thought on how to organize work, especially in free software projects. Minus one star for the Ayn Randian free market worship that fills the end of the book.

[Baldur · Rating 5 out of 5]

Great book mainly about building online communities to build open software project together.

Pieter shares his experience on what licence should be used and what conditions help to form a great community.

Same rules for everyone, make it easy to join, presume people want to do good thing, always solve the problem in minimal way, don't architect for problems you don't have right now. Promote community members to maintainers.

Try to build living, distributed systems.

[Simon Griffiths · Rating 4 out of 5]

Some great ideas on building open-source software communities and a lot of this could be applied to closed-source and enterprises too, recommended!

[Set · Rating 4 out of 5]

Neat, instructive well put. Centred around developer-communities, but still valuable for any type of community management.

[Igor · Rating 5 out of 5]

A big picture theory of open source projects. Great book from a great man.