CC'ing the MyPaint mailing list. On 2 December 2011 19:56, Morgan Daley <dal...@allegheny.edu> wrote: > My name is Morgan Daley, I am a college student at Allegheny College, in the > United States. For one of my classes the professor has asked that we find > leaders on a creative commons project, and ask them some questions about > what they are doing. While looking around for a project that interested me > I came across the My Paint project, and found out about your part in the > project. If you don't mind I would like to ask you these questions:
Hi Morgan, I'm more than glad to answer your questions. I like thinking and talking about these things. Do note that I am not "the" leader of the MyPaint project, and I have not actively focused on being a leader in the project. But as a person who has been around in the project and similar projects for some time, maybe I have some insights to share still. I have CC'ed the MyPaint mailing list so that others may respond as well. > As an organization gets larger there can be a tendency for the “institution” > to dampen the “inspiration.” How do you keep this from happening? As a open project in the creative field (digital painting/drawing), we are blessed with a lot of creative inflow. Artists using the software we make often like to share their art on sites like DeviantArt and the fact that they used MyPaint to create it. See http://mypaint.deviantart.com/ for example. Some come to us directly, telling us how they use the software in their workflows and with ideas on how the software can be improved, or share techniques with other artists. This is very inspirational for the people involved in the project. I find that the challenge in many open source projects is not that there is not enough inspiration, it is that there is not enough manpower to act on this inspiration and take the idea somewhere. This can be very demotivating: After all, what good is a high inflow of ideas if you can't do anything with them? > What advice would you give someone going into a leadership position for the > first time? First and foremost have a strong and clear vision, and communicate this clearly and consistently. You want to attract people who share the same vision, or visions that are aligned, and also to attract as few people as possible who have incompatible visions. From this you can work to set goals for how to achieve that vision, preferably in such a way that it is easy to determine whether you are progressing towards them or not. If you want to be a leader, I think that it is first when you have these things 'down' that you should start worrying about doing the 'actual work'. Knowing how to achieve X is meaningless if you don't know what X should be. Don't waste your and others time chasing the wrong things. > How do you encourage creative thinking within your organization? In the environment we have I think the most important is simply to not discourage creative thinking. This is harder than it may sound as a leader, as it often means refraining from trying to get things 'your way'. Especially in volunteer projects, people derive their motivation largely from being able to work towards goals that they think are worthy in _their way_*. If you take that from them, there is a high risk that you take away most of the motivation. And then everyone loses. * This of course is the same for yourself, which is the reason it is so hard to let go of it. > Do you set aside specific times to cast vision to your employees and other > leaders? Hehe, no, very few things happen at specific times in a small open source project like MyPaint: Everyone is a volunteer, so there are no employees. This means that people work when they find the time to do so, in between their work/studies, family and friends. Some only contribute once or twice, some only a couple of times throughout the year, and some spend many hours a week at times. The vision is perhaps cast mostly through the collective of day-to-day actions, discussions and decisions. For those who are closely involved with the project, this typically works well enough, as they are present in most of these interactions. However, for those that are less involved it often does not. They might only have observed a few interactions, and thus fail to see the bigger picture*. To address that, Martin wrote up the goals on our website: http://mypaint.intilinux.com/?page_id=56, and we point people to that regularly. * The vast majority of decision happen in public forums, through mailing lists and IRC chat. But of course many who have an interest in the project do not follow these actively. > Can you explain the impact, if any, that social networking and Web 2.0 has > made on your organization or you personally? Hmm. I don't see how it has made a big impact on MyPaint. But then again, we have not tried to leverage it much either. And as an open source project, we have already had the main trait that people associate with "social networking and web 2.0" for a while: direct and informal interactions between core people in the organization/project and its consumers/users. So maybe we were there already? > Thank you for your help with this project. You are welcome. If you write a paper, do a presentation, or blog about it, I'd love to read/see it! -- Jon Nordby - www.jonnor.com _______________________________________________ Mypaint-discuss mailing list Mypaint-discuss@gna.org https://mail.gna.org/listinfo/mypaint-discuss
