Social ArchitecturePieter Hintjens
Social Architecture
by Pieter Hintjens · first published 2016
24mentions
8recommended by
16HN commenters
2016–2021first – last mentioned
50% recommend44% neutral6% critical
Why HN recommends it
Focuses on building the community first, with code as a side effect, and on how power and governance shape open source projects. Cited as practical guidance for maintainers and aspiring OSS developers.
Summarised by Claude from recommending comments
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I felt this way as well (since the mid nineties) until a couple of weeks ago when I read _Social Architecture_ by Pieter Hintjens. It has a strong idealogical flavour. He stresses that you should focus on building a community, with the code and platform as happy side-effects of that community. For that reason,…
on “Minoca OS: A new open source operating system” ↗…way the power is shared and the shape of community structure is huge factor often neglected by tech-only focused maintainers/owners. There is a good piece of wisdom on social aspect of open-source in Social Architecture by Pieter Hintjens[0]. I recommend learning about his pov to anyone interested in open-source open-projects. [0] https://www.gitbook.com/book/hintjens/social-architecture/de...
on “Give away your code, but never your time” ↗…Consortium, with the primary intent to see how it worked first hand. Sadly, it didn't. Even more sadly, I still have little clue what could work, what to advocate. I am inspired by Pieter Hintjens' Social Architecture as model for successful OSS: http://hintjens.com/books But have yet to practice it myself. -- Sorry, I always conflate ideas. My end goal is to figure out how to make useful, meaningful software while…
on “Distributism” ↗This reminds me of some parts of Pieter Hintjens' book Social Architecture. He advocates that open source projects practice "optimistic merging" where essentially any patch that is well-formed should be accepted, without value judgement (though they may be reverted later). He…
on “Permissionless innovation” ↗I'm a big fan of Social Architecture by Pieter Hintjens, and it's explanation for why he picked GPL instead a BSD license. BSD tends to fracture the community, and the community is generally even more important than the code, per se.
on “My Personal Journey from MIT to GPL” ↗For the future, I would totally read Social Architecture. It's available here for free (libre and gratis), and is not long, 100 pages or so printed. https://hintjens.gitbooks.io/social-architecture/content/ A huge part of that is how to structure an open…
on “Ask HN: My company wants my side project. What can I do?” ↗The direct explanation is at http://hintjens.com/blog:117#toc47 but you should read the whole post. Or even better the book Social Architecture.
on “Owncloud has been forked into Nextcloud” ↗…effectiveness of state legislators, how the misc rules impact the games they play. Learning how wikipedia does things, for better or worse, is on my todo list. I'm hoping there's works like Peter Hintjens' Social Architecture for wikis. http://hintjens.com/books
on “An empirical study of obsolete answers on Stack Overflow [pdf]” ↗Belated reply, apologies. I read Social Architecture (after my Kuali experience). It's very good. In my head, it sits alongside Clay Shirky (eg Here Comes Everyone). Whenever questions like "how do I make money working on open source?" and "which license…
on “What to do once you admit that decentralization never seems to work (2018)” ↗…the good, e.g. toleration of off-topic / inappropriate content, deters helpful contributors from returning, while encouraging more detrimental contributions). I would recommend reading Peter Hintjen's "Social Architecture"[1]. He addresses a question worded exactly the same as yours. He built a more narrowly scoped community as an integral part of building the ZeroMQ messaging library and tools, and ensuring that it was…
on “Ask HN: How are online communities established?” ↗…little these days considering how great many of his speeches and essays are. To me, he's the epistemic authority on developing software collaboratively and following his principles has aided my career. "Social Architecture" should be read by any aspiring open source developer.
on “Steps Towards Happiness (2015)” ↗Pieter Hintjens makes a similar argument in Social Architecture, describing ZeroMQ's community guidelines: > All patches are owned by their authors. There SHALL NOT be any copyright assignment process. > Here we come to the key reason people trust their investments…
on “Don’t sign a CLA” ↗…exercising. Something like "I just lie down until the feeling goes away." Happily, I'm not that bleak.) -- When I am feeling optimistic, I imagine a future where we adopt a hybrid of Pieter Hintjens' Social Architecture and Michael Bryzek's Test in Production. https://legacy.gitbook.com/book/hintjens/social-architecture... https://qconsf.com/sf2017/sf2017/presentation/testing-produc... TL;DR: Accept all PRs, radically…
on “Modern Code Review: A Case Study at Google [pdf]” ↗I'm reading Pieter Hintjens "Social Architecture" at the moment, and there he warns exactly about what just happened to Elasticsearch.
on “Amazon Has Gone from Neutral Platform to Cutthroat Competitor: Open Source Devs” ↗…economics of its use, the sociology of its users, and the entirety of what Austrian economists call “praxeology”, the science of purposeful human behavior in its widest scope. Also see Pieter Hintjens' book _Social Architecture_[1]. This is a sensitive issue, because it comes down to the question of who is at the top of the hierarchy, and it's part of human nature to be highly sensitive to our relative position within a given…
on “Hard and Soft Skills in Tech” ↗