Hi all! Let me get the introductions out of the way first…My name is Victor Palau and I am a Release Manager at the Symbian Foundation.

I was living in India when I got the chance to stay at a small Coffee and Tea plantation in Koppa (in Karnataka). The plantation was owned by my friend’s family, and we thought it would be a good weekend break. Although it sounds quite grand, the plantation was a nice medium size house with a mountain attached to it. We toured the site with my friends grandfather, and for the first time I saw why open source works.

When one plus one is greater than two…

It turns out that the plantation, as many in the region, is too small to roast their own grains so they sell them along to big coffee companies. As coffee is a global market, they soon realised that their main competitors weren’t their plantation neighbours in India, but huge coffee exporters from other countries such as Brazil.

They decided to build a community as a way to fight back. They started by sharing tips on how to make the local land more productive and what techniques worked better, and helping each other by sharing specialised and expensive machinery. They have been successfully running the coffee open community for years.

So why does it work?  The coffee farmers of Koppa have identified a way to collaborate and solve a common problem that they could not solve individually, very much like an open source project. The Symbian platform has the potential to address challenges that the whole community is facing, while still providing room for product differentiation.

Accessing Innovation

The Plantation owners also agreed with a local university to start running research projects in their lands with the condition that the results would be shared with the whole community. Hence, they accessed as a community the innovation that they couldn’t afford on their own. Innovation is hard to predict and nurture and open communities provide a better way to access it, even when it does not happen within your company.

Being open is hard!

However, it is not as simple as it sounds. Creating an open community (whether it is about coffee or software) relies on trust.  Everyone at some point asks themselves these questions:

• If I am to share my innovation, can I rely on the rest of the community sharing theirs? will they keep their commitments?
• Will people criticise my ideas? what will they think of my work?

Clearly the issue of trust becomes more important for virtual communities such as open source projects. Game Theory advocates that transactions where communications are limited and the option of deflecting from a collaboration would bring bigger rewards than collaboration, people will deflect.  However, it is also argued that repeated interaction and dealings with a group of people reduce the risk of each collaboration (see iterated prisoner’s dilemma discussions).

Unfortunately, there is no easy answer to placate these concerns , communities are as good as the trust between their members. It is our job in the Symbian Foundation to foster the growth of these relationships.

And finally…

I’ve tried to list in this post  a few reasons on why open source community works and what are some of the hurdles along the way. However, there is only a way to convinced yourselves of the power of open source… get involved in a community. We are open for contributions!