“Most developers are itching to be a part of their favorite projects. You do not scale, but by giving developers tools and getting out of their way, your project can. So please remember that when issues are reported on your open source project, you should not fix them. I hope this serves you well and would love to hear about your experiences and help any way I can.”
By Wesley Beary in “Less is More published Nov 27, 2011. Hat tip Jake Dahn.

A leader will always lead by being prepared to do the work themselves, but I’m really feeling what @geemus wrote.

It is in the ethos of the WordPress community, and the company, my former employer, Matt Mullenweg formed to support it. Here is my favorite part of the Automattic Creed:

“I will never pass up an opportunity to help out a colleague, and I’ll remember the days before I knew everything.”

I’m excited by the help I’m receiving from my new colleagues at Piston Cloud and the OpenStack community.

Pistoneers are kindred spirits of Automatticians. Before joining the Piston Cloud team I noted automation being a regular theme on “Our Team“.

“In conjunction with his self-professed affinity for sharing source code, John Carmack has open-sourced most of the major id Software engines under the GPL license. Historically, the source code for each engine has been released once the code base is 5 years old.”
Wikipedia article: id Software

Photo "cmd.exe" cc by-sa flickr user n3wjack

I think this is a novel approach, and I’m surprised that I haven’t heard of any other companies making this sort of commitment. Fellow open source zealots would warm up to you and you’d earn the love of developer communities everywhere. It also increases the chance that your software has a greater legacy.

Let me know if you’re committing to opening the source of aged versions of your proprietary software. Will it be 2, 3 or some other length of years from now?

“During a break on the Thursday I took the chance to ask Nancy White a question – “What is a ‘healthy’ community?” In looking at these various orientations it struck me that there must be recognizable ‘patterns,’ say, of a “successful open source community,” that could help us recognize others when we see them. This is exactly right and exactly wrong; as Nancy helped me understand, exactly wrong because it locates the notion of health in some abstract standard outside the community, when the notion of health being put out here is about internal coherence and accord – is the community becoming (or at least striving to be) what it wants to be“.
By Scott Leslie, Northern Voice ‘10: …, May 11th, 2010

Emphasis mine.

Like previous years, I’m really excited about these amazing people so generously sharing their WordPress expertise one on one!

The WordCamp Genius Bar came about when myself and other WordPress participants felt regret for not being able to answer all of the excellent questions people were stopping us in the hall with at the first WordCamp (2006, has it really been 5 years). For WordCamp SF 2007, WordCamp Genius Bar was born, and has continued every year since with the help of Maya, Elea and numerous genius volunteers. It has become an ingredient in the WordCamp formula, the most potent batches anyway.

“Yourself, plus two others. With only two, each person needs to be aware of all the details in case the other person needs to take a break / gets run over by a bus / whatever. With three, the load is spread a bit more easily.”

Boris Mann, thoughts on Passion and Frustration, October 5th, 2009

"Three lemurs eating" by Tambako the Jaguar. CC by-nd. Flickr Hosted.

From starting a company with Boris and Co’s Bootup Labs to being the area experts for your company, you want three of you.

3 is a magic number.

I’ve always just gone with having one backup, but reflecting on it now, I should have two backups in each area.

At first it seems like an incredible amount of redundancy, but someone’s own focuses and work doesn’t go away when they have to fill in for you. You need two backups, two people who can step in to carry your load — each carrying some of your load.

This extends beyond backing you up. This creates a mesh of collaboration,. Having different collaborators (back ups) in different areas leaves no weak links.

Disagreeing about something with your backup? With three there is always a moderator / negotiator / tie breaker.

Yesterday , we, WordPress won Best Open Source Social Networking CMS.

Who are we?

Well, this is a really hard question to answer, and you aren’t going to find me trying, but I can share a little bit about the small percentage of the people I know that make WordPress amazing.

WordPress 2.3 is the third major release since WordPress became my working life. This is a special release for me because mid-September marked my one year with the Automattic team.

The greatest reason why it is the most special release for me so far is not the awesome improvements to the product, but the collaboration… and yeah, the awesome improvements to the product are a direct result of the collaboration.

As I wrote the other day, “Before WordPress, I haven’t ever been part of a community of this size where people support each other so well”. When I think of the tens of thousands of people that participate in WordPress, I get totally overwhelmed. What really boggles my mind is that these people aren’t participating passively, and each individuals contribution can be identified, whether it is as simple as choosing WordPress, helping a friend set it up, or as unexpected and involved as the year that Robin Adrianse spent among the top five code contributors to WordPress — I miss you Robin, but I know you are up to awesome things with more ahead for you.

Almost all of the people that I saluted in WordPress 2.2 Source Code Worth $1 Million! deserve recognition, but I’m not going to duplicate the link love fest — though they all most certainly deserve it. I will mention some of the many WordPress members that inspire me and keep me excited about my work.

Ryan continues to get his WordPress pump on while balancing his boy Ronan in his other arm. Equally, Donncha does a similar act with his little one, Adam, and his other baby WordPress MU.

It gives me headaches just thinking about the problems that Mark Jaquith solves. The bugs that Canonical URLs would cause gave me nightmares to go with my headaches, but Mark methodically and thoroughly borrowed, designed, coded and tested this feature, and it hasn’t disturbed my sleep at all.

In that post for WordPress 2.2, I wrote, “Peter Westwood (westi) continues to earn the most consistent contributor award”. Well, that would still be true, except that he is contributing even more now! At the end of September, Matt announced Peter becoming a lead developer and since then not did he play a large role in getting 2.3 polished, he has complimented his debugging and coding by started an invaluable weekly post on development work in WordPress.

Otto42, after the core developers probably considers tickets the most. Along with Otto, Bas Bosman (nazgul) is the chief trac manager and lends a lot of his development expertise to WordPress. Jeremy Visser is a trac worker, a regular contributor, and does not let things fall off the radar.

Daniel Jalkut (dcj) (Red Sweater), developer of MarsEdit worked with our Joseph Scott to scratch a lot of itches and treat some rashes with XML-RPC support. Joseph also worked with the brilliant Tim Bray, Pete Lacey, Elias Torres and Sam Ruby on giving WordPress a good AtomPub.

Jennifer Hodgdon has become WordPress’ development documentation specialist. She is also very generous with her expertise on wp-hackers, and clearly an awesome WordPress plugin and website development.

One month later, it is clear that WordPress 2.3 is the smoothest release . The proof? Maintenance release 2.3.1 with little to scare me.

I’ve made my kudos purposely short, and risk offending many of the amazing people that contribute to WordPress, so please help me out here!

I would love to find a way to met more both online and in real life. Who are your WordPress heroes? Have you remembered to thank them lately?