In my meandering through the blogosphere this morning, I came upon a post from Kaliya about why certain contributors to the OpenID effort were not properly attributed in a recent announcement. She has since posted a response she received from the PR person who handled the announcement, pointing to the ever increasing complexity of having more people involved in getting approval etc… While that is true, to acknolwwedge a significant contribution from an organization or individual is very important, and I believe was mishandled in this case.
I was trying to add my comment on her original post, but apparently you must be a registered user on her blog to do so, which I am not. So I am posting it here instead, because this is a very important point to make:
Yes Kaliya – everyone shoud work hard to be more inclusive and appreciative of other people’s contributions to the broader community. It is a shame that so many times, a few people who are working so hard to be leaders within a given community of practice choose to not attribute or give credit where credit is due – it seems to happen all the time and unless it stops soon, many people who do not already embrace the open source ethos will choose not to share and not to contribute to the commons. There needs to be at the very least, a modicum of repsect given to every contributor, and more for major contributors, to every community effort rather than the selective approach that seems so prevalent.
If we can’t reward people financially for their contributions, we must absolutely reward people and give them respect through accreditation – something that has been sorely lacking for too long among many of the vanguard in the current societal transformation. During my lunch with David Brin last week, we dove deep into the idea of mutually beneficial reciprocity. After that conversation I came away understanding the importance of this one shared value as the basis of collaboration in the commons. I will be posting some audio on Social Media Club soon and writing more of my thoughts there…
