The Cathedral and the Bazaar (and Quakers)

As some of you will be aware, I’ve put a fair bit of time in my life into software development – I’ve earned a living doing it, I’ve studied it formally, I’ve done it as a hobby. Some of this has been connected, to a variable extent, to the ‘free and open source software’ community, as much a social movement as a software development model, in which the source code of software is available, anyone can modify it, and there’s no restrictions in how you use it. This approach has given us Linux, which I imagine almost all of you have heard of, as well as office productivity packages like LibreOffice and OpenOffice, and specialist software like the database systems MySQL and PostgreSQL or the statistical software package R.

One of the great figures of the philosophy of free and open source software, Eric S. Raymond, wrote a famous essay about different approaches to open source development. Originally presented at a conference for Linux developers in 1997, and later published in a collection bearing the same title in 1999 (the book is still evolving, and available free on his website). That essay, and book, is called The Cathedral and the Bazaar. It talks about two models, the cathedral model and the bazaar model, that broadly describe the way most open source projects had been developed up to that point. So, what does this have to do with religion, what does it have to do with Quakers? Some of you might have a guess already, but read on – through some more about software development – and all will become clear.

Maxim 18

Improving Business: Small Changes for Big Impacts

Small steps can take you a long way.

A lot of people think the way we do Quaker decision-making, our application of the Quaker Business Method, could be significantly improved. Or, at least, the way one or more Meetings they are involved in do it could be improved.

But we don't need to tear things up and start again, or introduce significant, novel variations in order to improve the way we do business. There are small changes we can make that, when applied in the right circumstances, can make a huge difference. This post will explore some of these, with explanations as to the purpose and advantage you can expect to see. It's likely that some Meetings will already be doing some of these – Quaker Business Method is not the well-defined, definitive set of practices we tend to think – but there are certainly many that don't.

Improving Business: Looking Beyond Quaker Methods

When making tough decisions, Meetings should consider a wide
range of tools to support their efforts.

Quakers have a wonderful and rich history and some brilliant methods for decision making; as my earlier posts in this series have started to reveal, these go beyond the “classic” Quaker Business Method, with variations and supporting strategies to be used around the discernment itself. However, sometimes we don't need to reach for Quaker things to handle decision-making in the best way. In this post, I will be exploring some secular strategies for both decision-making and support of decision-making, and situations in which they can be helpful as adjuncts to specifically Quaker practices.

I am aware, from previous conversations with various Friends over recent years, that some react with something approaching horror or scandal at suggestions such as these. On the other hand, there are also Friends who agree with the idea, having actually used such approaches successfully, and others who haven't tried them but as optimistically curious about the possibilities, as ways of breaking through situations which Quaker processes tend to be fairly bad at handling. I am sure all three groups will be among those reading this blog, and please feel free to continue the conversation in the comments section below, or elsewhere on the internet.