I was one of the people interviewed for Jyrki Wahlstedt’s essay Managing Changes in Collaborative Innovation Networks. It deals with how innovation networks like free software projects communicate:

As the project matures, things change. The initial ideas are accepted (otherwise there would be no project), and something has been built. That something has been downloadable for some time, and the software produced in project gets users. The number of users may be very large, for some projects in sourceforge.net, for instance, the number of downloads may be in hundreds of thousands during one day. This leads to a situation, in which defects and enhancement requests surface. When there is pressure to modify the software, change and add features, remove defects, it will be interesting to see, how change management works and is reflected in communication networks.

Midgard, like many other open source projects, is experiencing challenges with the communication infrastructure. We have several different, and partially overlapping channels for communications and change management. This leads to confusion and duplicated information, and is definitely an area where we could do better,