The “Assembling the Android army” series of posts is where I provide completely unsolicited advice to Google and the Open Handset Alliance on strategies and tactics for growing the base of Android developers, to better cement Android’s place in the mobile platform marketplace. In the previous posts, I argue that Android needs a culture of “we” if collaborative development is to take off on improving the open source platform.
While the exact size of the Android team is not known, it is probably safe to guess that it is at least two dozen people, given the number of team members who speak up in public forums like the Android Google Groups.
The source code to Android has been available for five weeks. Five weeks of, say, a dozen Android-related email messages per day per team member is 7,200 emails. And there could easily be many more messages than that, since this does not count messages from the community, the number of emails per person could be low, and the Android core team estimate could be rather low.
So where are those messages?
If you look out on the Google Groups related to the Android open source initiative, there are perhaps 2,000. However, almost all of them are questions from people outside of the core Android team and their associated responses. There are few questions from the core Android team to the public.
And, most importantly, the ongoing development work of the core Android team is not there that I can see. This is another facet of the culture of “we” that the Android open source initiative is missing.
Right now, the core Android team appears to be using some sort of private communications tools to coordinate their own development efforts, probably whatever they used before the project was released as open source. This approach is easy, but it is inappropriate, ineffective, and inconsistent with the goals of an open source project.
Communication is the backbone of collaborative development. There will inevitably be some communications that are not available to all participants: physical meetings, IM conversations, and the like. However, these need to be kept on the periphery, with the bulk of communication happening in the public eye, for all participants to, well, participate in. That is the only way for everyone to feel that they too are part of the team.
Lacking that, the current approach reinforces an “us versus them” culture. The “cool kids” are their own clique, with their own communication channels, while the rest of us are left wondering why we are not cool. As Marshall McLuhan said, “the medium is the message” — if the medium for core Android team communications is closed, the message is that, license notwithstanding, Android is closed. This hardly seems to be in the best interests of the Android project’s long-term success.
