I’m just on my way home after a great evening at the BT Centre for ‘An evening of open discourse’, which was an open self organising evening of discourse around open source, open data and open APIs.

There was a great panel initiating the discussion and debate, with Doc Searls, Karim Lakhani, Blaine Cook, Kevin Marks, Jeremy Ruston and Lars Kurth. A good enough panel for me to overcome the fact I was by far the least code-aware person in the auditorium by a factor of almost infinity. And then some. But given the fact I blog about microblogging exclusively on www.140char.com, the chance to listen to a former lead developer at Twitter and the principle co-author of OAuth was particularly of interest, even amongst one of the more accomplished panels I’ve seen.

Luckily, although I’m not an Open Source coder, I’m very much a believer in the opportunities it brings, and interested in the history of it’s continued evolution, and the human elements and personalities involved – and I knew enough to follow all the technical references, which was nice.

But problem the most reassuring thing for me was that it seemed the main two elements of the debate were two non-technology issues:

• How do commercial and Open Source interests co-exist either alongside each other or in a hybrid model?
• How you can assemble, motivate and integrate a community.

Those are two areas where I’m less ashamed of the fact I use Open Source tools, but I’ve never built even the smallest part of one!

And obviously the community model is of huge interest, and it was surprising in some ways to hear that there’s still a widespread admission of a lack of understanding about how communities might work in the Open Source developer world, which has been around for decades longer than the current assumed knowledge of a large group of marketing people in the social networking world.

Which probably shows the difference between people who deal with code, and those who might deal more in packaging and branding.

But it’s also clear that there’s still a huge learning for a lot of people around the fact that starting Open Source/crowd-sourcing/social networking/user generated content isn’t something that unleashes the ‘magic internet pixies’ who come and provided free coordinated, organised and harmonious free labour. One reason colleagues can manage to stay civil on many occasions is the fact they’re getting paid to be there!

The biggest challenge definitely seems to come for those businesses, such as Symbian, Sun or Linden Labs who have attempted to open up what was formerly a closed system, and then how those changes have sometimes struggled to be integrated into the rest of the business, and to motivate the open community in the way that was correctly, or incorrectly envisaged by the business originally.

Much the same as magazines sometimes suggested that when they unleashed ‘Commerce, Content, Community’ (the revised ordering of importance), that the content and community elements would take care of themselves.

Hence why communities don’t have hierarchies, shared beliefs, infighting, rules, standards, laws etc.

Oh wait.

I’ll try and expand more on communities across technology/networks and on and offline in the future.

There were also some really interesting insights, such as the power distribution of open source projects, in that, as expected a very small percentage of people do a lot of the work. But the perhaps surprising insight is that all of the new/novel ideas about the project came from the Long Tail, who might turn up, contribute one novel aspect from a different viewpoint, and then disappear – but their ideas make the project.

Kevin Marks did a good job of separating out the two principles of having open code which everyone might use, and having open standards which would allow different code to interoperate, and that the key sign of the gold standard is when two people can interoperate without even knowing the other exists.

And Blaine provided some really good insight into the early days of Twitter when it was more like 5 employees than 150 – such as the conscious decision not to develop an official Twitter client, and his introduction of the Twitter API as the push towards opening everything up.

It was definitely a great event, and I’ve got a lot of appreciation for the efforts of the organisers. Plus BT Centre look kinda cool from what I saw of it…