community

This book has been sitting on my desk for so long precisely so I make sure I share my enthusiasm for it with more of you. I've been suggesting this book to several friends and so far the feedback from them was also overwhelmingly positive.

While Chip and Dan Heath do not deal much with software development and absolutely not open source in this book, I'd boldly say this is one of the greatest books I've read for those who want to get something done in an open source development environment. There are countless great stories in this book from all areas of life. From getting children with cancer to take their pills through saving species to attracting more customers to your carwash, it deals with situations when you seemingly don't have any directing power over the change you want to see in behavior/direction from your peers. You are not a boss, you don't pay these people, maybe you don't even know who they are, but you want to see a positive change happen.

Check out this video for example with a short summary of one of the tips that feels very relevant to the state of Drupal 8:

The authors built the structure of this book around a metaphor from University of Virginia psychologist Jonathan Haidt, saying our emotional side is an Elephant and our rational side is its Rider. The whole book is structured around tips to direct the rider (eg. provide specific guidance for the critical moves), motivate the elephant (eg. shrink the change or show how its already underway) and shape the path (eg. build habits to get there in a natural way).

I'd highly recommend Switch - how to change things when change is hard to anybody who want to get something done in an open source community and would not plan to go it alone.

Since the 4.7 version, Drupal has free tagging included by default. Unfortunately this only allows for a shared tag set for a node, so that when multiple people tag a node, those tags go into a common list. Who tagged the node is not remembered, anyone can remove any tags and add new ones (given the permission).

Some people argued that this system should be called folksonomy, because at that time that was the hype of the day. Luckily the free tagging name was kept. Although if you need real folksonomy support (per user tagging, editing of own tags, personal tag clouds but still powering a common tag set), you need to look into a contributed module. Interestingly there are two similar solutions for the problem: the community_tags module and the taxonomy_user module. Since I need this functionality for a project, I needed to look at them, so here is a rundown of the differences I see from looking at their implementation.