Some years ago I got caught up in a very annoying conflict with James over r/puppet. I don’t remember if he’d created the space or not, but he’d been the sole moderator for years. He’d been doing an excellent job, but recently he’d been drifting away from the Puppet community and spending more of his time on his mgmt project. (Which is totally cool and you should check it out sometime.)

Some moderation tasks had begun slipping by. Spam posts took a while to get removed. The look and feel of the forum hadn’t kept up to use the newer theming capabilities. You know, minor things that felt like increasingly irritating papercuts over time. I thought I’d take a little work off his hands and asked for mod status to which he immediately replied that no company should ever have full administrative control over its own community and denied my request. What a jerk! 🤣

We eventually came to a compromise by which he gave me limited mod status as long as I brought along two committed community members to take full admin roles and have veto power over me. And then some time later as we built trust, I also got full admin and didn’t have to ask the other mods for help updating the forum theming. For some eight years or so, this arrangement has worked out very well.

But I’m here now to tell you that James was right all along.

Community Stewardship 👍

Many people are passingly familiar with the idea of checks and balances in which branches of the government can prevent excesses in the other branches. The push & pull in opposition to each other creates a stability in the whole system similarly to how cantilever truss bridges support weight. In contrast, governments that concentrate all the power in a single branch are generally inherently unstable and usually require totalitarian methods to prevent unrest.

The parallel to community is obvious, although the consequences are rarely so brutal. When a person is ready to leave a community, they just do it. No police state stops them at the border. And then the community collapses. Sometimes quickly and sometimes in excruciating slow motion. It’s almost inevitable when a community doesn’t have power over itself.

We’ve seen examples of this for ages in the tech world. Right now we’re watching a particularly drama-filled MiniMusk Mullenweg Meltdown ravage the Wordpress community because he has nothing to keep him in check, but that’s far from the only example. I was involved (very peripherally) with Andover way back in the day (get offa my lawn you kids! ) when VA swooped in and booted out all the original community volunteer SourceForge admins. Without the corrective pushback of community volunteers, the place very quickly devolved into the first case of enshittification that I personally witnessed. SourceForge still exists, but it’s the barest shadow of itself. I can’t remember the last time I even looked at it before five minutes ago.

And closer to the Puppet ecosystem, just look at the roller coaster that SaltStack has been on since the VMware/Broadcom acquisition. First in January they posted a “no open source without direct revenues” manifesto. Then in May, Tom Hatch, creator of Salt, stepped down. And finally in September, the community manager, Jimmy Chunga, left the building.

Given that timeline, observe the difference in another VMware owned community forum between May and September. Today, there’s a single orphaned post from 25 days ago with zero replies. When a corporate entity owns a community, there’s very little to keep them prioritizing community needs, and people respond to that.

Perhaps a better way of stating James’ objection is that

📌 A community always has ultimate power over itself, even if sometimes that power is exercised by simply leaving.

“Corporate Stewardship” 🤢

This is why I don’t truly believe there’s such a thing as “corporate stewardship” with implied ownership. The very definition of the word is (emphasis mine):

stewardship, n. the careful and responsible management of something entrusted to one’s care

One cannot be a steward of something you own and have iron control over! Being a community steward means responsibly managing the community on behalf of the community instead of to “control the message” or mine it for leads or other kinds of monetization. And when a corporate entity has unfettered power over a community, without the checks and balances pushback to keep it in line, it’s an unstable system that inevitably falls into enshittification. Corporate entities simply are not capable of telling themselves no, especially when they believe that there’s money on the table.

So why did it work for r/puppet and other aspects of the Puppet Community for so long?

In reality it didn’t. Puppet’s community never fell under corporate stewardship. It only appeared that way because some of the folk in admin/owner roles were employed by Puppet. But the key is that we were all community members first and foremost. We participated in community, we helped people in the Slack and asked for help ourselves, we built Puppet modules and other tools to satisfy our needs, we helped connect people with needs to people with solutions. And then we also did our jobs, just like everyone else in the community.

Vox Pupuli leaders and other community members always set the ground rules for the community and the Puppet Community Team just implemented them. That’s not to say that the company didn’t have any say–we certainly did help steer the ship. But Puppet’s influence was gentle and always followed the needs of the community itself.

Our problem was that we never wrote down and codified these practices. For example, we had a very firm rule that any Puppet employee with a leadership role or other decision making influence would not run for the Vox Pupuli management committee to avoid a conflict-of-interest and having undue control over community decisions. That’s why you’ve never seen myself or David Sandilands on the PMC. But that was an informal rule that we held ourselves to, it wasn’t part of the Vox bylaws.

In short

The Puppet Community has always been under community stewardship, even though it wasn’t always obvious as such. And that’s the only way that a healthy vibrant community can prosper. Unfortunately, we were sloppy and didn’t protect against future iterations of the company that weren’t as responsible.

Now as I’ve become exclusively a community member, I’m becoming more and more convinced that we need to firmly re-establish community leadership of the Puppet ecosystem. I’m still not quite sure what that means, but one thing’s for sure: we gotta write it down this time!