The Power of the Community

It isn't new, other have already said it, but today I found another demonstration of the Power of the Community. A Community of motivated people created many successful software projects, like the GNU/Linux project. When the idea for a new project appears and a community builds up around it, the project at such a pace that commercial companies would say it is impossible. In fact, when the community that is developing an application that they will use it, magic happens.

Today I was browsing through the web when I came across this set of videos on YouTube. It is about the Jokosher project. What is the Jokosher project? Well, I'll quote its home page:
Jokosher is a simple yet powerful multi-track studio. With it you can create and record music, podcasts and more, all from an integrated simple environment.
It may not sound that great, but this application was built like every application should. And is moving at a quick pace because of the community that surrounds it. But back, to how the application was built. First they laid down their requirements. They also chose the tools they wanted to use, because they were the developers. Next step was to male lots of GUI Mock-Ups. Incredibly enough, someone decided to code one of the mock-ups, but nothing actually worked underneath it. Well, the Community stepped in and Jokosher is being developed at an incredible pace. In fact, LugRadio is being recorded with Jokosher, since it was the driver for the project.

This project is a living proof of what a community, and humanity in general can achieve if people set their minds to something. Believe me, this is not something you can force upon a group of people. No, the software won't come out faster the more under-paid persons you throw at it. Actually, even with over-paid persons it simply won't work. You need motivated persons, a sense of community to drive a project. Building this community is hard, specially in commercial projects. In fact, I believe that for commercial projects things are even harder since a motivation is hard to build and easy to destroy, but that is a whole different story.

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