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Welcome to the fifty-eigth issue of De Programmatica Ipsum, about Community. In this edition, we enumerate the ways in which a technical community can degrade; in the Library section, we review "Working in Public" by Nadia Asparouhova; and in our Vidéothèque section, we learn about technical marketing from Guy Kawasaki.
My father, whom I have already mentioned in this magazine in a previous article about skeuomorphism, is an architect and urbanist. While walking down the streets of Buenos Aires, he would often mention what he thinks is one of the greatest paradoxes of our time: humans have invented cities to feel safe from predators and to ensure their survival, yet most cities are nowadays among the unsafest places for humans to live.
There is a website out there providing an answer to the question "What is Developer Relations?," a question that this author, whose job title is precisely that one, gets a lot. According to this resource, Developer Relations is an umbrella term encompassing three major areas of activity: "Community," "Content," and "Product;" a perfect description of a job role, at least as far as this author is concerned.
In the twenty-five years since the appearance of the phrase "Open Source", many authors have tried to explain this simple fact: why do software developers willingly and spontaneously collaborate, often on a pro bono basis, to the creation of open-source software? And most importantly, how does this even happen? Many books have been written around this seemingly illogical fact.