I stopped updating “The Darker Side of Open Source” due to it’s depressing nature. I started another timeline called:
If you think I should continue “The Sustainers Journey”, click the 
below. If you have feedback, bring it.
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I’ve been clicking through the ‘dark side’ timeline.
Thank you for putting this together @jdorfman
I think it is obvious that things look dark if we include only failures and breakdowns – I understand that is the whole point of the timeline. However, Open Source has a way to rise from the ashes (sometimes), like LibreOffice rose from the abandonment of OpenOffice.org.
Right now, the laundry list of negative headlines does not tell a coherent or convincing story. Maybe that is okay, I just wanted to provide that feedback.
Also, instead of including tweets, I recommend including a screenshot of them, otherwise some people like me will not see the tweet:
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The timeline would be able to make sense, if there was a way to filter it. We could tag each negative headline with the type of failure that it portraits and allow people to switch through ‘vulnerabilities’, ‘market failure’, ‘community fallout’, ‘developer burnout’, or what ever category makes sense. With such a focus, the timeline would appear less ‘random’ and tell the story of how these types of failure have become more prevalent (or more covered by the press).
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My pleasure
That is a great point. I’m not sure if it is worth maintaining. Although, I think it is a good tool for history lessons so we don’t repeat the past. Conflicted.
Damn, I didn’t even think about that. Should have taken a screenshot and added it as a comment just in case. Live and learn.
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I’m using Timeline.js and not seeing anything in their docs for filtering.
Great idea! In fact, their #1 tip is:
- Keep it short. We recommend not having more than 20 slides for a reader to click through.
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I share your conflicted sense here. To make it useful for a history lesson, we would have to highlight the context, what led up to decisions or failures, who was involved, what were the motivations, what could have been alternative outcomes, and how did it play out in the end. While we can probably get some of that information by looking at the linked articles, I think we would need to bring that information into the timeline.
The resource would be valuable for sustainers to find past references of failures for when they need to put together a presentation. I have not been around long enough to know some of the earlier failures and learned from going through the headlines.
Instead of a timeline, that must be clicked through one item at a time, a list of these headlines might be an easier to consume format because the information is available at one glance (potentially filter list?).