[Andrew Losowsky]

Running an open source community platform for a decade is no small feat - particularly one as storied and supported as Coral. Andrew Losowsky's reflections on its first decade are inspiring.

"Among so many conversations, we brought commenters into newsrooms to speak with journalists, moderators to conferences to talk to academics, we consumed and conducted research, we talked at the United Nations about online abuse, we invited college students to conduct hackathons, we co-hosted a conference called Beyond Comments at MIT... and so much more.

What we learned early on was that the core problems with online comments aren’t technical – they’re cultural. This means that technology alone cannot solve the issue. And so we worked with industry experts to publish guides and training materials to address this, and then designed our software around ways to turn strategy into action."

This is so important: most of these problems are human, not technical. The technology should be there to support these communities, but a lot of the work itself needs to be done on the community and relationship level. That's an important ingredient for success.

One sad note: while I've seen a few of these reflective posts from projects lately, it's not obvious to me that comparable new open source projects are being created that will be hosting their own reflections a decade from now. I think there needs to be significantly more investment into open source from institutions, foundations, and enterprises. Not every project will succeed, but for the ones that will, the investment will pay dividends.

#Technology

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