When you are on a complex endeavour, there are so many things that can go wrong. Sometimes you cannot plan for all the possibilities and have to build redundancies. Even then things usually fail (Murphy's Law). Frappeverse is one such complex event. The preparations start months in advance with the event planning. For the engineers, it is the only real “deadline” they ever face in Frappe. Since we have always been a “lean” company, we don’t usually plan for contingencies, so something or the other always goes wrong. Sometimes the stage and the lights are a problem, sometimes the layout is a problem, sometimes its the food, sometimes its the “vibe”, sometimes is the content. In the past I have mostly been “ambivalent” by the event. It feels good to hear all the nice words people have to say, but also feels hollow when people don’t follow-up with real contributions. This time, its been a week since Frappeverse and for the first time, I have zero reason to complain and feel nothing else but contentment. Is it just “profits”, or is there a real change in the way things happen?
Auditorium fully packed
Let’s start with the event itself, we booked the auditorium one day in advance so that the screen and sound systems can be setup and we started sharp on time. The venue and the ticketing system was super smooth. The mural came out wonderfully (though we could have done better on the lettering). The Global Partner Meetup the day before was excellent. There was all round positivity. The Frappe engineering team came through with the content - though the delivery can be a lot better. I am not fully complaining because at Frappe we want people who build the software to come up and showcase it as well. These are highly skilled engineers, not necessarily great public speakers. The hall of 700 was packed to the brim. We not only had ecosystem partners, but also several customers. The layout and circulation was perfect with reduced stalls and a separate hall for Track II talks. We had a music program with excellent fusion of Indian folk music and a great community discussions as well. Later we hiked up at the National Park with a few partners and got to spend some “quality” time as well with those who choose to drop by.
The highlight of the event was the community discussion on Day 2. The Frappe ecosystem is both a community of open source enthusiasts and entrepreneurs who want to provide services and build companies around open source. Frappe the company falls on both sides. I have always felt that both these elements are important if we want to build a lasting ecosystem. Communities are about shared responsibility not just about taking, but also about giving. If we don’t talk about giving, then it does not make sense to build a community. But to be a “giver”, you need to first be “content”. Only if you are content, can you give freely. Also contentment is a very strange thing. Sometimes very rich people are discontent, and sometimes not so rich people are content. In the past, I used to feel frustrated with the lack of givers. That was a wrong approach as well. The thing that I did do right was that we only offered the stage to those who were totally aligned to open source. We made sure from the very early days that there is no place in the Frappeverse for those who want to share closed source applications. Though I don’t have a real problem with them, its just that the community I wanted to build was a one where people contributed.
Our first attempt to create a community of givers was the ERPNext Foundation - we had a community appointed CEO and also we funded people to work for the Foundation (Jay and Basawaraj were early employees). Then we realised that Frappe cannot be both the company and the foundation, other people need to step up as well. The Foundation then pivoted to taking up the role of the larger FOSS community and exited this ecosystem. In the next few years, there was nobody actively taking up the leadership of the community until Mina Ezzat from Egypt took up the role and started creating a “Frappe Alliance”. It had been a year since the Alliance had been announced but there was nothing happening. This time, I was determined to see the Frappe Alliance off the ground. We had heated discussions within Frappe about what to do next and how do we get the community going without Frappe being the main factor behind it.
During Frappeverse, I held talks with several active contributors - Mitesh Choksi, Revant, Basawaraj, Muchai, Mina, Raffael, Hussain (newly minted community member), Rahul and others. Rahul Bansal of rtCamp is the latest addition to the community and has a different background than most people. rtCamp is a premier global WordPress agency and is super successful. After successfully scaling in the WordPress arena, Rahul was on the lookout for expanding into other communities and products and Frappe fitted the bill for him completely. We had an impromptu discussion with some community folks and Rahul about how the WordPress community is structured. We learned about several organisations like “Central” and how WordCamps were run globally. We learned how the community organised contributions via “Working Groups”.
We learnt that WordPress started because another open source project, B2, had suddenly shut down and Matt Mullenweg and Mike Little forked it. It meant that WordPress already had a community when it started unlike Frappe and ERPNext. For Frappe, there was hardly any “community” in the early years. It was more than 5-6 years before people started taking the project seriously and by the virtue of survival, Frappe had learned to live without community. Later when the community “showed up”, it was always the takers. I clearly remember that in one heated debate, someone said “Value extractors should have a seat on the table”. That just blew me up, and I said - you have seat on the table when you contribute and have skin in the game.
Rahul Bansal talks about WordPress
For me there were two things the community could strongly contribute with - Events and Marketplace. In the informal discussion, I nudged the community to collaborate on the Frappe Marketplace - which is kind of a neglected platform within the Frappe company since we don’t really have people who are motivated to take it forward (hint: If you are interested, email me). Later in the community discussion we created some rules around creating Working Groups (WGs) and we started with the Marketpace Working Group. Hussain and Rahul volunteered to lead this effort. There was a lot of doubts and people wanted “assurance” from Frappe that this will be an official effort. We kept amending the proposal till we were able to draft something that had no objections. Finally it felt we were making real progress. Hopefully by next Frappeverse we will be able to see the community be an active contributor and doing some heavy lifting as well.
People always assume capitalism and community do not go together. One is based on accumulation of wealth and one is based on generosity and contentment. I think for the first time we felt both. Frappe is doing amazing as a company, and we don’t feel we have compromised our values. Everyone who comes to Frappeverse feels an over abundance of “wholesome positivity” - which is ironic, because I am the guy who says it as it is. The focus is always on doing the right thing, without thinking about the outcomes. Somehow this time, everything fell into place. No matter how much money we make, this feeling is priceless. Being committed to core values - openness, excellence and being honest is exactly why this feeling exists.
I don’t think we should trade anything, not money, not success, not fame for this.
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Post-script: The day after the Frappeverse, I had a chance to spend a few hours with Rahul. He shared his life story growing up in a small village to being a political student leader to a blogger to finding his place in the WordPress community. He seems to be a diametric opposite to me - mostly an introvert and “dreamer”. We also had a very long chat with folks from Mongolia who were planning to build a massive global platform on ERPNext. The leader of the team called ERPNext “India’s gift to the world” and invited me to visit Ulaanbataar as well.
Sometimes the world is a hard place, and a place like Mumbai city makes it very obvious. Nobody really cares about you and you have to get used to rejections and failures. But sometimes if you persist with values and simple things, the world also opens up dramatically. I have seen this not only with the Frappe community but also other communities around open schooling. We are configured from childhood to become drones, serving the hierarchies that persist. If only we are willing to take off our blinders the world can be a wonderful place as well.
