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Trust in open source communities
Quoting: Trust in open source communities - Duck Alignment Academy —
In chapter 3 of Program Management for Open Source Projects, I talk about the importance of trust. “Open source communities run on trust,” I wrote. I go on to talk about building trust by establishing relationships and credibility. This is fine when you’re coming into a defined role, perhaps if you got hired to fill a sponsored role in a community or if a project leader has asked you to apply your skills to the project.
Most people, of course, don’t come directly into a defined role. They start by making a small contribution: filing a bug, answering a question on a mailing list or forum, submitting a patch, and so on. Sometimes, they don’t even plan to stick around. They’re making one contribution and moving on. The kind of trust-building based on relationships doesn’t work as well in that case. But you still need trust to evaluate a contributor (and thus their contribution).
This issue has only grown more relevant as large language models become widespread. If the person who submitted a pull request didn’t write the code, do they understand it? Can they answer maintainers’ questions or address feedback? Is the code even worth a maintainer’s time to review or is it plausible-looking garbage?