Developmental stages and problems for open communities and networks

Over the past 8 years, I have contributed to the development of www.sensorica.co, an open network for open innovation and peer production. 

SENSORICA can be described as a commons-based peer production community as defined by the p2pValue project, and as a permissionless p2p network like Bitcoin. 

Along with my hands-on involvement in SENSORICA, I have also contributed to other open networks and communities and observed their evolution. It didn't take long to noticed that these new types of organizations were developing similar problems as they were growing in complexity. A few months ago, I sat down to uncover the underlying mechanisms behind these problems. My theory is synthesized in the table below. 

In essence, open networks and communities go through developmental stages. The transition from one stage to the next requires organizational transformations, which are adaptations to the new conditions that the organization is facing. More often than not, these transitions are accompanied by organizational crisis. Sometimes, these crisis are fatal, they destroy the organization. This is an attempt to inform those involved in setting up open communities and network, to help them steer clear of potential pitfalls as their organization mutates through its developmental stages.  

Summary of developmental stages (see details below)

	Developmental Stage	Contribution and reward	Structure	Athmosphere	Problems
1	Informal	Only volunteer	Ambiguous and ad hock	Friendly, loose, fun	Attract attention
2	Formal	Mostly volunteer	Some basic roles, some norms, some procedures	Mostly friendly and fun	Dealing with complexity
3	Managing material assets	Volunteer and for benefit	Clear and more stable roles and relations, written rules, some adopted methodologies	Higher responsibility, some frustrations.	Dealing with the freerider
4	Tangible rewards generation	Mostly for benefit and volunteer	Clear and stable roles, formal relations, system of rules, body of methodologies, legal structure	Formal, professional	Dealing with the thief
5	Large potential	For benefit, wealth generation and projecting influence	Always filled roles structure, excellent governance, solid legal standing, proven body of methodologies, connections with the larger ecosystem	Responsible, formal, professional	Dealing with the jealous enemy

This table was created by Tibi, as part of a new synthesis work. In alpha version. CC BY-SA 3.0 licence

If the table above is not clear, if you need clarifications, please ask questions in the comments below, and I will use your feedback to improve this post. 

More details and explanations