Kathy Sierra tweeted today about the transition from talking to doing in tech culture. We have Camps, but getting from the inspired conversation to actually producing something useful isn’t always easy. Kathy used the term ‘jam’ to describe what it is when people get together to create something, rather than just talk about it. Here in Portland we use the term ‘hackfest’ or ‘codesprint’. Both of those terms imply working with code that’s already out there. Jam seems like a better term when you’re making and playing from scratch.

I thought this could maybe be the start of our lifecycle:

inspiration/tweet -> *camp -> git init -> *jam -> project

I threw the revision control in there as a placeholder for grabbing a namespace and distributing code.

How do you think community-developed software gets created? How would you describe the process your own projects go through?