1. surprise, astonishment, or admiration.
2. indulgence in speculative inquiry, often accompanied by an element of doubt.
Extracts from the 2005 O'Reilly article -Ofun:- Excitement and learning are infectious. It’s clear that everyone working on [the project that gave birth to -Ofun] is having a blast ... There’s a pervasive sense of high potential and great possibilities, and that sense decays slowly, even during inevitable lulls.
- Embrace anarchy. ... For a development project, modern version control systems can give you “anarchy with an audit trail”.
- Cast committer rights far and wide. ... [scan] a number of technical groups 2-3 times a day trying to hand out the committer bit, responding to people’s musings, and generally spreading awareness.
- If invitation isn’t completely automated (as for example with a wiki), make sure many people in different timezones have admin rights to invite a new committer, and pay attention enough to do so.
- Working code is more fun than mere ideas. Continuously push the team to sketch out ideas in code, committing quick and dirty prototypes that can be refactored as they grow. ... [if someone is] afraid to release “not good enough” code ... [ask] can they please put it somewhere linkable?
- Mentoring and even answering basic questions should happen continuously.
- Encourage random fun tangents
- Get every committer to add themselves to the AUTHORS file (this is a good choice to be a new developer’s first commit)
- Turn your project into a culture, one that you would like to live in.