What is Working in Public about?

Working in Public is Nadia Eghbal's examination of open source software as a window into a broader shift in how creative and technical work is organized online. Published in 2020 by Stripe Press, the book started as a research report Eghbal wrote at GitHub and grew into a full account of what open source has become — not the collaborative utopia its early advocates envisioned, but something stranger and more instructive.

Eghbal's key observation is that the standard mental model of open source — a community of contributors working together toward a shared goal — describes only a minority of projects. Most successful open source software is maintained by one person or a very small group, with a large periphery of users who consume the work but rarely contribute to it. She introduces a taxonomy of project types: federations (many contributors, high user growth), clubs (many contributors, low user growth), stadiums (one or few contributors, high user growth), and toys (one or few contributors, low user growth). The stadium is the dominant form: a single maintainer, often overwhelmed, serving a massive user base.

The economics of this situation are troubling. A maintainer of a critical open source library might have millions of dependents — companies whose infrastructure relies entirely on their work — and receive nothing in return. Eghbal draws on the attention economy literature to explain why: users' contributions to a project are governed by the same logic as social media consumption. Watching, starring, and following are low-cost forms of engagement. Submitting a pull request, reviewing code, answering issues — these are high-cost. Most users rationally choose to free-ride.

The second half of the book broadens from open source to the creator economy more generally. Eghbal argues that individual creators who work in public face an analogous attention economics problem: a small group does all the production, a large group consumes it, and the distribution of attention tends to concentrate at the top. Platform dynamics — recommendation algorithms, follower counts — accelerate that concentration. The book ends with observations about how creators manage their attention and what sustainability might look like, but Eghbal is more diagnostic than prescriptive. Working in Public is short and precise, the work of someone who thought carefully about a specific problem and decided not to pad the analysis.