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Presentation materials for “How to start an open source project of any scope and size”

Saturday, January 21, 2012

Here are the slides from my Friday talk at SCALE10x in the FOSS Mentoring track, “How to start an open source project of any scope and size“: ODP and PDF. These slides are (as usual) under a Creative Commons CC BY SA 3.0.

Although a brand-new presentation, I think this one went over pretty well. All of the material I know by heart and can speak on extemporaneously (i.e., for many hours on end). For this reason, my notes section is unusually (for me) empty. I’m going to work on filling out those notes – that makes it more useful for others to reuse, thus adding more fuel to the Creative Commons licensing – and I’ll make a generic version available in TheOpenSourceWay.org presentations directory.

This was a good enough talk that I think it can be useful again in other locations – it really does a good job of distilling a huge amount of the information you need to start, sustain, and grow an open source project. I’ll be submitting it other places, hopefully more people agree with Gareth and put me on somewhere!

Filed in Community, Fedora, FLOSS, Open Source, Presentations, Red Hat, Talks | Comments (3)

SCALE 10X-citement – oVirt and starting a FOSS project

Wednesday, January 18, 2012

After having to sadly cancel last year for SCALE 9X, my family and I are looking forward (nervously) to SCALE 10X this coming weekend. You’ll see us at:

So my Friday talk at 3 pm is,”How to start and sustain an open source project of any size“. I’ll be going through the start/sustain bits, and trying to do some actual work with the audience. I’m hoping some of the audience will be interested in starting a project, or already working on it, and we can do some work for their efforts as a group.

Also on Friday I’ll be attending the Fedora Activity Day (FAD) that starts at 10 am – I’ll be there to help and learn.

My daughters are joining their friend to give “Ultimate Boredom 2.0” at 11:30 am on Saturday as part of the SCALE: The Next Generation youth conference. I think the talk title is an allusion to how much they think they will bore you (ultimately), which must be greater than the two other times they have given a similar talk (2.0). In addition to talking about how they’ve participated in open source projects, they’ll cover some of their favorite free/open source software – last I saw the presentation covered GIMP, OpenShot, TuxPaint, and Hydrogen.

Finally, on Sunday morning at 11:30 am I’ll be giving, “oVirt – Infrastructure and management platform for the data center“. This is a general what-is-oVirt, how-did-it-come-to-be, where-might-it-be-going presentation, similar to the one Carl Trieloff gave at the start of the oVirt workshop in November 2011.

See you in LA!

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oVirt workshop

Monday, October 31, 2011

The first oVirt workshop starts up at 8:30 am on Tuesday 1 November at Cisco Building O in Milpitas, CA.

This event is the open sourcing of the code behind the Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization (RHEV) management console. These assets have been rewritten in Java from the original implementation by the team that was originally from Qumranet before their acquisition by Red Hat.

As with the rest of the open source virtualization stack (Linux kernel, KVM, etc.), we all benefit the most from a strong, sustainable open upstream. Having that upstream dominated by one vendor will greatly restrict the innovation possible by the project. For this reason, Red Hat went out to a number of interested parties, offering a seat on the initial board (which is later filled meritocratically) for any organization willing to put 10 resources to work on the project. For the initial board, that list is Canonical, Cisco, IBM, Intel, NetApp, Red Hat, and SUSE.

I got involved in this because the project’s technical director, Carl Trieloff, called on our Community Architecture and Leadership team to help with community scaffolding for the launch and beyond. Since then I’ve been building the ovirt.org website, setting up the communications, creating and filling the wiki, helping with the source repository, starting an open services infrastructure team so all community members can help, and organizing this workshop with Robyn Bergeron.

So this is what I’ve been up to, which I really should have been writing about, but … ah, life.

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Astronomy curriculum for Fall 2011

Monday, September 26, 2011

My 13-year-old daughter wanted to take an astronomy class at the local community college, but alas it was full with actual college students. (She can start taking classes at 13, and this was a first interest.)

Instead we are going to watch lots of astronomy videos and see what that inspires. Maybe a new project? Also, she has a former teacher who took us up to her ridge-top-clear-view-in-the-Santa-Cruz-Mountains home for some telescoping, and we’d like to arrange for that again. Maybe after she dreams up a new project? One project I suggested was to study up, then take her own video of the night sky and narrate it, then edit it for a short piece on … something.

So I’m going to use this post and regularly update it with the videos we or she are going to watch or did watch, just so we get a nice running total. I’ll also link in the websites we use, etc.

  • http://new-universe.org/ – I plan to get this book and possibly use it as a core item, since I think the cosmology and humanistic viewpoint will appeal to Malakai.
  • http://www.khanacademy.org/#cosmology-and-astronomy – Yeah, I know, i could just start and stop here. :)

 

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New community manager position on my team

Wednesday, September 7, 2011

You may have heard that the Community Architecture & Leadership team recently graduated another founding member, this time Max Spevack, who went to work at Amazon.

Right now we are looking for someone who can take over significant focus on Fedora, as well as provide skills in community consulting and strategy for other Red Hat efforts.

Myself, I’m looking for another rounded, senior-level person who can apply the open source way – thinking & doing – as well as help make practitioners out of other people. Just spread this word around – someone out there hasn’t thought her or his self in this role yet, but could be.

Looking at this role, it is an example of job skills and merit that can be learned and earned while working on open source projects. You may not be currently in the field of “community relations and management”, but you may already have all the skills needed to teach and do the open source way inside and outside of software projects.

And you certainly don’t need to have come up through the Fedora Project, but that can’t hurt. Historically, we do what anyone would do – hire the people we know are great at doing the job we want done. Your work in Fedora should reflect that. If you have other open source project experience, it’s out there. If you’ve been practicing the open source way correctly, you’ll be able to show us that experience using open content in public archives.

Check out the job posting. I’m not in control of the process, but I think the location could be flexible for the right person, so it’s worth considering even if you don’t want to move to Raleigh and be our voice-in-the-seat-at-Red-Hat-HQ.

If you are someone who I would recommend anyway – so I would be biased toward you in a selection process – I’d be more than happy to pass you into our resume system with a recommendation.

(Updated to fix my incorrect interpretation of the job requirements; having worked in the Fedora Project already is a written job requirement.)

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Paris and Milan – Open World Forum and FUDCon

Tuesday, September 6, 2011

For my first trip out of North America, I’m very excited to be talking at Open World Forum on a panel about community citizenship, in Paris at the end of September. The following weekend I’ll attend FUDCon Milan, where I hope to stir up some cloud community discussions. So how about that for a first European trip?

We had to wait until nearly the last minute to plan this trip, since I want to take my wife … and if she can’t go, that means I have reason to stay home. Hand-in-hand like that. We finally made a decision that works, booked our tickets, and now have to find a hotel in Paris.

Part of this trip is that from Sunday 25 September through Thursday 29 September, I’ll be working early in the day in Parisian cafes, and spending the evening with my wife and whatever friends we make as we go. We’ll be open, exploring, photographing, and looking for great food and wine (and music and dancing …)

Debora has a passion for the French language, which she has studied since she was a child, but has never visited France. Myself, I’ve never even been to Europe. We’ll get to break some personal barriers and have some fun.

So I’m looking for whoever I know, or friends of friends, to help us find what artistic, musical, underground (restaurant? catacombs?), alternative, and interesting Paris fun is out there. (I expect Milan to be completely filled with FUDCon, except Sunday evening when Debora and I will explore and discover together.)

Also, if you know a good hotel (conference one is full) or have an apartment we can rent for the week … let me know.

Now, to go sort out power adapters, SIM card for my Droid 2 Global, wireless broadband for the laptop …

Filed in Events, Fedora, Travel | Comments (3)

Cloud interest at FUDCon Milan

Tuesday, September 6, 2011

These past 18 months have seen a lot of broken travel plans for me, so I’m so-very-extra-super-excited-and-nervous to be going to FUDCon Milan (and Open World Forum.) My wife, Debora, will be joining me for the travel to Europe – a good thing since her Italian and French are so much better than mine. (I’ll probably be unable to resist butchering Italian with my Spanglish.)

One reason I’m going to FUDCon is to connect with people about open source cloud communities. While there isn’t enough momentum for an entire conference (yet), consider that at FUDCon Tempe this year there were enough discussions of cloud-related topics that they practically formed a track.

What will the cloud discussions at FUDCon Milan be?

I know of a few cloud/virtualization-related developers who are attending:

OK, that’s not a very long list.

Who else is going? Who can we invite?

What interest can we generate? Anyone want to do  do a “build a cloud with Fedora” or something that attracts systems folks?

What is interesting for developers who want to build on top of these clouds as infrastructure and platforms?

One of us from the Cloud SIG can talk about the general activities in Fedora, so I count at least four cloud related talks in those I’ve listed here.

Filed in Events, Fedora, Open Source, Red Hat | Comments (1)

Developer evangelist role at Red Hat

Thursday, September 1, 2011

Here’s an interesting job:

Partner Technical Evangelist

Red Hat has large cachet with upstream, open source developers, and our relationship with mainstream, corporate developers is fair but scattered. Strong in the Java area, nice developer studio, but what’s the cohesive story? How do we interact as a whole with software vendor (ISV) partners and developers who work for our customers?

It seems likely that the above job will interact and work in those areas. In fact, the role is described as rather senior – perhaps someone with the right skills and personality could wrestle serious improvements to the Red Hat developer experience for customers and vendor partners? This role is inside of the ISV ecosystem team probably because of a need for evanglism to ISV developers as well as customer developers.

When I use the term corporate developer, I mean the person who builds and supports applications that run inside of enterprises and SMBs, written by the staff for the staff. These are folks who are looking for:

  • Best practices for developing on top of  Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL).
  • How to package and deploy software the Red Hat way.
  • Tutorials on how to use developer-focused tools in a Red Hat environment, from JBoss through Eclipse to Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization (RHEV).
  • Forums to find answers and ask questions.
  • 24×7 non-interactive support and solutions, so they can get their work done at their own pace.

You or anyone you know interested in this sort of work? Contact me or just apply yourself.

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Working group on community metrics

Friday, August 12, 2011

Are you one of us few, lucky people who attempt to keep track of the health of one or more communities?

Have you written any tools, processes, or other content/code that helps you with this? (For example, our team wrote and uses EKG for mailing list analysis.)

Are you looking for a commons to share ideas, code, content, and so forth?

We are looking for that too. We see a common problem space, are tired of working in isolation, and think there should be a working special interest group on this topic. A group made up of all the other individuals and teams currently working on this in isolation.

If it doesn’t exist, we want to start a new working group for this. Maybe you’d like to be involved? Comment on this blog post so I can include you in what we find out or make happen.

We see other groups who are working in this problem space … apparently in isolation from each other?

(If any of the above are not isolated but are part of a commons movement, can you show us where the commons is? That is, beyond their own mailing lists.)

So each of the above is a unique community or analyzer with a unique situation and needs. But certainly there are common areas where we can help each other? Common tools even if the analyses are different in the end? Common processes to share, even if your implementation is closed-source-in-house?

I just spoke with the QTM group at UPenn’s PRECISE Center who are using open source repositories for reputation analysis, working from a tool originally written to track wiki article author/editor quality. I want to invite them to either join a working group with us, or join in starting a new one.

So what’s going on out there?

(Updated with improved information and better links about the UPenn crew.)

Filed in Community, Fedora, Open Source | Comments (9)

June, what June?

Wednesday, July 13, 2011

I just noticed that the entire month of June passed, and I’ve been hidden away from the world – off work, off writing, off any community activities – caring for my wife while she goes through some tough times. She’s not out of the woods entirely yet, but clear fields are in sight and I’ve rejoined the work force. We should be back working our magic at Fairy-Tale Farm within the next week or so, as well.

As I approach my tenth year at Red Hat this coming October, I’m currently focusing on helping wherever I can with our new and existing cloud community efforts, from Red Hat OpenShift to the Fedora Cloud SIG. I’m also working more deeply on The Open Source Way, externally as the canonical upstream location for how-to and why-to do projects within community, and internally as a community consultant across Red Hat. More activity coming on The Open Source Way mailing list, if I have anything to say about it.

Filed in Art of Living, Community, Family, Fedora, Personal, Red Hat | Comments (1)