I registered this domain years ago as a community project identity for getting free expo passes to LinuxWorld. It was just an idea for a domain name that came to my head at the moment of registration, as a crossover of my interests in free and open software and cooking.

So I am kicking off this idea, with myself as Chef de Cuisine, and inviting folks who are involved in free/open source software and who like to cook to be on the planet. All these folks need to do is provide me with a feed link. For example, when I write for something to appear on the Linuxchefs planet, I’ll use the tag ‘linuxchefs’ for the post, and it will automatically appear on the Linuxchefs planet.

Interested? Drop me an email.

Where it comes to talking about all the technologies involved, I admittedly fell a bit short. I haven’t been keeping up on every TLA in the related technical spaces around oVirt and KVM, and I didn’t get through a full research on all the topics before the presentation. One of my strategies, though, is to just run this presentation to learn what is and isn’t appropriate for a presentation. So I told the audience it was a new presentation, thanked them for being beta testers, and acknowledged that some in the audience certainly know more on the topic than I do and I appreciate chiming in with answers.

Which happened a few times, thank ye gods and goddesses.

In addition, I chopped up the original 21 slide presentation in to 91 slides, with each slide covering one topic. This is similar to one paragraph for an idea when writing. The decision to do this came from a late-Saturday-night discussion with Josh Berkus, who has some fame and skill in presenting. (Once I learned that a slide of mine from a State of Fedora Lightning Talk had made it in to Josh’s deck-of-shame – slide 5 in this PDF -  I figured it was worth  a rethink-of-approach. Hey, we all make mistakes.;-D ) The 91-slide version was not optimal, but it was better than the 21-slide version.

Now, to help this slide show be more useful, I will do my part in filling out the notes sections where I actually know what I’m talking about. Jason Brooks is working on a consolidated deck that improves on this one, and I’ll get my notes in to that one as the canonical.

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!

• FOSS Mentoring on Friday, I talk at 3 pm.
• SCALE: The Next Generation on Saturday at 11:30 am, Malakai, Saskia, and Mirano are presenting for the youth event.
• In the Cloud and Virtualization track on Sunday at 11:30 am, I’ll give a second talk on oVirt.

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!

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.

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.)

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?

• Mozilla’s massive metrics project
• Meego metrics
• Ubuntu metrics
• Debian team quality tracking
• Simon Phipps’ open-by-rule benchmark
• Tom Callaways’s fail-o-meter
• Open Governance Index
• Redmonk
• 451 CAOS Theory
• And many others, I’m sure …

(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.)

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.

“What’s wrong with the actual Fedora lists?” Robyn asked me. “We’re just not being very true to our roots when we have a special list just for Red Hat folken.” There’s a very real risk that people will reckon the list receives priority by other Red Hatters (it might, that’s the point!) and is elitist (“Too good for our lists, eh?”)

I don’t disagree with those concerns, and here’s what I’m thinking for reasons and mitigation:

1. People inside of companies using software to get their work done may perceive external community lists as outlaw places, as unsafe (because some discussion might touch upon confidential materials, devolve to attack/defend, etc.), and – honestly – scary unknown territory. Speaking with colleagues for support (“Hey, Jo, how do you …?”) gives people the feeling that the responsiveness of the community is going to be proper to the situation – no one other than a Red Hatter can know how important it is for Foo Bar from Sales to get her presentation to work on her Fedora 15 laptop. (That, I believe, would be the perception by people of why to use an internal-only list; hard to battle that perception without first getting them in to a  common forum – albeit a private one – to hammer out the real issues.)
   • For example, I know folks who first had to be hand-held through using internal IRC, then they got their entire teams to use it, and after a number of years, were willing and interested in venturing in to the open community IRC. I am confident that final step happened only because the earlier ones came first – for some people, the long-time in non-public space is perhaps the only way they’ll make the transition.
2. Desktop Linux users often get help from their local user groups, from special for-newbies-only mailing lists, and so forth. I would consider an internal fedora-users mailing list to be a similar, hand-holding gateway – ask questions here first, and if we can’t get an answer and need help from a Fedora list, either we’ll help you do that or ask for you.
3. If managers know their team members can ask questions on a private, confidential, internal list, they may be more likely to permit Fedora usage. Otherwise, there is little value in switching from the corporate standard build (CSB) of Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL).
   • Sometimes people really do need the kind of software that can only be found in a latest Fedora. For example, I’ve heard from some of the big movie animation studios that while they run RHEL on their render farms, they may use Fedora on their desktops if a designer or developer needs what can only be found in a super-modern Linux distribution. Having support when you need, where you need it from, is a good thing.
   • Similarly, folks who aren’t paid to be available helping on external Fedora lists are in fact paid and empowered by Red Hat to help other Red Hatters. It would be great to get that help to happen out in the external lists, but maybe it just has to start somewhere else first.
4. Communities need private spaces, maybe this could be one?

I would make a goal of the list to be, help internal users to gain the confidence and competence to go the external community instead. The internal list could be a training community, and those who want to graduate go on to make other Fedora lists better with their experience and point of view.

For those of you who would love to see dozens or hundreds of Red Hat worker bees who run Fedora participating on the users@fedoraproject.org mailing list … this is the only way I can think of so far that might yield more of that.

Ultimately I’m asking all of you out here first because while I know other Red Hatters might like and use the idea, it is your perception that I can never adjust by just showing you the private archives to prove it’s a reasonable approach to take. If I’m going to ask you to take our word for yet-another-hallway-discussion-being-OK, I should at least ask you before I start the hallway discussion group.

I’m curious if your company or organization does something like this. What do you think of this idea? How could it be made better? How can I mitigate the risks more?

Comments are open.

A big part of researching and teaching about the open source way is being able to tell illustrative stories to bring home the reasons why you want to implement the principles. So the handbook has a chapter devoted to that, “Great stories to tell“. I’d like to keep doing more there.

One idea is to have a regular (twice-a-month) audiocast discussion about current events in the world and look at them with the lens of the open source way.

Ideally these would be stories beyond software and technology. There is so much transparency going on in the world, so many open collaborations, and so many stories of people doing things “just like they do in open source software.” That is what opensource.com is filled with.

So I need a partner, and some occasional guests.

A partner who can:

• Get on the mic with me a few times a month to discuss extemporaneously about current events and the open source way.
• Bely the extemporaneous nature by doing a bit of preparation with me – picking show topics, preparing links.
• Be willing to do the entire project the open source way – from tooling to how we make decisions for the show. The open source way doesn’t mean we give up control, but we do increase transparency to full.
• Grow the show with me and others’ help, including a point in the (near?) future where we do the initial recording live while engaging with a live audience.

Guests who can:

• Bring an informed opinion, backed up by facts, on the subject of applying the open source way to a domain of expertise or interest.
• Have stories to tell that go beyond just techology.
• Be willing to work on the show in the open source way, too.

Are you that person? Know of the right person?

About me, if you don’t know me:

• I can be very, very loquacious.
• I can be funny, but am (as is typical) much funnier with certain people than others. Being funny together for the show would be just awesome.
• I tend to talk too fast especially when I get passionate, but I’m a fairly good listener.
• I have a secret desire to be on the air.