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.

Is there a natural reason we have leveled off just shy of a dozen student projects? Is that all we really want done? All we are prepared to support?

The conclusion I’ve come to is that this is the level we get for the effort put in. Other projects that have more student slots simply have more people organizing as administrators, as well as mentors — more people making more smart decisions. They seem to be drawing from a common set of open roadmaps. Maybe the project-wide experience has made it so people actually watch out for opportunities to include students in the roadmap.

By contrast to what I’ve seen in Fedora, projects such as the Apache Software Foundation (ASF), GNOME, and KDE routinely have three to four times as many student slots. There are numerous reasons why, but I think a core part of it is this:

• The KDE project has a huge idea list this year – 120 as of this writing. Last year they got 46 student projects accepted to run for the summer.
• While GNOME’s page for this year is still a bit short as of this writing, they go through a vetting process for ideas and 2010′s idea page was 30 strong, well-organized ideas.
• Apache had 39 projects in 2010 and 32 in 2009, and some of them must have come from big project lists such as this list of 70+ project ideas in 2009.
• By contrast, Fedora’s idea page this year just grew to 20 items without organization. Past years are similar, such as thirty for 2010, fifteen for 2009, and thirty for 2008 all poured on to the page with a jumble of qualities. No vetting for quality and commitment of the mentors. Hard ground for much seed to get purchase.

So we have fewer ideas out there on average, and they are jumbled on the page with no organization against project wide goals or a roadmap.

What part do idea pages play?

From what I’ve seen, Google assigns student slots based on the interest students show in a project. More ideas, more coordinated marketing across the teams, and more work to get students’ attention generates more applications. That seems to be an important factor in determining how big a project can scale for students.

To make that attention happen requires commitment from each mentor and sub-project team they are associated with. To get a winning application, an idea might get three or four or ten that don’t quite make it. Mentors have to work fairly with all the students, trying to improve applications (within reason), and making decisions in the end to pick three dozen from an original of perhaps two or five hundred applications. Not much problem though when you’ve got a hundred mentors reviewing.

I reckon that a well organized and large pool of ideas comes about best when there are enough people working on making that happen. Subsequently, that becomes enough people to actually manage the increased program size, the applications, the mentoring, and so forth. Thus, the ideas page becomes a fair representation of how ready a project is to scale to what size.

If some folks in Fedora would really like to see our GSoC program be two-times, three-times, or even four-times the size that it has been, I put all this out there in hopes that it helps.

(Numbers in this post that are not linked back to the source originated from queries to Melanage at http://code.google.com/soc for the year specified in the statistic.)

The gist of the movie is, GW McLintock (Wayne) is a tough but fair minded cattle baron in a US territory in the 1890s.  The relationship with the Comanche is interesting; McLintock is a former Indian fighter who speaks for the Comanche in a kangaroo court, and secretly supports their choice to die fighting instead of in prison.  The ranchers are at odds with the farmer settlers, who are looking for land to farm at 6000 feet above sea level (good luck.)

McLintock’s wife, Katie (Maureen O’Hara), is also tough, not fair, and rules her family with an iron parasol.  She has also separated from GW because of something she won’t talk about; she has moved out and comes back in the movie to help welcome home their daughter.

Said daughter falls in love with a young farmer, who happens to be a star pugilist who had to drop out of Purdue when his father died so he could help on the homestead.  Their love blossoms over fighting and, yes, when he spanks her for encouraging her father to shoot him, it’s clear love is in the air.

So the end is GW chasing Katie all over town, as she losses more and more clothing, until he finally catches her and spanks her in front of the whole town.  They he jumps in his carriage and leaves.  “Oh, no you don’t,” Katie cries, and suddenly able to run as fast as a horse in her heels (when she couldn’t outrun a Wayne-stride-through-town), she jumps on the back of the carriage.  Closing scene follows, with them embracing as silhouettes in the window.

Oh, did I mention, this is a comedy?

It is odd to watch a move like this, and both admire the slightly more respectful (for a cowboy movie) view of the Comanche situation in the 1890s.   Meanwhile, all the women in the film are just looking for the right strong man to tame them, break them like a wild horse.  Not even as an overtone — mother and daughter have multiple scenes where they slam a door or stalk off mad after being mistreated, then giving a sly sidelong glance and half smile at the abuser (husband, young beau.)

The sooner we erase these stereotypes from our cultures, the better the future will be.

Several years ago, when Red Hat stopped going to LinuxWorld, North American Fedora Ambassadors still felt it was relevant to Fedora.  I believe this was primarily because of the chance to connect with other contributors, the oxygen in the lifeblood for so much else at the show. LinuxWorld was a touchstone for the communities to reach out to each other, network, and grow the contributor-base, to attract more O₂ molecules.

When IDG changed the name after the 2008 show to OpenSource World, myself and some folks I talked with were not sure if the show could maintain relevance.  The change seemd to go head-to-head with O’Reilly’s OSCON.  I also heard that the expo floor would not be free this year, although I haven’t found any confirmation.  If that were the case, it would mean the flow of volunteer-oriented people who might participate or contribute to an open source project would trickle to a drip or a full-stop.

Just this week two things happened that sealed the deal.  First, my keynote proposal for “Participate or Die” was turned down.  I had said if I got a keynote talk in (fat chance!), then I would rally for a Fedora presence to back me up.  Why was it rejected? “Possible reasons include: multiple submissions on the same topic, the appropriateness of the proposal to the conference format and ranking the expected level of interest.”  I’d bet it was the middle one — IDG probably doesn’ t think their audience wants me to threaten them with irrelevance.

The other item came from an email from IDG that was forwarded to me.  Apparently, the free booth space for open source projects in the  .ORG Pavilion is no more.  Open source projects are being offered a 10×10 booth with two stools, high counter, carpet, and electricity (no network) for $1995.  Hey, it’s a 60% discount!

Just to add salt to the wound, I got an email to the account I’ve used for years to register for a free expo pass.  I’m eligible for a free pass as an event alum! Not sure what there is to see since all the actual open source projects have been conveniently priced out of the expo floor.

So, I’m just an Ambassador in the Western NA region, but I certainly am not going to waste a dime or ten more seconds of my time on the clearly irrelevant OpenSource World.  My recommendation is for Fedora Ambassadors to skip this show.

Maybe everyone should skip it?

1. Your goal is to prepare your child for a rich and abundant life in the real world.
2. Your goal is to let your individual child blossom in her way, in her time, knowing a firm grounding in her family and roots prepares her to find her best path at each step of life.

If you follow the first guideline, then you make preschool decisions that affect college choices, are working hard to make money that supports a rich and abundant life, and want your children to attend the best schools with the best programs.  You may not have spent as much of a quantity of time with your children, you focus on quality, and figure that their rich and abundant life that they’ll lead forever is the best thing you can do for them.

Or something like that.

If you follow the second guideline, you treat your children like a slow cooked meal.  Each ingredient of their lives is cultivated from the ground, locally and appropriately.  You follow the schooling they want, letting them set their own pace and break away slowly from the family constellation at a pace that suits each child.  You may work less or for less money or make some other compromise that puts the most amount of time in the hands of your family, aware that the future years are going to be unknown but most likely, they’ll be little stars moving in their orbits by then.

The first guideline is most like the guideline that our society follows.  That is, “The norm and the expectation.”  Some people follow it by clear choice, others because they haven’t thought of any other way.  Following the second guideline is more rare in the US culture, although perhaps a little less so than even a decade ago.

I was contemplating this as I looked at the International Baccalaureate site. I’m clearly in the second guideline camp, but I felt mixed emotions looking at the little baccalaureates from around the world.  How happy they look!  I be they feel really a part of something! What bright, shiny futures they’ll have!

This emotion has to do a bit of battle with the part of me that knows these children are forming a new constellation with new people precisely because they were forced from their first constellation, their family circle, at an early age.  Forced from the breast, from the family bed to the crib, from the crib to their own bedroom, from their bedroom to the nanny, nanny takes them to preschool, preschool starts a bond with same age people that is shattered in college, and after that … well, the real world starts.  A real world that is in fact nothing like those first 18 years, except where they repeat family choices with their own future families.

It’s honestly hard not to feel I’m failing in part with my children by not teaching them everything now that they’ll eventually need.  Even as I watch their peers in other lifestyles learn so much more at such an earlier age than I ever did.  If it weren’t for the pioneering experience of other homeschoolers to bolster me when the cold chill goes down my spine in the night, I don’t know how I’d make it through to the morning.