The two big questions were generally:

• How do we enable developers and designers to contribute back to setiQuest in a way that benefits all involved?
• How do we share the SETI vision with the world, so that conversation can come back and support people wanting to find ways to participate?

The community building problems are pretty straightforward, the kind of thing we cover in The Open Source Way (TOSW).  In fact, I’m going to follow up this meeting by joining a working group to help setiQuest architect the community structure and seed the leadership team/interim board.  I intend to create and use some checklists and so forth derived from TOSW handbook. To me, it’s a great chance to take the principles in TOSW and see them applied in another domain while at the same time applying them to actually new open source and open data.

Another stroke of luck, one of the IDEO people I met today works on OpenIDEO, their new project to open the design thinking process.  I’m excited to get to follow up with them, find out more about how they want to grow the OpenIDEO community, and how that can feed in to and learn from a “Design the open source way” chapter in The Open Source Way.  It will be an interesting conversation, since I intend to press on the license and terms used by OpenIDEO in comparison to the open nature of the site’s purpose.  At the same time, I hope to learn about more about the challenges of design and free/open business models, and learn more about how to make The Open Source Way a better book.

I’ll write more about this as it develops.

Part of the way to scale ourselves we have always done, which is to engage with other community leaders and leverage each other.  Recently I had a new idea that we could fill out our circle on education and open source by inviting people who are passionate about K12 to work within our team as external contributors and entirely in the public sphere.  Read on if this is interesting to you.

Our team’s definition includes that we are failing if we are growing too quickly by adding paid bodies to manage projects instead of building projects that scale themselves.  A project or program truly done the open source way should be able to survive and thrive without a person paid to be at the helm or shoring up all the work.  So we baked it in to our team’s methodology (and that explains why we work on ten full-time things at once, because once done right each might become a not-full-time thing that comes from and benefits many others.)

One could argue, quite correctly, that our team is currently extended in to the community via all the community leaders we are in regular contact with, where we mutually support in varied ways.  Primarily in Fedora and TeachingOpenSource.org, but others as well.

What I’m imagining is a person, or a few people, deeply passionate about open source, young people, and education.  We recognize that a big selling point for people is that FOSS can save cash-strapped schools a lot of budget.  However, we think the higher goal is to teach open source participation.  It’s as easy as contributing to a Wikipedia article or testing and sending feedback on Sugar activities.  The point is to show kids that they can tinker with their own knowledge, and we start by showing the teachers how to tinker.  They already tinker with what they can – many teachers jump around a textbook if they see fit.  Our goal is to make them feel the same way about technology and the wider world of information, that it is something they can manipulate, model that manipulation to their students, and kickstart a new generation of makers, autodidacts, and teachers of learning it yourself by doing it yourself.

Here’s how I imagine such a community leader role description would go.   Think of it as a first draft.  What would you add?

And more importantly, would you be interested in doing one of these roles?

FOSS in Education Community Leader Role Description

You have a passion about free and open source software (FOSS) and education.  In particular, we are looking for people who want to work in the primary education years, sometimes shortened in the United States as “K12″ to signify thirteen years of primary education.  You can focus on one or more niches in the K12 area, such as public schools, charter schools, private schools, homeschools, foreign or second-language schools, etc.

In this role you will be expected to:

• Choose one or two niches to focus on.
• Attend weekly or bi-weekly bi-monthly meetings on IRC with other members of the community leadership team (CLT), as set by consensus.
• Set goals for the quarter and year, and report status and progress back to the CLT.
• Potentially travel (regionally, nationally, or internationally) for education conferences.
• Interact with school boards, principals, teachers, and staff at all levels about teaching open participation and collaboration.

You should have or be willing to develop skills in these areas:

• Research and writing.
• Public speaking.
• Community organizing, which is done from within and not on top of.
• Fedora Linux and Sugar on a Stick.
• Being a catalyst so others are able to do things (versus doing everything yourself).

The role includes on the job training in being a catalyst in communities (PDF includes full speaker notes.)

While you retain copyright on all your work, you are contributing all your work to e.g. TeachingOpenSource.org under the Creative Commons BY SA 3.0 Unported license.

A last story if you’ve read this far …

Once upon a time there were two build systems and two sets of packaging standards around Red Hat and Fedora.  They were very similar, but were in fact forked from when Red Hat Linux was split in to Fedora Core and Red Hat Enterprise Linux.  Primarily, the Fedora packaging standards, tools, guidelines, and processes greatly evolved in the first few years of the fork, compared to their kin inside of Red Hat.  When the Fedora Project brought all the Core packages out to the open community infrastructure, the Red Hat engineering teams had to retool and reunderstand these new systems.  They adopted the packaging guidelines that were driven for six releases by open community process.

There are many examples of this, where everything from code to content to policy and processes that are developed in the Fedora Project are adapted or used directly by other parts of Red Hat.  Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) is a primary example of that, but also consider how important the entirely community run Extra Packages for Enterprise Linux (EPEL) project is to Red Hat and our customers.  If you don’t know, it’s very important.  I don’t know a service or support person who doesn’t direct customers to EPEL on a regular basis (until the customers figure it out, and maybe take the next step of participating directly in EPEL for shared benefit.)

So the deal is this:  while there can be zero guarantees or promises, you can look to history to tell you there is a very good chance that your doing work and helping set our policy on K12 FOSS education will find it’s way up in to the education strategy that we work on for Red Hat.  Our team’s role is very strategic, more than probably any other similar team exposed by Red Hat to open community work.  You can take advantage of our sharing nature and our desire to use your smart and capable brain to help us figure out this part of the future in K12.

People always say, if you complain about something in FOSS be prepared to do something about it.  We can offer you an opportunity to become a catalyst and center of gravity around K12 and education and teaching participation in FOSS, which means a chance to make a difference in exponential and surprising ways.

Interested?  Comments are open below, if you are ready to get used to the always-in-the-open discussions.  If not, contact me directly and let me help you help us … help you … help everyone.

Note: It should be clear from this site’s URL that these are my own, personal opinions and don’t necessarily represent those of Red Hat, my team at Red Hat, the Fedora Project, TeachingOpenSource.org, or pretty much anyone else in the entire universe.  I am noting this because I want it clear that I am not giving any kind of picture in to Red Hat’s hiring plans.  Also, I am not describing actual Red Hat strategies any more than discussing Linux kernel strategies tells what will be included in the next RHEL update.  I am writing this post as a way to better explain my idea to my own team, meaning that team is vetting this idea at the same time as you are.  Thus, even my own opinion here is subject to change.  This note is here because I’ve never discussed open strategy in this context and I want to set our shared expectations about what is going on here.

(Updated 2010-08-17 to meetings suggested as bi-monthly (twice a month) and decided by consensus.)

• 16 July our team loads up a mini-van and starts the 12+ hour drive to Portland, Oregon.  On the way we stop in Berkeley, CA to visit the wonderful folks at ZaReason.  Cathy and Earl, our proprieters, are loaning me one of their snappy new (and shiny red!) Terra HD almost-mini-notebook.  I’m giving it a full test run under Fedora for a number of reasons.  Personally, I want to see what life is like on a modern, small notebook; I’ve always been a “bigger is better” laptop selector (for myself.)  I also want to see how this system, loaded with stock Intel components, handles Fedora 13 and maybe rawhide (Fedora 14 to be.)  This also gives me a chance to help iron out any kinks in delivering Fedora on these systems, if any arise.  I’ve long been a fan of ZaReason’s approach to supplying systems to Linux users, they’ve clearly developed a following, and it’s great to see them reaching out to Fedora users with pre-installation and so forth.
  • The trip north is simply epic, with the Bay Area, Central Valley of California, Mt. Shasta, the Siskyous, and the Willamette Valley of Oregon.  Beautiful country, awe inspiring.  It is great to show it to some folks for their first time.
  • We arrive pretty late to Portland where we hook up with Robyn Bergeron, who I get to meet in person for the first time; she’s very cool.  The hotel is very nice right in the middle of downtown, and we settle in to be as fresh-as-possible for CLS the next day.
• 17 July we spend at CLS, participating to various degrees.  My take of the Community Leadership Summit (CLS) community is that there are a number of large groupings you can lump attendees in to.  Some are very experienced online community membesr and leaders.  Some have taken that community leadership to add a production of some sort to the necessary, core social need of being involved.  Common products are free and open  source software projects, but those aren’t the only ones in evidence.   Some are a subtle mix of social and something tangible that still can’t be held in your hand.  Within those groupings are people who are new, experienced, and everywhere in between.  I don’t think these differences are clear to everyone attending, and I think they create some potential disconnect in terms of how the people coming to CLS interact.  Just something to expect in a rather new community, and dinner conversation spurs Max to write a blog post at my prodding.   I attend a few sessions:  “Moving beyond the mailing list“; “You suck or conflict resolution in your communities” (where we hear the advice to, “Just remove them from your mailing list,” when a poisonous person problem in e.g. the Fedora Project is much more complex).  I meet up with lots of old and new friends, make new friends and contacts, have a great lunch downtown at the food carts, and do my best to do my best.  We end the day with sushi served by model railroad, which finally makes me happy.
  • There are two incidents that happen that day, one I observe that makes me feel very uncomfortable while it is happening, and the other I hear about a few days later.  Both happen in the morning plenary session, and both are disturbing instances of sexist behavior.  I think my blocking on writing about those has contributed to my not writing about the event overall.  I feel that my first real writing about this has to be to the CLS discussion list, because this is the community where the behavior happens and needs to be corrected.  At the moment, that is all that I’ve decided.  I’m still feeling that stunning and chilling effect that makes me want to go silent and pretend nothing is happening, all will be forgotten. Ick.
• Sunday 18 July starts out OK, although we are all a bit over-sleep-ish.  This morning I pitch a session to share about the community leadership handbook, The Open Source Way.  I give a good, thorough introduction, and try to illicit some feedback on what people need from such a book, as well as prodding them to use it as a canonical resource for the principles we are espousing all the time.  I also attend a few sessions, including  “You’re killing your community“, a wry look at why too much help can be harmful.  We end up having dinner at the top of Portland, at Portland City Grill overlooking everything, where happy hour yields us some nice food at a tasty price.  Late night Saturday and Sunday we pony up for some points-only poker, and I learn finally how Texas hold ‘em is really played.
• On Monday 19 July we head down to Oregon State University campus to meet with Drs. Tim Budd and Carlos Jensen.  The real and potential fall out from this trip are worthy of a separate blog post, and I think I’m going to write an article on it for opensource.com.  The summary is, I’m seeing an inverse mirroring relationship between the goals and methods of FOSS and academia.  It opens some really cool possibilities.
  • Also cool, for the rest of the week I get to meet multiple graduate students from OSU working on research that is useful and can make a difference: gender equality; enormous lack of joining and engagement; and so forth.
• Monday night is the Teaching Open Source education bird’s of a feather mini-session, and I get to meet even more interesting people.  Then I head back to Corvallis to …
• … spend Tuesday with a friend and his family.  I head back to Portland in time to help with booth setup, then back to the hotel where I’m surprised by the kids and Larry showing up earlier than I expected. Yay!  Food is sought, then bed.
• Early Wednesday I’m up to finish my part on the final slides Mel and I are using this morning at 10:40, “5 FOSS in Edu Projects That Changed the World“  All goes fine in our talk, it is actually pretty good, and the day is a bit more relaxing after that.  We work the booth and hang out in the expo hall, make trouble, and talk lots of stuff to lots of people, especially teaching open source (TOS) stuff and the open source way stuff.
  • Wednesday night I dip to an Android hands on, which includes my own Nexus One handset to start developing on and such.  Thanks Google, and thanks Tim Bray for organizing the session along with the awesome crew from Google.  My girls are going to be very jealous when I get back to the hotel room.
• Thursday we try to just improve on Wednesday, including getting one or two mini-talks going at the Fedora booth.  Lots more TOS talk, I have lunch with an old friend and colleague (downtown food carts for the win again.)  Now that I’m with the kids, I take it pretty easy at night, heading back in to the hotel early and getting wicked tasty pizza delivered by bicycle for dinner from Old Town Pizza.
• Friday I’m up early again, having a morning adventure walk and finishing updating my slides (source and all OSCON materials) for my talk today, “Being a Catalyst in Communities: The Science Behind the Open Source Way“.  Very smooth talk, I’m happy with the updated slides and after giving the talk a few times this year, I’ve got a good stride with it; also, I don’t go over time.  Then we pack everyone up, load the kids and Larry in the minivan, and head back south to Santa Cruz.  We arrive home about 3:30 Saturday morning, and here I am still.

I hadn’t thought about it before, I’m used to thinking in terms of locality for law.  This is the law that generally touches us every day – from traffic to local statutes.  I’m sure we’re regularly affected by international commercial law, for example, but I just don’t spend much time thinking about it.

It hadn’t occurred to me that we could support FLOSS licensing in this way.  Richard laid out some areas that need attention for the idea to actually work.

• Stewards of widely used licenses need to provide public guidance on interpretation and usage, such as how the FSF does for the GPL family.
• Projects should document their interpretations of the licenses they use, such as how they intend them to interoperate.  Fedora is a great example here.
• They can also help by documenting policies on inbound contributions, such as what Richard and I did for The Open Source Way.
• Distribution projects can help police licensing and explain their own rationale, such as how Debian and Fedora have done it.
• Consider community dispute resolution institutions to resolve intracommunity FOSS licensing conflicts and questions.  The SFLC has assisted in this before, but that is not a very scalable solution.
• … plus others I didn’t capture in my notes; we’ll have to get Richard to write an article about it.

After listening to this and some follow-up questions from the audience, I stood up and suggested that there seemed to be an existing community of practice around FLOSS licensing.  Maybe we should formally recognize it, invite wider participation, maybe setup some infrastructure.

Such a community of practice could define and provide guidance as a stand-alone, neutral party that all interested people can participate in.  Individuals in upstream projects, downstream distros, or stand alone developers can join and bring questions for discussion.

This is a classic example of a situation where a community of practice can be highly successful.  I’m not sure how it fits in, but I’d like to see opensource.com/law be a central place to hear from the community around international FLOSS licensing.

I walked away with one last thought, after listening to Richard share his thought processes as he has pondered this domain.  More than nearly every other lawyer on the planet, Richard has been exposed to many aspects of FLOSS licensing in an international arena.  His musing left me thinking how the law is a completely human constructed mindscape, meaning the ability to do thought experiments is greatly expanded.  Imagine if you could work on physics problems in a mental universe where the laws of physics were your own construction.  Not wildly speculated science fiction, but well thought out and explored mental maps.

Non-lawyers tend to think of the law as immutable.  Perhaps in some ways it is, when you take a snapshot of it in the moment, with current thinking and case law.  But new thinking, it seems, can cross with case law, and possibly give out something new that didn’t exist before.  There are current international legal constructs that didn’t exist a hundred years ago.  It seems like a time to make another one for FLOSS licensing.

From the inky shadows on the right, Richard Fontana reviews the FLOSS legal landscape.

This is a follow-up to the successful CLS that occurred before the last OSCON in San Jose.  The idea was born at the first CLS to have additional, regional, and smaller CLS events in between an international, annual event.  Well, small was the idea originally, but it sounds as if CLS West has nearly as many people attending.  In addition, the Ignite session on Saturday night at Google HQ gives a handful of us a chance to bring a message to the assembled attendees and a few guests.  I’m planning to break out our new upstream project – an open content community book we’ve started and are ready to open for wider collaboration.

If you want to attend CLS West, there are still free tickets as of this writing.  If I know you and you want to come to just the Ignite event, I’ll gladly hook you up as my guest.  That, I believe, is first come, first served.

Why am I reporting this?  The Gallup headline for their own results is, “U.S. Clergy, Bankers See New Lows in Honesty/Ethics Ratings“.  Of course, their take on the story is that, surprise surprise, people trust bankers even less than before.  Now you’ll tell me car sales people are lower on the list now, too?  Oh, yep, there they are, 7% dropped to 6% this year.

I found the story about the nurses more interesting and wanted someone, somewhere to do a story on that tidbit.  Here it is.

Naturally, the story angle about the drop in trust of bankers is what other articles picked up, including one from the New York Times that was referenced from this story about Darth Vader ringing the NYSE bell.  The Times article did mention “(t)o be fair, the perceived integrity of most other professional groups that Gallup asked about — including clergy, lawyers and pharmacists — has also been falling in the last year. Police officers are the only group that seems to have enjoyed a significant increase in public esteem.”

But really, the part that jumped out at me was the fact that trust for nurses is 20% higher than for police officers, and a full 14 points higher than the nearest ranked profession.  I doubt the drop in trust from 84% to 83% is very important, comparatively.

Oh, I see one reason, there is a trend here.  In 2008 Gallup wrote, “Nurses Shine, Bankers Slump in Ethics Ratings,” which followed up the 2007 report, “Nurses Top for Ethics and Honesty.”  Nurses have been at the top of the list since they were added in 1999, with the exception of 2001 when firefighters took the top spot.  I’m wondering if the real story is, while Gallup is providing a good service in keeping track of this information, they really don’t have much to say about it otherwise.  A rise or fall in a few percentage points in a single year could indicate many different things.

I will give them one thing – the banking profession’s fall from 41% in 2005 to 19% now, that definitely shows something is afoot.

Today (02 Dec 2009) I moderated the townhall on IRC for the Fedora Board candidates.  Full details are available on the Fedora elections page.

The meeting log is available, and here is the list of questions we went over. A few follow-up questions were chimed in the stream of discussion, so you need to read the full log to find all the questions discussed.

1. What is a Linux distribution to you and how important is it that the Fedora Project creates one?
   1. What the original question made me ponder is, how important are “ancillary to making a Linux” the various activities in the Fedora Project?  Is it fair to consider them ancillary or are they actually primary?
2. Aside from a distribution, what other sorts of “deliverables” are important to the Fedora Project?  Are there any deliverables that the Project should be producing that it isn’t?
3. What do you see as Fedora’s greatest failure in the recent years?
   1. What do you see as Fedora’s greatest triumphs in recent years?
4. Is important to you to create an official fedora package box: with DVD and manual?
5. Ok, an education program of some sort seems to fall when within the boundaries set in the project’s mission statement. What factors should go into deciding what activities get to ride in the front seat of the Fedora bus? Or does the primary distinction really not matter much?
6. How do the candidates feel about the changes occured regarding PackageKit during the F12 launch and the ensuing bad publicity? How could it have been avoided?
7. What do you think the Board could do in order to help efforts such as https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/SIGs/Store that would allow for more brand recognition by allowing more people to obtain Fedora branded gear?

Did I say … V O T E ?

These are the sort of things I find myself microblogging about on twitter and identi.ca, which may explain why my blog has been going dark the last few months as I’ve been more micro than macro.

This 15 October marked my eight year anniversary with Red Hat.  I celebrated by presenting to people in our Raleigh, NC office about the open source way.  It all comes full circle, eight+ years later people (enterprises, governments, SMBs, academia, all of that) are still coming to the acknowledged and trusted open source leaders to learn how to get this done.

1. It’s not evil.  Despite a propensity to paint Red Hat as having dark, secret motives by some members of the world, the evidence is clearly to the contrary.  Being a public company, we have to act in the best interest of shareholders.  That means keeping stuff confidential that could affect the stock price, etc.  That’s fairness and ethics.  But we also know and have clearly demonstrated as a company that we make more money for our stockholders by following the open source way.
2. We make money by doing the right thing.  Why other people have not figured this out, I don’t know.  All the open core/fauxpen core/dual-licensed business models haven’t been working as well as everyone who is their proponent claims they would do.  Our pure-play open source model is really the only sustainable one.  Why? It doesn’t incur the cost of closed source the way the other models do.
3. We’ve maintained our culture throughout the years.  Every month there are new hires at Red Hat who, bless they souls, come from Big Grown-Up Companies who Know How to Sell Software.  *sigh*  You can imagine, keeping the proper open source way culture flowing requires dealing with internal as well as external onslaughts, pressures, and personalities.  At this company, the technical people have a serious influence on adjusting the mindset of the very smart people we bring in who haven’t yet fully absorbed the open source way.
4. We make some of the best technology while participating and catalyzing in the best communities in the world.  I love the people I get to work with outside of the Red Hat walls, and I’m there able to gain some credence often because of the power of @redhat.com after my name.  Everytime I add to that brand, I know I give many more than myself that same power-of.  That same is true when I wield the power of @fedoraproject.org.
5. They’ve taken a misfit genius like me and turned me in to something useful to the world.  ‘Nuff said.

In baseball, the batter is trying to hit a ball hurling through the air.  The batter has three chances to swing a thin stick of wood at that ball, trying to hit it; once that hit happens, physics really shows it’s stuff, converting all that combined speed via a new arc that can travel a surprising distance.  Hitting that ball so far that it cannot be retrieved in the time you can run around the bases on the field of play is called “a home run”.  If you don’t swing but the ball was in the zone where you could have hit it, a strike is called.  Three strikes and you are out (end of turn.)  But if you swing and fail to connect the stick and ball together, that counts as a miss (strike), too.

First was my swing, ‘Architecting communities‘, in that I don’t think the session came to it’s potential.  After I hit some highlights of what we do at Red Hat in architecting communities, we wandered around a bit in the general areas that were a bit of a theme for CLS.  How to track, how to measure tactics, diversifying contributor base, defining the target audience of participants, etc.  One thing I appreciated from this was meeting (and later talking with) Paul Cooper of the Moblin project.  I hope I provided some insights for folks.

Later that day I put up a session called ‘Letting go of leadership‘.  This session was great, lots of active discussion, many people who had been through the processes before of letting go and growing leadership around them.  I was happy to put in a few bits of experience from the Red Hat and Fedora Project viewpoints.  Best thing was getting a chance to talk about parade leaders and true leaders.

You can tell true leaders because they usually don’t want the job, but recognize that organizing people around their goals is a great way to get things done, and make most folks happier.

The parade leaders are the ones who look for a group in motion and jump in front of it before the cameras go off, and everyone says, ‘Oh, there’s the leader.’

(I stole this idea from someone else who has yet to write on it anywhere I’ve seen, so I have to be the canonical source for this idea for now.)

The ironic home run was, I was jawing and having coffee over the break before that session, and I ran my mouth right in to the time of the session.  I had no idea it was off until Jeff came to me, “Hey, Karsten, there’s a room full of people ready to start in your session.”  D’oh!  I refreshed my cup of coffee and headed to the room.  When I got there, at least 25 folks sat in a big circle, and they were deep in discussion.  Someone immediately spoke up when I arrived apologetic, “Oh, we thought you did that on purpose to make a point of how to let go of leading a session.”

Zonker even mentioned that in his blog entry as if it really was a serious tactic; bless his faith in me!

Another fun discussion was the “Letting go of Leadership,” session that Karsten Wade proposed. In a stroke of genius, Karsten showed up late to the session, illustrating what happens when a group is “leaderless,” and how quickly the vacuum is filled.

Funny enough, I had joked in the opening plenary about, “What if you want to leave your own session?”  That is a basic rule of the open space way of holding meetings and unconferences that we use at FUDCons, and I was happy to accidentally invoke that.

New and useful:

• Event wiki.  If you’ve ever participated in a BarCamp-style event with pre-planning on a wiki, that’s what this is about.  Pitch ideas in advance, find people with similar talk suggestions, pair up, and wow-the-world.  Plus it’s good for travel planning, car sharing, where-to-eating, and so on.
• Lots of people attending.  Looks like over 150 have signed up, meaning we’ll have a good number actually show.  Although not an explicit goal of the first conference, we’d love to see people from outside of high-tech.  Lots of communities with volunteer and paid leaders out there.
• Think of the CLS as an upstream leadership project.  It is a neutral space where people from any community can contribute ideas and grow materials, content, processes, friendships, and so forth that we all benefit from downstream.

One thing I’ve appreciated is that Jono has been working to keep the event very neutral, including skipping the usual round of high-finance sponsorship seeking.  We figure, for a free event we can be a bit more lean in terms of what is supplied.  Example – expect to take a lunch break and walk outside to downtown San Jose with the group instead of having an expensive catered lunch.  At the end of the event, we’ll have an all-hands session to go over how the event went and plan what we want to do next time.

That said, if anyone who has the (perceived) neutrality of an O’Reilly wants to sponsor a few things, such as coffee service on one day or event lanyards, contact one of us organizers and we can see if it fits.

One idea I had for lanyards was, bring your own.  How many do you have collecting dust hanging in your home office or jammed in a drawer somewhere?  Heck, I might be able to provide lanyards for the whole event!

See you there?