Today I sat with my project manager glasses participating in an IRC work session on Fedora Insight.  The session, much of which was logged and summarized using the awesome zodbot and the meetbot module (plain text logs and summary.)  The logs were started a bit late, but include a summary followed by work on the internals of Zikula, it’s templating system, and making things that much better for the Fedora Insight move to production.

We are meeting tomorrow (Sunday 28 February at 13:00 UTC and going for another eight to ten hours) in #fedora-meeting-1 to continue working on the final bits.  This includes documenting and teaching the process of moving from publictest instance to staging.  We have a Zikula team member, Simon Birtwistle, who is making that magic happen.  We want to make sure we capture that as knowledge in to the Infrastructure SOP system.

In addition, we’ll be following some Infrastructure procedures to dump the database from testing and load it in staging.

This has been a long journey with a lot of hands helping along the way.  It’s the double-edged sword of fighting with free/libre and open source software on your side.  You can’t brute force your way through some of the parts because time isn’t the most important value in the equation.  Both the Fedora systems and the upstream Zikula team have benefited from the work, we are now literally 99% there.  Smacking good!

There continues to be some balance with the existing Zikula package.  The current one in Fedora is in the version range of 1.1.x, while upstream has a 1.2.x series that we need to run instead.  By comparison to 1.1.x, 1.2.x  contains fixes and removes hacks in favor of better solutions, some of which are related directly to working with the Fedora Project.  There is a ticket requesting that a 1.2.x version be hosted by Fedora Infrastructure until an appropriate solution can be made for the Fedora main version, which may be waiting for 1.3 to release.

That’s my wrap for the day.  Pascal will publish something to the logistics list archives later, I reckon.

Is it the first of its kind?  Not sure, not likely.  We are certainly not finding any academic research and such to suggest that ‘open marketing’ as we practice it in the Fedora Project is very common or understood.

It’s mature enough to invite you, a traditionally trained and skilled marketeer, to participate and get something great out of the process.  The methods follow from the principles of free and open source software development.

The key principles I think go in to open marketing are:

• Practice radical transparency – all conversations and decisions are done in the open, including the full, 100% true marketing and brand plans.
• Trust your community – don’t save even part of the work for your corporate marketing team.
• Train your community – many of us didn’t know squat about proper marketing before becoming involved in Fedora Marketing.
• Increase your capacity for wider participation – you need room to get core things done and have legitimate peripheral participation.
• Don’t rush things – spin off tactical work e.g. event handling to a different part of the project; focus on strategy and enabling others to work from a common brand vision.
• Focus on being a service bureau – support the rest of your project as they need it, don’t try to get ahead of what they are doing with traditional product marketing approaches.
• Find how to lead with market research – open research of open communities will yield data useful to the rest of the meritocracy.
• There is no “way we do it” – people who know about any traditional profession should bring their expertise, but be prepared to transform and transmogrify on the fly.

A year or two ago, if a bunch of traditional marketeers had landed on Fedora Marketing, I think it could have been a disaster.  There seems to be a sea change of thinking in marketeers.  Maybe the power of the social media phenomenon has finally sunk in to the marketing way of thinking.

Before the social media blossom, open-minded marketeers didn’t have a lot of good reference points.  Doing things “like” open source software wasn’t an argument for pursuing the open source way in marketing.  There has been a lot of fauxpen marketing – it may purport to be authentic, but it’s really just skilled manipulation.

Skilled manipulation cannot move at the power of the people using Twitter and Facebook.  Authenticity has a ring to it, don’t you think?  I imagine there are hundreds of marketing folks out there now doing a version of, “I told you so,” as they rework plans to include such crazy things as innovation from the community of customers.  Some marketeers have embraced free culture and are learning how to work with it for the benefit of all.

Many are surely still using ‘open marketing’ as they would ‘open source’ – an item on a checklist of “features” that speaks nothing about the actual way those are included in the path of innovation.

Here in Fedoraland, we’re building an open marketing campaign one brick at a time.  If you are or know of any marketing people interested in getting involved in an open campaign, come our way.

Looks like Jono had a similar reaction, seeing it up close last week, as he reports in Linux Pro Magazine:

Like many shows, an area is provided in which non-profit, volunteer-led upstream open source projects can exhibit for either free or a nominal fee. The .org area at the event was disappointingly pushed right out of the way of the exhibition to the back of the room, in a separate room with no line of sight to the other exhibitors. In this room, the open source projects were provided with a run-of-the-mill circular table and chairs. I found this a frankly embarrassing and degrading nod toward open source projects. Many of these projects form the backbone on which an event such as this can prosper, and event manager IDG needs to afford them more respect than was rustled up for this show. I was not alone in this view either; a large number of exhibitors not only were disappointed that the .org projects were shoved to the back of the venue but were keen that their commercial exhibits be in line of sight with the .orgs to promote more cross-pollination and discussion. Come on IDG, you can do better than this.

Glad now that I saved myself the time wasted and did something actually useful for the free and open source software world that week.  To all friends old, new, and not yet met, I’ll catch you next time … at one of the nice regional events that do a really great job.

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?

Take last Fall’s OSBootCamp as an example.  This series of no-cost events was put on by an organization that is now the Free and Open Source Software Learning Centre, hosted at Universities to introduce students to open source, regardless of their previous experience.  Taking a look at the line-up from the day I was there, they brought in some heavy hitters with great stuff to say – Eric Allman, Kirk McKusick,  Brian Behlendorf, Matt Olander, Josh Berkus, Leslie Hawthorn, and so on.  On that day, I talked with and presented to people who are brand-new to open source and people who practically invented the community organization methods we all take for granted.

I gave a student-focused, 20 minute presentation on why to contribute to open source from within the classroom.  Focused on students, it recommended they seek classes that let them work on live code instead of doing an autopsy on the same old dead code.  I also talked about how Red Hat and Fedora pick and grow projects, as part of letting the audience get an idea of how to choose where to contribute.  The video is available on the FOSSLC site, and isn’t too bad a view of me talking. The slides with my full set of notes are available on the Fedora wiki:

https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Community_Architecture_presentations#OSBootCamp

There were some other interesting parts of that day worth mentioning.  Kirk McKusick (FreeBSD) and Eric Allman (Sendmail) both mentioned recognizing the direct connection between FreeBSD and Fedora Project structures and growth/sustainability methodologies.  We felt the only real difference is licensing philosophy.  I appreciated McKusick’s experience with the BSD license.  He said the BSD license allows people to realize for
themselves they are better off putting their code upstream for maintainability purposes — pragmatic realization over time v. GPL’s benevolent forcefulness.  He referenced many situations over the years where businesses had decided to put their code in to the BSD trunk instead of maintaining and reporting it with every release; the pain taught them the value of the open source methodology.

There was a good  database panel that reminded me somewhat of my experience talking in panels with other Linux distro community leaders.  When asked why choose one over the other, all gave descriptions of how they fit a niche more than overlap.  “You wouldn’t want to run a website with a lot of connections on Ingres; you wouldn’t want to run a financial trading system on MySQL.”

https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/SIGs/ISV_Welcome

ISVs have always been a part of open source and Fedora, but there are a number of changes over the past eighteen months that have drawn a lot of attention to Fedora from ISVs.

One of these is the creation of the EPEL (Extra Packages for Enterprise Linux) repository. ISVs can have their open source packages ready to install to RHEL 4 and 5 environments without having to spin up the development, packaging, and delivery infrastructure. They also gain immeasurably by being part of the Fedora community and getting a six to twenty-four month head start on their testing for the next version of RHEL.

Another important milestone is the arrival of OpenJDK 6 in Fedora and EPEL, which is now certified as 100% Java.  Because of the need to compile everything from source in Fedora, we were previously limited by what applications could get working under gcj.  Having a certified Java in Fedora and EPEL is an open invitation to Java web application developers and ISVs that specialize in that software.

If you are part of an ISV or otherwise interested in seeing them succeed in Fedora, join the ISV SIG, especially the mailing list.  The purpose of the list is to discuss the issues special to ISVs, with technical discussions happening in the usual places.

1. North American Fedora Ambassadors are in the midst of a nice resurgence, this is a great time to show your mettle and get more deeply involved.
2. Jack and I will be there, we always know how to have a good time.
3. Considering which exhibitors are not going to be at LinuxWorld (HP? Sun? Red Hat?) and who is sponsoring and what is being installed at all the official desktop shootouts and installfests, you might consider the Fedora booth to be a great island in a storm of fanboy crap.

The San Francisco show has always been a touchstone of West Coast open source communities, and many are well represented as usual. But the relevance of the show is always in question, especially after the death of the Boston show, which was the last show Red Hat was at. I was there, I saw the tumbleweeds blowing down the aisles. When vendors stop exhibiting at LinuxWorld SF, it makes me wonder. Do they no longer need to prove their open source chops and are ready for the next level? Or are they missing out on actual, qualified sales leads and cannot justify the enormous cost for marketing alone?

I hope that the reports of LinuxWorld’s death in San Francisco are beyond greatly exaggerated, and I’ll continue to do my part to bring open community to the show.

Aside from the Fedora work, I’ll also be wearing my reporter’s hat for Red Hat Magazine and Dev Fu. Looking for stories, videos, and all the interesting bits I can find.

Best for me, even though I have to come out of my introvert shell to talk with people, I’m going to make sure I’m paired up with one of the nutty extroverts when we talk with ISVs, and I do not have a presentation to prepare for (yay!). Also, the travel is nicely short, no full day used to get there; it should be about 4.5 hours from my house door to meeting up with Jack and Greg at the hotel for the trip to OSU.

To be clear, I’m just asking as another Fedora Ambassador, not as anyone who has purse strings to open. You’d likely be on our own dime for travel and lodging. OSCON isn’t really a premier Fedora event, but it could be, especially if you help make it so. If you are interested, definitely follow the Ambassadors join process, but also contact me or one of the Community Architecture folks to let us of your interest in this event. Go ahead an comment on this blog post, too.

Where is the one for Fedora?

Anyone have a contact at OpenJDK?  Seems like we could give them the equivalent set of installation instructions for the page, “How to download and install prebuilt OpenJDK packages.”

I’d really appreciate that being updated somehow, especially in advance of next week when I plan to beat the OpenJDK drum at Sun’s Community One developer event.