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!

On Wednesday, my girls and Larry and his girl are catching a train in Emeryville, CA.  It’s a 19 hour journey to Salt Lake City, which seems long but is only 7 more hours each way than driving without all the downsides of driving.  Also, it should be an awesomely beautiful ride, even at night.  We’ll get a chance to finish our presentations, explore the train, and relax.  Also, sleeping is more comfortable than in a driving car even without a sleeper car.

If you are attending, or know anyone else who is, here a list of the talks we’re giving:

• User Groups 2.0 – Larry talks about the modern user group experience. Friday 08 October at 11:30 am.
• opensource.com – How open source is changing your life beyond technology – I’m giving this talk about how the open source way gets applied in business, education, law, and so forth, as often discussed on opensource.com.  Friday 08 October at 11:30 am.
• Barn raising and musicians on the green – old ideas in a digital world – Friday night’s keynote by me will talk about how the open source way is rooted in a long tradition of how communities get things done.  My goal is to give a talk that pulls in the new-to-FOSS while giving the FOSS experienced something new to think about.  Friday 08 October at 4:30 pm.
• Fedora Birds of a Feather (BoF) – The classic session for Fedora friends, fans, and contributors to get together and discuss all things Fedora.  Friday 08 October at 7:30 pm.
• Ultimate randomness – girls in open source – Mirano, Malakai, and Saskia will reprise their talk from the SCALE 8x Women in Open Source Summit.  After this last weekend’s sleepover at my house, I can attest that this is a whole new presentation based on the original and will be well worth attending.  They’ll talk about TuxPaint, GIMP, OpenShot, and other stuff they do with open source. Saturday 09 October at 11:30 am.

Wow, that’s a lot of stuff!

Looking forward to the train ride and the chance to meet folks at a conference that is new to me (first UTOSC for my girls and me.)

After posting this, I was reminded that Ryan Rix is doing a BoF, Fedora, FOSS, and Schools.. The story of Fedora Campus Ambassadors at 6:30 on Thursday 07 October, and Robyn Bergeron is presenting Tour de OMNOM (Open Marketing, not Obscured Marketing at 1:30 pm on Friday 08 October. Of course, Jared Smith is giving the Thursday night keynote at 4:30 pm, Swimming upstream: How Linux distributions help the entire community.  Jared is also giving a second talk, Automated Deployments of Linux in a Small-business Environment at 6:00 pm Friday 08 October. *whew*

8:45 a.m. – Welcome & introductions, Michael Tiemann

9:00 a.m. – Dr. David Upton, Chair of Operations Management, Oxford University

9:45 a.m. – Free and Open Technologies: A Policy Update from the European Union, Karsten Gerloff, President, Free Software Foundation Europe and Graham Taylor, Chief Executive of OpenForum Europe

10:30 a.m. – 15 MINUTE BREAK

10:45 a.m. – Matt Jadud, Assistant Professor of Computer Science at Allegheny College

11:30 a.m. – Wikimedia: Strategic Planning the Open Source Way, Eugene Eric Kim, Cofounder & Principal, Blue Oxen Associates

12:15 p.m. – 15 MINUTE BREAK

12:30 p.m. – Q&A: Creative Commons and the Music Industry, Daniel James, director, 64 Studio Ltd.; Curt Smith, solo musician, singer and songwriter as well as co-founder of Tears for Fears; and musician Brad Sucks

1:15 p.m. – The Stimulus and Standards, Dr. John Halamka, CIO of Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center and Harvard Medical School and chair of the US Healthcare Information Technology Standards Panel

2:00 p.m. – 15 MINUTE BREAK

2:15 p.m. – Michael Tiemann, Vice President of Open Source Affairs at Red Hat and President of the Open Source Initiative

3:00 p.m. – Open Source License Compliance, Richard Fontana, Open Source Licensing and Patent Counsel, Red Hat, Inc.

3:45 p.m. – 15 MINUTE BREAK

4:00 p.m. – Open Source for America, Jeremy Allison, Linux Evangelist, Google, and Terri Molini, public/investor relations consultant with Initmarketing, the Open Source Marketing Agency

4:45 p.m. – The Open Source Way: Creating and nurturing communities of contributors, Karsten Wade, Sr. Community Architect, Red Hat, Inc.

There are already two lessons learned from this first Open Your World Forum — learning as you go is part of the open marketing experience.

First, the team put together the forum on very short notice and elected to use a known system for presenting, provided by a vendor (Thomson Reuters), rather than research open source solutions. I haven’t seen this system, but I’m fairly certain it is not an open source project.   This is the kind of thing that happens in the real world, where time, money, and opportunity are finite.  The key from here is to get it in the plans to use an open solution next time, and I understand that is the case.  Perhaps John Adams will write a post about the experience for the business channel.

Second, the presenter selection could use some diversity in voices, particularly different cultures and sexes.  As I commented extensively, the presenter crew is 100% men and 92% European in ancestory.  I think we can do a lot better than that, and I’ll do what I can to help find that diversity to add to the width and depth of the voices at future Open Your World Forums.

Whittling from the set of slides I used for Ignite CLS West, I cajoled them in to six slides that still follow the principles of presentation I want them to follow. Big font, few slides, can be given in ten or forty minutes.  As part of my standard procedure, I included a set of notes for each slide.  The idea is to make the works more reusable, as well as help me keep on point when talking.

http://quaid.fedorapeople.org/presentations/Presenting-The_Open_Source_Way.odp

http://quaid.fedorapeople.org/presentations/Presenting-The_Open_Source_Way.pdf

Image copyright (c) 2010 Debora Wade, released under CC BY SA 3.0 Unported

Overall, the keynote went great.  No real glitches and I survived the big laughs when the “security updates available” alert went off on my laptop when I was talking about security. I meant to be both ahead of the length of time involved and to talk more slowly.  Not sure how except to cut words while conveying more.  (Certainly the parts about SELinux could have been about 3 min. shorter, for example.)

I was very proud to have my family there in the audience, too.  Now they know I’m not totally nuts.

There is a break in the middle between the two parts where a few minutes of video was lost. Mainly I was talking about stuff you can read here:

• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fedora_(operating_system)#History
• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Hat_Enterprise_Linux#Relationship_to_free_or_community_distributions
• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Security-Enhanced_Linux#Implementations

My wife requested more visuals in the presentation.  I realize this stripped down style works for me, but not for people who want to make a visual connection with the spoken word.  For example, when I’m talking about Prince St. in Boston, having a nice shot of Prince St. on the screen would help convey the story better.   This all requires me to have more practice in giving the talk so I don’t mix up the order of stories.

Regardless,  I am going to do some improvement to this presentation because I’d like to give it again, and I think some others would as well.  The OpenOffice.org source and a PDF with notes are both available, all of it is under the CC BY SA 3.0 except the image of the resonant pendulum from exploratorium.edu (Red Hat got permission to use that image; I’m looking for a free content replacement or I’ll have to make a special trip to shoot my own.)

Preparing for the talk and during giving it, I found myself being newly aware of diversity and inclusivity issues.  I heard in comments from multiple directions that people appreciated my recognition of the value of people who participate quietly, and that their silence isn’t only shyness.  Often there are very legitimate reasons someone does not feel enabled to speak up, and due to the nature of the situation, some of us may not be able to even know or understand that.  There were still a few parts where I saw my language lacking, e.g. usage of the ubiquitous and excluding “you guys”, but overall I was much happier with my talk than many, many others I have sadly witnessed.

Being charming and funny is all good, but not at the expense of 66% of your current and future audience.  Meaning, when you offend a large group (e.g. women) and their supporters (e.g. sensible men), you approach 66% of the audience who are or should be turned-off by you.  (There will always be some of the offended group who don’t see the privileged behavior as bad, and many in the non-offending group who also see no problem.)

Since the success of free and open projects is related to the quantity and quality of contributors, and since contributors arise from participants who arise from the 80%+ who are just consumers … well, we need about 100+ new people to generate three to five contributors.  It doesn’t make sense to continue excluding huge swathes of humanity, especially for the sake of vanity and way old school thinking.

This talk is in O’Reilly’s Ignite format, which is 20 slides that auto-advance every 15 seconds.  The math says, 5 minutes and you have to keep on a very tight schedule.  As both a curse and a gift, I talk quickly, and I think I came out relatively intelligible.  Sort-of.

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.

For those who’ve never heard of building automation systems (BAS) and the smart grid, you have my pardon to take a few minutes to go read up.  In essence, BAS controls lighting, heating/cooling, and power.  In some buildings, especially modern (last decade+) construction or recent reconstruction, there are smart(er) devices right down to individual fans or perhaps lights.  In some cases these end-devices have various embedded sensors that report data or have localized smartness.  For example, the heater, the boiler, and all the thermometers share data.  From a building management standpoint, there is a measurable savings.

Where these end-point systems are generally interoperable (they use the term Open Systems), the software that interacts with the devices, providing information and control to humans, is closed and proprietary.  There are also many end-point devices that only interact with a proprietary interface.

The problem of the controlling software is a chance for open source to significantly change the game.  Money and energy savings, just to start.  A way to improve the quality of life for people around the world.  It is even more interesting because of how potentially useful the existing on-site hardware is.  There are many end-point installations that can be controlled with open source-based BAS software.

The power grid is, in essence, a massive network already connecting houses and commercial buildings.  It is also fairly ubiquitous:  “You have an existing network in your house,” someone said to me, “It’s the bus bar in your electric box!”

Kent Hoskin, from Robinson Solutions, told me, “If there is one thing you take away to share, it is this – there is a new computer to program.”  This includes the 4 million+ commercial buildings in the US alone.

One project is Open Lynx, which a lead developer demonstrated before I spoke on the open source round table.  In the demo, we looked at monitoring from an installation in Washington, DC.  In a larger demo on the expo show floor the day after I was there, they were going to show control beyond monitoring.

The round table was enlightening for all of us.  Many people were engaged when I spoke, taking notes, nodding their heads, and asking questions afterward.  It was great to be able to bring a bit of “been there, done that” experience and mentoring.  At the same time, I learned a lot about the history and potential future of BAS, and the 1.5 hour conversation I had afterward with some attendees was one of the best I’ve had in a while.  I’ve made some good contacts and am looking at ways that I can help get together other like minded people, which is one reason for this article.

A smarter local grid gives an owner a way to smooth out some of the costs.  For example, a company might have three buildings at a large site, each on a separate connection to the power utility.  One of the buildings might have an unusual spike of power draw on Sunday mornings that sets the rate for the week, while another building has an unusually low power draw at the same time.  A smart system could smooth out, drawing power from one building to the other to compensate, and keep the rate set lower to a level closer to the actual power used throughout the week.  For various reasons, the disconnected systems situation is more common than not.

In further research during my travels home, I learned a bit more about where the mentality of this industry is.  For example, they have ISO standard networking protocols (BACnet) and there some a rejection, scoffing, or eschewing of IP as a protocol.  In one article, Sustainable Design of Building Automation Systems, the author makes a classic case where the best answer is “open source and open standards”, yet doesn’t actually draw that conclusion:

In conclusion, a sustainable BAS is achievable with proper initial design considerations that include the use of open protocols, standardized network management tools and open access to product and training.

It reminded me of the way IT uses TCO as a way to calculate costs and savings when considering open source and open standards, but stops short of adopting the full open source methodology.  “Oh, let me take these open standards as given to me and swallow them without ever thinking I can affect the future here.”  I was happy that at least the people who attended the round table got a dose of how and why participation in open source is key to getting maximum potential and exponential value.

(Post updated to fix name and URL of Robinson Solutions.)

• Support for how and why to invest resources in open source
• A cluebat about why your organization should participate in upstream projects

… then send them to Esplanade 302 for my 11:50 am session this Monday 01 June, the first day of CommunityOne.  I’ll be presenting ‘Participate or Die‘, which is my more aggressive talk that shows real numbers, reasons, and evident truths about why you must participate in open communities that matter to your person and business.  Or, well, die.

If you intend to still be in business in the next few years, now is the time to take the proper strategic view about your participation and contribution to open source projects.

This is Sun’s CommunityOne event that happens concurrently with JavaOne.  However, I’m aware that this is also Oracle’s house, and the last time I was at the Moscone Center when it was Oracle’s house our host did not treat us very nicely.  I expect better treatment this year, but just in case, I’ll be packing my Unfakeable Linux t-shirt.

To make things really clear, though, I’ll be appearing in one of my favorite t-shirts, the VA Linux Systems one that says, “Open source. It’s the difference between trust and antitrust.” (Close-up of shirt back and what it looks like on a smart thinker.)