If you’ve redistributed that website banner in any way, you must read on.

When we got the final banner for the website from the creative team at Red Hat, I wrote back asking for assurance that the components of the banner were freely reusable and redistributable so we could put the work under the CC BY SA 3.0 Unported license with the rest of the content. This idea naturally covers the fonts used – they must be free fonts or the whole image is not redistributable and remixable.

Today I was clearing out some old email and discovered a reply from the creative team to my request from March of 2010, with a new banner SVG file attached. The original banner, which was in use until just a short bit ago on theopensourceway.org, was using the non-free Interstate font. This new banner, now in use, uses the free and open Liberation font.

So I’ve updated the source files in the project’s git repository and I’ve updated the website itself.

Now the only concern is if anyone else has actually redistributed this banner under the expectation that it was OK to do so.

I made an honest mistake in that I am not very good at distinguishing between fonts, so I didn’t recognize that this was a non-free font. I also made the sloppy mistake of not seeing the follow-up from the designers, who did the right thing by all of us. While I’m sure I had the rights to use Interstate under Red Hat’s license, I probably didn’t have the rights to redistribute the image for remixing and further redistribution. It’s not that the file contains the actual font itself, just sixteen English letters of it in a scalable-vector graphic (SVG) file. I’m sorry and hope it causes no further troubles.

If you think you might have redistributed that banner or remixed then redistributed any images based on that banner, please contact me (directly via email or in the comments below.) I want to make sure you get the updated source files and that we follow-up with anyone else who might have the incorrect images in use.

I KNOW the girls can see the build up, as I move, sometimes over the course of _days_ from reasonable, nice, conciliatory, consensus seeking to upset, sad, frustrated, and vocally angry.  Temper still as short as when I was a shortie.

Just as I can see when each of them is getting upset at something.  Yet these build-ups that we should know in each other, it’s like they won’t watch out for each other, for all of us.  It’s all about watching out for self, making sure that “I” get enough cookies, the best job in the chore, a fair number of turns on the swing.  It’s never about “let’s all watch out for each other” and in that way we make sure everyone is taken care of.

Same thing that frustrated me and made me sad and mad as a kid — people can perceive that something is wrong with another person, and don’t do very much to figure out what is up and help make everything a bit better.  People could spend their energy making sure that everyone gets enough cookies, instead of keeping score and making sure that, at least, “my pocket” is full.  Acting as if there is a scarcity of love and compassion.

So, I vocalize (over minutes, hours, days) that I am getting frustrated, that I am sad at being left with all the work while they play, and all that.  Finally I get to the point where I am mad, shouty, and calling out behavior as unacceptable, bad, bratty, whiny, etc.  Only then do I actually get some change in behaviour that is sufficient to get done what needs to be done.  Being punishment based, it is not long lasting and the backlash is painful.

Then each time, the cycle starts over again.  I remind, “We don’t want to get to where we’re mad at each other, right?  So let’s just do these chores when we are supposed to and not have them hanging over our heads.”  Then I roll up my sleeves and pitch right in, no matter what other top priority thing I have in hands, I pitch in to show them that we just need to start working and then soon the work will be done.

And most of the time, we go through the cycle again and again.  The whole time I point out, “We’re doing that thing again, don’t we want to stop?  Can’t we stop?”

Except for the times where my emotions get ahead of me, but it doesn’t seem to matter.  Whether my temper seems to come out of left field or whether I’ve carefully laid the tracks in advance and pointed out the trouble junctions, it always seems to end with my rushing at them like an express train, them staring at me like deer caught on the tracks in the headlight of my engine.

*Sigh*
*Cry*
*Sob*
*Sigh*

Life: equal parts bitter, sweet, sour, salty, spicy, rich, and the pungency of the umami.

Who knew it all lies on the bed of our tongue?  Blah.

• 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.

Not to accuse me of breaking it, although often enough … but in expectation that I’ll fix it.  Computer to clothes dryer, apparently, I have the tools and skills.

Of course, I really don’t.  What I have in the family is the most experience in diving in to difficult waters and finding my back out again.  When I do this for the family, I wonder if I’m just enabling them to not learn that skill?

Of course, my wife turns a huge load of brush and straw in to a garden bed in an afternoon, when I’d barely scratch out a square foot of clear space.  She turns daunting in to done while I’m still shading my eyes in fear.  Between us, we’re a good fit for getting most things done, mostly well, most of the time.

Of course, the girls are just kids.  At 12, I find Malakai to actually have a great attitude about diving in to things.  I think this is one of those ages-and-stages things, they are no worse and maybe better than I was at that age.  A few months ago, when Mal’s music player ran through the washing machine, she and I took it apart to dry.  A couple of days later, she put the whole thing back together again when I was out.  It worked, except the battery was dead.  Clearly, the learning to swim in difficult waters is sinking in to her, too.  Also, the joy of a job well done.

It’s just funny-but-not-ha-ha that I get the role that includes belly crawling under the house, sticking my hand in to my elbow to unclog things, and really just about anything that is gross.  I’m also the carpenter, remolder/renovator, bicycle and car mechanic, and head chef/kitchen manager.

My friend Rahul once said to me long ago, “Why would you cook?”  Where he lives, I reckon, food is easier and cheaper from a restaurant or a food stand.  I know that I love the act of cooking, the transforming and delighted mouths, and I love even more when we grow something from scratch that feeds family and friends.  At last weekend’s pie party, we served plum, apple, apricot, and rhubarb pies where the fruit all came from our garden.  It was pretty amazing to realize how much of the ingredients were from our own hands, from the sun and soil in our garden.

In the end, I guess I choose to do-it-myself because there is a feeling that it is the right way to live.  If I didn’t listen to these feelings and intuitions, I don’t know where I’d be now.

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.

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.)

To vote in the general elections, we only ask of ourselves two things: agree to the Contributor License Agreement and join a contributing sub-project.

Those sub-projects are ultimately responsible for who is in those groups.  They can make the barrier very high or very low.  For example, in the Fedora Docs Team, we only ask people to introduce themselves to the list and request inclusion in the account group via the web application.  Voilà, you are in the ‘docs’ group.  At that point, without any further requirements to prove yourself, you gain the right to vote for i) Docs Team leadership, and ii) overall Fedora Project leadership.  That is an appropriate level of barrier for the responsibility evident in the group.  Other groups, such as the software packagers or infrastructure sysadmins, have higher barriers and more steps for being added to the account group.

This makes it ridiculously easy to participate in the voting.  I like that.  It means that someone who spends time helping people in fedoraforum.org can gain a vote for who runs the project without too much effort.  They shouldn’t have to prove their ability or willingness to contribute to any group other than one sub-project.  If the sub-project wants the lowest barriers possible, they can have that.  For some groups, that means very low; you want people to be able to join and get right to translating, writing, designing, and so forth.

My reasoning is, these are thinking human beings.  If they can make the decision to get an account and start working, why raise barriers to their ability to influence their own future?

What are some potential risks or downsides to this approach?

1. People might game the system.  This means, use the relative ease of gaining access to the system to fake a majority and take over the project.
2. Making the process too easy means anyone of any intellect, background, and set of standards can gain a vote.
3. If emancipation is too easy, people won’t value it.
4. People might game the system by organizing in voting blocks.

How does the Fedora Project mitigate these risks?

1. Firstly, simply agreeing to the CLA isn’t a human-free process.  Each account that agrees to the CLA is checked by Spot (Tom Callaway, Fedora Engineering Manager.)  Doing this as part of his responsibilities, Spot makes sure that each person is in fact a real person.  There is also a dubious value in the gaming of the system.  Once the gaming is discovered, it’s a simple matter of overriding the poisonous votes.
2. Aside from the fact that is the truth for any democracy, why should we care?  If we cannot attract enough people smart enough to vote well, then we have bigger problems than people voting stupidly.
3. Yep, this is a problem; voter turnout for Fedora elections can be pretty poor.  But the solution to that is not to raise the barriers but to convince people that what they have is very valuable, regardless of how freely it came to them.  This is one reason we are having multiple elections at one time, to gain on the momentum.  I am writing this post as a way of reminding Fedorans of the value of their vote.
4. One of the effects of a real democracy is that people have the right to organize in voting blocks.  That is not gaming the system, that is the way it works.

This week we went through the pleasurable experience of anointing the awesome Eric ‘Sparks’ Christensen as Fedora Docs Leader.  In all of that, the one thing that didn’t need discussing was me.  I covered my situation enough to explain that it’s really freaking important to Fedora that we keep leadership fresh and engaged.  I have become stale at leading Docs; I still work my ass off (for that measure of engagement), but I wasn’t seeing forests or trees anymore, just sawdust.  This post is to give a bit more background, and to let folks know I’m not going anywhere, just stepping back from the controls.

Wow, for the first time in a really long time, I do not have any named leadership positions in the Fedora Project.  My tenure on the Fedora Project Board ended in December 2008, Sparks is the new Docs Leader, Ian Weller is the Wiki Czar, I’m the most useless member of the EPEL steering committee, and my leading the ISV SIG is clearly part of the “get it moving and get out of the way” methodology.  I really am in a position to be a catalyst rather than being part of the old guard who is getting in the way of change.  Wahoo!

I usually find myself accidentally in leadership positions.  I don’t take the mantel lightly nor do I often handle it very well.  I’m indecisive and a poor whip cracker.  I make up for it by being a fair consensus seeker, networker, and idea collaborator.  I’ve learned to think and fake my way around this, like the way I appear extroverted when I just vont to be let alone.

To be perfectly honest, it’s not that I am really in my heart ready to let go — that is another quality as a leader where I fail, my inability to let go where I should.  My mixed feelings are entirely personal though, not a reflection on the kids currently making stuff happen.  This is clearly their time, and it’s obvious when you look at the resurgence in activity over the last few months as I lead up to this leadership change.  Now I can relax and let others take over the decision making and motivating, while I go back to kicking the occasional ass and actively helping with the F11 documentation as just another kid who happens to know a lot about how things work.  Also, since I don’t have to be the consensus building leader any longer, maybe I can start telling people who pour poison on fedora-docs-list to have a nice cup of STFU.

In looking things over for this post and for starting the Docs Project history page, I realized it has been four years since Greg Dekoenigsberg hit me up on IRC.  Aside from his great opener, “So, you appear to be the Docs leader,” Greg’s main point was something I highly agree with … and failed to do time and again.  “Get in, get it moving, then get out of the way.”  He was just doing that for (then) Fedora Extras, and it seemed like a good formula for Docs.

We formed a steering committee that I basically appointed, and proceeded from there.  My goal was to enable someone else to quickly come in and take over as the group leader.  Who did I pick in my mind as the natural successor?  You may have heard of him, Paul W. Frields.  Just when I was going to tap him to take on the mantel, Max Spevack did just that for Paul as an appointed member of the first Fedora Project Board.

With Paul effectively sidelined for the next year, I started over, working with the folks on the Fedora Documentation Steering Committee (FDSCo.)  We tried various schemes, including the first version of “should we revert to a SIG and give up on elections” discussion.  Sometime in 2008 we decided to skip the next election cycle — there weren’t enough people to run, the voting in the past elections had been dismal, and it was a distraction from getting work done.

So our tally now is — one year to get my legs underneath me and get the project moving (2005), one year to court then fail with Paul (2006), one more year to try that again with Paul before he got hired to a more distracting job (2007), one year to throw up our hands and just get work done instead (2008), and now here we are.  We brought ourselves to a pretty good place.  There are many more active people, people who are acting like leaders even without being invited to do so, and a renewed sense of purpose and possibility.

Now I get to relax a bit and be just useful instead of large and in charge.

Looking at the schedule for the recent FUDCon BarCamp … it still looks like that Mentor Summit wiki of a few years ago, where mainly the sessions I attended have notes and are categorized.  Noteable exceptions, though. Mel Chua, from Sugar/OLPC, was keeping great notes and session transcripts (via IRC logs.)  Paul W. Frields wrote in some notes from his git talk.

If you kept any notes, create a [[Natural language page name]], such as [[RPM vs XO FUDConF11 BarCamp session 20090110]], link it from the wiki schedule page, and put in the page the link to add it to [[Category:FUDConF11 BarCamp sessions]].

If you have any memory of what was covered — make the page.

If you were one of the presenters and maybe have some presentation notes, slides, or demos to refer to — make your page and link to it.

While I appreciate the extra effort we all go to when we travel to FUDCon, we also have to remember all the people who cannot attend.  There is a lot of valuable work shared and plans made during those sessions.  It is all invisible to the larger community.  Keeping some notes and posting them where others can read and learn is an essential part of bringing a FUDCon to a proper close.

My Red Hat-appointed seat of the last 18 months expires with this election. My interest is in seeing some new blood working on the Board. I haven’t been spending as much time directly on Board projects in the last six months, which is a good argument for new blood , but also comes from the crossover of my work in Community Architecture. I’m a 100% community guy all the time now, so the board is only another 1% on top. By bringing in new people, there should be a surge of new ideas and energy. Especially with the caliber of people such as Dimitris and Michael.

Which is the other reason I am not running. Red Hat is going to want to appoint someone new to my seat rather than extend my stay, and that is definitely the right thing to do. To stay on the Board, I have to stand for election for the first time. No problem there, I think I’d have a fair chance, but then I’d be blocking one of these other great community organizers to have a chance leading this ship.

What I’m looking forward to is running in the next election in six months, when the new round of people are more seasoned and have had a chance to steer the Board for a while. I’ll be refreshed, full of new ideas, and ready to engage. If I should be fortunate enough to get elected.