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The virtuous water cycle – updating an old analogy

29-May-13

When we talk about how code moves in the free/open source software ecosystem, we often use the upstream/downstream analogy. In this analogy, code flows from an upstream project downstream to the users and vendors. Users use. Vendors package and support. When anyone contributes their ideas (innovations) and code back to the project, it is said to happen in the upstream.

Recently I was in a meeting with a few folks and we were discussing the flaws in that analogy. For one, it describes backbreaking labor or requires magic – how do you get your changes from downstream back upstream without overland hauling, big motors to get through the rapids, or a helicopter firefighter team. It supports the idea that getting things upstream is hard, and therefore undesirable. Our real world experience is that the projects prefer to make it easy to contribute, and then we have to extend the analogy for pipelines that carry water, etc. It also doesn’t really describe the actual flow of innovation, it’s not all in one direction toward a larger ocean.

As a first pass at describing this virtuous flow, I wrote,

We all live on the same river. Care where your water comes from. Care where your water goes to.

What this misses is the circularity of the flow that a river doesn’t encompass. For a river to be circular it is either something magical or it’s not a river, i.e., the analogy is inaccurate. Just as I reached that conclusion, so did JimJag because he jumped up and drew this image on the whiteboard:

water_cycle-whiteboard-drawing

That, folks, is a water cycle. It solves the circularity problem because it looks at an ecosystem as a whole. In a normal physical world the water that flows downstream doesn’t spontaneously go back upstream directly. Anything else that happens to get water back upstream directly is a manual process – pumps, helicopters, etc. But a river is not in isolation – it flows from multiple sources down to the ocean, and along the whole way evaporation brings the water back to the atmosphere so that it can come down in ways that may replenish the water sources.

In this new analogy (and diagram), I’m not sure yet where to put the various groups we’re used to putting on the river. Such as, “User”, “Project”, “Vendor”, and “Customer”. Also, it’s unclear to me if the water represents one thing – contributions, code, content, what? – or if the water is in fact us. Looking at my own experience, I work for a free/open source software company, contribute to many projects, benefit from many thousands of more projects, and am a customer of vendors who create and sell solutions around or based on open source. As I’m moving around that water cycle … am I a boat or the water itself?

 

Filed in Community, Fedora, Free Culture, Open Source | Tagged , , , | Comments (7) »

Social support not private patrols

25-Feb-13

If you are concerned about how the City of Santa Cruz has stretched in to hiring private security teams to patrol public open spaces, email the City Council by tonight or show up at the Tuesday 26 February meeting. The Council is going to vote on actually legalizing their own practice, and extending it to allow the private security to patrol the public beaches. Read on for some of my thoughts on this matter.

Here in Santa Cruz, we have this … interesting process used by the City to impose some kind of control on the river levee.

Because we have totally failed as a city population to make the beautiful river levee into a destination for people – there are no food carts, no cafe tables, no benches, no vista points, no attractive plantings, no shade structures, no art, no population of hipster-intellectual-professional-slackers to make the place look cool – the levee instead becomes the quiet, hidden place for all the street people to hang out. (There is a long history as to why we ignore this treasure in the middle of our city, and continuing to allow private security teams to drive patrol cars is not any help to solving that.)

The City’s solution is to hire private security guards to drive up and down the levee. I’ve never seen them do anything other than drive. I can’t imagine what they can do from inside of their vehicle. I just know that my dog and I have to stop and step out of their way as they squeeze through spaces where only emergency service vehicles should ever go. I go on the levee all the time, and I find the private security patrols to be as bothersome to my use of the open space as any of the street people, travellers, and derelicts who hang out there.

People who are enjoying the river levee, regardless of their purpose or background, have the same legal rights of being there. At least, during daylight hours and out of the sections the local Parks Department has closed for “rehabilitation”, which is admittedly their way of making it illegal to be there so they can give tickets to trespassers-on-public-green-space. I have friends who have been ticketed for picnicking on this closed space. I’ve been verbally warned for walking my dog on the levee after dark when it is “closed”. The command and control exerted over this open public space has the effect of further reducing the enjoyability for everyone.

It turns out that the private patrols don’t currently have a legal right to drive there, which the City Council is considering changing. Here is a letter from City Council member Micah Posner to the local Nextdoor group.

Several of you have mentioned a dislike of First Alarm trucks driving on the levees. I always wondered how they were authorized to do that without permission from the City Council. As it turns out there is a city ordinance that limits cars/trucks on parks and beaches to maintenance and emergency vehicles. This ordinance is on the agenda on Tuesday at 3PM with a proposed change that would allow First Alarm and other vehicles contracted by the city to drive in parks and on the beach. This would be an excellent time for people to send emails AND come to the meeting if you have an opinion about these vehicles driving on parks and beaches. Send emails (by Monday evening) to citycouncil@cityofsantacruz.com

Regardless of where you personally stand on the issues of street people in Santa Cruz, I think we can all agree on a few things:

  • Santa Cruz really is mostly populated and controlled by the people who live here with legal residences and generally contribute to the tax base.
  • Changing the laws to reduce the rights of a small population affects all of us.
    • For example, in the City of Santa Cruz, if you are on your lunch break and take a snooze on a park bench after eating, you are in violation of the law. There is a ban on public sleeping that was put in place as a focus on a specific population, but it is binding for all people.
  • If you are going to accept your rights being reduced, you should know about it (be informed) and really consider the implications. Are you really going to be more secure?
  • Money spent on patrols that sweep street people around (“million-dollar broom” is an accurate term, budget-wise) doesn’t solve any of the problems that keep these people on the street. When people need help, they benefit more from social workers than another night in jail.

Thus I’d rather see us pay social workers to walk around the levee solving problems for people who get lost in three-letter-agency bureacracy. I would rather not see us pay private security patrols to drive around getting in the way of every citizen’s right to enjoy the open space free of car exhaust in our faces.

I encourage all of you to write the City Council and let them know what you think.

Filed in Community, Freedom, Responsibility | Tagged , , , | Comments (1) »

Fedora joins Google Code-In 2012

19-Nov-12

Google Code-In is the pre-college program for 13 to 17 year old students to earn prizes for completing tasks in various open source projects.,

This year will be the first year that the Fedora Project participates. We’re looking to build on many years success with Google Summer of Code, but the stakes here are higher. Unlike college students, who learn real life lessons the hard way, pedagogically you can’t allow high school students to truly fail. But failure is built in to the open source ethos. A fine line must be trod.

If you are a 13 to 17 year old or know one who is interested in code, design, documentation, just about aspect of an open source project, have them check out what Fedora has as tasks. They should also look at the wider program. Students can do work across multiple projects, or dig in deeply to a single project. Ideally, tasks are designed to be done within a few hours or days.

If you have any questions, I encourage you to contact Buddhike Kurera, who was last year’s GSoC admin. IMO, he has been doing a fabulous job driving the Fedora Summer Coding group. Joining the Google Code-In is the next step in his vision of how Fedora can work with students in these sort of contest/internship-style programs. I’m excited and curious to see how it all goes.

MWikipedia: M (named em ) is the thirteenth letter of the ISO basic Latin alphabet. →

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Contributor agreements – the grass is browner

05-Nov-12

If you’ve been looking to implement a contributor license agreement (CLA), or your free/open source software project already has one, I wanted to let you know that the grass is greener on this side of the fence. As soon as you can, burn your CLA and never look back.

I’ve had more than my fair share of dealings around these tools of accidental-anti-community – I’m fairly sure I coined the phrase “nuclear option” to refer to using the CLA to relicense without obtaining copyright-holder consent, and I certainly was instrumental in using that option in the now-defunct Fedora CLA.

As I continue to hear groups and organizations struggle with using CLAs, I wanted to pull together a few useful pointers and one particularly good presentation by Richard Fontana. Basically, I agree with everything he says, especially how CLAs inhibit community-building.

Richard is Red Hat’s lawyer specializing in FOSS licensing, and he gave this half-hour talk at the Open World Forum this year as part of the European Open Source and Free Software Law Event. In “Contribution Policies for FOSS Projects“, Richard systematically covers the major objections and concerns about CLAs.

Richard inherited a Red Hat practice of using CLAs, and I think it’s fair to say that he represents the learning that Red Hat has done institutionally around contributor agreements. Similar to other organizations, we originally thought the CLA was a good practice overall, and you’ll find the remnants of that practice throughout Red Hat-started projects.

These days, though, you can see that we’ve been using what Richard calls “inbound = outbound”, that is, code and content coming in to the project as a contribution is simply taken in under the same license the code and content is distributed under, no additional agreements required. If the project uses the Apache License, contributions must simply be under the Apache License. Same with the GPL, and so forth.

Examples of Red Hat using inbound = outbound in practice are the oVirt project and OpenShift Origin, both of which are licensed under the Apache License. Similarly, I like the contribution policy we crafted for The Open Source Way. It’s simple, clear, unambiguous, and reusable.

One thing I appreciate about Richard’s viewpoint is that he looks beyond the basic concern that legalese can scare people away, which is what many perceive as the main threat. More importantly, he highlights the way contribution agreements create different classes of contributors with a larger imbalance of power than many of us recognize.

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Response to ‘Meaning of “the only thing that could have happened”’

16-Jul-12

After I setup John D. Smith’s account on The Open Source Way wiki, I followed up to look at his website and discovered he is one of the authors (with Etienne Wenger and Nancy White) of “Digital Habitats: stewarding technology for communities”. This is a book out of the communities of practice milieu, and in fact is a book I’ve recommended on a few occasions. (An oversight: we missed having it listed on the wiki, which John fixed, thanks!)

This post is in response to John’s post about his experience at the Community Leadership Summit this year. I tried to post this as a comment to his blog, but had troubles getting signed in, so I’m going to post here instead.

John, I’m glad you bring up the topic of belonging at CLS.

Originally, there had been a CLS goal of reaching out beyond software to share with people from different community backgrounds than open source. I think that is still a goal.

When I was last at CLS in 2010, some of us looking for that higher-level community leadership conversation were disappointed at the quantity of “how to deal with assholes in your online forum”-type sessions. At the same time, it was already becoming a place for that higher-level discussion but only about open source communities.

The reports I got from CLS 2011 revealed that trend continued, on the higher-level side. It has become a place for people interested in open source communities, and is now the de facto summit for that angle. Unfortunately, this growth of one aspect – which is honestly the easiest one that could have grown out of CLS – has the effect of pushing aside the conversations from outside of the software sphere.

One reason I agreed to put so much support in to CLS this year – working with Guy Martin on the OSS community consulting working group, and a good percentage of my team at Red Hat were there, although I had to cancel at the last days – is because of the growth of the open source aspect. I cannot ignore that being valuable to what I do. However, I do think it’s a loss to not continue growing the non-software focus.

Would you consider coming again if you and others could make it more of a place that works for your interests? You might only represent a small percentage of the people there for a while, but the kind of higher-level conversations on community interaction that you want to have outside of just-software is very much needed. Open source folks need to learn about what is happening outside of our narrow sphere of influence and affect. “Digital Habitats” is good example of the kind of material many people may not know about – that’s been my experience with the main “Community of Practice” book, people really didn’t know there was this body of academic research that addressed what we experience in open source communities.

If that type of conversation doesn’t grow at CLS, it will grow somewhere else. I would like it to happen, though, where the open source folks can be involved – we have a lot to teach, but even more to learn.

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Fedora 17 packager metrics and why I care

20-Jun-12

I’m going to do something very dangerous – talk about specific raw, unanalyzed, and likely inaccurate statistics.

But I don’t know how else to combine radical transparency with my work of tracking and analyzing community health.

Does that mean someone is likely to read my posts and cherry-pick information that serves their own agenda? Perhaps. But I don’t choose to be open and transparent because it’s the risk-free position. I do it because it’s the better way to do things.

Do I expect some healthy criticism of my methods and results? Yes, I encourage it, and figure criticism will be more accurate and reasonable when the critic can view my methods transparently. I know I’m doing things incorrectly and getting things wrong. I need the eyes and help of others who care as much (or more) than I do.

Part of the better way is that I’m doing work on tracking community health directly in the communities themselves. The tools and data already belong there, so will the gathered statistics and (at least) base analyses. There is no opportunity or reason for me to keep all this a secret, but it is going to be a while until a coherent story unfolds. In the meanwhile, I’m making the proverbial sausage but without a recipe.

A website we’ve been working on at Red Hat is going live next week – and I’ll announce it when it goes live, but give us our rare Big Reveal without tittering, thankyouverymuch – and one part of that work is going to be based on these statistics I cooked up about Fedora Packaging today. At a minimum, this post is a reference for how those statistics came about.

Thankfully Toshio still had the script he wrote with Max a few years ago (2007!), and with some tweaks to the interaction with the Fedora account system (FAS), I got these raw, unanalyzed, and likely inaccurate statistics about who owns and co-maintains Fedora 17 packages.

Why am I so certain they are inaccurate? Simply, folks at Red Hat who work on Fedora don’t always use their @redhat.com email address. Unfortunately, this tool creates statistics based solely on the email address of the packager. We don’t have anything more than a wild guess about how many Red Hat people use a different address (most likely user@fedoraproject.org but others from personal domains and mail hosting services.)

Is there anything I can do to make them more accurate? I need to make a mapping of the different email addresses Red Hat folks use, mapped to their main Red Hat account. This will help with sorting out this sort of detail.(Currently 659 accounts to check, not a terrible manual research job, just tedious.)

Why am I so concerned with who owns or maintains what packages? Aren’t Red Hat people community contributors, too? Darn tootin’ they are, but that’s not the point. I know people look at such statistics as a competition, but that’s not my goal. These are statistics that are all out there in the public, I’m just doing a job of gathering things together. I’m doing that job because it’s one useful way of knowing if projects are being successful. We all want to see a steady, sustainable growth in packages in Fedora, with a healthy balance of package ownership so that one person or one organization isn’t taking on too much for itself. I’d like to be able to give a more accurate account of who at Red Hat contributes to Fedora – I’m sure even Red Hat doesn’t know exactly how much effort goes in to Fedora (and other upstreams) from Red Hat folks.

What is my future plan for these specific statistics? I feel responsible for reporting these, now that I’m starting. I recall Simon Phipps once wisely saying, “Don’t start reporting on any statistics that you don’t want to report on forever.” I accept that, and that any changes to the reporting – the methods, sources, results, etc. – need to be highlighted and explained. (I also hope that by putting tools and methodologies directly in to the projects, others can be involved in the creation and delivery of statistics and reporting.) I’ll link out to everything I do from the canonical Fedora statistics page, and I’ll host tools, configurations, and documentation on Fedora Hosted and the Fedora Project Wiki. Anything that is generic will also get contributed to the Metrics Working Group (metrics-wg) of TheOpenSourceWay.org.

And now, the stats and how I got them:

./rhpkgers.py f17 maint.list users.list 
Total Packages: 12157
Total RH Maintainers: 386
Total NonRH Maintainers: 659

These stats are for people able to commit to the package.
The first set disregards packages which are open for anyone to
commit:

Packages which have at least one Red Hat maintainer and packages
which have at least one non-Red Hat maintainer:
   @redhat.com: 5330
  !@redhat.com: 8575

Packages which have solely Red Hat maintainers, solely non Red Hat
maintainers, and a mixture of both:
  solely   @redhat.com: 3490
  solely  !@redhat.com: 6735
  mixed redhat+!redhat: 1840
     orphaned packages: 92

This set factors in the possible effects of open acls (ie: anyone
in cvsextras can commit:

Packages to which only Red Hat packagers can commit, only non Red Hat
packagers can commit, or both:
  solely   @redhat.com: 0
  solely  !@redhat.com: 0
  mixed redhat+!redhat: 12157
Total Packages to which anyone can commit: 12154

Steps:

  1. Get a list of all maintainers for all versions of Fedora (8.2 Mb file in the end): 
    • curl https://admin.fedoraproject.org/pkgdb/lists/vcs?tg_format=plain \
> maint.list
  2. Get a list of all active user accounts (61201 accounts, 3 Mb file); substitute the USERNAME and PASSWORDwith those of any active FAS user (I used my own): 
    • curl -d 'user_name=USERNAME&password=PASSWORD&login=Login' \
'https://admin.fedoraproject.org/accounts/group/dump' > users.list
  3. Run the scriptspecifying the package version: 
    • ./rhpkgers.py f17 maint.list users.list

I will be getting a git repo started on Fedora Hosted soon to put relevant bits in, and I’ll update this post with a link to that repo when ready.

 

 

 

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Mailing list web interface magic

14-May-12

For a while now folks I know have been talking about how to reoutfit Mailman so it has a proper web front-end. The idea would be to provide additional features, make open source mailing lists friendly to web forum loving people, and keep hardcore email-only contributors able to participate in the same medium as free-wheeling web forum afficionados.

Máirín put up a series of posts that not only give great visual thoughts, but are some powerfully good ideas on providing something a community can really gain from using. I’m not going to try summarizing, I just encourage you to read at least these two:

… and go ahead and read 7,750 pixels of mailing list thread, which came first anyway.

One thing that really struck me about these ideas is that many of the features that rely upon posting history can be run against an existing archive of messages. That means upgrading Mailman to features like these means quickly gaining a view in to the history of your mailing list that is a sizeable part of the richness of the new features. All the ideas that rely upon keywords in posts, previous posting history and frequency and topics covered, all the reputation ideas, all that would be seeded with as many months or years of archives a mailing list has. That’s really cool!

I really look forward to seeing some of these kind of changes in Mailman. I’m a big fan of Mailman on the straight mailing list management side. But over the years I’ve seen the wider and wider divide between the users who prefer web forums and those who prefer mailing lists (many of whom are contributors who want to interact with other users, but not on a web forum.) These ideas could provide a great stitching of that divide, without forcing a big change on either party.

 

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Mexican-style mocha – the Mexicano

30-Apr-12

This recipe builds on the cardamom coffee recipe I wrote about, not only instructions but also in how I came to discover the drink in the first place.

As with much of my cooking, I go with inspiration based on experience and love of ingredients and preparation styles. I invent many dishes this way, but it’s hell on my ability to repeat something – I’m not yet a disciplined recipe maker. That’s one reason I am writing these down now, to capture more of the process and result, to freely share the ideas, and to encourage myself to become a better recipe writer.

So the idea for this recipe just came to me one day when preparing cardamom coffee. The ingredients were all present in my cupboard, and I think they remain the best choices for this drink. In particular, the use of raw cacao nibs is essential in making the best version of this drink you can. I’ve tried it with high-quality cocoa powder, and it settles to the bottom of the drink in a very unsatisfying way. Using the raw nibs and grinding them with the coffee means they pass all their chocolate-y goodness in to the brew juice with none of the bean matter. Working from the whole bean means you have a fresh ingredient (instead of heavily processed), cocoa butter included with the cocoa flavor, and every other flavonoid/antioxident awesomeness is present, not stripped out in processing.

I call this a Mexicano mocha as it combines flavors I like in a Mexican hot chocolate (chocolate, cinnamon, cardamom – recipes vary, these are what I like) with espresso-style coffee and extra hot water (aka an Americano.)

  1. In your coffee grinder put your measure of roasted coffee beans, quantity to taste.
  2. Take one to three green cardamom pods and crush them on the counter. Separate the seeds from the green skin, put the seeds in the grinder with your beans. (I found three pods works for me, some people prefer two pods, use one pod if you want a lighter taste or just as starting place to work up from. For me, four pods per cup was too much, but I can see people who would prefer more pods. For a taste more like original Mexican hot chocolate, omit the cardamom entirely.)
  3. Add 1/2 teaspoon cinnamon chips. I keep this form of cinnamon because it is small enough to easily grind, but large enough to have many flavorful oils trapped in the unground parts.
  4. Add 1/2 to 1 teaspoon raw cacao nibs.
  5. Grind the coffee beans, cardamom seeds, cinnamon chips, and cacao nibs together until the coffee is the grind level you want to work with.
  6. Brew the coffee the way you prefer.
  7. The resulting brew will be very bitter because of the raw, unsweetened cocoa from the cacao nibs. You might like it if you like extreme bitterness, but I want a more balanced flavor than that. Other than a big dose of cream or milk to lighten and sweeten, I also use an equal amount of honey to the amount of cacao nibs in the original recipe. (If you split your mocha to two cups, don’t add the equal amount of honey to each cup unless you want it too sweet.) If using a different sweetener, adjust amount to taste.

I have used cocoa powder when I was out of cacao nibs, so a tip: add the cocoa powder after the drink has been filtered entirely. The very small powder will clog any filtering mechanism, slowing or stopping any brewing. (In a French press, I reckon it would just sink to the bottom.) Cocoa powder clogged my Bialetti moka and made it whistle from the escape steam valve.

 

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Elderflower lemonade (cocktail)

27-Apr-12

My wife is a big fan of a St. Germaine and champagne cocktail. Recipes vary, ours is (dry) champagne, St. Germaine’s elderflower liquer, lemon (I’ve seen some use limoncello, but ick, give me real lemon anytime), and a lemon twist. Our local favorite cocktail houses serve it in a flute or wide (martini) cocktail glass.

But when we want a bubbly lift without all the alcohol, we might make an elderflower lemonade cocktail:

  • Fill a tall glass 2/3rds with ice.
  • Fill glass 3/4ths with plain sparkling water.
  • Use a zester or peeler to make a long lemon zest twist, then cut the lemon in half.
  • Cover the lemon with a cloth before squeezing or squeeze through a screen to catch seeds, then squeeze entire lemon in to glass.
  • Add 1+ ounce St. Germain’s elderflower liquer, or to taste. You are looking for the point where the sweet just cuts the tart enough to be drinkable, but it still makes you want to pucker a bit – tart, not too sweet.
  • Rub twist around glass rim, squeeze to bruise the skin to release more oils, and top drink.

Days must be getting warmer, eh?

 

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Cardamom coffee

24-Apr-12

(If you like this recipe, try out the next evolution, the Mexicano, a Mexican-style mocha.)

When I first read about the idea of putting cardamom in coffee, I was intrigued. I’ve always appreciated the effects of fresh, green cardamom pods in cooking, and the idea of an old Arabic tradition for welcoming a guest with hot cardamom coffee was too cool to not figure out.

But all the recipes I found didn’t treat the coffee beans, cardamom seeds, or resulting brew in a way I liked. I think many relied upon an older way of making coffee, where you simmer chunky-ground beans and seeds in a pot, then strain and sweeten. I’m more of a modern, fresh-ground coffee type of person. So I built a recipe that worked for me. This is the recipe for a single cup, increase proportions for more brew, adjusting the quantity of cardamom seeds to taste.

  1. In your coffee grinder put your measure of roasted coffee beans, quantity to taste.
  2. Take one to three green cardamom pods and crush them on the counter. Separate the seeds from the green skin, put the seeds in the grinder with your beans. (I found three pods works for me, some people I’ve gave this to prefer two pods, use one pod if you want a lighter taste or just as starting place to work up from. For me, four pods per cup was too much, but I can see people who would prefer more pods.)
  3. Grind the coffee beans and cardamom seeds together until the coffee is the grind level you want to work with.
  4. Brew the coffee the way you prefer.
  5. The resulting brew may be more bitter than you like. As I usually use a touch of cream or milk to lighten and sweeten my coffee, I also use a touch of honey in this cardamom coffee.

 

Filed in Cooking, Fedora | Tagged , , , | Comments (5) »