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Category Archives: Community

Call for help: I need you, the Open Source Way needs you

24-Mar-22

Thank you for reading this, I appreciate your attention and will only take a few minutes of it. In short, issues in my personal life are making it hard for me to pay attention to the Open Source Way project in the ways it needs, such as creating a community governance, shepherding the guidebook’s 2.1 […]

Dangers of in-person meetings for an existing community

20-Apr-17

It is inarguable there is a lot of value that we humans get from meeting with people in person. For a free/open source software project, this is often cited as the glue that holds together people whose normal interactions are textual (email, IRC) and lower-resolution than an in-person interaction gives. People who are bound together […]

Rate of discussion analysis on centos-devel

09-Jun-14

I was curious how the discussion rate on centos-devel compared to previous time periods. I want to know if our work on growing the project participation at the contributor level is working, and while examples such as the increase in the SIG activity are a good indication, one simple one is to see if there is […]

Why consensus-decision making is better for open source projects

21-Apr-14

Many of us use consensus-style decision making in our free/open source projects such as Apache’s lazy consensus model, but often we have a practice or even a governance of having things end up in a majority-wins voting process. In a majority-wins voting model, the dynamic is one where the dissenters are marginalized — the majority […]

CentOS Dojo Santa Clara – 31 March before MySQL Conf

19-Mar-14

On the eve of the Percona Live:  MySQL Conference and Expo (Monday 31 March 2014) I get to help run my first CentOS Dojo at the Santa Clara Convention Center. For this event, I’ll MC and give a talk about the newness in the CentOS Project. The lineup so far is pretty set and quite stellar: […]

CentOS and GSoC

03-Feb-14

With the Google Summer of Code season upon us, I’ve decided to stick my nose right in to the situation and help run a GSoC for the CentOS Project. I was co-admin for Fedora for 6 GSoC sessions, a mentor for a few specific projects including the kick-off for Transifex, and ran the one-off Fedora […]

Explaining the CentOS governance, or, Ouch, the snicker-snack

20-Jan-14

My man Donnie Berkholz wrote a good analysis (and great blog post) about the new relationship between Red Hat and CentOS, with a delicious analogy of myself appearing as the Jabberwocky. (Does that make Donnie the young man with his vorpal blade?) For many reasons, I’m honored at the comparison. Yet, I detect some underlying […]

Red Hat and CentOS joining forces

07-Jan-14

As you may have heard by now, Red Hat and the CentOS Project have announced that we are working together. I’m very excited about this announcement and what it means for the future. There are plenty of resources that I’ll list below to find out more about the new effort, but I wanted to take […]

Defining self-identity for an open source project & how did Fedora do it?

04-Sep-13

As an open community innovation engine, the Fedora Project continues to grow and change in how it creates/consumes itself for its community audiences. These are the “How is it made?” and “How do we use it?” questions. Over the last 6 months I’ve read and watched discussions and proposals around these topics, such as Tom […]

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 […]