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New community manager position on my team

07-Sep-11

You may have heard that the Community Architecture & Leadership team recently graduated another founding member, this time Max Spevack, who went to work at Amazon.

Right now we are looking for someone who can take over significant focus on Fedora, as well as provide skills in community consulting and strategy for other Red Hat efforts.

Myself, I’m looking for another rounded, senior-level person who can apply the open source way – thinking & doing – as well as help make practitioners out of other people. Just spread this word around – someone out there hasn’t thought her or his self in this role yet, but could be.

Looking at this role, it is an example of job skills and merit that can be learned and earned while working on open source projects. You may not be currently in the field of “community relations and management”, but you may already have all the skills needed to teach and do the open source way inside and outside of software projects.

And you certainly don’t need to have come up through the Fedora Project, but that can’t hurt. Historically, we do what anyone would do – hire the people we know are great at doing the job we want done. Your work in Fedora should reflect that. If you have other open source project experience, it’s out there. If you’ve been practicing the open source way correctly, you’ll be able to show us that experience using open content in public archives.

Check out the job posting. I’m not in control of the process, but I think the location could be flexible for the right person, so it’s worth considering even if you don’t want to move to Raleigh and be our voice-in-the-seat-at-Red-Hat-HQ.

If you are someone who I would recommend anyway – so I would be biased toward you in a selection process – I’d be more than happy to pass you into our resume system with a recommendation.

(Updated to fix my incorrect interpretation of the job requirements; having worked in the Fedora Project already is a written job requirement.)

Paris and Milan – Open World Forum and FUDCon

06-Sep-11

For my first trip out of North America, I’m very excited to be talking at Open World Forum on a panel about community citizenship, in Paris at the end of September. The following weekend I’ll attend FUDCon Milan, where I hope to stir up some cloud community discussions. So how about that for a first European trip?

We had to wait until nearly the last minute to plan this trip, since I want to take my wife … and if she can’t go, that means I have reason to stay home. Hand-in-hand like that. We finally made a decision that works, booked our tickets, and now have to find a hotel in Paris.

Part of this trip is that from Sunday 25 September through Thursday 29 September, I’ll be working early in the day in Parisian cafes, and spending the evening with my wife and whatever friends we make as we go. We’ll be open, exploring, photographing, and looking for great food and wine (and music and dancing …)

Debora has a passion for the French language, which she has studied since she was a child, but has never visited France. Myself, I’ve never even been to Europe. We’ll get to break some personal barriers and have some fun.

So I’m looking for whoever I know, or friends of friends, to help us find what artistic, musical, underground (restaurant? catacombs?), alternative, and interesting Paris fun is out there. (I expect Milan to be completely filled with FUDCon, except Sunday evening when Debora and I will explore and discover together.)

Also, if you know a good hotel (conference one is full) or have an apartment we can rent for the week … let me know.

Now, to go sort out power adapters, SIM card for my Droid 2 Global, wireless broadband for the laptop …

Cloud interest at FUDCon Milan

06-Sep-11

These past 18 months have seen a lot of broken travel plans for me, so I’m so-very-extra-super-excited-and-nervous to be going to FUDCon Milan (and Open World Forum.) My wife, Debora, will be joining me for the travel to Europe – a good thing since her Italian and French are so much better than mine. (I’ll probably be unable to resist butchering Italian with my Spanglish.)

One reason I’m going to FUDCon is to connect with people about open source cloud communities. While there isn’t enough momentum for an entire conference (yet), consider that at FUDCon Tempe this year there were enough discussions of cloud-related topics that they practically formed a track.

What will the cloud discussions at FUDCon Milan be?

I know of a few cloud/virtualization-related developers who are attending:

OK, that’s not a very long list.

Who else is going? Who can we invite?

What interest can we generate? Anyone want to do  do a “build a cloud with Fedora” or something that attracts systems folks?

What is interesting for developers who want to build on top of these clouds as infrastructure and platforms?

One of us from the Cloud SIG can talk about the general activities in Fedora, so I count at least four cloud related talks in those I’ve listed here.

Developer evangelist role at Red Hat

01-Sep-11

Here’s an interesting job:

Partner Technical Evangelist

Red Hat has large cachet with upstream, open source developers, and our relationship with mainstream, corporate developers is fair but scattered. Strong in the Java area, nice developer studio, but what’s the cohesive story? How do we interact as a whole with software vendor (ISV) partners and developers who work for our customers?

It seems likely that the above job will interact and work in those areas. In fact, the role is described as rather senior – perhaps someone with the right skills and personality could wrestle serious improvements to the Red Hat developer experience for customers and vendor partners? This role is inside of the ISV ecosystem team probably because of a need for evanglism to ISV developers as well as customer developers.

When I use the term corporate developer, I mean the person who builds and supports applications that run inside of enterprises and SMBs, written by the staff for the staff. These are folks who are looking for:

  • Best practices for developing on top of  Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL).
  • How to package and deploy software the Red Hat way.
  • Tutorials on how to use developer-focused tools in a Red Hat environment, from JBoss through Eclipse to Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization (RHEV).
  • Forums to find answers and ask questions.
  • 24×7 non-interactive support and solutions, so they can get their work done at their own pace.

You or anyone you know interested in this sort of work? Contact me or just apply yourself.

Working group on community metrics

12-Aug-11

Are you one of us few, lucky people who attempt to keep track of the health of one or more communities?

Have you written any tools, processes, or other content/code that helps you with this? (For example, our team wrote and uses EKG for mailing list analysis.)

Are you looking for a commons to share ideas, code, content, and so forth?

We are looking for that too. We see a common problem space, are tired of working in isolation, and think there should be a working special interest group on this topic. A group made up of all the other individuals and teams currently working on this in isolation.

If it doesn’t exist, we want to start a new working group for this. Maybe you’d like to be involved? Comment on this blog post so I can include you in what we find out or make happen.

We see other groups who are working in this problem space … apparently in isolation from each other?

(If any of the above are not isolated but are part of a commons movement, can you show us where the commons is? That is, beyond their own mailing lists.)

So each of the above is a unique community or analyzer with a unique situation and needs. But certainly there are common areas where we can help each other? Common tools even if the analyses are different in the end? Common processes to share, even if your implementation is closed-source-in-house?

I just spoke with the QTM group at UPenn’s PRECISE Center who are using open source repositories for reputation analysis, working from a tool originally written to track wiki article author/editor quality. I want to invite them to either join a working group with us, or join in starting a new one.

So what’s going on out there?

(Updated with improved information and better links about the UPenn crew.)

June, what June?

13-Jul-11

I just noticed that the entire month of June passed, and I’ve been hidden away from the world – off work, off writing, off any community activities – caring for my wife while she goes through some tough times. She’s not out of the woods entirely yet, but clear fields are in sight and I’ve rejoined the work force. We should be back working our magic at Fairy-Tale Farm within the next week or so, as well.

As I approach my tenth year at Red Hat this coming October, I’m currently focusing on helping wherever I can with our new and existing cloud community efforts, from Red Hat OpenShift to the Fedora Cloud SIG. I’m also working more deeply on The Open Source Way, externally as the canonical upstream location for how-to and why-to do projects within community, and internally as a community consultant across Red Hat. More activity coming on The Open Source Way mailing list, if I have anything to say about it.

What would you think if I started an internal-to-Red Hat Fedora users list?

26-May-11

So I had an idea this week, partially in response to one of our stellar global support staff members saying that he wishes there was a person or place to send internal people needing user help with Fedora. The kind of help they would get from the external Fedora users mailing list, the kind of peer support that an internal-enterprisey-IT-service-desk can’t really provide.

“What’s wrong with the actual Fedora lists?” Robyn asked me. “We’re just not being very true to our roots when we have a special list just for Red Hat folken.” There’s a very real risk that people will reckon the list receives priority by other Red Hatters (it might, that’s the point!) and is elitist (“Too good for our lists, eh?”)

I don’t disagree with those concerns, and here’s what I’m thinking for reasons and mitigation:

  1. People inside of companies using software to get their work done may perceive external community lists as outlaw places, as unsafe (because some discussion might touch upon confidential materials, devolve to attack/defend, etc.), and – honestly – scary unknown territory. Speaking with colleagues for support (“Hey, Jo, how do you …?”) gives people the feeling that the responsiveness of the community is going to be proper to the situation – no one other than a Red Hatter can know how important it is for Foo Bar from Sales to get her presentation to work on her Fedora 15 laptop. (That, I believe, would be the perception by people of why to use an internal-only list; hard to battle that perception without first getting them in to a  common forum – albeit a private one – to hammer out the real issues.)
    • For example, I know folks who first had to be hand-held through using internal IRC, then they got their entire teams to use it, and after a number of years, were willing and interested in venturing in to the open community IRC. I am confident that final step happened only because the earlier ones came first – for some people, the long-time in non-public space is perhaps the only way they’ll make the transition.
  2. Desktop Linux users often get help from their local user groups, from special for-newbies-only mailing lists, and so forth. I would consider an internal fedora-users mailing list to be a similar, hand-holding gateway – ask questions here first, and if we can’t get an answer and need help from a Fedora list, either we’ll help you do that or ask for you.
  3. If managers know their team members can ask questions on a private, confidential, internal list, they may be more likely to permit Fedora usage. Otherwise, there is little value in switching from the corporate standard build (CSB) of Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL).
    • Sometimes people really do need the kind of software that can only be found in a latest Fedora. For example, I’ve heard from some of the big movie animation studios that while they run RHEL on their render farms, they may use Fedora on their desktops if a designer or developer needs what can only be found in a super-modern Linux distribution. Having support when you need, where you need it from, is a good thing.
    • Similarly, folks who aren’t paid to be available helping on external Fedora lists are in fact paid and empowered by Red Hat to help other Red Hatters. It would be great to get that help to happen out in the external lists, but maybe it just has to start somewhere else first.
  4. Communities need private spaces, maybe this could be one?

I would make a goal of the list to be, help internal users to gain the confidence and competence to go the external community instead. The internal list could be a training community, and those who want to graduate go on to make other Fedora lists better with their experience and point of view.

For those of you who would love to see dozens or hundreds of Red Hat worker bees who run Fedora participating on the users@fedoraproject.org mailing list … this is the only way I can think of so far that might yield more of that.

Ultimately I’m asking all of you out here first because while I know other Red Hatters might like and use the idea, it is your perception that I can never adjust by just showing you the private archives to prove it’s a reasonable approach to take. If I’m going to ask you to take our word for yet-another-hallway-discussion-being-OK, I should at least ask you before I start the hallway discussion group.

I’m curious if your company or organization does something like this. What do you think of this idea? How could it be made better? How can I mitigate the risks more?

Comments are open.

Thinking about an audiocast for The Open Source Way

06-May-11

OK, so we’ve got this interesting, upstream, canonical, referenceable community to write cleverly and talk about the principles of the open source way. Also, hey, let’s gather some details on how to implement these principles! But *yawn*, pardon me, even a genius can’t make that prose very interesting. It needs some stories.

A big part of researching and teaching about the open source way is being able to tell illustrative stories to bring home the reasons why you want to implement the principles. So the handbook has a chapter devoted to that, “Great stories to tell“. I’d like to keep doing more there.

One idea is to have a regular (twice-a-month) audiocast discussion about current events in the world and look at them with the lens of the open source way.

Ideally these would be stories beyond software and technology. There is so much transparency going on in the world, so many open collaborations, and so many stories of people doing things “just like they do in open source software.” That is what opensource.com is filled with.

So I need a partner, and some occasional guests.

A partner who can:

  • Get on the mic with me a few times a month to discuss extemporaneously about current events and the open source way.
  • Bely the extemporaneous nature by doing a bit of preparation with me – picking show topics, preparing links.
  • Be willing to do the entire project the open source way – from tooling to how we make decisions for the show. The open source way doesn’t mean we give up control, but we do increase transparency to full.
  • Grow the show with me and others’ help, including a point in the (near?) future where we do the initial recording live while engaging with a live audience.

Guests who can:

  • Bring an informed opinion, backed up by facts, on the subject of applying the open source way to a domain of expertise or interest.
  • Have stories to tell that go beyond just techology.
  • Be willing to work on the show in the open source way, too.

Are you that person? Know of the right person?

About me, if you don’t know me:

  • I can be very, very loquacious.
  • I can be funny, but am (as is typical) much funnier with certain people than others. Being funny together for the show would be just awesome.
  • I tend to talk too fast especially when I get passionate, but I’m a fairly good listener.
  • I have a secret desire to be on the air.
http://www.pulpproject.org/

A checklist for organizing a community

18-Apr-11

This is something that The Open Source Way has needed for a while, some checklists to follow when seeing where you are in implementing the various principles. Since the principles meld the narrative a bit, there may be a few checklist items in one principle. Also, a short checklist is just plain easier to follow, and useful when it has links back to principles … when someone-of-you-and-I fixes that, too

This first checklist, Organizing a community – checklist, is derived directly from the chapter, How to loosely organize a community. It is focused on the first work that needs to be done to get a community started and ready for sustainability. I’m sure it is incomplete, which is why I’m putting it out there in hopes that those of you-and-I who care will comment here … or on the project mailing list … or even come do some fixes on the page yourself.

Two caveats:

  1. This might be done better somewhere else. If it is freed and opened enough that I can include it, I would like to. At the very least, a link on the references page would be good.
  2. This checklist is for any type of community interested in emulating the success of free software and following the open source way. As such, it is a generic checklist and does not dive in to specifics that matter to any one domain. Such as software development. So, for example, don’t tell me that I missed the “licensing” section. Not all communities have copyright works to license. What is a general way to handle that question? Let’s put that in the book.

Roadmap and communications plan for “The Open Source Way”

31-Mar-11

Having an open roadmap (and a communications plan is part of that) is a pretty integral part of running a community the open source way. Just as the idiom about the carpenter’s leaking roof, we have been going without a collaboratively written, working roadmap for “The Open Source Way“.

To start that off, I am doing what I can to improve the roadmap page, just finished pushing out the communications plan parts that I can commit to, and have started a discussion on the mailing list about the roadmap and comms plan.

What I want to drive toward next (and very soon!) is a release schedule. I really do want to chop down and pulp up some trees (or use all post-consumer grey paper) to put out some actual handbooks you can hold. But that requires more of the content to just be there. (I don’t really want to print with any ‘example needed‘ sections.)