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OSCON and CLS 2010 highlights

31-Jul-10

As usual, when I get back from a big conference and trip, my mind is full processing everything that happened, and my life is full recovering from the effects of the travel.  Instead of a full report right here and now, I’m going to give a quick highlight of the latter part of July 2010.

  • 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.
Filed in Community, Events, Fedora, Leadership, Responsibility, TOS, Travel | | Comments (2) »

Midway point approaching for Fedora Summer Coding

30-Jun-10

The season is clipping right along for Fedora Summer Coding.  The projects are set and running, and we’re approaching the mid-term evaluation period 05 to 12 July.

A quick look at the numbers:

  • 15 students and projects.
  • 20 primary mentors, with 15+ more general mentors (includes mentoring the mentors)
  • Three funding sources (two from Red Hat) are making the proof of value program happen this summer:
    • We know the concept works (thanks Google’s Open Source Programs Office!), with specific value to Fedora Project and JBoss Community in this 5-year summary report.
    • We have a model to include other sponsors and are actively seeking them.
    • The work this summer proves to those potential sponsors the value of this program.
    • The sponsors who lay a wager by supporting the program for the southern hemisphere this October are buying their own proof of value to see if they want to continue next year.

Next on the schedule is the mid-term review.  During that period, mentors review and privately discuss the state of each project and the student.  The goal of a project is to help the student learn FOSS participation via the Fedora Project and JBoss Community. Ideally, there is good code or content that comes out of it, but completing the initial project plan isn’t the real purpose.  As often happens, in open development we discover new ideas, methods, and reasons along the way.

For example, this week I spoke with a mentor who’s student is struggling a bit with the initial scope of the project plan.  If the only goal were to get that coding done, we’d all be in trouble.  However, the mentor is going to work with the student to narrow the scope so that it is achievable within the schedule.

Having to rescope and reorganize is not uncommon in the FOSS worlds, and this student is learning that reality first hand.  We’re all ambitious with our ideas and skills, and sometimes don’t learn until immersed what is hard and what is easy.  It’s better to rescope and complete a smaller project than to leave in frustration.  Guiding the student in that way is what the mentor is here for, as much as anything else.

In terms of sponsoring, my goal is clear.  I want to see this program run the way we run free and open source software projects.  By bringing in other sponsors, we create more room for innovation in the program’s organization and implementation.  We give these friends and partners a chance to reap the same benefits with a similar investment.  In the process, we work together to strengthen the FOSS ecosystem in to higher education.

Guess what we call that?  Yeah, the open source way.

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A few minutes with Groklaw and The Open Source Way

16-Jun-10

Rebecca Fernandez wrote this article, “Build an authentic, valuable online community“.  In the comments Jason Hibbets pointed out that PJ at Groklaw had picked up Rebecca’s request for help in filling out the empty parts of The Open Source Way dealing with healthy community interaction, especially trolls and other poisonous people. Thus we got “What Happened to my Creative Commons License?“, which includes a fantastic story about using the open source way in legal research, called “Extending Open Source Principles Beyond Software Development”.

I read all of PJ’s story (great stuff) of the Groklaw community and the eventual arise of trolls and astroturfers, glanced at the comments (wow, lots), wrote up an appeal to PJ to relicense, and along the way … I read something that reminded me to read the other comments first and not start my own thread if it belongs under another.  So I skimmed all the comments, leaving out all the side discussions about “Google {should,shouldn’t}” and such, and did find one where PJ explained why she would NOT be using a different license than the NC/ND for Groklaw works.  OK, fair enough.

So I wrote this comment, “Thanks, inclusion in The Open Source Way”.

This is my first time commenting on anything on Groklaw, and the reputation has me a bit intimidated. Yet, it was a fun distraction, and now I’ll keep my eye on the discussion for a while to see what else comes from it.  Meanwhile, I used this same content to stub out a page on the TOSW wiki, “Legal the open source way“.  This placeholder gives me a way to find myself again when I sit down to write the chapter, with help from PJ’s article-in-a-glass-box.

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Summer rolling in Fedora Summer Coding

07-Jun-10

The best part of Fedora Summer Coding 2010 has begun: students are working on their projects with mentors and related communities.  Although some of it may happen on the program discussion list, most of that work should be in those related communities.  We’ll start seeing student and mentor blog posts on the Fedora Planet, and there is soon going to be a stand-alone planet blog aggregator for just this program.

The announcement email explains everything nicely, with a list of accepted projects, and then details about funding.  We’re still working on updating and cleaning up the wiki pages.

The proposal review process was a challenge.  We missed our first deadline, then our second, and moved in to a few days where we just didn’t say anymore when things were going to be done until they were.  We finally reached a good set of decisions about which proposals to accept and fund.  In the end, we were six days late past the original deadline, and two days in to the actual student coding schedule.  I’ve proposed a minor adjustment to the schedule that puts the onus of making up the lost time on the mentors who lost it in the first place.

Part of this challenge was having to manually read, sort, and discuss proposals on the private mentor mailing list.  The proposals are all on the Fedora Project wiki, so managing and commenting was more difficult.  This was a result of starting the program from scratch without pre-building new infrastructure; in the future we’ll know more what we need by comparison to this experience.

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Attending Fedora 13 release party in Walnut Creek

29-May-10

http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Release_Party_F13_Bay_Area

If you are going, see you there.

Tomorrow morning I’ll get some goodies from Larry Cafiero up in Felton, and our media selection is going to be hand burned DVDs and CDs.  Doubt we have any labels, so a Fedora sticker and a permanent ink pen it is … I’ll bring a few ISOs on an external hard drive, plus a few USB keys for network/hard drive installs, so we can do quick updates and installations over USB.

No plans to present anything but I’m likely to pipe up about free culture and stuff, if prompted.

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Great stuff at Open Your World Forum, plus me

25-May-10

This Thursday, 27 May, I am going to be closing out a day of awesome talks in an online seminar called Open Your World Forum.  This is a production from opensource.com, and if the quality of the line-up this time is any indication, the producers have some great talent at drawing together a wide range of voices.  My closing talk is on The Open Source Way wiki and book, and I’m just finishing my notes for my presentation.   Register before you move on.

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.

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Open Source Bridge and the evolution of the Catalyst in Communities talk

24-May-10

Working on the next evolution of my talk “Being a Catalyst in Communities – The science behind the open source way” for Open Source Bridge next week in Portland.  It was originally given as a SCALE 8X keynote, and it’s mostly me representing Red Hat.  I’m busy reworking the slides based on feedback I got back then, and then re-rehearsing the talk.  I’m excited to have a chance to hone such a good talk, this is the first year that I’ve been able to do that (I’m learning.)

If you are going to be at OSB10, I’m talking Wednesday 02 June from 1:30 – 2:15pm in Broadway.  I arrive Tuesday morning and am back out Thursday by Lunch, so a nice long window to talk free and open topics.

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Death to the postmortem, long live …

18-May-10

Every release cycle in Fedora I see folks use the term postmortem to refer to discussions after the release that focus on analysing what happened during the release, with a focus on fixing mistakes and repeating successes.  This is a neologism borrowed from domains such as business.

Humans are wordy people, and the effects of a word that contains “mort” in it is to be focused on death.  A postmortem is an autopsy – it can only be conducted on something after it is dead.  That’s the very definition of the word.  In using it, we talk about the body of our work while implying death. Not healthy!

I get that it has a popular usage, but why follow the trend and refer to our release process as death?  It’s not even a lifecycle, it’s many lifecycles.  It’s an ecosystem. Fedora is a living project with a regular rhythm.  The only death we see are ideas, both good and bad, before their time, or just in time, or long overdue.

Some alternatives to postmortem:

  • Post-analysis
  • Release review
  • Post-game analysis (sports metaphor)
  • Sanity check
  • Pause for the cause
  • Happy hour
  • Post-release analysis
  • Release feedback
  • Post-release loopback
  • After the fact
  • Hindsight meeting
  • Safety check
  • Loopback review
Filed in Community, Fedora, Writing | Tagged , | Comments (10) »

Applause for “How to ask FOSS developers for features” post

13-May-10

In the vein of other great “how to help in FOSS projects” emails, presentations, and so forth, the Fedora developer list saw another one from Richard ‘hughsie’ Hughes, titled “Sending a sensible email“.  It begins:

There appears to be a trend on this list where a random user just posts an inflammatory email with “ACME SOFTWARE IS RUBBISH”. Now, if the maintainer of that software is scanning the email list, bear in mind he (or she) has likely spent a significant amount of time and energy getting the software into the state you see it now. They probably spend evenings and weekend closing duplicate bugs and fixing trivial typos that people notice. If you title an email with such rubbish then the maintainer is simply going to ignore it or spam it. I’ll explain why:

The way open source software works is you get the software for free. If you don’t like it, you get your money back. If you want an additional feature, or a bug fixing really fast you either pay a Linux company like Red Hat or Suse some money and they assign a developer to work on it. If it’s a big feature it’s going to cost lots of money.

The other way is to join the software mailing list, and suggest the new feature, and “sell” it to the maintainer.

Believe me, this works.  It may be easier to do it yourself if you are a programmer.  But if you are a normal mortal like the rest of us, you have to get creative and find ways to get it done anyway.  If you aren’t going to pay someone, you have to make it compelling for them to work on it, and it really helps when you contribute something back to the effort.

Free/open source software (FOSS) has a way to do that.  Ordinary users have the power to affect change that matters to them in the software they use.

Wield the power wisely.

Tip one, ask questions and make arguments in a nice and respectful manner.

I’m thinking there needs to be an appendix or section or something in The Open Source Way about how to interact with a community to get things done.  That is arguably the scope for the entire book, but perhaps a good story or two would help illustrate.

As one good story of how an organization has learned from community interaction mistakes and turned that learning in to valuable contributor creating and scaling, check out Dr. Dan Frye’s keynote from the Linux Foundation Collaboration Summit.

Sending a sensible emailSending a sensible email

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POSSE Cali schedule updated – now 06 to 10 July

12-May-10

Although a bit late in the game, we decided to move our POSSE forward by a day.  This is to keep us from running against the July 4th weekend.

We cooked up a poster and information packet you can read, use, and pass around.  It’s mainly about getting people to the main POSSE Cali page, then to apply.

Otherwise, we are looking for attendees.  If you know any educators or good networkers around education, please pass on the information.  We need to get more people, it makes it better for all involved.

Filed in Classroom, Education, Fedora, FLOSS, Open Source, TOS | Tagged , | Comments Off