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November 16, 2009
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The Bookshelf: Building Open Communities

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One of my big interests is building and analyzing communities, especially in the open source space. I’ve learned a lot from my experience in the Gentoo Linux and Eclipse communities and take joy in the experience. There are so many interesting topics within community building from effective communication mechanisms to development processes to governance. I see a future where a lot of software is developed in the open and building a community around that will be vital to the success of that piece of software. As I was writing this post, Microsoft just announced that they are open sourcing the .NET micro framework and attempting to build a open community around the technology…

Microsoft is also in the process of forming a community of interested and involved members to help shape the future direction of the product. There will be a core technology team that is composed of Microsoft and external partners, and people will be encouraged to propose projects, which will be vetted before they are accepted…. The site will also support people building extensions that exist alongside the platform rather than being integrated into it…

You know when Microsoft is releasing stuff under the Apache 2.0 license and attempting to build communities there’s a shift in the industry happening. Good for them!

Ok, on to the point of this post now. My reading list went empty recently and I needed to fill it with some interesting books. In particular, I was looking for books related to open source and community building. The good news is that I found a couple of interesting books, the bad news is that I wish there were more books on these topics. I’ve been devouring the Art of Community book by Jono Bacon (Ubuntu’s Community Manager).

It’s a fascinating book which outlines some of the aspects of community building and share’s many of Jono’s experiences in developing the Ubuntu community. A lot of the things he discusses can be mapped to what is going on within the Eclipse community. Jono’s coverage of the importance of meritocracy and governance pleases me.

Anyone else have a chance to read the book yet?

Another book that I’m looking to devour is the Groundswell by a couple of Forrester Research’s analysts.

I’m always a fan of case studies around social technology and how it can impact your business. My favorite recent example is the United Breaks Guitars debacle… how much heartache did that cost United? I’ll let people know what I think of Groundswell when I finish it.

Anyone else reading anything good around open source of community building lately? Any recommendations?

November 16, 2009
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Rock n’ Roll San Antonio Half Marathon 2009

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Yesterday, I had the pleasure to participate in the Rock n’ Roll San Antonio Half Marathon. It was a foggy morning and more than 20,000 runners showed up! Since I like to play with numbers occasionally, an interesting thing to note is that of the runners that participated, roughly 70% were women. Is that a trend that I missed somewhere? I thought there would be a more even split.

rnrsa1

I enjoyed running the half marathon given that there was music about every mile. I didn’t get a PR but I’ll settle for my 1:35:52 time. As an ode to my computer science background, I managed to finish 256th overall. Here are my stats for the day:

Chip Time: 1:35:52
Overall Place: 256 / 20021
Gender Place: 217 / 7436
Division Place: 32 / 971
Pace: 7:19
5K: 21:31
10K: 43:21
15K: 1:07:02

The post race festivities were a bit ridiculous given the 20,000+ people surrounding the Alamodome.

rnrsa2

I wonder if it makes sense to put a limit on how many people can attend an event.

November 12, 2009
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Born to Run Author in Austin

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Yesterday, I had the opportunity to hear Chris McDougall speak about his book, Born to Run at Rogue Running.

Born to Run

If you’re into running or thinking about starting to run, I highly recommend giving the book a read. The attitude of the Tarahumara people are interesting… they enjoy running and they don’t have cushy shoes like most people where. I mean, how can you resist this introduction…

In the hills of Mexico, a tribe of Indians carries an ancient secret: a diet and fitness regimen that has allowed them to outrun death and disease. We set out to discover how the rest of us can catch up…

While you’re reading, go pickup a pair of Vibram Five Fingers.

November 11, 2009
16 Comments

Lowering Contribution Barriers in Open Source

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Inside the Eclipse community, we’re looking at ways to make it easier for people to contribute. Part of that work involves working on improving the web presence of Eclipse when potential contributors come visit (the other major part is at the code level, but we will leave that for another post). To help me with some ideas on how to improve the contributor experience on the Eclipse.org site, I wanted to look at how other open source communities are handling it at the moment. My thought was that visiting other community sites would also help me play the role as contributor since I’m so entrenched with things at Eclipse and have a difficult time putting myself into the role of a contributor.

Mozilla

When visiting the Mozilla site, I was greeted with a gigantic Get Involved button.

mozilla

Mozilla realizes that there are many types of contributors out there and accommodates appropriately for that.

mozilla2

As a bonus, Mozilla even had contribution options based on how much time you have available!

mozilla3

Awesome!

Symbian

The Symbian site had no clear way for me to realize how I can contribute to the effort. The site was pretty but I’m not sure the excessive use of flash is going to win bonus points with developers (does Flash even run on Symbian-based phones?).

symbian

After some digging, I found the Symbian developer site.

symbian2

It was pretty easy to find links to code, bug tracking and forums. I didn’t see any obvious links for people who may want to contribute translations or their artistic skills to the project. Then again, the Symbian foundation is pretty new so maybe they aren’t at the point where they need translation contributions.

Fedora

Inside the Fedora site, I immediately was drawn to the Join Fedora link.

Join Fedora

After clicking that link, I was presented with a wonderful variety of ways I can contribute to the Fedora project.

fedora2

I’m a huge fan of any open source community that realizes that contributors come in all shapes and sizes; there aren’t only coders out there.

Ubuntu

The Ubuntu site had nothing obvious on how to get involved immediately (you have to scroll down quite a bit to see a link to get involved).

ubuntu

I dug around a bit and found a link to Get Involved with the Ubuntu community. I was delighted to be presented with the way I would like to get involved.

ubuntu

Ubuntu seemed to classify its contributors into developers, non-technical users, technical users and people willing to donate money.

Seems reasonable.

Conclusion

What did I learn at the end of this exercise? It’s important to realize that there are many different forms of contributor roles in open source. Here’s my simplified version of the major roles contributors may play:

  • Writers
    • These people can help with things like documentation and articles
  • Developers
    • These people can code; provide patches; potentially become committers
  • Translators / Internationalization

    • These people can help with internationalization efforts
  • Graphical Artists / Designers
    • These people can help with artwork; don’t let coders design things
  • Evangelists
    • These people can help organize events and spread the word; marketing is key

There are contributors that may fit many of these roles, but most will specialize in one type of role. The key thing to understand is that you need to cater to each of these roles including how much time people have (like Mozilla did). For example, developers will want to know how to access code and contribute patches to the project. Translators will need to know where to go to translate strings for the project or file bugs for long German words that wreak havoc on your user interface. And so on…

What do people think? What can open source communities do better at making it easier for people to contribute? As a next step, I’ll take a look at playing the role of contributor in one of these communities and write a “Hello, World” type application.

If you have any ideas on how to improve the contributor experience at Eclipse, please comment on this bug.

November 10, 2009
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Movember – Day 10

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As some of you may know, I am growing a moustache for Movember. I have decided to put down my razor for one month and help raise money for prostate cancer research with my fellow Eclipse committers.

Last week, I held an election on the type of moustache I should grow because I’m a fan of elections and letting my readers have some fun with my life. The results of the election were close with the “porn star” style moustache garnering over 30% of the votes. The runner up was the “trucker” style but thankfully I didn’t have to go through that ordeal.

moustache

As for moustache progress, as of day 10, I’m building a solid base towards the “porn star” moustache:

movember-zx

The next update will happen on Day 20, stay tuned!

November 8, 2009
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Run for the Water 2009

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This morning, I participated in the Run for the Water 10 miler. I’m a fan of any race that has copious amounts of coffee available before I even get to the start line.

run4w1

It was a bit foggy this morning, but it didn’t discourage the Austin running community from coming out and cramming into position at the start line. As a bonus to the American national anthem… we were presented with a rendition of the Burundi national anthem which was a nice touch.

run4w2

I struggled up the hills and managed to finish in 1:09:47 which put me 10th in my age group. I’m not completely happy with my finish, I expected to at least run sub 7 miles, but hey, practice makes perfect. The course was difficult for your usual Austin race and I commend the organizers for making it challenging. You know, given that we were running down Pecos St and Scenic Dr, the organizers might as well offered an extension that went up Mount Bonnell given the amount of hills we ran.

run4w3

On the whole, it was a great and challenging race. It also proved to me that I need to start doing more hill work. Next up is the very flat Rock n’ Roll San Antonio race.

November 5, 2009
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The Company-Customer Pact

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I’m not a fan of anonymous feedback or anonymous communication, especially if you’re trying to build a community around something. I recently came across the Company-Customer Pact which I highly recommend people read as it embodies a lot of things I believe in.

Challenge

We, customers and companies alike, need to trust the people with whom we do business. Customers expect honest, straightforward interactions where their voices are heard. Companies work to inspire brand loyalty and deliver satisfaction while trying to understand their customers better. It is evident that we all have a crucial stake–and responsibility–in transforming the adversarial tone that too often dominates the customer experience.

A Call for Shared Responsibility

Along with open, authentic communication comes the mutual responsibility to make it work. As each of us is both a customer and an employee, we share in the rewards and challenges of candor. By adopting these five practical measures, we can together realize a fundamental shift in our business relationships:

What do people think?

Any lessons we can take away that would benefit the Eclipse community?

November 5, 2009
8 Comments

{F}CKEditor

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Hrmm, one of my favorite HTML text editors, FCKEditor, got re-branded.

fckeditor-logo

It’s now known as CKEditor.

ckeditor

Wonder why they changed the name :)?

On a side note, they have an impressive licensing scheme.

CKEditor is distributed under the GPL, LGPL and MPL open source licenses. This triple copyleft licensing model avoids incompatibility with other open source licenses…

For commercial usage, they have the CKSource Closed Distribution License.

For many companies and products, Open Source licenses are not an option. This is why the CKSource Closed Distribution License (CDL) has been introduced. It is a non-copyleft license which gives companies complete freedom when integrating CKEditor into their products and web sites…

Fun.

November 4, 2009
6 Comments

I’m growing a ‘stache

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To the dismay of my stylist, I’m growing a ‘stache for Movember.

big stache

Apache may have their 10th anniversary, but Eclipse committers are growing ‘staches for prostate cancer awareness this month.

Since I’ve been involved with open source for quite awhile, I’m used to doing things in a transparent fashion. I decided to create a poll for the type of moustache I should grow, seeking community input.

moustache

I’m currently favoring the “major” … in the end, I hope I an rock a moustache like Orlando Bloom or Johnny Depp. So please, vote for my ‘stache and I’ll announce the results this Friday. While you’re voting, please take time to donate if you have the resources.

November 2, 2009
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Symbian, Nokia and Java

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Ok, as an Eclipse guy, I have to admit something, I sort of have a man crush on the Symbian Foundation.

symbian-foundation-logo2

From my experiences in the Eclipse and Gentoo communities, I see a lot of things Symbian is doing right to build an open source community. They are definitely putting a significant amount of resources behind the effort. However, that’s not the main point of this blog post and really a subject of another blog entry on building communities. My main point is that Nokia recently announced (thanks Gorkem) that they will be contributing their Java runtime to the Symbian Foundation…

At the BOF I also discussed of our contribution of our runtime code to Symbian Foundation. Basically the idea is that for Symbian^3 we plan to get all of our libraries code (except Web Services as it’s not Nokia owned code). Ken Walker from IBM talked of what they will provide on VM and core libraries level. They will provide J9 VM+CLDC/CDC/FP libraries in the binary release under an RND license. This means that developers will have a fully functional runtime from Symbian Foundation for java me applications as it appears in current S60 devices. Nokia plans to utilize EPL license for our contribution. Since many of the core libraries are already available in Apache Harmony there’s pretty good open source mobile java library set then available with business friendly OS licenses.

This is great news for mobile Java developers; I like when I see public roadmaps available.

From my point of view, it’s great to see some Java focus. Back in the day when mobile wasn’t hot, I did some mobile Java work with the embedded Rich Client Platform (eRCP), I even helped write a book on the topic.

eRCP Redbook

During that time, there were a lot of APIs lacking on the mobile devices which eRCP tried to solve along with giving mobile developers a reasonable modular user interface technology via OSGi. However, there wasn’t much interest at the time. Furthermore, there were challenges involving writing applications for mobile devices… it was just plain hard. The customization of the user interface was difficult… it was hard to theme applications… you couldn’t really use something like CSS at the time. My favorite problem was in regards to writing a reusable user interface across phones. For example, let’s pretend we were writing an expense tracking application for the Nokia 9500:

Nokia 9500

The first thing to notice is there’s a nice wide screen when the clam-shell is open. There’s a lot of things you can fit into your user interface when the phone is in that mode. Ok, now let’s pretend that the user closes the clam-shell so you have a smaller screen available. What does your application UI do? Do you present another view of your application, the same screen? Will everything fit? Who knows? Take this thinking a step further and imagine writing a reasonable reusable interface across phones like Nokia’s older s60 line… and so on…

s60 nokia phones

Those were the days!

On a side note, this is one area I think Apple is brilliant in. Have you noticed that their mobile phones have had the same LCD size for a few generations? Have you ever thought why? In my opinion, it makes the life of a developer easier when it’s something you don’t even worry about. I predict that Apple will continue this pattern for awhile.

In the end, it’s exciting to see so much open source action in the mobile space, especially when my favorite license is involved… the Eclipse Public License.

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