It’s great that Red Hat pays you to hack on stuff. But that’s just the beginning of the real greatness of Red Hat. The real greatness is that Red Hat is folstering a corporate culture that actively grows community around technology advancements.

That is the biggest hardest challenge facing corporate entities as distinct members of the larger ecosystem. Making corporate business culture and turning its communication outward so company employees are doing the bulk of their development interactions in the public square, even when they are talking to other employees of the same company. I doubt Red Hat is perfect at that, but I think they are really trying as a corporate entity to have that outwardly thinking corporate culture instead of an inwardly thinking one.

I didn’t mean ‘web forums’ i meant pretty much any public venue. irc, email, webforum, whatever. Anywhere where external community can engage and participate in the development process of that technology. I’m still looking for the best noun which describes that collection of spaces.

Since you do a lot on irc, do you archive those discussions in an organized manner? The one thing about doing a lot of development work on irc is that it becomes harder to understand how things got from point A to point B when trying to understand design decisions. Mailinglist threads archives while cumbersome, are useful restrospective tools to chart the evolution of developer headspace.

-jef

I would say probably as high as 60% of time. Probably about 25% of the other time is spent on email, and the other 15% on research or testing.

> how much of that is hacking on open source code? 100%?

100%.

>What percentage of your “work time” is dedicated to interacting with community about the open projects you hack on?

Well, there’s no company policy, but I try to reserve at least a little part of each day communicating with people. There’s no point trying to develop code in secret.

> how much of that communication time is spent talking on internal Red Hat channels

About 1% – but then that’s mostly private stuff like pay or other RH internal stuff. Never development.

> And how much is done in public forums?

0% in forums, I don’t seem to get along with the “moderators” very well… 99% of my communication is in public IRC and public mailing lists.

Anyway, RH rocks

In being part of the Fedora community, I find that one of the greatest joys is getting to interact with all the fantastic people like yourself who make Linux happen. Getting to listen to the concerns of all kinds of use cases and watching the magic happen. I continue to be proud of being part of that (granted a tiny little part), and I will always be grateful to Red Hat for creating the chance for me and everyone else to take part in building something truly great and to steer the Linux platform through innovation and creativity.