So far we have a fair few teams signed up to the Fantasy World Cup I mentioned before. Now is your last chance – you can join after the start of the tournament, but you won’t get any points for matches before you join, so it’s better to join up now.
Seth Godin: It’s easy to confuse people who are passionate and loud with the majority
Daggy music is one way to make the hoons leave an area, because they can’t stand the music
Who knew that Barry Manilow could become such a force for public order.
Way back at the start of 2005, nineteen Ethiopian youths were given cameras and asked to document their lives in a photo blog – the result was Ethiopia Lives.
At the end of the year, due to some technical issues, the site ceased being updated and now the photo blog is housed on Flickr.
Not only is the standard of the photography excellent, the stories and the images give you an insight into what life is like for normal Ethiopians, far from the almost dehumanised photos of famine you associate with the country in the West. It’s what Hugh MacLeod calls “reaching people on a human scale”. And it’s very effective.
Luis: Danese Cooper and Duncan Davidson (in the comments) have both written on the dynamics on Sun, which mean that managers are typically more interested in representing the interests of their teams to higher management, rather than the other way around.
Personally, I wish I had worked for more companies like that (I did work for Informix at one stage, where we had internal politics like that, and it was great to work there. Until they laid everyone off and sold cheap to IBM. Anyway…) – all too often, the lower down you are on the ladder, the further your orders are removed from reality – decision makers colour company strategy with their personal agenda, and you get a really funky view of the world from down there.
So yes, in big companies there is a lot of mistrust in the outside world. People talk about source code and “intellectual property” being the family jewels, and if you work in a company where a high level manager says “it’s not possible – you just can’t do that”, then that’s an issue that takes time to sort out.
And honestly, I’m now willing to give Sun the benefit of the doubt. Yes, OpenSolaris is under an MPL-alike licence and isn’t GPL compatible, for no particularly good reason that I know. But it’s still a free software licence, and that’s a huge advance on before.
(edit: Firefox/MPL comparison removed – Firefox is mostly dual licenced GPL/MPL)
I can finally lift the veil on something that I’ve been involved with for a while now…
The Blender Foundation, the GNOME Foundation, the GIMP developers and the Uni-verse consortium have grouped together to hire and build a giant 20×30 island booth in the main aisle of the SIGGRAPH trade show in Boston in August. We had some help from an anonymous donor, and Ton has done a huge amount of work pulling all the strings together.
I’m really excited about this – SIGGRAPH is a huge show, and free software will be right in the middle of it – no more skulking in the corner of the “Open Source Exhibition” where the organisers hide the guys who can’t afford to be in the main hall and give then a 6×6 space to put up a computer – we have prime real estate.
I have all sorts of ideas about how GNOME and the GIMP can use this opportunity – from hob-nobbing with Hollywood types to showing off XGL, Cairo and all of the user interface work that people in the project have been doing.
I’ll be looking for volunteers over the next few weeks to halp with the stand – keep the dates in your mind when taking your Summer holidays – July 30th to August 3rd (exhibition from 1st to 3rd), Boston Convention and Exhibition Center.
J’ai répondu (tout comme Tristan Nitot de Mozilla) à quelques questions du Journal du Net pour une article intéressante: L’enjeu du financement des projets Open Source
Point clé:
…si nous comptons 200 personnes à plein temps […] ce ne serait pas démesuré de suggérer que Gnome représente un investissement annuel, reparti sur plusieurs sociétés, de plusieurs millions d’euros par an.
There has been some debate recently on how the project can attract more people outside of the male geek group. Shaun McCance made the point that non-technical posts in general are typically under-represented in GNOME.
This echoes closely what Mitchell Baker has been saying about Mozilla:
[…] filling [non-technical] roles often means bringing in people who haven’t “come up through the project.” These folks who are new to the Mozilla project need to be accepted by the development community in order to be effective. Status as a Mozilla Corporation employee isn’t enough.
and
If one’s skillset is something other than code, then proving oneself through understanding the intricacies of our code is at best inefficient and probably a blocker for many people. So the challenges are to find mechanisms for people in non-code roles to demonstrate they share the values of the Mozilla project and can make contributions that people want to support.
Conclusion?
Integrating non-engineering contributors takes a lot of trust and feeling our way gently. Those people joining us in non-engineering roles must trust that the technical contributors will give them a fair chance to participate, add value, become respected and gain influence and leadership. The engineering community must trust that these people who may be new to the Mozilla community and don’t have deep technical expertise are worth listening to and giving a fair shake.
In other words: Be excellent to each other.
But more than that, we need to start recognising when there is a skills deficiency in the project, and actively recruit people with those skills, drawing them the map of how the project works, and helping them become great contributors. There are a number of examples of non-technical people coming into the project and making an impact – Quim Gil, John Williams, Telsa Gwynne – but there are probably more examples of people who passed close by, felt the water, and went on their merry way without ever engaging, or being engaged by, the GNOME community.
So during the marketing BOF at GUADEC this year, I would like to focus on this – how can we make non-technical people interested in marketing GNOME feel like their work makes a difference.
Marketing is not just promotion – real marketing is a two-way dialog between the project and the market, with us saying what we do and why, and the market telling us how we can do better, or what they need that we’re not doing. And GNOME marketers will feel like a part of the project from the moment where something we do changes the project for the better.
Quite a few people around the GNOME community are still suspicious of companies who invest in free software – do they really get it? Is their investment fickle, or are they in it for the duration?
When I see Sun’s CEO announcing initiatives like this, it’s hard for me not to get excited about the company. I like what Sun are doing, I like the blogging CEO who answers personal emails himself, I like their investment in free software, I’m confident that Java will follow the lead of JDS and OpenSolaris. Sun are on the cluetrain, in a big way.
We will be having Lightning Talks again this year at GUADEC!
For those who missed last year’s talks, we got wowed by (Dave Reveman?)’s wobbly windows and cubic workspaces, Jonathan Blandford’s demo of Evince, J5 showing off his worth on session management, and Sebastien Tricaud showing off Gscore, the first application to fully use Cairo for its rendering, among others.
This year, we already have some interesting candidates – for example, a GStreamer based media center, desktop tagging with Leaftag and a demo of the Pitivi non-linear video editor.
Sign up on the wiki to stake your claim for a lightning talk spot – there is no lower limit on the amount of time that you take, but talks are limited to 5 minutes including set-up time. It’s fast & furious, and a great way to get wider attention for your project or idea – pique our curiosity – people can always spend the rest of the conference hasseling you for details, show us why your work is great.
Some tips on lightning talks from perl.com will help you make a killer presentation:
Update: Thanks to Daniel Glassey for letting me know he wasn’t the wobbly cubey guy. I’d like to know who it was though…
