November 14, 2012
community, freesoftware
1 Comment
I spoke to Kevin Carillo about what makes a good community citizen a few months ago – he had already been working for some time on his research at that point, and I thought that his approach and ideas were interesting.
Recently, he blogged about his work, and released a survey targeting recent contributors to a variety of projects, including Debian, GNOME and Mozilla.
As a long-time participant in various open source projects, I regularly see sociologists posting announcements for surveys to lists asking for developers time without first trying to get a feel for the communities involved, and figuring out how their work can benefit the community. They are zoologists, studying the behaviour of strange and wondrous beasts they don’t understand.
Kevin, like Evangelia Berdou and Malgorzata Ciesielska in the past, has adopted another approach – talking to people one-on-one and crafting a survey after building an understanding of community dynamics. I have high hopes that his resulting research will be as valuable to us as Evangelia and Gosia’s work was in the past.
I encourage anyone who fits the target profile to participate in his survey.
October 16, 2012
community, freesoftware
No Comments
This year, we hosted a Humanitarian Free and Open source software track at the Open World Forum for the third time. The track has been of great value to participants as a way of communicating with other practitioners in the space, and exchanging best practices and experiences around funding, community, and working with NGOs.
Once again, we had great participation from representatives of a wide range of projects, in crisis management, healthcare, social enterprise and microfinance. And the quality of the presentations was excellent – when discussing after the conference with Leslie Hawthorn what our favourite presentations were, the short answer was “all of them”. My personal favourites were Mark Prutsalis’s description of the EUROSHA project, Heather Blanchard’s experiences from working closely with aid agencies, and Leslie’s presentation with Julius Awakame of the great work that OpenMRS is doing in electronic medical record management targeting the poorest communities in the world.
The number one request I have had for the track is to turn it into more of a conversation – part presentations to establish a baseline for discussion, but mostly workshops or discussion forums on issues common to projects in HFOSS. Some organisations have funding, but have not succeeded in developing a commercial ecosystem of partners to support the deployment of the software. Other organisations have a partner ecosystem, but have not succeeded in growing an active community or identifying a sustainable funding model. Others have vibrant communities, but do not have either the funding or the organisational infrastructure to have a full time staff, or to bid for projects with aid agencies.
How would you feel about making next year’s Humanitarian track at the Open World Forum a worldwide meeting place of leaders of HFOSS projects, over two days, with a more traditional conference component including presentations, round-tables and workshops, and a Humanitarian BarCamp the day afterwards in Paris? I bet that if we can get critical mass for the idea that we could make this a regular meeting place for these projects. If there is somewhere else more appropriate as a meeting of minds, I’m happy to point people there instead, but I do not have the impression that there is. It has become obvious to me that there is a need for such a meeting place, and Paris in the Autumn seems like the ideal place to have it – central location, easy accessibility internationally from Europe, America, Asia and Africa.
Is there interest in making a real Humanitarian FOSS conference in Paris next year?
September 14, 2012
community, freesoftware, General
13 Comments
Speed bump ahead!
This week I was reminded that the first step in an Open Source project is often the hardest. We’ve been using MediaWiki for a project at work, with the “ConfirmAccount” extension to deal with spammers – a very nice extension indeed! It adds account creation requests to a queue where they can be handled by members of the bureaucrat group.
We had one wishlist item. We wanted to have a notification email sent out to every member of the group when a new request was received. There is an existing feature to send a notification email to a configurable email address, but not to the whole bureaucrat group.
So I said to myself, how hard can that be? And I rolled up my sleeves and set aside an afternoon to make the change, and submit it upstream. After a few false-starts which were nothing to do with MediaWiki, I got down to it.
First task: Upgrade to the latest version of MediaWiki – the version on Fedora 17 is MediaWiki 1.16.5, and the latest stable version is 1.19.2. So I download the latest version, and follow the upgrade instructions to over-write the system MediaWiki install in /usr/share/mediawiki with the upstream version. Unfortunately, the way that $IP (the Install Path) is set changed in version 1.17, in a way that took a little time to work around.
Once that was done, I downloaded the HEAD of the trunk branch from SVN which was linked from the old version of the extension home page, and got the extension working. That needed a few additional modules, and some configuration to get the email notifications working locally, but eventually, I was good to go.
I got to work making my change. It took a while, but once I figured out how to turn on debugging and the general idiom for database queries, it was easy enough. After a couple of hours hacking and testing, I was happy with the result.
The first date
I headed back to the extension home page to figure out how to submit a patch. At the same time, out of habit, I joined the project IRC channel, #mediawiki on Freenode, reasoning that if I got lost I could ask for help there. No indication on the Extension page, but a web search showed me that MediaWiki uses Bugzilla. So I registered for Yet Another Bugzilla Account, and confirmed my email address a few minutes later. Then I created a bug on Bugzilla, and attached my patch to the report.
Simultaneously, on IRC, I was asking for help and was told by a very nice community guy called Dereckson that the preferred way to submit patches was through Gerrit. It turned out that the extension home page should have been pointing to the more recent Git repository all along, and I had been developing against the wrong version of MediaWiki. Dereckson updated the extension page with the right repository information as soon as he discovered it hadn’t been updated before. No big deal, I cloned the Git repository, and tried to apply the patch from svn to git. Unfortunately, it didn’t work – some other changes related to translatable strings had changed code in the same area, and I had to re-do the change, but that was pretty easy.
I did try to submit a patch by following the procedure in the git workflow document, but without an account on Gerrit it didn’t work, of course. Dereckson convinced me to apply to developer access. After some initial resistance, because I really didn’t want to be a MediaWiki developer just to submit a drive-by patch, I requested developer access with the comment “I just wanted to submit one patch to an extension I use, Extension:ConfirmAccount.” Half an hour later, jeremyb approved my request with the comment “That’s what you think now!” 🙂
Then I went to the documentation on getting access and followed the instructions there until I was directed to upload my ssh key to labs and found I did not have access to that resource. Thanks again to Dereckson (once more to the rescue!) on IRC, I found my way to getting set up for git and Gerrit, and got an SSH key set up for Gerrit. Then I went back to the instructions for submitting a patch and a quick “git review” later, I had submitted my first patch ever to Gerrit.
Jumping through hoops (CC by-sa, rwp-roger@flickr)
Pretty quickly, the first couple of reviews came in. First comment: “There’s some whitespace issues here.” Gee, thanks. Second comment, from Dereckson (again!) started with a “Thank you”, said the idea was a good one, and then gave me an example of the project norms for commit comments, and made one comment on the code suggesting I use an option.
As a first time user of Gerrit, I noticed a few issues with it for newbies. It’s not at all clear to me how to distinguish “important” commenters from trivial-to-change things like whitespace issues. It’s also not clear whether a -1 blocks a commit, or how to have a discussion with someone about the approach taken in a patch. Also, it was unclear what the suggested way to update a patch was and propose a new, improved version. My first try, I made some changes, committed them into a new revision on my local branch, and pushed the lot for review (normal git workflow, I daresay). Unfortunately, this was not correct. I ended up squashing the two commits with a “rebase -i”, and since then I have been using “commit –amend”.
After a few more rounds of comments (another whitespace comment, and a suggestion to avoid hard-coding the group name), I am currently on the 5th patchset, which I think does what it says it should, and will pass review muster, when someone gets around to reviewing it. I’ve been told that the review time for a small patch like this can be up to 5 or 10 days, and I don’t know exactly how I know that the process is over and it’s good to commit.
Sunk costs
The end result is that for a small change to a fairly simple MediaWiki extension, I spent about 2 hours coding, and about 4 or 5 hours (a full afternoon) going through the various hoops involved in submitting the change for review upstream.
I’m aware that this is a one-off cost – that now that I have a Bugzilla account, and a git and Gerrit account, it will be easier next time. Now that I have spent the time reading the MediaWiki coding conventions, git workflow, and have spent time understanding how to use Gerrit, I won’t have these issues again. The next patch will only take a few minutes to submit, and I won’t be wondering if I did something wrong if I don’t get a review in the first 10 minutes.
But along with some installation and firewall issues, I ended up spending slightly more than a full day on this. In hindsight, I’m saying to myself “was it really worth a full day of work to avoid maintaining this 20 line patch over time?”
I think it’s important that projects make newcomers jump through some hoops when joining your project – the tools you use and the community processes you follow are an important part of your culture. Sometimes, however, the initial investment that you have to put into the first-time use of a tool – the investment that regular contributors never see any more – is big.
If you’ve never used Bugzilla, git, Gerrit, or SSH, how long would it take you to submit a first patch to a project? How many hurdles does someone have to jump through to submit a patch for your project? Is there a way to ease people into it? I could imagine something like an email based process for newcomers, and only after they’ve made a few contributions, insist that all of the community’s preferred tools and processes be used. Or having true single sign-on, where you have only one account-creation process for all of your interactions with the project, so that you don’t end up creating a wiki account, a Bugzilla account, a Labs account and configuring a Gerrit account.
I want to make clear – I am not picking on MediaWiki here. I rate the project well above average in the speed and friendliness with which I was helped at every turn. But they, like every project, have adopted tools to make it easier for regular contributors, and to help ensure that no patches get dropped on the floor because of poor processes. Here’s the $64,000 question: are the tools and processes which make it easier for regular contributors making it harder for first-time contributors?
April 16, 2012
community, freesoftware, work
30 Comments
I’m joining Red Hat on May 2nd, where I’ll be working with the Open Source and Standards team. We’ll be working hard to help all of the projects that Red Hat contributes to kick ass at growing community. I have known several of the team from years gone past, and interviewing for the position was frankly a pleasure.
I’d like to thank Karsten Wade for thinking of me and making the connections back in February. When my future boss described the position and the team to me around then, and asked me whether I might be interested, I couldn’t help myself from saying “I think you just described my dream job”. I know you’re supposed to show restraint and play hard to get in these situations, but I got carried away.
Red Hat is one of the few companies out there that could tempt me away from independent consulting. They have a range of projects covering the server, desktop, middleware, cloud services and virtualisation. They are the top, or one of the top, corporate contributors to dozens of projects I use every day. I love the Red Hat philosophy of working with communities to make great Free and Open Source software.
Of course, that doesn’t mean that everything is roses. There are projects within Red Hat (or that Red Hat contributes heavily to) which need to improve their community processes, that could do a better job of promoting themselves, or that have hung on to former business models post-acquisition, at the expense of community growth. And it’ll be our job to fix those issues. It’ll be challenging, it’ll be a slow, incremental process. But I have no doubt that it will be very rewarding. I’m looking forward to it!
February 16, 2012
community, General
No Comments
Mentoring, lawyer/developer relations, organising events… a few pieces I’ve written/delivered were released recently.
As an OuterCurve mentor I wrote a short article targeted at project managers considering submitting their projects to the Google Summer of Code this year.
My piece on getting people together was included in the recently released Open Advice book, edited and put together by Lydia Pintscher and others. It’s in great company – there are some excellent articles in there. My personal favourites are “Everyone else might be wrong, but probably not”, from Evan Prodromou, “Documentation and my former self” by Anne Gentle, “Software that has the quality with no name” by Federico Mena Quintero and “Who are You, What are You Selling, and Why Should I Care?” by Sally Khudairi, but there are more where those came from.
My write-up of the talk I gave in the Legal Issues DevRoom at FOSDEM, “Gray areas in software licensing” was published on LWN (it’s behing a pay wall for a few days, email me and I’ll share a direct link). Bradley Kuhn informs me that it will be available in audio form in the very near future in the FaiF oggcast.
And my presentation “Crafting Communities to Craft Software” at Redmonk Brew (aka Monkigras), which I reprised in a modified form as “Sustainable mentorship” for FOSDEM in the cross-desktop DevRoom, based largely on an article I wrote a while back was very well received – thank you for the praise! Videos from London and Brussels should be going online soon. In a related note, Kohsuke Kawaguchi’s presentation on creating a developer community was also awesome.
And finally, Stormy Peters published her write-up of the hiring process which led to Karen Sandler becoming the GNOME Foundation Executive Director. I had the pleasure of being part of the process, and I think I contributed something useful to it.
December 7, 2011
community, work
No Comments
For the past few months, I have been offering a new service – a training course tailored to helping a team be effective working with community projects – whether that is engaging an existing community, or growing a community around new code. Details of the topics I cover are up on my site. Developing software in community is as much a social activity as it is a technical activity – and engaging an existing community, like moving into a new neighbourhood or starting at a new school, can be very daunting indeed. This course covers not just the technical issues of community development, but also the social, management and strategic issues involved. Some of the questions that I try to help answer are:
- What are the tools and communication norms?
- How can I get answers to my questions?
- Is there a trick to writing patches that get reviewed quickly?
- How do I figure out who’s in charge?
- How much will it cost me to open source some code/to work with an existing project?
- How does managing volunteers work?
- Is there anything I can do to help my developers be more vocal upstream?
- What legal issues should my developers be aware of?
All of these things, in my experience, are challenges that organisations have to overcome when they start engaging with community projects like Apache, GNOME or the Linux kernel.
If you’re having trouble with these issues, or some subset of them, and are interested in a training seminar, please contact me, and we’ll talk.
November 18, 2011
community, freesoftware, General
9 Comments
A couple of days ago, I tweeted this: “Insight of the day: All “community norms” documents come down to one word: Empathy. Think how others will feel before you act.” I think that’s worth developing on.
As I was growing up, empathy meant "Deanna Troi" to me
Here are a few examples:
- GNOME Code of Conduct: “If someone asks for help it is because they need it. Do politely suggest specific documentation or more appropriate venues where appropriate, but avoid aggressive or vague responses such as “RTFM”.” – think how it feels to need help, and to take the step of asking for it. I want to know that someone *understands* what I’m going through, feels my frustration, and is looking for a way to help relieve it. Recently, when confronted with a technical issue that prevented me from using my scanner, the advice I received on an IRC channel was to upgrade or change my Linux distribution! How un-empathic can you get!
- Koha patch rules (along with every other development project in the world): “The patch must apply to the current HEAD of the master branch of the code”: Put yourself in the place of a project maintainer who receives a patch proposal. He tries to apply it to his source tree, but the merge fails. Why? Because the patch was created against a year-old release of the project, and he’s since reworked internals to solve a different, unrelated issue. The maintainer is faced with a number of unsavory choices now: Spend time reading the patch, understanding what it does, and “forward-porting” it to master; check out the old branch, apply the patch, review, and test it there, and not commit to master; or drop the patch. What would you do in that situation? Someone is giving you a gift, which is going to make work for you. Is it worth an hour or two of your time to work on it to get it to just apply to your work? You still need to review the patch after that – which you would have to do anyway. In that situation, most people will ask the original patch proposer to do the initial grunt work and get the patch working on the tip of master.
- Now flip things around. You found a bug in software you use – the bug was really annoying. You took the time to get the source code, identify, qualify and fix the buig, open a bug report, which was confirmed, and attach a patch which you have checked fixes the problem. And what answer do you get? “Not good enough – work on it more”. How would that make you feel? That depends on how it is communicated. If it’s a stock answer, like a sheet of paper handed over a tax office counter, with a list of prerequisites, then I bet that would make me angry, resentful and frustrated. I poured time and effort into that patch, and this is how you treat it? If the criticism is of the core of the patch – it doesn’t fix the problem, or should do so differently, then the criticism might be easier to take. But if it’s issues which potentially add many hours of effort on top of time already spent, with no benefit to the proposer (check out the latest code, upgrade half a dozen dependencies without breaking my old version, compile it, and then forward-port the patch), chances are he won’t do it. An empathic response might be to make someone aware of the guidelines and their reason for being, but help him with the forward-porting on IRC by asking him to explain the patch, what it does and why.
All of those guidelines on indentation and whitespace, commenting code, including test cases, updating documentation, and ensuring code compiles at the tip of the master branch are designed to help patch proposers make patches which are easy for maintainers to apply. And in this context, an empathic patch proposer can understand them much better. Miguel de Icaza did a great job of framing this right.
When I was in college, I went to the Netherlands one Summer for a working holiday. At one point, I had a job offer for short-term work, but needed to be registered for tax to start, and I needed a bank account to get paid. So I went to the tax office, and the lady behind the counter very resignedly handed me a piece of paper with prerequisites, and told me to come back when I had fulfilled them. Then she looked over my shoulder and said “Next!” One of the prerequisites was a permanent address – I explained that I was living in a camp-site for the summer, and would that address do? Of course not! No proposed solution, no consideration of the situation I was in, no empathy.
Then I went to the bank, where I was told that I needed a permanent address to open an account. Same sense that the person I was dealing with didn’t care about me. So with my friend Barry, we looked into short term accommodation options. Landlords required (among other things) an employment agreement and a bank account before they would rent us accommodation – even if only by the week! In the end, we had to pass up that job, and work “on the black” for less than minimum wage to survive the Summer – but what choice did we have?
How frustrating! Just imagine how we felt. That’s empathy.
Again and again in community guidelines, whether it’s guidelines for people who are approaching a community to report a bug or propose a patch or feature, or guidelines for community members dealing with each other and people outside the community, this idea “think how this would make you feel if the roles were reversed” is pervasive, but unwritten. I think that it should be.
It reminds me of a social experiment I heard about recently:
Rats are placed in a box with a lever. When you pull the lever, a food pellet is distributed. The rats quickly learn to pull the lever. After a while, you change the configuration of the cage. Now, when the lever is pulled, the food pellet is distributed, but a cold shower drenches all the rats in the box. After a while, the rats learn not to pull the level, and start to punish rats who do as a group.
The second generation starts when a new rat is introduced into the box. as he approaches the leverl, the older rats all jump on top of him, to prevent him from touching it. In effect, they are teaching him the rule “don’t touch the lever”, without explaining why the rule exists. As time goes on, new rats are added, and old rats removed from the box.
The third generation happens when there are none of the oiriginal rats left in the box. None of the rats have experienced the cold shower after the lever was pressed. At that point, you can turn off the cold shower function – you will be sure that no rat will ever touch the level, because the community rules forbid it. Ask any of the rats why, though, and they will not be able to give you a better answer than “because that’s the way it is”. If rats could talk, of course.
Community guidelines which are purely written documents, but which neglect the empathic side of the equation, and don’t explain how not following the guidelines affect other people, can be similar. It’s important to include the reasons for guidelines,so that we don’t forget how breaking the rules makes others feel. It’s also important to have sufficient flexibility and adaptability in dealing with new community members – like the rat experiment, circumstances change all the time. Back when everyone was using CVS, performing merges was a complicated and time-consuming process. Nowadays, rebasing and merging with Git, Bazaar or Mercurial is so easy that some of the coding guidelines we used to have may no longer have the same impact. Likewise, email technology has moved on, and with cheap and copious bandwidth, email norms have evolved – netiquette community norms move on with them.
In general, as Bill & Ted famously said, “Be excellent to each other”. Think about how your actions & statements will be received. Be empathic.
October 6, 2011
community, General, gnome, maemo, work
5 Comments
With the announcement of Tizen (pronounced, I learned, tie-zen, not tea-zen or tizz-en) recently, I headed over to the website to find out who the project was aimed at. I read this on the “Community” page:
The Tizen community is made up of all of the people who collectively work on or with Tizen:
- Product contributors: kernel/distribution developers, release managers, quality assurance, localization, etc.
- Application developers: people who write applications to run on top of Tizen
- Users: people who run Tizen on their device and provide feedback
- Vendors: companies who create products based on Tizen
- Other contributors: promotion, documentation, and much more
Anyone can contribute by:
- Submitting patches
- Filing bugs
- Developing applications
- Helping with wiki documentation
- Participating in other community efforts and programs
Wow! That’s a diverse target audience, and a very wide ranging list of ways you can help out. But is it really helpful to scope the project so wide, and try to cater to such a wide range of use-cases from the start? And is the project at a stage where it even makes sense to advertise itself to some of these different types of users?
I have talked about the different meanings of “maintainer” before, depending on whether you’re maintaining a code project or are a package maintainer for a distribution. I have also talked about the different types of community that build up around a project, and how each of them needs their own identity – particularly in the context of the MeeGo trademark. I particularly like Simon Phipps’s analysis of the four community types as a way to clarify what you’re talking about.
For Tizen, I see between three and five different types of community, each with different needs, and each of which can form at different stages in the life-cycle of the project. Trying to “sell” the project to one type of community before the project is ready for them will result in disappointment and frustration all round – managing the expectations of people approaching Tizen will be vital to its long-term success, even if it opens you up to short-term criticism. Unless each of these communities is targeted individually and separately, and at the right time, I am sceptical about the results.
“Upstream” software developers
The first and most identifiably “Open Source” family of communities will be the software developers working on components and applications which will end up in the core of Tizen. For the most part, these communities exist already, and Samsung and Intel engineers are working with them. These are the projects we commonly call “upstreams” – projects you don’t control, but from whom code flows into your product.
In other cases, code will originate from Intel and/or Samsung. In the same way that Buteo, oFono and the various applications which were developed for the MeeGo Netbook UX were very closely associated with MeeGo, there will be similar projects (sometimes the same projects) which will have a close association with Tizen. Each of these projects will have their own personality, their own maintainers, roadmaps, specs – and each of them should have their own identity, and space to collaborate and communicate.
Communities form around programming projects not because of the code, but because of a shared vision and values. Each project will attract different people – the people who are interested in metadata and search are not the same as the people who will be passionate about system-wide contact integration. Each project needs its own web space, maintainers, bug tracker, mailing list, and wiki space. Of course, many projects can share the same infrastructure, and a lot of the same community processes (for things like code governance), and for projects closely related to Tizen, we can provide common space to help create a Tizen developer community in the same way there’s a GNOME developer community. But each community around each component will have its own personality and will need its own space.
At the level of Tizen, we could start with an architecture diagram, perhaps – and for each component on the architecture diagram, link to the project’s home page – many of the links will point to places like kernel.org, gnome.org, freedesktop.org and so on. For Tizen-specific projects, there could be a link to the project home page, with a list of stuff that needs to be done before the component is “ready”.
Core platform packagers, testers, integrators
Once we have a set of components which are working well together, we get to the heart of what I think will be Tizen’s early activity – bringing those components together into a cohesive whole. Tizen will be, basically, a set of distributions aimed at different form factors. And the deliverable in a distribution is not code or a Git tag, it’s a complete, integrated stack.
The engineering skills, resources and processes required to integrate a distribution are different to those of a code project. Making a great integrated Linux platform is obviously difficult – otherwise Red Hat would not be making money, and Ubuntu would not have had the opportunity to capture so much mind-share. Both Red Hat and Canonical do something right which others failed at before them.
Distributions attract a different type of contributor than code projects, and need a different set of tools and infrastructure to allow people to collaborate.At the distribution level, it is more likely you will be debating whether or not to integrate a particular package or its competitor than it is to debate whether to implement a feature in a specific package. Of course, it is possible to influence upstream projects to get specific features implemented, not least by providing developer resources, and there will be a need for some ambassadors to bridge the gap to upstream projects. And it is possible for a distribution to carry patches to upstream packages if that community disagrees. But in general, not much code gets written in distributions.
What the distro community needs and expects is infrastructure for continuous integration, bug tracking software, a way to submit and build software packages, good release engineering, an easy way to find out what packages need a maintainer (see Debian’s WNPP list or Ubuntu’s “need-packaging” list for examples) and a way to influence what packages or features are included in future releases (see Fedora or Ubuntu for examples). They also want tools to allow packaging, testing and deploying the integrated distribution – for an embedded distro, that might mean an emulator and an image creator, perhaps.
Vendors and carriers
Communities of companies are worth a special mention. Companies have very different ways of working together and agreeing on things than communities of individuals. I was tempted to just roll vendors into the “Platform integrators” community type, but they are sufficiently different to be considered another type of community. Vendors have different constraints and motivations than individual contributors to the platform, and we should be aware of those.
Vendors like to have a business relationship – some written agreement that shows where everyone stands. They have a direct relationship with people who buy their hardware, and have an interest (potentially in conflict with other communities) in owning the user relationship – through branded application stores, UI and support forums, for example. And since vendors are typically working on hardware development in parallel with software development, they care a lot about a reliable release schedule and quality level from the stack. Something that companies care about which individuals usually don’t are legal concerns around working with the process – do they have patent rights to the code they ship? Are they giving up any of their own potential patent claims?
3rd party application developers
Application developers don’t care, in general, whether the platform is open source or closed, or developed collaboratively or by one party (witness the popularity of Android and iOS with application developers). What they do care about are developer tools, documentation, and the ability to share their work with device users and other application developers. Some application developers will want to develop their applications as free software, and it is possible to enable that, but I think the most important thing for application developers is that it’s easy to do things with your platform, that there are good tools for developing, testing and deploying your application, that your platforms APIs are enabling the developer to do what he wants, and that you are providing a channel for those developers to get their apps to users of your platform.
An application developer doesn’t want to have to ship his software to 5 different app stores on every release – in contrast to vendors, he would like a single channel to his market. Other things he cares about are being able to form a relationship with his users – so app stores need to be social, allow user ratings and comments, and allow the author to interact with his users. Clear terms of engagement are vital here too – especially for commercial application developers. And application developers are also another type of community – they will want to share tips and tricks, code, and their thoughts on the project leaders in some kind of app developer knowledge base.
Device users
There is another potential community which I should mention, and that is users of your platform – typically, these will be users of devices running your platform. It should be possible for engaged users to share information, opinions, tips & tricks, and interesting hacks among each other. It should also be possible to rate and recommend applications easily – this is in the interests of both your user community and your application developer ecosystem.
OK, so what?
Each of these community types is different, and they don’t mix well. They mature at different rates. There is no point in trying to build a user platform until there are devices running your platform on the market, for example
So each type of community needs a separate space to work. There is no point in catering to a 3rd party application developer until you have developer tools and a platform for him to develop against. Vendors will commit to products when they see a viable integrated platform. And so on.
What is vital is to be very clear, for each type of community, what the rules of engagement are. As an example, one company can control the integration of a platform and the development of many of its components (as is the case for Android) and everyone is relatively happy, because they know where they stand and what they’re getting into. But if you advertise as an open and transparent project, and a small group of people announce the decisions of what components are included or excluded from the stack (as was the case in MeeGo), then in spite of being vastly more open, people who have engaged with the project will end up unhappy, because of a mismatch between the message and the practice in the project.
So what about Tizen? I think it is a mistake to announce the projects as a place to “submit patches, report bugs and develop applications” when there is no identifiable code base, no platform to try, and no published SDK to develop against. By announcing that Tizen is an Open Source platform, Intel and Samsung have set an expectation for people – and these are people who have gone through the move to MeeGo under two years ago, and who have seen Nokia drop the project earlier this year. If they are disappointed by the project’s beginnings because the expectations around the project have been set wrong from the offset, it could take a long time to recover.
Personally, I would start low-key by announcing an architecture diagram and concentrating on code and features that need writing, then ramp up the integrator community with some alpha images and tools to allow people to roll their own; finally, when the platform stabilises roll out the developer SDK and app store and start building up an application developer community. But by aiming too big with the messaging, Tizen runs the risk of scaring some people away early. Time will tell.
September 22, 2011
community, freesoftware, marketing, work
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Tomorrow, Friday September 23rd, the Humanitarian FOSS track at the Open World Forum will bring together leaders from some of the most important humanitarian software projects and case studies of the impact these projects are having on people’s lives around the world. I’m happy to have been allowed to chair the track, and I am humbled by the quality of the presenters and the impact that their work is having.
In addition to the Humanitarian track, we are also honoured to have Laura Walker Hudson from FrontlineSMS give a keynote presentation on the overarching theme of “Humanitarian FOSS – serving humanity” in the main auditorium at 17:15. Laura will give an overview of the myriad ways that free and open source software is saving and helping people’s lives.
The Humanitarian track will have two core themes:
- Crisis Management– how Free and Open Source Software plays a role in extreme events
- The Sahana project, born in Sri Lanka after the 2004 tsunami in the Indian Ocean, helps NGOs and citizens caught in a crisis by crowd-sourcing missing persons reports, co-ordinate different NGOs working in the same place, and track incident reports and volunteer co-ordination.
- Tashiro Shuichi from Japan will present the ways that Open Source software helped during the tsunami disaster in Japan.
- Syrine Tlili from the Tunisian Ministry of Communication Technologies will tell us how Open Source was used by citizens during the Arab Spring revolutions
- Sigmah is a project that enables project management for NGOs
- Sustainable Development– once the crisis is over, what are the projects that help with systemic problems like education, health-care, sanitation, and documenting human rights violations?
- SMS is the killer app for communication in the developing world. Most villages in Africa, Asia and South America have cellphone connectivity, but unreliable power grid, Internet and no phone lines. FrontlineSMS enables you to send and receive SMS messages from any computer, using a cheap phone or GSM modem. It is at the heart of every prominent humanitarian software project.
- Sugar is an operating system which was designed from the ground up to meet the needs of educators in developing countries, as part of the OLPC (One Laptop Per Child) project to revolutionize the use of technology in education. Sean Daly from the Sugar project will show us a deployment of Sugar and OLPC in a secondary school in a small town in Madagascar.
- Martus, a project created by Benetech, allows the secure recording and storage of testimony relating to human rights violations. Testimony collected with Martus has been used to successfully prosecute police officers for murder in Guatemala.
- Mifos, which was developed by Grameen Bank, the pre-cursor of micro-financing, provides a micro-financing platform for financial institutions.
- Akvo help connect doers and donors to transform communities in some of the poorest parts of the world, funding water, sanitation, and health-care projects around the world.
- The Open Bank Project promotes financial transparency and provides tools to allow people to fight corruption in banking.
Coders for Social Good
There are dozens of amazing Free/Open Source Software projects working to improve the lives of people around the world. For example, Literacy Bridge provides talking books to communities in Africa, and OpenMRS enables the gathering of medical information from regional clinics to reduce child mortality by improving resource allocation.
Many Open Source developers are developing software in communities because they want to make the world a better place. Working on a humanitarian project provides a unique opportunity to combine the social good of Open Source community projects and the public good of helping people in need. Social Coding 4 Good is a new initiative from Benetech which puts willing volunteers in contact with humanitarian projects in need of resources.
The schedule for the track is available on the Open World Forum website. For any press or interview requests, please contact me by email dave@neary-consulting.com or my cellphone +33 6 77 01 92 13.
September 19, 2011
community, freesoftware
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After some last minute confirmations, cancellations and other trials and tribulations, I am very happy with the final line-up for the Humanitarian FOSS track at the Open World Forum this year.
We have a range of projects attending and speaking this year which will cover both crisis response (crowdsourcing first responder information, document and information management when it’s most important) and longer term actions (education, sanitation, financing sustainable projects, enabling reconstruction and securing people from persecution).
I’m particularly happy to have Syrine Tlili from Tunisia presenting the role that free software played in the citizen’s revolution in Tunisia this Spring, and Tashiro Suichi to tell the story of the lives that were saved thanks to free software after the tsunami disaster in Japan in March. I also expect Simon Redfern’s presentation on the Open Bank Project to be particularly interesting, in the context of the current financial crisis.
In addition to the track, Laura Walker Hudson has also agreed late in the day to keynote on the topic of “Free and Open Source Software: Serving Humanity” at 17:15 on Friday the 23rd. As project manager of FrontlineSMS, she has a key position at the center of a lot of what goes on in the humanitarian world: SMS is the key means of gathering and sharing information with rural areas of the developing world, and is also the main way people share information during a crisis.
I’d also like to take the opportunity to give a big shout out to Bayor Andrew Azaabanye from the Literacy Bridge project – he was due to speak on the ways Literacy Bridge is being deployed in Ghana, but unfortunately we could not get a visa in time for him to attend.
We will be in the “Paris” room from 1pm until 5pm on Friday September 23rd – I hope to see a lot of you there!
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