Building the Community Mojo
May 15, 2007 11:53 am GeneralI’ve been thinking a lot about Project Indiana, especially in terms of how we might grow a community around the distribution. Fortunately, there are some awesome examples, and very much an opportunity to learn from.
It took just 3 years to create the phenomenon that Ubuntu has worked hard to achieve, with well over 600,000 registrations in their hardware database, and millions of users worldwide. Within that time, they’ve had 6 successful releases, top of distrowatch, 2.5 million posts on ubuntuforums.org, and really are one of the most awesome distributions. Most of the what follows isn’t exactly rocket science to the people who have been keeping a close eye on this community.
#1. Mark Shuttleworth is a spaceman
Anyone who has met Mark knows that he’s absolutely solid well thought out guy, and a perfect spokesman for free and open source software. Not only that, but the SABDFL has been to space. It has the cool factor, and people generally rally around cool people like Mark.#2. Smart hiring process
Mark (and Canonical) had smart hires. He concentrated on people that already had high profiles within the open source community, specific to the roles and technologies that would be leveraged. Who wouldn’t immediately follow and love the Jeff Waugh’s and the Benjamin Mako Hill’s of the world? Not only that, but he also gave each hire the opportunity to suggest other hires that should be interviewed. Not necessarily original, but smart, and the canonical line up were a whole bunch of smart motivated people.#3. Debian, Debian, Debian
Ubuntu started from a well engineered base distribution, Debian. With access to 16,000+ packages, an awesome infrastructure, support for multiple architectures and an organized community and user base, it was a winning combination. Ubuntu fortunately didn’t have the same social differences and the releases started rolling.#4. Time based releases
GNOME learned this relatively early on in its history, and we’ve never looked back since. With a 6 monthly time-based release following the GNOME upstream release schedule, it provided the best opportunity to automatically qualify for a whole range of user interface improvements, and focus efforts on a few of the harder issues for each release. With regular releases, developers could not only stay on the bleeding edge and concentrate on their project, but also provide the opportunity for new developers to join existing communities and ensure they were up to date with the tool chain and libraries.#5. Freedom
Very early on, Ubuntu had a strong commitment to freedom – the freedom to download, run, copy, distribute, study, share, change and improve. That freedom was complemented with their ‘humanity towards others’ definition, capturing the spirit of the free software world. Very early on, they implemented a code of conduct policy and encourage inclusiveness.#6. Freely available
An obvious benefit of having Mark behind the project, Canonical made a Linux distribution more freely available than ever before, regardless of location or bandwidth. shipit.ubuntu.com was born, sending millions of CD’s right around the world, allowing advocates to share spare copies to their friends and colleagues.#7. Soft porn
While it proved to back fire on the team, Mark’s idea of showing the ‘humanity towards others’ and a natural look by a series of controversial nudie backgrounds wasn’t necessarily a bad idea. It created a buzz, and people downloading it to see for themselves. It turned out that the initial target audience was a little more wider reaching and mature, but perhaps a shrewd publicity stunt?#8. Derivatible distributions
Ubuntu encouraged and provided technology for derivatible distributions – both install and LiveCD. Out of that spawned the likes of kubuntu, edubuntu and xubuntu among others.#9. Face to face
With the reality of a 6 monthly release cycle, stuff had to happen fast. The open development meet-ups were a strong part of that cycle, allowing the teams to set goals for the next releases, along with proper specifications and boundaries for that work. Everyone was invited to attend and participate, with Canonical sponsoring travel for those developers who had core knowledge to get the important goals achieved.#10. Best of breed
Not taking away from the awesome job everyone did, but for a long while Ubuntu was considered purely an integration team – very little development was done. It was a distribution with a collection of the best of breed open source technology, polished to perfection. They stuck to their ‘just works’ blue sky dream and focused on the right set of priorities – from power management to wireless support. They were the epitome of a typical web 2.0 company with their hardware database, with every submission helping to grow their potential user base and determine their priorities.
Clearly OpenSolaris needs to stand on its own – every community is different, and it would be a mistake to generalize. However, I do believe there are overlaps in terms of having a core set of goals – whether that’s being free and open, focusing on things like hardware and peripheral support, application availability or help and support. We have much to learn.
