Karsten Wade, Sr. Community Gardener, Red Hat
- @quaid
- FOSS advocate for 10 years
- being a catalyst in communities
- to be the catalyst in communities of customers, contributors, and partners creating better technology the open source way
- word "in" is important
- "in" could have been "over," or "of," or "for" ... but none of these work as well because it creates an imbalance
- "in" suggests everyone being in it together
- currently have a doctoral candidate in cultural anthropology at Fedora who's helping the project get better
- learn about Fedora, learn how they do things
- a lot of people think open source works the same way tom sawyer got his fence whitewashed
- tom sawyer would rather go down to the swimming hole
- friends come along, so tom acts like he LOVE painting the fence and his friends start painting the fence for him
- model actually works a lot differently -- barn raising analogy is better
- need to do a lot of work before you call people in to do the actual barn raising
- build the foundation, do the preliminary work
- doing the actually raising is a great thing to have the community do
- can't call everyone in too early or too late
- example of interaction in red hat community - http://lwn.net/Articles/83360
- written by someone inside red hat projects to show what it looks like to the outside world
- story of how fedora came about
- early days of red hat, developer side was coming along pretty well
- customers and people writing software for RH had issues with the speed at which new distributions came about
- now, fedora is released every six months, and RHEL is a snapshot every 18 months with longer-term support
- this model works well for businesses but didn't work as well for the community overall
- always a challenge to strike a balance when a company needs to keep some information private but the project is open source
- around fedora 2 timeframe the NSA contacted red hat to talk about a security-enhanced version of linux
- trying to get out of vendor lockin with another vendor
- took base OS and slapped security stuff on top, but couldn't upgrade, support, etc.
- NSA understood the open source model and thought it would address their issues better
- fedora core 2 added SELinux
- gotten better over the years, was kind of rough early on
- people turned it off originally--it's on by default and that irritated a lot of people
- it's ok to disappoint people in OSS, but it's never OK to surprise people--you'll lose them and they won't come back
- fedora 7
- dropped the word "core" from the name
- prior to fedora 7, all the build tools were behind red hat's firewall
- in the meantime the community created a build process that was better than red hat's
- fedora 7 and forward enabled anyone to do builds
- virtualization
- RHEL 5 timeframe, xen was the only technology really available at the time
- xen is code outside the kernel so this made including it in RH more difficult
- at the same time, kvm was being done and it was in the kernel, which made things more easy to integrate
- libvirt abstracted the actual VM technology under the hood
- this kind of went against the direction of the community but red hat gave a clear roadmap as to why they were doing what they were doing
- red hat wound up buying the company that was working on kvm
- POSSE - Professors' Open Source Summer Experience
- week-long bootcamp to help teachers teach open source
- people graduating don't have good experience with real-world projects by the time they graduate
- red hat went to people who taught open source to learn about the challenges
- wasn't a single location for educators to discuss teaching participation in open source
- academic calendar very different from the open source calendar
- success formula -- if educator is involved in an open source project and knows how to participate, they're much more likely to encourage their students
- even with the projects, helps to teach students how best to interact with open source projects
- have some real-world marketing classes to each people how to market open source projects
- created http://teachingopensource.org
- text book - Practical Open Source Software Explorations
- first POSSE held in Raleigh in 2009
- worked on mozilla, packaging, dealing with bugs, etc.
- nothing too technically difficult but getting a feel for the process and how to get involved
- cultural differences
- did a POSSE in China and while in the US we're OK with more collective learning, professor not necessarily being an expert, etc. but it's different in China
- idea of "productively lost"
- contributing
- e.g. wiki translations and contributions -- showing people how they can make a difference
- communities of practice
- "communities of practice are formed by people who engage in a process of collective learning in a shared domain of human endeavor: a tribe learning to survive, a band of artists seeking new forms of expression ... in a nutshell: communities of practice are groups of people who share a concern or a passion for something they do and learn how to do it better as they interact regularly." Wenger, McDermott, Snyder - "Cultivating Communities of Practice"
- entire body of social science work around how communities work
- about more than number of users in the system or number of downloads
- more about the overall health of the community
- elements of a communities of practice
- domain (what)
- community (who)
- the people who care about the domain of knowledge
- need to allow people to be themselves and not try to force them to be who you want them to be
- only reason to shut someone down is if they're actively doing something poisonous
- practice (how)
- turn knowledge into something that can be spread around
- principles of communities of practice
- design for evolution
- open a dialogue between inside and outside people
- people on the inside need to maintain openness and transparency
- people on the outside need to feel they're being heard, and also know how they'd become one of the inside people
- invite different levels of participation
- every aspect is important
- experts don't fall out of the sky, more likely they'll be created from within
- develop public/private spaces
- focus on value
- combine familiarity & excitement
- create a rhythm for the community
- weekly meetings, release every six months, etc. -- create expectations
- free <3 open <3 free
- bottom line is that free software is a great brand that works for hackers, open source is a great brand that works for businesses
- not trying to say one brand is better than the other
- Book: The Open Source Way: Creating and Nurturing Communities of Contributors
- http://quaid.fedorapeople.org/presentations
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