Markus Flierl wrote: > I just got off the phone with Jim Grisanzio, THE OpenSolaris evangelist, > see http://blogs.sun.com/jimgris/ Jim was sharing his experience on how > to grow communities on OpenSolaris.
Thanks, Markus. It was very nice talking with you as well. I often have conversations like that, and you reminded me that I should really write some of this stuff down. :) I have many blogs on community building (hundreds, probably), but it's not all in one place. Nor is it all fresh. So, today I wrote up some of the things we discussed on the phone, and I'll keep adding to that post over time: http://blogs.sun.com/jimgris/entry/building_opensolaris_communities Also, I did a talk on contributing to OpenSolaris at FOSS.IN that is really another aspect of community building: http://foss.in/2007/register/speakers/talkdetailspub.php?talkid=256 And Glynn Foster did a talk on contributing to OpenSolaris from a developer perspective (which was really excellent): http://foss.in/2007/register/speakers/talkdetailspub.php?talkid=363 > In Jim's opinion engaging > universities Yep. Joey Guo in China and Joe George in India are the two Sun people who are really driving various education programs. They are great guys and very open to visitors and new technical content to talk about. > and attending open source conferences are one of the best > venues for that. One thing that is key for attracting people is to > actively call out projects that people can work on. I have to admit, in > the past we haven't been very good at calling out what kind of > contributions we are specifically looking for. This was literally a requirement for the Project Days talks at FOSS.IN in Bangalore. See the FOSS.IN schedule http://foss.in/2007/schedules/ for all the presentations. The OpenSolaris Project Day was on the first day (listed in purple on the right side of the schedule). The talks were all centered around how to contribute to various technical projects, and they were presented by Sun and non-Sun community members. > I'd suggest that we > prepare a list of things that we'd like to see from the community to > provide guidance to people interested in contributing. Some of the > things that come to my mind are a basic GUI (Someone in my team already > did a first pass at this, but I'm sure there is a lot more that can be > added to it) as well as contributing bug fixes. In addition to that > Crossbow makes the HW classification capabilities of Network Interfaces > transparent. This allows people to build more effective fire walls and > IDS systems by pushing filtering and classification of packets down into > the NIC HW. Cool. Be as specific as possible. You may want to flush out ideas on list and then post them on the project page so people can blog about them. I'd love to be able to point to lists of things we need as well as people who are contributing. See the Intel project for two grids listing some of their contributors: http://opensolaris.org/os/project/intel-platform/ http://opensolaris.org/os/project/intel-platform/code-contributions/ > There are probably thousands of other ways for people in the community > to contribute: Documentation of typical use cases, best practices for > managing virtual NICs, creating demos etc. Any other ideas? Also consider working with the globalization community to see if the community is interested in translating use cases into other languages. Jim -- http://blogs.sun.com/jimgris
