Raquel Velasco and Bill Buck wrote On 10/13/06 00:49,:
Hi Jim, having just spent some time on the Power.org BoD and being
involved in this effort over the same period of time (in both cases
since Dec 2004), we would say you, Sun and the Community have done an
exceptional job by any measure. Ice cream for everyone! :-) Is there
a Solaris flavor yet?!
I don't know about ice cream, but we surely have some nice wine:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/jimgris/9347833/in/set-749516/
:) And thanks, much appreciated.
BTW, we would like to be able to serve this at
a future Austin OpenSolaris User Group meeting - that would be the
meeting where we feature the Solaris for PowerPC Community. :)
Yes, and you guys have some new code out there, too. Congrats! Now about
an ARM port next? Lots of cell phones here in Japan ...
Turning this into more will still take time, but not too much. Just
read this:
In his studio apartment in a residence hall for graduate students, he
showed one of them, which he said was filmed in April 2005. In it, Mr.
Chen talked about “getting pretty depressed” because there were only 50
or 60 videos on the YouTube site. Also, he said, “there’s not that many
videos I’d want to watch.” The camera then turns to Mr. Hurley, who
grins and says “Videos like these,” referring to the one Mr. Karim is
filming. (NYTimes)
Very cool.
The road to success is paved with continuity and a process of
innovation. We recommend the following:
1. Host an event - look at the mailing lists over the last two years,
see who is participating, get everyone in a room. "Being there" is
actually an important ingredient in successfully commingling ideas,
processing them and actualizing them into practical results. The theme
is _Next_ and Sun as the champion of collaborative innovation is
bringing the following to be involved...
Yes, we've had conversations here and there ever since the pilot program
about a conference. I think we decided to wait a bit so we could finish
getting more code and projects out there and finish some of the key
infrastructure requirements. Also, we wanted to at least get some user
groups going and participate in some general industry conferences. But I
like the idea of organizing our own conference, though I hate that term,
to be honest. Event is better. I like the format of the Jini Community
Meeting. It's small but highly focused and engaging. Another option
would be to have some sort of gathering but at a university or series of
universities around the world. Regardless of venue or style, I like your
idea of getting together with the active community participants.
2. The practical steps that should come next should be driven by target
markets and products, i.e. something tangible beyond the code. Code is
not the end in itself. It is time to make the community more relevant
to more people because we want the community to grow. But, before
that, the framework has to be in place. There needs to be a
collaborative online structure that leads to a process that produces
results... How to say that in another way? A USAID representative who
might be driving microenterprise development (a great new market) has
not a clue what Mercurial is. We need a repository and _process_ for
"dummies" and not just software engineers.
Ah, yes. This is a critical point. There's a lot to say about this, and
it has come up often.
In general, I think we are where we are right now because we are
basically a kernel source community. So, whatever size we are fits our
current offering as a community. I mean, that's the majority of the
stuff we have out there right now. To me, it's pretty big, too. And it's
pretty high end, as well. It's also a complex program when you consider
everything involved. But I think the distributions have helped a great
deal in engaging more general users, though.
So, two points: I think we can grow as a kernel/application
development/engineering community significantly just taking our current
path into consideration. I mean, so many developers don't even know
about us yet, so there's potentially huge growth right there --
especially in the universities and especially in Asia. But what I think
you are talking about is a much greater growth on top of that. Am I
correct? I get that from the "not just software engineers" bit. :) So,
who else? Tell me more about that that USAID guy. How do we talk to
those people? And what would a process for dummies look like?
Jim
It is time to take Solaris
to "real" application if you want to engage a bigger community.
We appreciate the opportunity to be and to have been involved. Thanks
for the great work.
Sincerely,
R&B
On Oct 12, 2006, at 12:08 AM, Jim Grisanzio wrote:
Hi, guys.
Occasionally, we have conversations about how we are doing as a
community. These conversations take place on these forums, at
conferences and user groups around the world, and also inside Sun.
I'd like to get a conversation going about where we all think we are
right now as a community and where we'd like to go.
At this point, we have an enormous amount of code out there, many
projects and communities, a few ports and distributions, code
integrations, a variety of contributions, an SCM infrastructure
coming, and a draft governance model close to done. We also have
about 150 mail lists with thousands of developers generating a
stunning amount of conversation, and we have about 16K or so people
registered on the site.
So ... where do we go from here?
Year one was clearly about getting out there, releasing lots of code,
and building infrastructure. What's next? To me, community growth --
in size and diversity -- makes a lot of sense to be discussing, but
I'm happy to shut up and sit down if people think this is not a valid
area of focus. Keep in mind, when I say "community growth" what I
mean very simply is people. I'm still amazed -- and inspired -- by
the fact that a large number of people out there don't we're open.
I've always viewed this as an opportunity for growth, though, not as
a problem. But are we engaging them properly?
Some questions for consideration:
* Are we happy with the current size and growth rate of the community?
* Are we measuring this growth accurately?
* How much could we potentially grow? And in what areas?
* If we wanted to grow in size significantly, how would we do it?
* Now that the community is more diversified, how do we view Sun's role?
* What are we not doing as a community that we could or should be doing?
* What should Sun do to help grow the community, and what should we as a
community do for ourselves?
* What's possible?
* What am I missing ...
Any thoughts would be appreciated -- partly because I'm very much
invested in seeing this project grow, partly because I like talking
about the community to new people, and partly because I'm pretty
bullish about our potential. And also, there are always new people
joining the OpenSolaris community, and I'd love to get their opinions
on this issue as well.
Best,
Jim
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