Hi Jim, synthesizing a bit....
On Oct 13, 2006, at 1:39 AM, Jim Grisanzio wrote:
<snip>
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 ...
Ugh. When the new FSL owner/management takes over this may be a
requirement. Solaris would do well to think about ARM. Sigma
Designs just had a design win with Cisco for an SoC based on ARM.
The general purpose SoC is the next big thing for hardware ( http://
bbrv.blogspot.com/2006/02/soc-4u2.html ). Cell phones are still much
more pervasive. Sun Ray Mobile? Java+Solaris combo? The last time
we were in Tokyo we could not believe how many people were walking
down the street looking at their cell and texting or video-chatting
as they walked.
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.
We just did that for the BoP Network this week at Cornell: http://
www.bopnetwork.org/
Academic environments are solid neutral ground for a diverse group
(diversity is important) and seem to put people into an open frame of
mind. This is also something we have done in Power.org.
http://www.power.org/news/events/university_seminar/JSCC_Moscow
http://www.power.org/news/events/barcelona/
The international approach also ties into your international
community drive...
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?
Yes
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?
A USAID lady in this case. She runs this Program: http://
www.microlinks.org/
Here is our process: http://www.power2people.org/goals4.html
We will add OpenSolaris on top as soon as we have it on the EFIKA.
We intend to ship Tom Riddle/Sun Labs boards/systems soon.
You are welcome to vector us to the right Sun person for USAID (our
hardware or not).
R&B
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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