"Should we open source this project?" An easy question to ask, and a hard one to answer. The goal of this article is not to answer the question, but maybe to give some tools that you can use to find the answer when the question arises.
The first question to ask is why the project leader is interested in open source in the first place. Typical answers might include "because we want a community" or "because we want to be the Firefox of our field." But when you dig deeper, there may not be a clear understanding of how an open source project can benefit your company's goals.
The creation of an open source strategy is about finding that benefit. In short, you want to understand why open sourcing this project will benefit the company.
This morning, I was asked to give a few tips about staffing a booth at a technology conference—or, indeed, any conference. This got me thinking—there's things that I do at a conference that come out of years and years of experience doing it wrong, and then tweaking it the next time.
It's a bit like the turning of the leaves, or the return of the swallows at Capistrano. Invariably, the wheel of community management will always slog back to the the topic of "which is the best communications platform for my users?"
It was one of those moments where you weren't quite sure you heard something right.
Previously, we talked about 
A friend of mine recently had to go to the cardiologist to figure out what was what with a racing heartbeat. The cardiologist looked at my friend's current history, including all the current prescriptions my friend was taking… and promptly added one more medication—a beta blocker—to the list.
Being a project manager in your community is an important part of any community lead role. Your job as a community manager is to help feed and water the community, and when I’m asked about how to describe my job, it’s usually "everything that isn’t code is part of my problem." My role is to help guide and catalyze the community to grow beyond where it is now, and for that, you’re going to need some project management skills.
Twenty-five years ago today, Red Hat got its start. A quarter century of creating and supporting world-class software is a pretty big deal for us, and we wanted to celebrate the occasion by demonstrating just how far and wide Red Hat as a company participates in free and open source software!
As Red Hat's community portfolio grows, the Open Source and Standards (OSAS) team needs to shift our approach to supporting their needs. To accomplish this, the OSAS Community Outreach team will be shifting to a consultancy-style approach.
It is an easy metaphor to fall into: we compare the communities that surround our free and open source projects to the actual communities in which we reside. For the most part, the metaphor works really well. I myself have used the metaphor to describe things like server and IT infrastructure to streets, water lines, or power grids. Governance of open source communities to the way different neighborhoods, towns, and cities govern themselves.