People, in general, have a hard time moving outside their comfort zone. Or even thinking about it. We can plan ahead for events that cause us discomfort, but when things are going well–especially when they are going well–we can fall into the trap of complacency.
For example, right now I am dealing with a head cold. It’s no big deal, I am still plodding along at work, getting things done. But I did not plan for this, and my productivity levels are correspondingly low this week.
We are rapidly entering a new era.
The era where data is the lifeblood of the worldwide economy.
The era where organizations that learn how to channel their data will survive.
The era where those that do not will become dinosaurs.
I am reading Superminds – the The Surprising Power of People and Computers Thinking Together by Thomas W Malone–a book which calls out various facets of injecting Artificial Intelligence into thriving ecosystems of humans working together to augment the collective intelligence of these groups as a whole. Malone takes us through a journey into a world that brings to bear collaborative technologies and machine learning to aim for the perfect enterprise — An enterprise that can be ideally positioned to formulate and execute the most effective strategy to be successful. Respecting one of the “super brains” in the recent past, Malone calls this enterprise “Alberts”. I continue to read this page-turner and within a few pages, Malone references Wikipedia and Open Source software as highly de-centralized online groups that are much more prominent — just as he had predicted in his Future of Work book published in 2004. This got me thinking. Can this concept of the “Supermind” be applied to Open Source? Taking a cue from Malone’s idealistic enterprise–“Alberts”, join me as I inject a new member into the Open Source community–O2S2.
The news that IBM has signed an agreement to acquire Red Hat made an impact throughout the business world Sunday, leaving many to speculate what the future will bring for Red Hat. Specifically, some are wondering what this acquisition will mean for the many upstream projects in which Red Hat participates and sponsors.
Our CEO Jim Whitehurst imparted a strong sense of direction for Red Hat as it starts on this new journey, with a comment that directly relates to upstream communities: “Our unwavering commitment to open source innovation remains unchanged. The independence IBM has committed to will allow Red Hat to continue building the broad ecosystem that enables customer choice and has been integral to open source’s success in the enterprise. IBM is acquiring Red Hat for our amazing people and our incredibly special culture and approach to making better software.”
A replacement plan/document is a great community resource, even when you’re not being replaced.
A year ago, as the role of RDO community manager at Red Hat was moving from one person to another, that team started thinking about what needs to be in place to effectively transition a role. More generally, the managers started thinking about planning, and documenting, for anyone’s eventual replacement.
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The Data a znalosti & WIKT 2018 conference is rather small regional event for young researchers and PhD students. Its focus is on data, analytics, machine learning, and other related topics. The program of the conference is mostly academia-oriented and presented topics rather theoretic. Red Hat was a sponsor of the conference, which took place in Brno on October 11 and 12.