Much of what we do on the Open Source and Standards team is focused on community growth, on the premise that a growing community, by and large, is a healthy one.
Growing a community is never as simple as throwing out your code for the world to see and letting your code's awesomeness speak for itself. You can build the coolest application on the planet and still have problems getting people to help you with it, even if you have a sparkling personality.
We've talked about this before, when discussing onboarding. Onboarding is what we call the process used to get people into a community. That process can take many forms, and there can be more than one path into your community, but the key thing is having a process. Otherwise, you can have a project where you build it and no one comes.
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The kid was the western suburbs of Pittsburgh, strolling up to the Red Hat booth on day two of LinuxCon North America with his dad in tow. 17 and a senior at West Allegheny High School in Imperial, PA, this young man had an interest in studying computer science and had come to LinuxCon with his father to get the lay of the land.
At this point, you might think the story would be about how we walked this young man through all of the different education options Red Hat participates in, including our University Outreach and Red Hat internship programs, and he left with a glowing confidence about the open source future before him. And indeed, that is pretty much part of what went down: my colleague Tom Callaway spoke at length with this student about those very topics. But while Tom was shaping future minds, I also had an interesting discussion of my own with the boy's father.
I spoke to several students at the booth over the course of the week–more women than men, I was pleased to observe–and while they all do represent the future of open source, that designation was not just limited to them. Anyone can come into open source and free software development and find their passion there.
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Fedora's Flock wrapped up two weeks ago, after a lovely week in Krakow, Poland. Here's an organizer's-eye view of the conference and some updates.
Overall, I think this was a great event. At least, the feedback I got from folks who attended was that it was productive and they had a good time.
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Later this month is the day traditionally used as the anniversary date for the Linux operating system, which got its public start with an August 25, 1991 post to the comp.os.minux newsgroup. This year, Linux will celebrate its 25th year of changing the world.
Linux has come a long way since those days in the latter half of 1991, and countless articles and books have been written about the impact of piece of software has had on the development of technology.
To get an idea of how fast Linux took off, think about the timeline of the first year of Linux's existence.
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I have been fortunate enough to attend LinuxCon Japan this week, a conference of 350 attendees in the Bunkyo neighborhood of Tokyo that features strong tracks to keep developers and business people here in Asia appraised of all things cool and open source.
I was asked to do a couple of talks, one being on how community can have real value on the bottom line of a business and not just be an expenditure on an organization's bottom line. It went pretty well, and one of the questions afterward was very interesting.
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Today is the day that Fedora 24 has been released!
It's kind of a big deal at Red Hat, since Fedora is the upstream from which many things flow. So, as such, it's a community release that gets a lot of attention both within Red Hat, and without.
I actually had the opportunity to clean-install Fedora 24 Beta last week—not that I am some Fedora über-fan or anything. No, this was a necessity brought on by a dead hard drive. Thank goodness for cloud backups… one new drive later and I was installing Fedora 24 from a live USB.
The experience itself was nothing notable, in that I had enough bad experiences with Xconfigurator and snapping CRT monitors to still make my subconsciously twitchy whenever I do a full install. Silly, yes, but I was poor in those days. So "not notable" is high praise indeed.
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This is not about how to create communities and who is doing it wrong. This is about the perception of community and the difference between the perception and reality.
Here's what I know about communities:
- They're hard to get into.
- They're hard to get out of.
What in the what?
On the first rule: this goes for all communities. Move to a new neighborhood. Get into a new software project. Go to a new school. Move to a new city. Join a new company. All of these are "communities" in different ways. It's usually not the case that you show up and you're immediately seen as "a valuable member of the community"—you're an unknown quantity. You have to put energy into this community to be welcomed; to be able to contribute, you have to have spent time there.
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Wednesday was another fine day at Red Hat Summit 2016 in San Francisco at the Moscone Center. After a really fun keynote that included deploying a mobile game that something like 800 attendees played live, it was time for breakout sessions.
One of the things I have discovered while working with mapping platforms like OpenStreetMap is that there really isn't anything like a straight line in the world.