Category: Business

OSCON and OSBC are two big open source software events. I like both of them but I find them to be very different conferences. During OSCON, I had a conversation with Larry Augustine where we tried to define the difference between OSCON and OSBC. We debated whether it was different companies or people that made the difference but I didn’t feel like we figured it out.

I had this thought today:

True or false? People go to OSBC to meet with companies represented by people. People go to OSCON to meet with individuals who sometimes happen to work at companies.

You could obviously ennumerate a lot of specific differences between the conferences (panels vs lightening talks, sponsor keynotes, booth prices, type of speaker, etc) but I think it’s more than conference organization that gives them different flavors.

We need a trade-a-ride program for people needing a ride like Paperbackswap does for books. To be honest, I wasn’t thinking of commuters when I thought of this. I was listening to a Science Friday program on brewing beer while sitting in traffic and thought, we don’t have good public transportation so people often don’t drink responsibility – what if people took turns being the designated driver. And not going to the party and drinking coke but just showing up at the end of the evening to give a ride home. If you made a good social networking application with good tools, people could send a text message when they needed a ride and people that said they were available would get a text message. A potential driver could then accept the ride, key in when they would be there and go give someone a ride. You’d get points for miles. Then you could use your miles to request a ride from someone else. (On a different night of course.) It’d be useful for nights on the town, rides to the airport, times when your car is in the shop … and maybe just plain old carpooling.

There’d be some security problems. You might want to make everyone show up somewhere and show their driver’s license so you could verify who they were if there were any issues. And you’d want to only give addresses to people actually giving rides. Maybe you could start with a known "safe" pool of people like a university where you know everyone’s identity.

Usually I hear people justifying why they should work from home. Seth Godin argues that companies should justify why you should work in the office:

If you’re a knowledge worker, your boss shouldn’t make you come to
the (expensive) office every day unless there’s something there that
makes it worth your trip. She needs to provide you with resources or
interactions or energy you can’t find at home or at Starbucks. And if
she does invite you in, don’t bother showing up if you’re just going to
sit quietly.

I’ve worked in three companies that had lots of people and lots of
cubes, and I spent the entire day walking around. I figured that was my
job. The days where I sat down and did what looked like work were my
least effective days. It’s hard for me to see why you’d bother having
someone come all the way to an office just to sit in a cube and type.

While there are some people that just need work to provide a quiet place to work as they can’t do that from home, I’m more in the "what’s in it for me?" – usually it’s the in person interactions, more effective meetings, etc that draw me in.

What about you? Why do you go into the office?

Brand tags shows you a company logo and asks you "what’s the first word or phrase that comes to mind?" Then you get to see what other people said. I saw Pepsi and said "not coke" – turns out "coke" was the most common response. I hope the Pepsi brand people see that! For Pizza Hut, I said greasy – it  was the second most common response. (Pizza was first.)

It was kind of fun if you have some time to kill: brand tags. I wanted to put in our company name but I’m guessing not enough people have heard of it yet for it to be meaningful.

Can you guess what the brand at the left was?

(Pabst Blue Ribbon.)

This is a picture of me negotiating a contract with a Global 2000 company and several attorneys over a pay phone.

Friday I had it all figured out. I had a five minute meeting in our home town at 8:00, then I’d drop the baby off at day care (20 minute drive), and then do my conference call in the car on my way to the 7 year old’s school (another 20 minute drive) where I was helping out with the jogathon. The problem? I left my cell phone at home!

If you are ever looking for pay phones, try looking for liquor stores and convenience stores. And hope you are calling a 1-800 number because they cost 25 cents a minute!

A number of people have asked about my "Would you do it again for free?" presentation. It's a talk about why open source developers started working on open source software and how money and companies have changed that. 

One of the things about the open source community that continues to
baffle those non-open source people is, "why do you do it?" Open
source developers work on open source software for a number of reasons
from scratching an itch to gaining a reputation to building a resume to
contributing to a good cause.  The interesting problem comes when money
enters into the equation. Research shows that when someone works on something for free (for
internal rewards) if you start paying them you replace those internal
rewards. Then if you stop paying them, they will stop working on it.
Does that hold true for open source software?  Are commercial companies
killing open source by paying people to work on it?

You can find the talk in ogg format. (Note the file is about 100MB!) You can also get the audio and the slides. If you know how to convert from ogg to something I can embed in a blog post, please let me know!

I gave this talk again at SCALE and there I added more of "here's why developers work on open source software and here's what they can do to help companies work with them effectively."

Let people talk about you. It’s free advertising.

I saw some cool art in the French Quarter yesterday. I would have posted a picture so that you could see it and maybe decide to buy it. But the artist wouldn’t let me take a picture of her art.

Did she think I could copy it? Did she think I could get a good enough picture to frame the picture instead of buying the painting?

I’ve been known to ban all laptops and cell phones in meetings. I understand that sometimes people use them to take notes or look things up – but most often I find people use them to concentrate on something else other than the meeting. This is bad because:

• If you are sitting there obviously not participating, it makes the other people in the meeting feel like you don’t care.
• If someone actually has a question for you, the meeting has to stop while someone catches you up. Then the meeting takes much longer.
• Since you were at the meeting, everyone thinks you agreed to what was discussed but not only do you not necessarily agree, you might not even know what’s going on.
• You were invited to the meeting because the organizer thought you had something to contribute to the discussion and you are not giving 100% thought to the meeting.

Meetings without electronics are much more productive, more fun and shorter! So I was happy to see this article today, Companies go ‘topless’ at meetings.

Many companies are banning
electronics during meetings after getting increasing complaints of
sidetracked workers slowing down productivity, the Los Angeles Times
reported Monday.

"Laptops, Blackberries, Sidekicks, iPhones and
the like keep people from being fully present. Aside from just being
rude, partial attention generally leads to partial results," said Todd
Wilkens of Adaptive Path, a San Francisco design firm

I have my doubts about how wide spread it is, but I wholly endorse it.

I should point out that I’m one of the worst – if I have my laptop at a meeting there’s a very good chance I’ll end up not listening to at least part of the meeting while I answer an email or check some fact online. You simply cannot read and listen at the same time.

So here’s to no laptops and no cell phones at meetings!