Our digital infrastructure is all open source. It’s built and maintained by a relatively small community of open source software developers. Right now the open source software work is funded by a variety of methods: volunteer time, nonprofit corporations and donations of time and money by a few corporations. Is that sustainable? Or should we […]
Our World Depends on Unseen Labor: Open Source Software Read More »
Developer relations is the combination of activities, programs and tactics to get developers using or developing for your organization’s product or ecosystem. The goal of a good developer relations team is often to make your organization’s product or ecosystem the first choice for developers. (You may be doing this just to sell more of your
What’s in a good developer relations plan? Read More »
I was writing a post about why you must work in the open to get more volunteers and I ended up writing this post about why I don’t work in the open. The Good So I think there are some very valid reasons for not working in the open: Personal. Not all projects are open
The Good, the Bad and the Ugly of why I don’t always work in the open Read More »
Traditionally, open source software has relied primarily on asynchronous communication. While there are probably quite a few synchronous conversations on irc, most project discussions and decisions will happen on asynchronous channels like mailing lists, bug tracking tools and blogs. I think there’s another reason for this. Synchronous communication is difficult for an open source project. For
The Starfish and the Spider compares two types of organizational structures. Spider organizations have a central command structure, like a CEO. If you detach one of the spider’s legs from the head, the leg can no longer function. It is not autonomous. Starfish organizations have very distributed command structures. Cut off a leg and it
Book Review: The Starfish and the Spider & Open source software organizations and money Read More »
High context cultures value personal relationships over process. You have to know someone before you can trust them and work with them. They also tend to be less explicit and rely more on tone of voice, gestures and even status to communicate. Typically Asian countries are more high context than Western countries. Think Korea and
Does open source exclude high context cultures? Read More »
Can forking a free software project enable you to regain your internal motivation to work on a project? My current theory is that if you work on free software, then you get paid to work on it and then you get laid off, that you would work on a different project. Because the first one
Forking an open source project: regaining internal motivation Read More »
“How do I raise enough money to be able to spend all my time working on my favorite free software project?” is a question I hear often. I have a few ideas and I’m very interested in hearing others as I think the world would be a better place if we all could afford to
How do I raise enough money to work on my project full time? Read More »
Planning a hackfest is not an easy process. You need an: organizer – someone willing to put some time into making the whole thing happen topic – what are you going to be hacking on, what do you hope to accomplish attendees – this is usually a particular group of people that work on a
Putting all the Hackfest pieces together Read More »
Recently I met someone who insisted on describing every department in his organization, all the acronyms and what they stood for. By the time he got around to describing how this whole thing related to me, he had lost my interest. (And I tried hard to hang in there!) He had given me too many
Words are important – just not always the way you think Read More »