hackfest n. A meeting where developers gather together in person to work on a free software project. Hackfests are one of the ways that things get done on free software projects like GNOME. They get lots of good work done, they energize teams and raise visibility of the project and its mission. The free software […]
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I’m at the Grace Hopper Women in Computing conference this week. I’ve been looking forward to it for months. However in the past couple of weeks I’ve had so many “women in open source software” or “women in free software” conversations – some good and some very draining – that I was half way dreading
Exciting times at Grace Hopper! Read More »
Bounties or grants are often suggested as a way companies can pay for work on free software projects. The GNOME community has had mixed results with bounties and grants, so when Funambol community manager Stefano Maffulli contacted me about a GNOME grant and said they'd had success using grants for Funambol, I thought it'd be
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[The beginnings of a keynote. Feedback and input welcome.] Open source is changing the way work gets done. Yeah, yeah, what's new? We all know that. But really, free and open source software has changed the software industry in the past but it's really changing things now. Especially when you look at industries that are
Open source is (still) changing the way work gets done Read More »
OpenSUSE is holding a community week this week, with a GNOME track. Curious as to what that really means, I asked Vincent Untz and Zonker (Joe Brockmeier) some questions. I really like that open source projects often find really new and effective ways to get things done. There's a openSUSE community week going on right
OpenSUSE Community Week Read More »
Many of you saw J5’s call to support the GNOME Foundation. The initial response has been great! I wanted to follow up with a general call to support open source software projects financially. The GNOME Foundation is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit. By definition it must serve the general public and by definition it must be supported
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I recently started investigating how GNOME could fund projects with grant money. Will Ross sent me an email with a lot of good information and I’d like to share his experience with others in the open source software community. Will Ross is a project manager with Mendocino Informatics, a small healthcare technology consulting firm in
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At OSBC last week I saw a great presentation by Dries Buytaert on how to build community. Dries is the founder of Drupal. The slides for his presentation (20 MB) include "Dries' 7 secrets" which I'll write about here. Dries started out by showing us how the Drupal community really is a community excited about
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Kim Weins is the Senior VP of Marketing at OpenLogic. Kim spent three years as a principal in CMO Strategy Group and helped companies such as Atomz (acquired by WebSideStory), TuVox and RedSeal to significantly accelerate their marketing efforts. Prior to CMO Strategy Group, she was at PeopleSoft where she was responsible for driving PeopleSoft’s
Companies: fostering or controlling communities? An interview with Kim Weins Read More »
Dave Neary gave me his speaking slot at OSiM USA. I have two challenges, make a talk to fit his title and abstract (although you can almost always safely ignore the abstract) and give a good talk in 20 minutes of time. Here are some thoughts I have. (The title of the talk is Increasing
Open source enables companies to collaborate Read More »