Category Archives: open source

Communities within Slideshare

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So my presentation on Community Management as a Core Competency of Open Source recently passed the 7000 views mark. I admit that I find it somewhat incredible that one can create a lecture that gets viewed this many times. But still more interesting is seeing how the content and community around Slidecast has evolved.

Presently my presentation is the 74th most viewed slidecast on Slideshare – it just got run over by “What Teachers Make” which blew by it on its way up the charts (and rightly so, it really is quite good even if it doesn’t have sound). I am also pleased to note thought that my bit recently passed “Paris Hilton Photo Collector” and is moving in on the Beautiful Women of Japan and 50 Funny Cats.

I’ve been visiting slideshare a fair bit since I first posted to it 8 months ago. What has been interesting is that as it has gets more popular it seems that both the slidecasts get better (for example “What Teachers Make”), and that the more interesting slidecasts are polling better (note “What Teachers Make” meteoric rise). Indeed my own presenetation’s relative rise against cats and sexy women is further example of this trend. A year ago it seemed at least a fifth involved scantily clad women – but the days of those slideshows doing well appears to be in relative decline (they are still there, don’t get me wrong). It just appears that once  you are this deep in the long tail, lots of other content is more interesting to people.

All this is to say that yet again Andrew Keen should be roundly ignored, but then the very fact you are here probably means you were already ignoring him…

Someday I hope to give a speech this good

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Just listened again (for possibly the 3rd or 4th time) to Clay Shirky’s speech on software, community and how we can do big things with love.

Confused?

Listen to the talk.

It’s short, there are lots of references to software programs that you probably won’t know – and don’t need to know. Underlying this is one of the greatest explanations why much of what we thought was solid is dying and what we believe is ephemeral is thriving.

It does mean that the ability to aggregate non-financial motivations, to get people together outside of managerial culture and for reasons other than the profit motive has received a huge comparative advantage. It also means that many of the future commercial opportunities are going be inextricably intertwined with that type of work and those types of groups.

so dave, what do you do? (or my life, on a powerpoint slide)

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So more than once people have asked me what I do… and sadly the answer is never easy. All the titles I’ve heard feel a little overwhelming, mostly because I don’t think I’ve done enough to earn any of them: public policy entrepreneur, public thinker, writer… Indeed, I most often use negotiation consultant and public policy analyst – but these fail to capture the threads of ideas that I’m attempting to weave together.

Herein lies the main challenge. Because I have picked up a number of diverse threads, my life sometimes looks scattered. (Admittedly, occasionally it is). But I see the connections between these disparate areas and I draw strength and ideas from the connections between them. Consequently, I need to do better at explain these connections, and why the matter, to others.

In pursuit of this goal I’ve created a map of my (work) life. Outlined are the three main themes I focus on and then, to show how my activities map against them I’ve listed a) some of the issues I tackle, b) the organizations I work with, for or sit on the advisory boards of, and c) some conferences where I give talks. Some stuff may be missing (indeed, if you see something please send me an email or comment below).

Better, I hope this might inspire you to map your own life. If it does please let me know, I’d love to see it and link to it.

At the very minimum, I hope this leaves you understanding me better.
note: you can click on the image to make it bigger

For those who like blogs – RSS Bandit

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For PC owners who like reading blogs I’d like to point you to RSS Bandit. It’s a program I started using a couple of months ago to track and read my favourite blogs.

Obviously those of you with Macs have other software you can use, but as a PC user I’ve found RSS Bandit has been great. One of its best features is that it downloads blog posts to your computer so that you can read them offline. As many of you know I travel a fair bit and I now often get caught up on a number of my blogs while flying. Very handy. Obviously just having all your blogs in one place is itself pretty handy – better still, keeping track of the posts you’ve read and those you haven’t is also helpful.

Oh, and as a bonus, it is both free and open source.

Of course, if any of my intrepid readers have found other blogging software they like please let me know, or better yet, post a comment.

The challenge of mozilla’s magnetism

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Mozilla is unique. The project gets more media, more publicity and more buzz than virtually any other open source project. It is, in much of the public’s mind, the poster child for open source and the open internet. More critically, this isn’t some interesting observation, why this is the case, and what it means, is profound implications for the success of Mozilla, the open web and the future of the internet.

I would argue that Mozilla’s uniqueness is not a result of being the most successful open source project. (I’m sure there is much heated debate over which is the most successful, largest, most complex, most important, etc… open source community/project). The fact is, it’s irrelevant.

moz-head-bigMozilla matters because Firefox is a consumer product. And not just any consumer product, it is THE consumer product that allows people to interact with the world wide web, the most consumer oriented part of the internet. Thus, while Apache, Linux, Sendmail and the million of other open source projects matter (a great deal!) the simple fact is, Mozilla is the brand that represents both the potential of open source and the importance of an open internet. This matters because it means a) Firefox and Mozilla are the catalysts in creating social awareness among millions of consumers about the importance of the open internet and b) as a result, Mozilla will likely be the first port of call of these newly awakened activists who wish to find ways to contribute.

This, of course, is both a blessing and a curse.

One the one hand it often seems that everyone, and I mean EVERYONE, has an opinion about Mozilla (and boy am I guilty of this). I’m not inside Mozilla but I can imagine the constant barrage of “helpful” ideas or suggestions or worse, outright complaints or threats, must feel exhausting. The banging on the gates never ends and engaging in it could distract the community from its important work.

On the other hand… how great that an increasing number of people have this energy and passion for Mozilla and, by extension, the open internet. Many of those banging at the gate – and a good many more who are simply too intimidated or too unsure to even do that – are primed and ready to be among the next million mozillians. The banging (or loitering) is a symptom of a desire to contribute – indeed it may be the only outlet they know of or have.

The real question is – how do we engage these people?

Should Mozilla do more to shape and lead the social movement around the open web? As David Ascher also notes, the opportunity of broadening Mozilla’s tent by absorbing these newly minted activists into streams of activities and helping channel their energy and enthusiasm is an exciting prospect. But I’m not sure the answer is a definite yes. As Mitchell Baker – in part – points out, the risk of diluting Mozilla’s mission or its culture is a serious one.

However, the social movement around the open web is going to keep attracting supporters. Again, because Mozilla is one of the leading catalyst in creating this social awareness these supporters are going to show up at it’s doorstep first. Regardless of the choice (absorb or not absorb) to successfully support the movement I’d argue that at the very minimum Mozilla needs a plan to a) greet these newcomers and make them feel welcome; and b) some capacity to point them in the direction of a variety of institutions, organizations, projects and activities, where they can channel their energy. The more people the movement can engage – or to reframe – the more communities of action with can create within our broader community of interest, the more likely we will be successful in acheiving an open internet.

Collaboration – a dirty word rescued by connectivity

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Col·lab·o·ra·tion
n.

1. The act of working together; united labor.

2. the act of willingly cooperating with an enemy, especially an enemy nation occupying one’s own country.

During a conversation over breakfast yesterday I was asked to talk about my experience in open source public policy (through Canada25) which led me to talk about the differences between cooperation and collaboration I’ve ruminated upon before here.

After outlining the idea my friend stopped me and said

“You know, it is interesting, for people in my generation (re: boomers) collaboration was a dirty word.”

He went to explain that he’d talked with young people in his organization and had discovered that they had largely abandoned the word’s negative connotations, but he was again struck by how easily I embraced and used the term. For boomers – he explained – “collaboration” brings forward notions of Vichy France or narcs, people who sold out or who betrayed their origins in some way, often for gain or even to work (usually on behalf of) of a new (usually alien and/or evil) outsider.

What a difference a generation makes. Today I see more and more of my friends using the term. Which begs the question…

Why?

One hypothesis I have relates to the changing nature of our economy and how we work.

I don’t know if people have to work in teams more frequently then they use to, but i feel fairly confident that even if the frequency of teamwork has remained consistent, the emergent, or self-organizing, or even self-directed nature of those teams has probably increased. Thanks to the telecommunication revolution, and even just the rise of the knowledge economy, we are increasingly being asked to work together as we exchange, mix, re-mix and mash up ideas.

As a result, I think ours is a generation that is grasping for more nuanced and complex ways to describe working with others. No where is this more important than in the online world where the opportunities for both communicating, and miscommunicating, have never been easier. And within the online world nowhere is this more important than in the open source space where whole new models of how people can work together on large complex problems are emerging. With so much going on, is it any surprise our vocabulary is adjusting?

I say great. We need a more sophisticated and nuanced vocabulary to describe how we work together. The fact is people can work together in lots of different ways, conflating that variation with a single term is likely to make success harder to repeat.

Now… the revival of the word evangilism among non-religious coders is also interesting. I’ve done research as to where that came from and would be curious how it started getting used. The resistance to that word – especially given the culture wars in the US – is likely to be much greater. Outside the technology geek world that word still triggers LOTS of people.

Oh, to live in a country with an open government

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So the British Government doesn’t just release masses of data so the people can mash it up – they are now offering a prize to the best mash-up. Sadly, our (Canadian) government couldn’t be more secretive with it’s data.

Government EntropySure there are some low hanging fruit that I (with the help of my trusted colleague Jeremy V) was able to get and use to create this mash up of the location of government offices. Sadly, their ain’t much (that is publicly available!) to mash it up against…

Ah, the things the public would do with the data it is supposed to own and have access to, if only its government would let it…

Sometimes it’s hard not to feel like we’re uninspired, secretative and falling further, and further, behind.

The Open Source Public Service

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Consider these to quotes side by side:

First,

“Human beings generally take pleasure in a task when it falls in a sort of optimal-challenge zone; not so easy as to be boring, not too hard to achieve. A happy programmer is one who is neither underutilized nor weighed down with ill-formulated goals and stressful process friction. Enjoyment predicts efficiency.

Relating to your own work process with fear and loathing (even in the displacing, ironic way suggested by hanging up Dilbert cartoons) should therefore be regarded in itself as a sign that the process has failed. Joy, humor, and playfulness are indeed assets…”

– Eric Raymond, The Cathedral & The Bazaar

(BTW: Who would have thought that the entire line of Dilbert cartoons – their humorous reflections on how organizations (dis)function – could be made depressingly painful in one brief phrase.)

Second,

“Disability claims and stress leaves are soaring. For many public service managers, the work-life balance is so unhealthy that one major federal department has tried to implement a BlackBerry ban between 7 p.m. and 7 a.m., so that people can reclaim some of their personal time. Management scholars are using the public service as a laboratory to study workplace dysfunction…

…The discussion about public service renewal is ongoing, but one valuable contribution arrived this week. In a report released Wednesday, the Public Policy Forum, an Ottawa-based think tank, succinctly identifies some of the key problems facing the public service. Few of these observations are likely to surprise Ottawa insiders, but it’s useful all the same to see them legitimized by respected researchers.

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The report confirms, for example, public servants feel so tangled up in procedure and regulations they are unable to get meaningful work done… Yes, public servants need to be accountable, especially in the post-Gomery universe, but if the “web of rules” is completely extinguishing every spark of innovation and producing the most risk-averse organization in the country, then there’s a problem.”

– The Ottawa Citizen Editorial Board

The narrative of the public service as a byzantine, rule bound place has become so accepted it is now unquestioned gosple. The truth is always more complicated. I know of, and occasionally hear from, people who work in places where (usually small) teams of public servants work in flat collaborative groups that are able to achieve great things. But the narrative exists for a reason – as the above Ottawa Citizen piece attests. This is why where you work in the public service (and often who you work for) is far more important than what file you work on.

So how much work in the public service falls within the optimal-challenge zone described by Raymond? More importantly, how many public servants would continue to do their job if they weren’t paid? 10%? 35%? 50%?

My suspicion is that the open source community for public policy is actually quite large. It includes those in the public service – who are tied up and tied down in their silos, but also extends much further. The problem is that it is tied down by process and an industrial model to “churning out” policy that doesn’t work well with today’s knowledge workers.

Canada25 showed that hundreds and indeed thousands of young people wanted to think about, engage in, and write about public policy in their spare time. All we did was allow them to focus on whatever they wanted and create as frictionless a process as possible. The result? Four well received policy papers in 6 years on top of numerous smaller projects, debates, discussion groups and countless other outcomes I don’t even know about.

The main point is that “open” can work in policy development. So maybe it is time to set the public service free? To allow policy analysts to self-organize and focus their attention to where they believe they can best contribute, rather than having hundreds if not thousands of them babysitting files that simple don’t move?

Why not treat policy challenges like open source software programs. Create a policyforge (modeled after sourceforge) where the policy can reside and where the module policy owner, can foster a community and accept its ideas, opinions and edits.

Will it work? I can’t guarantee it. But we’d better start experimenting because the one thing we do know. The current system is beginning to crack.

Open Edits to the Mozilla Manifesto & Hello Planet Mozilla

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Quite excited that I’ve been added to the ranks of Planet Mozilla – a great resource for those who want to be kept up to date on the going ons of the Mozilla project. Thank you Robert…

Since I’ve already been writing about Open Source and Mozilla there are a few posts that Mozilla Planet readers might find interesting. I thought I’d link to a few of them to give people a sense of my background and because some of them might be of interest.

First and most important is a redrafting of the Mozilla Manifesto – I’d be interested in people’s thoughts and feedback. This edit was unsolicited, I know Zak has been working on the manifesto and I thought there might be an appetite for a larger conversation.

Some others posts of interest include:

Okay, so that is quite enough… I’m looking forward to posting more.

Remixing the Mozilla Manifesto

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mozillaA growing number of us are carrying on an open conversation about the Mozilla Foundation, it’s future, and it’s role in supporting the open-web (or perhaps, more accurately, an open internet). To push the conversation forward in a concrete manner, I thought I’d share a few thoughts on the Mozilla Manifesto.

Firstly and most importantly, the manifesto states its first goal is to “articulate a vision for the Internet that Mozilla participants want the Mozilla Foundation to pursue.” I agree with this goal – so let’s let the community do just that. Open up the document and invite the whole community to offer their suggestions. Move the manifesto to a wiki where it can be edited directly, or at least offer an email address or comment box where community members can make suggestions.

My experience working on open-source public policy through Canada25 (described in the first five minutes of this presentation) tells me that, if we manage the process effectively, we will get a much improved document. Indeed, Canada25 has taught me that Linus’s Law of “given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow” can be extended to “given enough eyeballs, all content can be deepened.”

This leads me to the second point. What is the purpose of the document? On the one hand it feels like a true manifesto in that it articulates the goal for a social movement around the open-web:

These principles will not come to life on their own. People are needed to make the Internet open and participatory – people acting as individuals, working together in groups, and leading others.

At other times it seems to be a description of, or a mission statement for, the Mozilla Foundation and Corporation.

The Mozilla project uses a community-based approach to create world-class open source software and to develop new types of collaborative activities. We create communities of people involved in making the Internet experience better for all of us.

I’m not sure of the author’s intent (I should ask!) but I suspect the goal was to describe the glue that holds together or motivates the Mozilla community. My fear is that the current language creates a barrier between those inside the community’s formal institutions (the foundation and corporation) and those on the outside (that vast majority of people). I think we should weaken those walls.

More importantly, we should invite others to play with our document.

Then let’s put the juicy and exciting bits up front (a manifesto is supposed to inspire!) and then explain who we are and how we intend to serve those principles later.

THEN… let’s ask others to remix the manifesto, to delete out the parts about Mozilla and to add in, who they (or their organization) are, and how they will advance the Mozilla Manifesto. Let’s invite everyone hop on board and play with us. Remember, this is a social movement – so let’s get people excited and participating!

In order to show you what I mean I’ve drafted up a revised version that incorporates these ideas below. For those who haven’t seen it you can find the original version of the Manifesto here. (NB: everything in brackets is commentary to give my edits context)!

I’ll admit, I think this needs more pizazz, and could still be much improved, but here are my thoughts and contributions.  I’m sure there are still better ideas about how to articulate, and bring to life, this manifesto. Indeed, let’s hear ’em. If you have comments, or edits, please post below, ping-back in your own posts or email them to me. I’ll try to work them in and improve this alternative draft.

—

The Mozilla Manifesto, v0.9b (deaves edits)

Principles

(I say, let’s put the juice bits right up front)

The Internet is an important part of our lives. it is increasingly the social medium that connects us to one another and is an integral part of modern life. It is a key component in education, communication, collaboration, business, entertainment and society as a whole. To ensure that this remains possible in a manner that allows every individual to participate and benefit the Mozilla Community believes:

  1. The Internet is a global public resource that – through interoperability, innovation and decentralized participation – must remain open and accessible.
  2. Individuals’ security on the Internet is fundamental and cannot be treated as optional.
  3. Individuals must be allowed to shape their own experiences on the Internet.
  4. Free and open source software promotes the development of the Internet as a public resource.
  5. Transparent community-based processes promote participation, accountability, and trust.

Advancing the Mozilla Manifesto

Invitation

(Let’s tell people how the can participate as soon as possible)

The Mozilla Foundation invites all others who support the principles of the Mozilla Manifesto to join with us, and to find new ways to make this vision of the Internet a reality. Start by telling the world how you intend to advance the Mozilla Manifesto. Re-mix this document and publish your own pledge describing how you, or your organization, will advance these principles.

Here’s how we are…

The Mozilla Foundation Pledge

The Mozilla Foundation pledges to support the Mozilla Manifesto in its activities. Specifically, we will:

  • build and enable open-source technologies and communities that support the Manifesto’s principles;
  • use the Mozilla assets (intellectual property such as copyrights and trademarks, infrastructure, funds, and reputation) to keep the Internet an open platform;
  • promote models for creating economic value for the public benefit; and
  • promote the Mozilla Manifesto principles in public discourse andwithin the Internet industry.

Some Foundation activities–currently the creation, delivery and promotion of consumer products–are conducted primarily through the Mozilla Foundation’s wholly owned subsidiary, the Mozilla Corporation.

About the Mozilla Community and This Manifesto

(This was really more about who the community is rather than an introduction to the manifesto – so I’ve moved it to the end)

The Mozilla project is a global community of people who work to ensure that openness, innovation, and opportunity remain core values and attributes of the Internet.

The Mozilla project uses a community-based approach to create world-class open source software and to develop new types of collaborative activities. We are a community of people taking action and collaborating to make the Internet experience better for all of us.

We’ve penned the above Manifesto in an effort to:

  1. articulate a vision for the Internet that Mozilla community wants the Mozilla Foundation to pursue;
  2. find ways to broaden our community by speaking to people with and without a technical background;
  3. make Mozilla contributors proud of what we’ve done and motivate us to continue; and
  4. provide a framework for other people to advance this vision of the Internet.

These principles will not come to life on their own. People are needed to make the Internet open and participatory – people acting as individuals, working together in groups, and leading others. The
Mozilla Foundation is committed to advancing the principles set out in the Mozilla Manifesto. We invite others to join us and make the Internet an ever better place for everyone.