Sun.com Customer Experience and Stuff: Notes from the Sun.com customer experience team.

Last week I had the fortune of participating in the Open Source @ Sun Summit hosted by Simon Phipps, our illustrious chief open source officer. The people in the room are Sun's unsung heroes, putting in the long hours building community and committing the code to bring us the cool applications we use everyday (GNOME, Glassfish) and probably take for granted. It was a humbling experience.

Here are some of the memes that stuck:

1. Most people don't want to pay for software (and that's perfectly OK).
   The best software is free — a benefit not lost on developing countries, students and educators, and people like you and me. Putting technology into the hands of many leads to economic opportunity for all, since people bring their favorite open source apps into the workplace.
2. Convenience = revenue.
   There is a reason why people flock to the simple, powerful and elegant — they value their time, and will regard companies that satisfy needs with the least pain involved. Unbuntu, anyone?
3. Sun actively participates in many externally hosted communities.
   And, those projects end up in products like the Java Desktop System.
4. Most open source developers work for a corporation.
   Proof that open-source is a viable business model, beside building good will with the community.
5. "Any community is only as good as its people."
   Glynn Foster nailed it. Beyond coding brilliance, soft skills count for a lot, too. The most successful projects always have a person tirelessly emailing, settling differences, and exercising diplomacy with the community.
6. Never control, always influence.
   Everyone likes to be treated fairly. Consensus-building and diplomacy count as much code contributions, and are qualities demonstrated by the most successful project leaders.
7. "If you don't invest in community management, there will be no community."
   Bless you, Simon Phipps. Now I just need to convince a few of our stakeholders of the same.
8. Mojo Rising!
   Do people flock to your company site to download the latest software release, and tell their friends about it? Congratulations, you have karma. So hard to build, yet so easy to lose, it's the quality that companies dream about and lust after.
9. Why Can't We All Get Along?
   Even with most honorable and sincere intentions, agreements and licenses meant to protect the spirit of openness and freedom of open source are twisted by the crafty few, at the expense of all. May the GPL prevail!
10. "Innovation Happens Elsewhere."
    Enough said.

We live and work in an environment that requires collaboration.

There are very few things people can do alone these days, especially as design workers. We need to show things to each other, to stakeholders, to customers. Everyone needs to be involved at some level and at some point.

I have a colleague who was interviewed about her Information Architecture & Usability team at the last Information Architecture Summit. She conducts the interview with one of the members of her team. I like that she is a shining example of collaboration-even in the interview. Livia and Austin talk frankly about how their team is successful working within their company.

The interviewer, Christina Wodtke, sums up their top line items for success:

If you are a member of an internal IA, UX, User Experience, Usabilty, Design Research, User Research, etc. team you should keep these principles in mind:

1) learn the language
2) dress better
3) lose the agenda
4) be a resource

Simple and straightforward advice for success.

Listen to the interview >>>

The latest Techcrunch event, Techcrunch 40, is shining a spotlight on start-up companies that are all about enabling people to work together toward common goals. The power of the network is being leveraged to teach, to track investements, design electronic products and so much more.

Manifestations of wikinomics are popping up everywhere. This is about, "collaboration on an astronomical scale" according to chapter 11 in the Wikinomics playbook.

There is more room for an idea to take root than ever before. Each person can contribute more quickly and easily. Maybe we can all just get along, at least on the network. ;) The benefits are clear, sharing=winning. I knew that Sesame Street cooperation training I had when I was young was going to come in handy.

Many of my years at Sun were spent pounding away at the keyboard in relative isolation, writing technical documentation for what sometimes felt like an invisible audience. Fast forward to 2007 — my, how things have changed!

This video tells the story about how publishing has evolved at Sun. I was inspired by the release of wikis.sun.com, and I hope you enjoy it. Big thanks to our resident video wunderkind Danny Holland for the long hours he spent producing and tweaking the video.

I recently moved to a new group in the .Sun organization, and to help educate my new team, I prepared a diagram showing many popular Sun communities. I ran out of room and didn't include Open Solaris, Java.net, OpenSPARC.net, and few others, so my apologies in advance to those teams.

My team found it helpful, and I hope you do too!