OpenSolaris.org Content: A Writer's Weblog

Santa Clara California, USA
October 15-16, 2007
~150 Attendees

I attended the SMI Open Source Summit in Santa Clara last month, following are my notes.

I was a speaker at the event, so I got to sit up front at the speaker tables, but it was like a Lutheran congregation, with everyone filling up the back pews, and only a few folks daring enough to sit front and center. I saw Flip up there though, so I joined him. Flip and Emily and the rest of Simon's Open Source Group did a great job scheduling the event, keeping presentations timely, and explaining the activities. Kudos to the team for pulling it all off in such short time. Everyone's a critic, of course, so here are my wish list items for next time: more advance notice, fewer executive presentations, and more women on the panels.

Keynote

Simon Phipps kicked off the event by introducing Johnathan Schwartz. Johnathan got some familiar and tough internal questions right off the top, that he answered in a familiar and tough manner. I wrote down that, as CEO, Johnathan's main responsibilities are threefold:

• pick good people
  
• allocate budgets to them
  
• tell people his vision
  

Plus that blogging thing he does in his spare time. Note to self, this gets one out of answering a lot of specific questions swiftly. I think that, for this audience, more answers would have been better. Johnathan does know leadership and to him, leadership = courage. The courage to innovate, question, collaborate, develop leaders, and act first.

10 Ways to Kill Your Community: Josh Berkus

Josh's talk was the best presentation of the event, in my opinion. His presentation style is expert and the content was referred throughout the following two days of talks because it was so damn good. Here are the nine ways that I wrote down:

• Be Silent
  
• Document Nothing
  
• Stop outside commits
  
• Obfuscate Governance
  
• Hold closed meetings
  
• Legalese
  
• Encourage Poisonous People
  
• Make Tools Difficult
  
• Change Licenses
  

I guess I was laughing too hard to note down that tenth way to kill your community. In many ways we've all done all of these things and it was nice to have a good laugh about it and be reminded how deadly these are for communities trying to build software together.

Josh was followed by two expert panels on joining, forming, and working in communities. For good reason, we work in teams and organizations inside Sun and there is strict hierarchy everywhere, so community work is very different and very new and the experts did a good job of describing how to walk the lines of the corporate life of assignments and community life of contributions. We must always do both corporate and community and finding a balance while getting both into agreement is the core competency of the group who attended this summit. I was proud to be one of them.

Lightening Talks

I proposed a lightening talk on OpenSolaris documentation that was accepted, so I presented one slide entitled Credibility and Communication. I introduced my talk with the most important function of documentation: providing new information types.

If you do nothing else, develop new information types to address the biggest software problems you face. In OpenSolaris, the first big problem is learning, so we created a mini-curriculum. It is a small 5X7 hard-copy guide to OpenSolaris communities, user groups, core features, userland, processes, scheduling and debugging, with ~20 labs on ZFS, Zones, Networking, and DTrace in seven languages. It also has a companion instructor guide for professors. The second big problem was installation. So, we created a starter kit to provide LiveCDs, training, documentation, videos, step-by-step instructions, and resources for installing OpenSolaris and we translated it into seven languages. These two new information types (mini-book & starter kit) touched 100,000 Solaris newbies this year in a fresh, informal manner that we hope will bring them back to our technology and build out our community.

The rest of my five-minute lightening talk was bread & butter:

• Change acceptance process (CAP) - Internal writers need processes, exercises, meetings, and web pages to help them learn how to work in the open, how to transition to using new tools and foremost, how to understand licensing of their content and how their job changes.
  
• Outreach - You must reach out to other groups and projects to offer them documentation services, advise, support, and to answer questions and comments on mailing lists. This includes attending user groups and conferences and introducing yourself to developers, sysadmins, and enthusiasts in order to understand their use cases, problems, and needs.
  
• Contribution - You must contribute your documentation source files to the commons so that developers can use your stuff and make cool new stuff with it, translate it, re-spin it, and redistribute it to anyone anywhere who wants to know about your technology.
  
• Recognition - You must recognize and praise and cheerlead contributors and their contributions and welcome them and their valuable skills to your projects.

  Press Panel

  
  Simon followed with a panel of the press, Tony Wasserman of Carnegie Mellon, Ashley Vance of The Register, Fabian of OpenJDK governing board and Brazilian Java Enthusiast, and Dalibor Topich of OpenJDK governing board.

  What is going well: Relationships, developer conferences, open processes and descriptions of processes.

  What do we need to fix: Make processes more transparent and figure out decision-making.

  What do we need to overcome: Sun and other HW company histories

  How are we doing with users: Don't oversell and improve services

  In general, the press panel was very positive on our open source efforts, finding very little fault with the efforts behind OpenSolaris and OpenJDK and declaring that we've completely turned around perceptions of Sun software in two years time.

  Ian Murdock

  
  Ian followed with a short talk about OpenSolaris, and he specifically talked about the support model for OpenSolaris. Some in the room questioned how this support model will be in place by March, and he assured that it would be ready. Ian also talked about articulating the relationship between OpenSolaris and Solaris. DAY 1 closed with a fish bowl exercise, which is a free form discussion between anyone in the designated chairs (fish bowl).