Wednesday August 18, 2004

Wisdom of Crowds and Open Source? I was carpooling to work with a colleague recently and he told me about an interview he'd heard with the author of a book about collective wisdom, decision markets and betting at the races.  It was a thought-provoking discussion, as we navigated across town and explored how decisions resulting from collective wisdom (community wisdom?) might help with the effort to open source Solaris.

We pulled into the parking lot and switched gears, preparing for the work of the day.  But the ideas stayed with me.  A few weeks later, at Powell's, a book jumped out at me:  The Wisdom of Crowds - Why the Many Are Smarter than the Few and How Collective Wisdom Shapes Business, Economies, Societies, and Nations <> by James Surowiecki, who writes "The Financial Page" business column for the New Yorker.

Yep, it was the same book that triggered the carpool chat.  So I bought it - and am thoroughly enjoying it.  In addition to a provocative thesis, it's peppered with captivating examples of collective wisdom, including the Iowa Electronic Markets  (which has had some success predicting election results, moreso than the old standby of opinion polls), the Hollywood Stock Exchange's forecasts of opening weekend box office and the effectiveness of "asking the audience" in Who Wants to Be a Millionaire.  There's even a description of the honeybee waggle dance, and analysis of  whether to go for a field goal or 1st down in a recent Rams/Patriots Superbowl (not exactly my field of expertise.)

To make sure I'm not boring y'all with this book recommendation, I just searched through previous Sun blogs and noticed that  that Tim Bray gave a recommendation for a related article in Wired written by Surowiecki earlier this summer.  Worth a peek.

I'm heading off to the Sierra's for a long weekend at a crystal-clear (and butt cold!) alpine lake.  The book is squirrelled in one of the bags and I hope to enjoy it - and think about how some of the ideas could apply to Solaris and community decision-making...

(2004-08-18 01:19:09.0) Permalink Comments [1]

Sunday August 15, 2004

A Tonic for Change? A close friend just asked me why I'm starting a blog.  I had to pause - and think - before I replied with a threefold answer, lacking in brevity but hopefully achievable nonetheless.  My work at Sun in the Solaris team puts me in a position to help lead change within the company.  Certainly a blog might give me an avenue to influence members of the Solaris community - internal and external (but only if it is read, hah!)  I also have this simmering, naive hope that the blog might connect me to people out in the ether who have ideas and suggestions and criticisms to share - I value input.  And finally, the act of writing helps me to clarify my thinking, but I know myself well enough that I won't write without an audience, or at least an imagined audience.

I'm responsible for engineering teams that have created some of the useful (can I say cool?) features in Solaris 10 such as Zones and the Service Management Facility,  in addition to the Solaris Volume Manager and the Solaris Resource Management features described recently in blog-form by Andrei. 

I'm also directing the engineering effort to open source Solaris and have been spending a lot of my time planning the pilot and launch.  One of the enjoyable aspects of getting Solaris ready to open source is the opportunity to talk to customers who want to know more about the 1-2 punch of Solaris 10 and Open Solaris. A frequent question is: "Why are you opening Solaris, exactly?"

At OSCON up in Portland a few weeks ago (where I finally got to visit the brick and mortar form of Powells Books - wow!), my team and I met with a number of talented folks in the open source world in what I now call the 16th floor sauna (a conference room with way too much heat and minimal air conditioning) to discuss their experiences with open development and suggestions for our Solaris community building effort.

We walked away with a host of great ideas (thanks, guys - more on some of the ideas later) and I also left reflecting on a comment from Doc Searls (made in homage to Saul Bellow and the notion that the soul wants what it wants.)  Doc's advice:  "The soul of Sun wants something.  Tell it.  Be authentic."

I've been thinking about how to incorporate that Cluetrain vision of "authentic voice" into the answers to questions from the community ever since.  My answer to the question of "Why?":  Those of us who work on Solaris are proud of what we've created and love what we do.  We want to open up our development so that new voices and ideas enter the fray and help to make Solaris even better.  And we want to get Solaris into more (and more) people's hands - both to benefit Sun (driving Sun's business matters, of course - as exemplified by dog-sized t-shirts highlighted in Jonathan's recent blog) and also to enable innovation in the broader Solaris community. Innovation raises all boats, after all...

I remember the exact moment in my first CS class at Brown when I decided that a BS in Applied Mathematics just wasn't going to cut it.  Computer Science had to become part of the equation and part of my life. Wouldn't it be cool if tomorrow's students have that same ephiphany - triggered by coursework on Solaris 10, including, say, the "it-slices, it-dices, it-spins, it-whirls" DTrace?

Technorati Tag: OpenSolaris

(2004-08-15 01:36:21.0) Permalink