The Doc Exchange: alan mcclellan's blog

Picked this up from a Glynn Foster tweet; an interesting article about converting commercial products to free and open software: Making Corporate FOSS Successful.

Excellent perspective and some interesting numbers, too: e.g., 

"Some percent of users will be, just that, users (~90 percent), the other roughly ten precent will participant in your community in some way, maybe by asking or answering a question in your forums. The next one is the one that will blow your mind, of the ten percent of participants, only three percent of those will become contributors that fix bugs or add functionality."

"What that means is for every 1,000 users of your software you'll have three contributors."

Not sure where these numbers came from, but feels about right to me. Gives credence to the urge to promote downloads on the front end of the ecosystem and build broad user base.

I just joined a very promising organization focused on open source documentation: http://writingopensource.com/. Looking forward to the exchange of ideas with this group and to take a look at their projects.

As you may have seen on docs-discuss, they are following up their conference last month with a BOF session at OSCON. For more details, see: http://en.oreilly.com/oscon2009/public/schedule/detail/10217

Registration is free:
http://en.oreilly.com/oscon2009/public/content/free

Well, I've just wrapped up my first quarter as the OpenSolaris documentation community manager (modulo a pre-arranged trip to Europe :-). I have several impressions to share:

• Boy, Michelle Olson set the bar high! Darn you, Michelle!
• The OpenSolaris summit - I started work on a Saturday, attending the OpenSolaris summit in Santa Cruz. What a whirlwind that was, but I got my first exposure to some of the passionate and committed folks in the community and found some extremely strong advocates of the docs community. Very cool.
• Followed up the summit with CommunityOne and JavaOne. 2008.05 announced with great fanfare and excitement. Also very cool.
• Neil Young at JavaOne. Pretty darn cool.
  
• Returned to Colorado and started finding my way through  various meetings, organizations, discussion lists, tools,  licensing models, terminology (from encumbered man pages to OpenSolaris extrusions), package manager, consolidations, repositories, and more.
• Had a great meeting hosted by Ben Rockwood to kind of ground the community in who's doing what in OpenSolaris docs. 

I appreciate everybody's patience and support and I'm really looking forward to the next few months. Feel free to contact me directly or via docs-discuss with any inputs on what I'm doing well or not so well.