Jim Grisanzio: Engineering Program Manager, OpenSolaris

I went to the Tokyo2Point0 event last night. There were 250 people there, so it was a packed house for sure. Really nice to catch up with a bunch of people. I haven't been to one of these events in many months. Just been too busy. It was also to good to see Michael Sullivan do a short talk on the OpenSolaris Bible Translation Project, too.

The OpenSolaris Community in Japan will participate at the Spring Tokyo Open Source Conference with three talks from Keiichi Oono, Kenichi Mizoguchi, and Masafumi Ohta on February 27th. See Ohta-san's announcement in Japanese and English.

• New public information screens displaying much more detail about user, collective, and governance relationships (these screens will be accessible via each XWiki Collective in the near future as well).
• The ability to download the data from the public info screens in multiple formats.
• New screens in each private user account displaying summary data from all the user's relationships with start and end dates.
• The addition of eight languages (so Auth is now localized into 25 languages).
• Some miscellaneous bug fixes and probably some stuff I missed.
  

It matters greatly who wins the war because the winners write the history and they rarely -- if ever -- characterize events accurately. That's what makes history fun. It's a puzzle and it's always changing. In this case I'm talking about Caesar, who in 58 A.D. destroyed the Celts in Gaul (France), killed and enslaved millions, took the gold, propagandized the history, and went on to rule Rome as Emperor. Nice guy. That is of you like vicious dudes running psychotic military dictatorships. But whatever. The point is that the Romans won, so their view of things survived throughout the ages. But I'm more interested in what was lost? What did the Romans conveniently leave out of their history?

For that, check out The Primitive Celts, an entertaining and fascinating look at the Celts, who the Romans say were mere barbarians. But were they? Seems some archaeologists are discovering the Celts actually had a highly developed society with the most advanced calender at the time and a sophisticated economy based on a variety of trades. They minded gold all across Europe, and they built a vast network of roads to facilitate international trade. Generally, the contrast to Rome was nearly total. Where the Celts decentralized things into a web and community-like structure, the Romans centralized them into a rigid hierarchy. And that proved a critical and fatal difference -- at least in ancient times. Centralization won. Big time, actually.

But I wonder if that distinction remains true today. What's the better concept around which to build a society in 2010? And, more importantly, who wins the war when these differences collide for whatever reason? Surely the world today is substantially different than when the Romans were wrecking the place two thousand years ago, but would their systems prevail today? You can look at this from the perspective of a county or a company or even a project. It's just the management of resources to achieve a goal. Nothing more. But my question asks which is better and who wins now?

Here is a nice example from Serbia demonstrating the value of building a local OpenSolaris community. It can lead to some very interesting organizations paying very close attention to what you are doing. Congrats, guys! Some of the OpenSolaris User Groups are doing some really interesting work out there, and they are contributing to the overall community in a very big way.

• Japan's techies strive to bridge culture gap (January 2010)
• Tokyo 2.0 a buzzing hub for online communities, entrepreneurs (April 2009)

There's a new element coming to the OpenSolaris Bible translation project. Michael Sullivan, an OpenSolaris developer in Tokyo, has joined the project started a few months ago by Ken Okubo. Michael is building a series of technical presentations based on the book to help validate the translation into Japanese and also help get the book's content out into the community. He'll be talking about the idea at various community events in Tokyo (Tokyo2Point0, Tokyo Linux User Group, OpenSolaris User Group) to get people involved, and then we'll schedule the presentations as part of the Tokyo OpenSolaris Study Group meetings (date TBD). Discussions are also taking place in the community (here, here) about this latest phase of the project.

There were two sessions (beginners/advanced) at the monthly Tokyo OpenSolaris Study Group on Saturday:

A third concurrent session will be opened hopefully starting in February or March. More info soon. Subscribe to ug-jposug and ug-tsug to participate.

More info about the OpenSolaris communtiy in Japan here. More OpenSolaris photos here.

How could I not read an article in USA Today with a headline like this? Psychologists: Propaganda works better than you think.

It's true, of course. I find propaganda is a remarkably effective tool, and it's far more sophisticated in democracies than it is in totalitarian societies (see Chomsky here and here and a million other places, and also see David Barstow's reports on the media and the Pentagon -- video, article, article -- for a well-known and recent example). But what I found most interesting in the USA Today piece was the assertion that accurate information may not counteract propaganda very well and actually could help transmit it. If that's true, would it make sense to be more assertive in communications to drive the agenda and then to ignore critics (or at least the vicious and extreme ones)? I suppose this strategy wouldn't necessarily work in all cases, and there are certainly some very effective techniques to deposition attackers. But just tossing out good information in a attempt to thwart the bad stuff may not be a good use of time. Having the good information well documented so you can rapidly point to it for those interested is required, of course, but it's the never-ending iterative arguing that I think I'm done with. I've been trying this for about a year now, and I find it more effective than my earlier pattern of responding to everything in an attempt to change minds. I gave up. Plus, it's not as exhausting.

Propaganda fascinates me. I keep track at this tag: http://blogs.sun.com/jimgris/tags/propaganda

So many people claim they lead. Maybe they have a big hairy title or powerful position or know someone special, or maybe they just have lots of cash and feel we should all follow along quietly. There`s even a whole industry of "leadership" with books and seminars and all sorts of guys spinning up what it means to lead. I used to think all that was pretty cool (or interesting to study, anyway), but not any longer. Spotting leadership is simple. Look around the room, look for who`s talking and for who`s doing. Follow the ones doing. Chances are those people won`t bark orders to you, but instead they`ll encourage you to work right along with them and you`ll want to. You see, real leaders don`t duck when things get hot. They don`t get hard to find when things get confusing or uncertain. They don`t tell others what to do, either. They just step up and act because things need to get done. Leadership is demonstrated via action, and anyone can lead because anyone can act. Everything else is chit-chat.

Earlier today I was thinking about the original "good luck" email I sent to the OpenSolaris Pilot Community just before we opened the project in June of 2005. Fortunately, the opensolaris-discuss public archive actually goes back 9 months before we launched, so this mail survives in the open and from the other threads you get a glimpse into some of the very earliest conversations taking place when the project was private. Anyway, what strikes me is how different the situation was back then, how utterly conservative we were, and how my thinking has changed as a result of my experiences all along the way. A day after I sent this email, we opened. See my opening blog here, and the result of that opening announcement here. History. Always enlightening.

[osol-discuss] Good Luck and Thank You

Jim Grisanzio Jim.Grisanzio at Sun.COM
Mon Jun 13 17:27:01 PDT 2005

---

Hello, OpenSource Pilot Community.

I just wanted to chime in before the fur really flies around here:

 Good Luck, and Thank You!

You all deserve Sun's thanks for your efforts and your patience this 
year. It should be wild day tomorrow, for sure, so light up those blogs 
and start talking, guys. The engineers are leading this launch tomorrow, 
make no mistake about it.

Oh, and if you want to bring someone into the program, you *don't* have 
to call me and sign another f****** NDA. Just do it. I can't tell you 
how happy I am to not have to dig out another NDA. Not that I could read 
the damn thing but whatever. It's such a cold way to start a friendly 
little conversation, don't you think? Also, I've tried to honor as many 
of your requests (and those from internal people) as possible to get 
people into the program. We ended up with 145, but quite frankly, dozens 
and dozens of developers never made it in due to lack of time or 
resources. We even had a dozen Chinese engineers all briefed, 
translated, and NDA-signed but couldn't get export control approval in 
time. It drove me nuts for three months. I'm more than a bit pissed 
about that one.

Anyway, I hope you are happy with the results of what we are all 
releasing. The core team here has worked almost non-stop for weeks on 
this to get ready for the final push. We wanted to do more, you know 
that, but hey, look at where we were last year and look at the potential 
tomorrow brings. Also, the OpenSolaris team internally really has been 
genuine in their intentions, I can assure you. At times we've not been 
as open as we could have been -- we get that -- but I hope you believe 
me when I say that many people on the team fought hard on your behalf 
all year long. Every time you told us we were full of shit on something 
we took it to heart and it went up line. There were a few, ah, heated, 
conversations regarding some of the issues that were discussed in the 
pilot. We won some and we lost some, but every time we moved a little 
closer to our goal of openness. As you've seen, this stuff takes time. I 
wish we could have exposed more of that process to you. Next time it 
will probably be easier to do that.

As this program has grown it's garnered attention from all across Sun 
and from Sun's competitors and supporters. Just recently, I've heard 
from executives and engineers traveling to South America and to Asia, 
and they report that there *absolutely* is massive community interest 
out there. Even Wall Street has noticed. Some people are probably a bit 
confused since the Solaris community was supposed to be dead by now. 
Well, too bad. It's too late. They lost their window of opportunity to 
crush us. Our next step is to stay positive and to engage the interest 
we know is there, make it tangible, and grow this OpenSolaris community.

In a very real way, you've all been part of something special here. 
You've helped change this company and potentially an entire market along 
the way. Some people may not know this quite yet, but they'll surely 
find out tomorrow. You are some of the most knowledgeable people in the 
world about Solaris, and you've help make OpenSolaris a possibility. 
Congratulations and we'll see you on the other side.

Jim

McNealy's bittersweet memo bids good-bye to Sun: "Scott McNealy, the smack-talking co-founder and long-running leader of Sun Microsystems, has bid adieu to his company in a memo that mixes nostalgia with a rallying cry for employees about to become part of Oracle. The memo, sent Tuesday under the subject line 'Thanks for a great 28 years,' has more genuine emotion than you'll see in a year's worth of official communications from most corporate leaders." -- Stephen Shankland, DeepTech, Cnet News.

I think those of us who have worked with Scott or interacted with him in any way would agree. It's something you feel and you feel it right away.

Spent some time cleaning up the content in the Website Community yesterday. The transition to auth/xwiki is over, so I rewrote a lot of the content we had pointing to the project management docs and moved some content to archive to clean up the nav. I cut the amount of content on the top level page in half. Roadmap & Announcements updated too. Over the last few months, we've accumulated a huge amount of information about the website project and various community processes. Still streamlining. Next needs to address the front page of the site.

"We don't want our babies to die, and we want our children to go to school"

That's what motivates Greg Mortenson to build communities because that's what women tell him in Afghanistan and Pakistan. They don't want their kids to die. So to help out, Greg builds schools -- in a region of the world that has known only war and poverty for generations. Hear Greg tell his story to Bill Moyers on PBS.

There are many more videos and articles about Greg and his foundations and books. Just a wonderful story all around. Even the highest levels of the U.S Military are now reading his book -- Three Cups of Tea -- and they are listening to him in the field because he knows more about the culture on the ground than most Americans involved in the battle over there. He's not fighting terrorism, tough. He's building community. There's a difference. The first action is defensive, based on fear, and short term. The second is offensive, based on inspiration, and long term. One breaks. The other builds. But this no hand out from some rich guy in the West or even a government program. Greg is not rich and he built his organization from pretty much nothing. And people of modest means -- and kids with pennies! -- create and drive these programs. Not the rich. Not the governments. In this case, individuals make the difference and that's why it's so inspiring. And the schools have to be earned, too. Educational leadership and resources are contributed from the outside, of course, but things are distributed and managed locally as well. Land is given for free and so is labor. This way the local community owns what they build.

This guys knows what he's doing, and he figured it out in real time. I just tripped over him today, but he's been doing this for sixteen years. I will study him closely. Everything he does represents a repeatable model for building community anywhere in the world for any purpose. Think you can't do something? Think it's too hard? You must check this out. Very cool.

The first two images are from the bathroom at the Sun building in Yoga looking down on the rooftop tennis court and hot tub next to the Tomei Expressway.

Some images from the OpenSolaris Night Seminar in Tokyo earlier this evening with presentations from Junko Yoshida, Mami Sueki, and Shoji Haraguchi. Video from Shoji Haraguchi here.

Hundreds more images from the OpenSolaris community in Japan right here.

The latest version of auth.opensolaris.org is now in the Community Translation Interface for a localization update, and we are also now starting to localize repo.opensolaris.org as well. Because of many community contributions recently, auth.opensolaris.org already lives in 17 languages. It will be good to get the SCM Console at repo.opensolaris.org localized into a bunch of languages via the same process as we continue updating that application in the coming months. See the announcement from Ales on i18n-discuss for details about contributing to these these two website projects.

The localization of opensolaris.org -- which is currently 15 applications -- will come together over time and in various stages. But I really would like all of it localized into at least two dozen languages by the end of this year. Should be doable. So, if you are interested in participating, I wrote an outline about how we are breaking this into pieces and how you can get involved: Localizing Website Content. I will update the document as the project evolves. See the Internationalization & Localization Community for even more projects and information. Subscribe to i18n-discuss. Thanks.

Shoji Haraguchi just announced the next OpenSolaris Night Seminar in Tokyo. It will be on January 22nd in Jingumae. On tap will be Crossbow and Solaris Containers. Register early. These seminars generally fill up pretty quickly, and there's only room for about 100 people in the room. You know, we really could use some bigger conference rooms to hold these events. Lots of people are interested in OpenSolaris in Tokyo. See you there.

Nice article on the brain biology behind how scientists actually create science. Accept Defeat: The Neuroscience of Screwing Up. Recognizing anomalies, making mistakes, being challenged, and engaging in conversation are all critically important elements that make science work. Context and perspective matter greatly as well. Seems all very human to me. I`m not so much interested in the brain chemistry that influences behavior in science (you can see this in partisan politics as well), but what fascinates me more is the notion that with this awareness you can dig yourself out of the natural traps that catch most people, and that can lead to new opportunities that only a few generally see. From the article:

The "acknowledging the anomalies" bit from Thomas Kuhn is key. It may enable you to jump paradigms or start revolutions, which is very cool, but in the process it also gets you a lot of knives buried deeply in your back. So acknowledge carefully. More than a few people have ended up dead challenging paradigms throughout the ages. Granted, the deaths are at the extreme, but why go through all that if it`s not necessary. Start small. Pick off what you can. Even though most people usually can't change the paradigms in which they live, they can change the small things in their world by recognizing and resolving anomalies that crop up every day. Then, hopefully, over time the small changes add up to big changes. And when you are focusing on this process, you are more apt to spot big paradigm shifts coming along and you can jump when the opportunity is right. So, don`t be afraid to poke around and change your position and screw up from time to time. Failure is important. It helps you succeed.

Some images from Shogatsu 2010 from Kijima and Nagano Japan ...

The OpenSolaris Community will participate at 2010 Japan Developer Summit in Tokyo February 18-19. Subscribe to ug-jposug and ug-tsug for more information.

It's cool to see the localization of the OpenSolaris distribution moving right along with contributions going directly into the development builds. [i18n-discuss] The 2nd translation cycle of OpenSolaris 2010.03.