A New Focus

It's not every day you get to re-write your own job description, but that's exactly what I'm doing. It's not a big deal, really, since the OpenSolaris project is growing and changing, and we need all sorts of people doing all sorts of things around the world -- and we don't have nearly enough people or resources to exploit all the opportunities globally, but that's another story (and a good problem to have, too). Anyway, I view this as just a re-balancing of my job based on four factors:
  1. Getting elected to the OpenSolaris Governing Board,
  2. The evolution and changing needs of my team in California,
  3. My own career goals, and
  4. The unique opportunities offered by my geography.

I'll still be doing engineering project management and building OpenSolaris communities globally, of course. But I'm going to narrow my focus so I can get closer to some engineering projects that not only generate contributions but also help lead to revenue for Sun. I'll still be interacting with developers and users, but I want to expand to get involved with other open source and open standards communities and more customers, partners, universities, and governments as well. And although my focus has always been global, I'll probably be spending more time in China and India and other parts of Asia since those markets are growing rapidly and since I live in the neighborhood. I'll also be exploring new opportunities in Eastern and Western Europe this upcoming year.

Here's a rough project and time split I'm implementing:

  • Governance: 40% horizontal focus across the entire OpenSolaris project.
  • Website & Documentation: 30% horizontal focus specific to website content & development projects.
  • Globalization: 20% vertical focus specific to g11n engineering projects globally.
  • Communications: 10% horizontal focus on user groups, conferences, talks, presentations, etc.

There's a fair amount of crossover there, but that's ok since it gives me flexibility to mix and match projects under some main categories that make sense if I absolutely had to quantify them. What changes significantly, however, is the project mix and time split. Governance, website, documentation, and globaliztion are all new and will take up the bulk of my time. And although all of this involves advocacy to one degree or another, I'll now be focusing those communications efforts specifically on the projects I'm driving rather than anything I can get my hands on across the entire community. That's a critical point. That also will be a big change as I specifically let go of stuff in order to take on new stuff. There is no other way to grow, in my opinion, unless you have a solid core competency, and I intend to build from that perspective.

Also, I no longer use the title "community manager" anymore. I grew out of that role long ago as the project expanded, and the title doesn't fit for where I want to go in the future. Plus, maybe it's just me, I no longer feel comfortable with the connotation of the term. You can't "manage" a development community like this. You manage projects that build community and generate contributions, and that process leads to new products that generate revenue. And everyone benefits because you are actually building new markets in the process. Now, I never thought I was managing the community, per say, and everyone who knows me knows that, but that's how many people see the term "community manager" these days. To me, this is a distinction with a very big difference.

And finally, I'm now getting much closer to the globalization engineering organization at Sun with a dotted line report to Mimi Hills, the director of g11n who manages software development operations at many sites around the world. So I'll be adding some OpenSolaris-related g11n engineering projects to the mix of stuff I do for Bonnie Corwin's OpenSolaris engineering team. First up with g11n will be to evolve the language/country portals on opensolaris.org so we can properly implement the localization of content on the site. This is critical as we build the OpenSolaris community around the world. If you build globally, you are actually building across languages and cultures, and that's very different from building within a single language and culture.

So, we'll see how all this goes. It's all based around engineering project management and community development, but hopefully much more focused and much more valuable. For two years now I have been busy creating additional networks to support these moves. I've had an excellent FY08 (still 2 months to go), and I expect FY09 to be even better. Should be fun.

Posted: Apr 16, 2008

Permanent link to this entry

Comments:

How about OpenSolaris Global Motivator?

I know, it sounds too non-self-effacing for your japanization... Something along those lines though.

Keep at it.

Posted by Christopher Mahan on April 17, 2008 at 06:55 AM JST #

Thanks, Christopher. :)

Posted by Jim Grisanzio on April 17, 2008 at 11:01 PM JST #

Hi Jim, Congratulation on your new adventure, and welcome to G11n.
It will be fun to sit in the same meeting with you.
So, what is your new job title ? Oh, before asking this, I should consider
what's mine :-)

Posted by Reiko Saito on April 22, 2008 at 04:09 PM JST #

Post a Comment:
  • HTML Syntax: NOT allowed

This blog copyright 2008 by jimgris