Jim
Grisanzio
Sr. Program Manager, OpenSolaris
Engineering and Globalization Engineering
Member, OpenSolaris Governing Board
Sun
Microsystems, Inc., Tokyo, Japan
Images from Nanjing University
in China, 2007
I've been at Sun since 2000 in a variety of project management
positions. I've worked on several corporate communications teams for
the Java organization, and I've also worked with the tools and
standards groups and many of Sun's Open Source development projects. I
also did a year as an executive speech writer for a couple of Sun's
executive vice presidents. Overall, I've logged nine years in
communications at five companies (Sun, 3Com, Network World, Tufts
University, Animals Magazine) in three different industries (high tech,
publishing, medical sciences).
In early 2004, I moved from corporate communications to Solaris
engineering
to participate in the creation of the OpenSolaris project. Since the
beginning of OpenSolaris, I've managed projects to help build community
throughout Sun and on opensolaris.org and also at conferences, user
group meetings, and universities internationally. I'm most interested
in how engineers work across cultural and language barriers globally
and how large organizations participate in Open Source development. I
report to the Solaris kernel engineering organization, I have a dotted
line connection to the globalization engineering
team, and I serve on the OpenSolaris Governing Board. More on my current projects here.
My perspective on OpenSolaris comes directly from my history as a
project manager. I view the project in its entirely — engineering,
communications, logistics, marketing, infrastructure, strategy,
governance, finances, licensing, politics, language, culture,
globalization, and community. At its core, OpenSolaris is a global
engineering project to build a community of developers, administrators,
and users around a large base of source code, binaries, and tools. And all the dynamics involved in building such a community also lead to the formation of new products, new markets, and new opportunities. For my part, I'm trying to move in the direction of building community by managing engineering projects that draw contributions, deliver into the core product or support the overall project, and generate revenue.
In general, I'm fascinated with how projects operate and generate
possibilities for everyone involved. Open Source projects are unique in
this respect. They offer significant opportunity for individuals to
excel and benefit personally in ways that simultaneously benefit the
greater community. This is an entrepreneur's dream. I used to run my
own excavation business in New York, so I see software engineering as a
similar experience to construction in some critical ways. I have also
written and edited magazine articles, so I see creativity
and communications and documentation as a big part of software
development as well. All my life all I've done is project management.
Still doing it now.
Contact Information
Email: Sun and Gmail
Blog: http://blogs.sun.com/jimgris/
Links: http://del.icio.us/jimgris
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