Background, Current Projects, Contact Information

Nanjing University, China

I've been at Sun since 2000 in a variety of project management positions. I worked on several corporate communications teams for the Java organization, and I worked with the tools and standards groups and many of Sun's open source development projects. During those early four years at Sun, I worked with some of the company's most senior and well respected distinguished engineers, fellows, and executive vice presidents. I manged their public engagements at corporate events and industry conferences, wrote some of their speeches, advised them about competitive issues and product announcements, and ran their press and analyst engagement programs. Overall, I logged nine years in communications at five companies (Sun, 3Com, Network World, Tufts University, Animals Magazine) in four different industries (high tech, biotech, publishing, medical sciences), and during that time I supported hundreds of technical spokespeople while engaging hundreds of journalists at top media organizations around the world. I used that communications experience, along with a background in writing magazine articles, to transition into an engineering project management role at Sun.

In 2004, I moved from Sun's corporate communications team to Solaris engineering where I participated in the creation of the OpenSolaris project. Although my job has always been global and remains global today, I'm currently based in Tokyo where I contribute to multiple international communities involving OpenSolaris, Linux, Web 2.0, photography, and social media. Tokyo is a major economic center in Asia, and there are significant business opportunities that can be realized by implementing community development programs throughout the region. But long term relationships matter greatly here, and they are subtle and take time to build. Patience, consistency, and meticulous attention to detail are necessary to overcome the obvious and hidden barriers before you can even see the opportunities to build locally and then to connect regionally and internationally. But that's my focus for OpenSolaris in Tokyo.

From the beginning OpenSolaris has been a project about open development, community development, and market development. At its core, OpenSolaris is a global engineering project to build a community of developers and users around a large base of source code, binaries, and tools. For my part, I build community by managing engineering projects that encourage and support contributions across a wide variety of products and platforms. Since the beginning of OpenSolaris from the pre pilot phase a year prior to launch right up to the present, I've managed projects to build community throughout Sun, on opensolaris.org, and at conferences and universities internationally. And my perspective on OpenSolaris comes directly from my history as a project manager. I view the project in its entirety — engineering, communications, logistics, requirements, infrastructure, strategy, governance, finance, licensing, politics, language, culture, community.

I've used my blog as a core communications tool to write extensively about OpenSolaris (thousands of entries), and I've always been a top blogger for Sun and poster to the project`s mailing lists (thousands of mails). I've also occasionally briefed press and analysts about Sun's history and plans involving OpenSolaris. I created the website's language translation projects, user group project spaces, and Advocacy Community (where I currently serve as Facilitator), and I'm also a leader in the Internationalization and Localization Community. I've presented sessions on OpenSolaris at JavaOne San Francisco and Tokyo, Sun Tech Days Beijing and Shanghai, OpenSolaris Summit Santa Cruz, LinuxWorld Expo San Francisco, IEEE Japan, China Software Innovation Summit, OpenSolaris DevCon Germany and Prague, FOSS.IN Bangalore, and at multiple user groups, universities, and customer meetings. I ran for a position on the OpenSolaris Governing Board (OGB) in 2007 and lost but was elected to serve during the 2008-2009 term. While on the OGB, I participated in weekly board meetings, presented sessions about governance at conferences, and drove the process to draft new governance documents in an attempt to simplify and reorganize the community structure. I was also involved in implementing the first election during the OpenSolaris Pilot Program when the governance group was known as the Community Advisory Board. During that time, I participated in the OpenSolaris Pilot Program as an early year long effort when our team engaged developers, open source leaders, customers, partners, universities, and other teams inside Sun to build the OpenSolaris project from scratch.

Currently, my main role on the OpenSolaris project is to provide program management services for the opensolaris.org platform development effort on the Developer Collaboration Engineering Team, which is a global group of more than a dozen engineers and managers responsible for building and supporting opensolaris.org's web applications, multi-site server facilities, open development tools and infrastructure, governance processes, website content, and contribution programs. All of our work is designed to build an open source development community that participates at multiple levels and offers contributions of value from around the world. The OpenSolaris Developer Collaboration Engineering Team was the original organization at Sun that created the OpenSolaris program in 2004, and it has always been an engineering team building infrastructure to drive business. Our business is engineering community development, which supports market development operations and direct revenue opportunities for Sun's operating system product offerings.

In general, I'm fascinated with how engineering projects operate and generate possibilities for everyone involved. I'm especially interested in how large organizations participate in open source communities, and how they manage development operations across cultural and language barriers. The open source paradigm is unique in this one respect: it offers opportunity for individuals to excel and benefit personally in ways that simultaneously benefit the community and the companies that participate. This is an entrepreneur's dream within the structure of a community or a corporation. It's also lesson I've seen reinforced through many years of project management and community building experiences across multiple disciplines. I used to run my own excavating business in New York, so I see construction as a similar experience to software development in some critical ways involving not only management but also logistics and community development. I've also written and edited magazine articles and managed editorial production and photographic processes, so I see creativity and communications and documentation as big parts of software development methodologies as well. But all my life all I've done is project management. Still doing it now.

Updated 7/5/09