Background, Projects, Presentations

I manage projects. Period. 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 engineering 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 their speeches, advised them about competitive market issues, and ran their press and analyst 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, project management, and business — 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 also contribute to multiple international groups involving OpenSolaris, Linux, Web 2.0, photography, social media, and Hackerspaces. Tokyo is a major economic center in Asia, and there are significant business opportunities that can be realized by implementing development programs throughout the region among engineers and customers. 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 local programs and then to connect regionally and internationally (here, here). But that's what I do for OpenSolaris in the Tokyo & Asia Pacific region.

From the beginning, OpenSolaris has always been a project about open development, community development, and market development. At its core, OpenSolaris is a global engineering project to build an organization of developers around a large base of code, binaries, and tools. For my part, I manage OpenSolaris 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 opening right up to the present, I've managed projects throughout Sun, on opensolaris.org, and at conferences and universities internationally. My perspective on OpenSolaris comes directly from my history as a project manager. I view the project in its entirety — engineering, operations, communications, requirements, infrastructure, strategy, governance, finance, licensing, politics, language, culture.

Currently, my role on OpenSolaris is to provide engineering project management services for the opensolaris.org website development and transition effort. That project is owned by the OpenSolaris Open Development Team — a software development team that builds and supports opensolaris.org (web applications, multi-site server facilities, open development tools and infrastructure, governance processes, content, and contribution programs) and contributes engineering resources to the OpenSolaris binary distribution. The team numbers over a dozen engineers, administrators, and managers in North America, Europe, and Asia. All of our work is designed to build an open source engineering organization that participates at multiple levels and offers contributions of value from around the world. The OpenSolaris Open Development Team was the original organization at Sun that created the OpenSolaris program in 2004.

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 OpenSolaris. I contributed to the OpenSolaris Newsletter and created the website's language translation projects, user group projects, and Advocacy Community. I'm also a leader in the Internationalization & Localization Community. I've presented OpenSolaris at JavaOne San Francisco and Tokyo, Nihon Sun User Group, Tokyo Linux User Group, Sun Tech Days Beijing and Shanghai, OpenSolaris Days in Jakarta and Bandung, OpenSolaris Summit Santa Cruz, LinuxWorld Expo San Francisco, IEEE Japan, Pasona Tech Tokyo, China Software Innovation Summit, OpenSolaris DevCon in Germany and Prague, BarCamp Tokyo, FOSS.IN Bangalore, COSCUP Taiwan, and at multiple user groups, universities, and customer meetings (see a selection of presentations and links below).

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.

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 engineering 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 a lesson I've seen reinforced through many years of project management and community building experiences across multiple disciplines — software, biotech, medical sciences, construction, publishing, communications. But all my life all I've done is project management. Still doing it now.

A Selection of OpenSolaris Presentations

Event	Presentation	Audio/Video	Photos & Links
OpenSolaris Days, OSUG Meetings: Jakarta & Banjung, Indonesia November 15-18	Presentation		Photos and 5 blog posts
COSCUP Taiwan 2009	Abstract | Presentation	Video: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6	Photos
Website Transition Update #3: Community Conference Call August 2009	Presentation
Japan OpenSolaris User Group Meeting May 2009	Presentation
BarCamp Tokyo May 2009	Presentation		Photos
JavaOne San Francisco June 2009		Video
OpenSolaris Developer Conference (OSDevCon) June 2008	Abstract | Presentation		Photos
OpenSolaris Developer Conference (OSDevCon) March 2007	Abstract | Presentation		Photos
FOSS.IN Bangalore December 2007	Abstract | Presentation		Photos
China University Tour: Beijing, Fuzhou, Hefei November 2008	Presentation		Photos Fuzhou Software Park ACM/ICPC Competition Hefei University Science & Technology
China University Tour September 2008	Presentation		Photos Beijing OpenSolaris User Group Beijing Linux User Group Jiaotong University Beijing University
Pasona Tech Conference, Tokyo October 2008	Panel Discussion		Engineering Across Languages and Cultures
IEEE 7th International, CIT 2007 Aizu University, Japan October 2007	Presentation, Presentation		Photos
Sun Japan Business.Next May 2007	Provided presentation content to Sun Japan team.		Photos
China Software Innovation Summit, Beijing March 2007	Presentation		Photos | Background
Tokyo Open Source Conference March 2007	Presentation to the newly formed Japan OpenSolaris User Group
Sun Tech Days China, University Tour 2006, 2007	Presentation 2006 Presentation 2007		Photos 2006 University Tour 2006 Photos 2007
Tech Days 2006-2007 Tech Days 2007-2008	Content used by others in several presos for Tech Days.
Tokyo Linux User Group July 2007	Presentation		Photos
OpenSolaris Day Aizu University, Japan June 2007	Presentation		Photos
OpenSolaris Summit, Santa Cruz May 2008	Presentations on Advocacy and Governance	Video Intros	Photos
OGB Elections 2007 & 2008	Response | Position | Position Constitution Rewrite Original Roles	Audio 2007 Audio 2008: ogg, mp3
18th Annual Nihon Sun User Group Symposium, Keynote Presentation September 2006	Presentation		Photos
State of California, Sacramento Working Group on Open Source July 2006	Presentation
JavaOne Tokyo November 2005	Presentation		Photos