Contact, Background, Presentations

Photo by Joi Ito, Freesouls

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 (here, here) 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 source code, binaries, and tools. For my part, I manage OpenSolaris projects to build infrastructure that supports contributions across a wide variety of 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, infrastructure, strategy, governance, finance, licensing, politics, language, culture.

Currently, I am an Engineering Program Manager for the opensolaris.org website development project (current roadmap, 2009 roadmap). The 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.

Part of my duties managing international OpenSolaris projects involves significant communications. I've used my blog at blogs.sun.com as a 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 (archive) and created the website's language translation projects, user group projects, and Advocacy Community. I'm also a leader in the Internationalization & Localization Community, and I work with Sun's Globalization engineers on website localization projects. I'm also part of the website operations team and manage the collective life cycle infrastructure needs for the community. Additionally, I've presented OpenSolaris at conferences around the world: 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 below.

I ran for a position on the OpenSolaris Governing Board (OGB) in 2007 and lost but ran again and 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 development 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 in ways that simultaneously benefit the community and the companies that participate. 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.