Last year when I went to OSDevCon in Prague (photos, videos, text all tagged here)
I did some interviews as a life experiment. Seriously. I challenge
myself from time to time, so I figured what the hell. I'm far from
home. Who'd know, right? Generally, I will do almost anything to avoid
a live camera. Stills I'm fine with. Heck I take a lot of stills
myself. But live cameras scare me to death. Live microphones too. Bad. Anyway, in one of the interviews I spoke with Kelly Nishimura. She's the Sr. Engineering Program Manager on the OpenSolaris project in California. Those are the guys who build the OpenSolaris distro. Deirdré Straughan
shot the video, of course, and most recently she had the conversation
translated, so we are in six languages. That's cool. Just click on the
"captions" button in the upper left corner for the subtitles. Now, I
don't expect to ever do this sort of thing again. I mean, really. I
suck at it. But I must admit it was fun to do. Once. I just
have to stay clear of Deirdré because she has one of those "live" cameras
...
Thursday May 28, 2009
Tuesday Aug 19, 2008
Here's a little chat I did with Max Alt of Intel while we met at the
OpenSolaris Developer Conference in Prague a bit back. You can also find a conversation with Intel Dave and Jeff Cheeney on the Intel project page. Lots of Intel going on here lately.
Special thanks to Deirdre Straughan for taping these interviews.
11:30 mins
iPod version also availableSpecial thanks to Deirdre Straughan for taping these interviews.
Thursday Jul 31, 2008
While I was in Prague, I had a quick conversation with Kelly Nishimura,
the Sr. Program Manager in engineering for the OpenSolaris 2008.05
distribution. Deirdre
Straughan taped it. Sneaky. :)
~3:15 mins
Wednesday Jul 16, 2008
Ok, I can see I'll never have a career as an interviewer, but that's
ok. Blogging is a billion times easier. Anyway, Deirdre Straughan was
kind enough to record a
conversation I had with Chad Mynhier, a contributor to DTrace, at
the OpenSolaris Developer Conference last month. Chad also spoke at
OSDevCon. Very nice guy, too.
4:40 mins
Monday Jul 07, 2008
One of the best talks at OSDevCon in Prague recently came from Petr Tomasek, Robert Malovec, and Ales Cernosek.
They talked about globalization issues, and I especially liked it
because the guys focused on how to contribute translations to the
OpenSolaris project. In fact, they built a pilot system providing
community access to back end computers with the end result being a
package living in an IPS repository. If you are interested in
globalization and want to contribute to the OpenSolaris project, check
this out because your feedback would be most welcome. Here is the paper describing the details (from page 84 to 91). Here is the video presentation. And here is the slide deck.
As this system matures, I hope it -- or future versions of it -- will move to the Internationalization and Localization Community Group on opensolairs.org. Conversations for that community group take place on i18n-discuss.
As this system matures, I hope it -- or future versions of it -- will move to the Internationalization and Localization Community Group on opensolairs.org. Conversations for that community group take place on i18n-discuss.
Wednesday Jul 02, 2008
Special thanks to Deirdre Straughan for recording my session at OSDevCon (part one and part two). Rich Brueckner recorded sessions, as well. It's great to have all the conference materials up at osdevcon.org.
I'm certainly no pro speaker, but I'm making lots of obvious and fixable mistakes and that's making me better. My goal when I started this little trek into public talking a few years ago was to simply be able to get through a presentation without choking to death. I actually wrote that phrase down as a goal. I've largely achieved that, which is quite a relief, but I'm still trying to get better by improving the tone and transitions between stories and topics. This is critical since the content needs to be delivered via a story I can clearly imagine in my mind so I don't forget the bits along the way and so I can improvise and change things on the fly. I can't read or be bound by notes or even slides (I never read my slides anyway) since seeing the text can cause confusion, while at the same time I always felt I needed the content just in case I lost my way (which still happens). So confusing. Anyway, I still feel like I'm stuttering sub-vocally at times, but I can actually feel the process occurring in my head now, whereas before it all happened too fast and it was just a bunch of choking to death. So, this is good. As I experience more subtle levels of speech articulation, I can more easily adjust my way out of tough spots. Such a long way to go. Getting there, though.
I'm certainly no pro speaker, but I'm making lots of obvious and fixable mistakes and that's making me better. My goal when I started this little trek into public talking a few years ago was to simply be able to get through a presentation without choking to death. I actually wrote that phrase down as a goal. I've largely achieved that, which is quite a relief, but I'm still trying to get better by improving the tone and transitions between stories and topics. This is critical since the content needs to be delivered via a story I can clearly imagine in my mind so I don't forget the bits along the way and so I can improvise and change things on the fly. I can't read or be bound by notes or even slides (I never read my slides anyway) since seeing the text can cause confusion, while at the same time I always felt I needed the content just in case I lost my way (which still happens). So confusing. Anyway, I still feel like I'm stuttering sub-vocally at times, but I can actually feel the process occurring in my head now, whereas before it all happened too fast and it was just a bunch of choking to death. So, this is good. As I experience more subtle levels of speech articulation, I can more easily adjust my way out of tough spots. Such a long way to go. Getting there, though.
Tuesday Jul 01, 2008
Wolfgang Stief posted his images from the OpenSolaris Developer Conference in Prague. This is my fav. I like standing on things and shooting down.
I'm sure more images will be posted since there were a few people with cameras clicking away. I'll update here as I find them. In general, though, you can find more than 5,500 OpenSolaris images on Flickr now. Not a bad collection we have going, eh?
Saturday Jun 28, 2008
Friday Jun 27, 2008
Here are the
slides from my talk at the OpenSolaris
Developer Conference in Prague
earlier today. From an information perspective, the slides are pretty
much useless. They are just full bleed images with almost no content
whatsoever. I talked about community building from a governance
perspective and made up much of the specifics as I spoke. I had a
specific outline in mind, of course, but I just tried to tell some
stories about what I've experienced on the project -- including the
things we've done right, some of the things we've done wrong, and where
I think we're going. I was more assertive about my own opinions than
I've ever been, which was intentional, so I hope it came across ok. I
was a bit long winded (as I am in writing), so I think I have to
improve that. I'm the only non-technical speaker at the entire
conference, though, so I figured I'd try something new with the full
frame images with very few words. I think I'll continue this technique
for a while because I have a lot of photos I can talk about and that
offers a remarkable amount of flexibility to improvise during a talk.
But this was ultimately a discussion about getting involved in the
OpenSolaris project -- either in governance itself or in any number of
roles that will help you earn Membership and Core Contributor status in
the community. In many ways, governance is just another form of
community development, and there are many social, strategic, and
technical factors involved. The governmental systems on OpenSolaris are
still evolving, though, and some of the issues have been controversial.
This is normal. It's simply the evolution of a complex and unique
engineering project, one in which a multi-billion dollar corporation is
opening its core product and is building a global community while still
maintaining critical business operations.
There have been three clearly definable phases of governance on the
OpenSolaris project:
(1) Sun's role in creating the CAB from within the Pilot Program, the
development of (and confusion about) the Charter and Constitution, the
redefinition of the CAB to OGB and the expansion of its mandate and
extension of its term, and the ratification of the Constitution and
election of the first OGB. This period of time ranges from late 2004 to
March 2007.
(2) The first elected OGB begins normal operations with a Constitution
that doesn't necessarily reflect reality, but many people on the board
and in the community make a good faith attempt to make things work. The
OGB controls no resources and key parts of the project are still
internal to Sun. A community reorganization is specified and attempted
but stalls due to disagreements and inflexible infrastructure issues.
Trademark disputes over a new Sun distro lead to more arguments about
the project's lack of openness in some areas. This second phase was
March 2007 to March 2008.
(3) The second OGB takes office after a significant community argument
with Sun. Most members ran on a platform to reform the governance and
reorganize the community for two key reasons: the OpenSolaris community
and Sun need to be in sync about the project, and the structure of the
OpenSolaris community needs to reflect the reality of how the community
actually functions. The re-org can now take place because the
OpenSolaris engineering infrastructure team has resources to update the
website, move the gates external, and finish the work necessary to make
OpenSolaris an open development project -- which was the goal all
along. The reorganization is not fully specified yet, and the
discussion moves slowly. Sun's executive engineering management engages
with the OGB as well as the community. This current phase started from
March 2008.
The Reorganization
Currently the OpenSolaris community is structured around Members,
Community Groups, and Projects. Community Groups sponsor Projects and
grant Membership status to Core Contributors. There are some odd
groupings, as well, such as user groups, which we have stuffed into
Projects due to site constraints. Also, we have many Community Groups
that were crafted back in the Pilot Program that really ought to be
Projects today or consolidated into other Community Groups. And Sun has
yet another grouping called Consolidations, which doesn't fit the
Constitution. The website doesn't reflect the Constitution, too, since
the site per-dated the Constitution and its evolution stalled due to
resource constraints. So, the OGB's community reorganization has to
address all of these issues.
To begin the process of discussing the issue, the OGB recently proposed
interpreting the term Community Group to mean a class of groupings in
the community, not a group itself. In other words, Projects,
Consolidations, Special Interest Groups, and User Groups could
potentially make up the new groupings and they could have relationships
with each other in a web-like structure instead of the current
hierarchical structure. To establish some consistently across the
community under this proposed system, a new OGB committee would be
formed to create standards for granting Membership status.
The reorganization idea has already generated several counter
proposals, but the general concept is moving in the direction of
offering more flexibility for different types of groups and crafting a
system that reflects how OpenSolaris developers work rather than
imposing an artificial structure on top. The reorganization and the
infrastructure work necessary to support the changes will probably take
a year, so there is plenty of time to get involved and contribute. The
site can not be changed rapidly, and neither can a governance decision.
The site's current monolithic architecture is being updated in stages
to a new modular architecture, but it still must support current
operations. And the community will have to participate in and finally
approve any new governance structure.
Finally
The OpenSolaris governance process should define how the community
operates. Therefore, it's at the core of how people participate in the
project. It should not get in the way of participation, but it should
offer opportunities for many people to contribute in many ways.
That's it.
Update: Here is the video of my session:
part 1, 30 mins
part 2, ~40 mins
Also available in iPod video format:
Thursday Jun 26, 2008
Had a nice dinner tonight with some of the guys from the Sun Globalization team in Prague ...
Monday May 19, 2008
Thursday Apr 17, 2008
Friday Apr 11, 2008
I'm going to the annual OpenSolaris Developer Conference (tag: OSDevCon) in late June. Last year everyone met in Berlin, but this year we'll be in Prague with the German Unix User Group and the Czech OpenSolaris User Group. I've never been to Prague, so this will be a very cool trip. The location and timing is perfect, too, since I'm getting more involved in Sun's g11n operations and we have a team in Prague. And also I didn't want to miss this conference specifically because it was the very first conference that grew out of the OpenSolaris community without Sun creating it or driving it. It just happened, basically. The guys showed up on the list and did their thing. It had a special feel last year for that reason, so hopefully it will grow this year and well into the future.
Stop by if you are in the neighborhood ...
Tuesday Apr 08, 2008
Are you going to Prague in late June for the OpenSolaris Developer Conference 2008? Dirk Wetter posted a reminder for papers -- [osol-discuss] Last two weeks to submit papers to OpenSolaris Developer Conference 2008.
Sunday Nov 25, 2007
Martin Man announced the date and venue for the second annual OpenSolaris Developer Conference -- [osol-announce] OpenSolaris Developer Conference 2008 Date & Venue Confirmed. I went last year (my blogs here and the 2007 conf site here),
and I hope to go again this year. I think OSDevCon is the first and only OpenSolaris developer conference to come directly from the
community, which is very cool. There will be many more in the future, I'm sure. I wonder what the weather is like in Prague in
late June?
This blog copyright 2009 by jimgris
