Following is a late summary of OGB status at the half-way point in our term. This summary will form the basis for my talk at OSDevCon next week, which will hopefully be more of a discussion.

Outreach Status

We made more progress on outreach during our second quarter as a board, but the focus of our efforts was on outreach to groups within Sun on behalf of the OpenSolaris Community.

This quarter we invited Lynn Rohrer to join an OGB meeting and talk with us about the statistics her group generates for the OpenSolaris project that cut across communities, projects, and user groups. The data provided a picture of the activities that are tracked to measure health of the project and a view of the most active and least active areas in OpenSolaris as measured by mail and web page traffic. Lynn's presentation validated many of our assumptions about areas that need revitalization. The data also informed our work to assess all community groups, check contributor and core contributor records for community groups, and outreach to any groups with fewer than three core contributors in an effort to cleanup communities that are inactive and reinvigorate communities that wish to continue. Thanks to Peter Tribble for driving this effort and managing all communications.

The Developer Collaboration team responsible for the opensolaris.org web site infrastructure also joined an OGB meeting this quarter to discuss the roles and privileges implemented in the new opensolaris.org user authentication application. We agreed to minor changes to the role names in order to separate governance roles from web site roles which the Developer Collaboration team implemented last month. We also requested changes to the new application to enable the OGB Secretary to continue to manage grants on behalf of the entire community. We'd like to formally thank the Developer Collaboration team for making these late changes to the database and all the work required to re-migrate data so that we can continue on a path that separates governance roles from the web site roles and to support the current responsibilities of the OGB Secretary. Thanks also to Jim Walker for driving this review of the new authentication application.

Planning Status

We drafted and iterated on the 2010 election calendar this quarter and developed a schedule for our work on the draft Constitution. These two plans will take us through the final six months of our OGB term.

Implementation Status

We've implemented comments on the draft Constitution that were received just before the election last year and sorted out the disconnect between the Charter and Constitution to our satisfaction. We have added a Preamble to the draft that reinforces our commitment to open source and continue work on an executive summary that outlines the benefits of the new document. We are currently on schedule to meet our goal for stabilizing the draft and starting to communicate widely about the benefits of the document next week. Many thanks to John Plocher for driving this work, managing the details and making updates to the draft.

We are currently under moratorium for creation of new projects and communities on the web site until the Developer Collaboration team completes implementation and migration of the new XWiki infrastructure for opensolaris.org. But, we still intend to complete the work on the How to Start a Project on OpenSolaris document to replace project_instantiation.txt and publish the document after the transition to XWiki is complete.

We also continue to work on completing the Active Facilitators table and replace community group facilitators as people change roles. We'll begin regular communication to facilitation-discuss in November to provide key dates for election voting preparations.

Recognition Status

Sponsorship of the Facilitation project has helped to increase awareness around maintenance of contributor and core contributor records for community groups along with the outreach work to revitalize and cleanup community groups. So, we've seen a number of communities updating their contributor grants throughout this quarter and we hope to see that trend continue through the end of the calendar year, to prevent the rush of updated grants we saw just before last year's election. Thanks to Deirdre Straughan and the associated community group facilitators for their work to update grants for the OGB, Storage, Documentation, HA-Clusters, Device Drivers, Crossbow, LDoms, Sysadmin, Advocacy, HPC, and Printing community groups in the first half of the 2009 OGB term. This work puts us in a great position to get the remaining community group core contributor rolls updated by the end of the calendar year, so we can use our time in January to promote the nomination of new OGB members and the coming March election.

Overall, a productive quarter that sets us on a clear path for the second half of our term!

An update on the OGB after our first quarter as a team. Here we are, from the left: Jim Walker, Michelle Olson, John Beck, Peter Tribble, John Plocher, Simon Phipps, and Valerie Fenwick (kneeling).

Outreach Status

We've made a great deal of progress on outreach in the last two months. The OGB met with Sun's executive liaison, Vincent Murphy, over lunch at CommunityOne West and we had lively discussion about the future, why IPS, and modernization. OpenSolaris technical lead, David Comay also joined us to answer questions and to get to know the board. That evening, we held a Townhall that Vincent also attended along with a relatively small group of interested community members.
Four members of the OGB also attended an all-day event for OpenSolaris User Group Leaders where we met people in our community from around the world, most of them long-term core contributors and enthusiasts. We learned a great deal, answered their questions related to why OGB, why IPS, and leadership. We all went to dinner together and made new connections across the globe that have resulted in new folks joining our regular OGB meetings to make their voices heard. Finally, many of us went to OSCON this week to work the OpenSolaris booth, lead BoFs, and give presentations.

Planning Status

We completed the groundwork for election planning with a team of 30 facilitators on facilitation-discuss. This effort is bearing fruit already through light-weight education about contributor grants, voting, and the basics of community group facilitation for OpenSolaris. The project provides a team for communicating election information and schedules out to the wider community for the first time.

OGB members also provided planning input for the OpenSolaris Developer Summit by completing the recent survey about possible dates for the annual 3-day event. OGB Vice-Chair, Peter Tribble also continues to lead the community, project, and user group reporting effort he started in Q1 with plans for Q2 reports and beyond.

Implementation Status

On the implementation front, John Plocher is drafting a constitutional executive summary and preamble to clarify the benefits of the new constitution draft and to provide a vision of our community purpose. We've also drafted a new version of information about How to Start a Project on OpenSolaris to make it easier to understand. Valerie Fenwick continues to lead implementation of the voter responsibilities policy toward increasing overall participation in the annual election.

Recognition Status

We recognized all existing community group facilitators and granted them OGB community contributor status this month. We also thanked them, the outgoing OGB, and those who supported the 2009 election in our Townhall slide presentation. Peter created a poster at CommunityOne, that was also displayed at the User Group Leader Bootcamp, to promote all those communities, project, and user groups who reported status to OGB in Q1. We've also made some progress on all OGB suggestion box requests we've received. So, I think we've made some progress on recognition, but have a long way to go on this item to really call it a success.

Change Management

We're starting to ramp up some new work to support the community through upcoming changes we see on the horizon.

We're learning and testing the new collective roles that implement the constitution and governance in the new opensolaris.org authentication application that is due to launch in August. We're also assessing the new user group and project roles that inform the future constitution so we can account for them in our updates to governance documents.

We've talked about the new focus for deliveries of OpenSolaris with new build tools and processes related to our conversations about IPS. And we've started to study the new content management system and improved collaboration tools that are planned for launch on opensolaris.org this fall.

There is a lot of positive change coming and some of it will be disruptive at first and require everyone to pitch in, so we're interested in how to help support the community through the change and how we can have a positive impact on areas that will concern our developer community.

Overall, a very productive and exciting first quarter!

I worked the OpenSolaris booth at OSCON for several hours today. What a conference! I've really been missing out all these years.

This is the first year I've been able to attend, so I'm very glad it was in San Jose, CA. I managed to talk with about fifty attendees today and couldn't believe how well-known OpenSolaris has really become in such a short time. I suppose the OSCON crowd is far more keen on OpenSolaris than other audiences? Not really, but most have tried it!

That was what amazed me because when we started out, it was hard to find anyone at a FOSS conference who had tried opensolaris. Young and old have touched OpenSolaris now and a large number mentioned VirtualBox pretty early into our conversations. Go Liane! (Liane Praza is the mastermind engineer behind the OpenSolaris VirtualBox images distributed this year.

I talked with attendees about moving from S9 to opensolaris because we've largely preserved compatibility, I talked a lot about ZFS and live media and boot environments. Everybody has a copy running somewhere on some extra machine or virtual machine or partition. It was incredible to me because just 18 months ago people everywhere were almost completely unaware of OpenSolaris. Today made me feel that we're approaching a tipping point, half a million installs in about a year has set a very interesting stage. I certainly heard people saying that they have to know about OpenSolaris. I've been asking people the same question at conferences for four years have you tried opensolaris? and until today I hadn't heard people say of course.

An update after 46 days of the OpenSolaris Governing Board 2009-2010 term. As the newly elected OGB Chair, I'm pleased to say that we are moving away from the historical Parliamentary order in our regular weekly OGB meetings toward having live discussions of community issues. Please do join us!

Outreach Status

On the outreach goal, I feel we've reached enough new people in the community since my last blog post to warrant a grade of C+ in this area.

• The OGB Vice-Chair, Peter Tribble, is leading an effort to reach out and collect reports from community groups, projects, and user groups for promotion at CommunityOne.
  
• OGB Member Jim Walker has just announced a new OGB Suggestion Box that is already filling up with good ideas from community members.
  
• Planning for the OGB Townhall at CommunityOne is also going well and we hope everyone will join us at 6pm in room 305 at Moscone on June 1st for our first in-person OGB Townhall meeting of 2009.
  
• Simon and Peter will also join LOSUG next week to talk about the OGB.
  

Okay, that is a lot of outreach, so maybe we are getting a B- already. I still would like more joiners at our weekly meetings.

Planning Status

The OGB Calendar is getting some traction, and five OGB members are now using it to track our activities. We have a standing agenda item to vote on calendar entries for OGB that is working well and I'm hopeful that we will continue to pro-actively plan the year ahead.

Implementation Status

We continue to implement areas of the constitution and guiding documents toward improving voter turnout and member education.

• The most recent step was approval of a new Policy Regarding Core Contributor Grants, initiated by Valerie Fenwick, which asks new core contributor nominees to agree to have read their responsibilities before accepting the role.
  
• The Facilitation Project has, in its first month, made contact with 33 of the 47 Facilitators of the OpenSolaris Community Groups. Community Group facilitators are the life-blood of our voting and election system, so I'm thrilled (but not surprised) to see their immediate interest in the new project and willingness to join up.
  

Recognition

In our meeting yesterday, I requested a re-vote on the proposal to recognize individuals who support and contribute to the goals of the OGB, by nominating them for OGB Contributor grants. The majority vote passed.

This sets a new precedent for OGB, in that it paves the way for OGB to handle their contributor and core contributor grants in the same way that all other community groups do. This has been mis-characterized as make-work just for the sake of recognition, but it is actually a really important first step to get OGB in alignment with how other community groups are required to handle their grants.

We must work through the processes that all other community groups use in order to understand and improve upon them, and to build our credibility. It is not just a 'feel-good' endeavor, it is the singular path to full OpenSolaris Membership, and contributors to governance get equal opportunity for access to resources and recognition that come with membership.

An update after 23 days of the OGB 2009-2010 term. In my campaign platform, I said I would focus on outreach, planning, implementation and recognition. So, here is the latest in each area:

Outreach Status

There are several ways to measure my success around the outreach goal. So far, I would say I'm not getting a passing grade yet. While we've had a couple of additional community members join the 3 OGB meetings we've hosted, I'm not satisfied with such low turnout for our meetings. We haven't had the Sun executive liaison to a meeting yet either, so this is an area I'll work on. I'm pleased to say that we have agreed upon a set of slides for a short 15 minute presentation at the first 2009 OpenSolaris Townhall meeting, to be held tomorrow morning. I look forward to addressing the group and will count this event as progress (however small) on outreach.

Planning Status

My original goal around planning was to at least map out the activities for the year in the first month. We have a great start with the OGB Calendar and as we build more trust as a board, I think we'll make more use of it and increase transparency for the greater community.

Implementation Status

I've taken leadership on the Facilitation Project, with the goal of implementing the Facilitator role across the community groups. For many years I've felt this was a missing piece that could enable the community to function more smoothly by simply having a mailing list with subscribers from every community group with whom OGB could communicate. I'm thrilled at the positive response to the project proposal and I look forward to working with the facilitators to learn together and improve communication from OGB out to all the community groups through trusted members of those groups.

Recognition Status

As a community group, OGB has not used contributor grants to recognize people who help out with governance. I've long used the contributor grant for this purpose in other communities and I'll continue to write about this and think about how we can recognize those who contribute to the goals of OGB without using the contributor grant. Please send along your suggestions. I'm not getting a passing grade here yet, but I do recognize the efforts of the following community members for their work all last year to help us achieve the OGB goals:

• David Chieu facilitation of Laptop CG grants
  
• Vincent R Wang facilitation of Device Driver CG grants
  
• William Kucharski facilitation for PowerPC and Emerging Platforms
  
• Ceri Davies facilitation of Documentation CG grants
  
• Alan Burlison membership management application work
  
• Darren Moffat facilitation of Security CG grants
  
• Nicolas Solter facilitation of HA-Cluster CG grants
  
• Nicolas Dorfsman consistent feedback on guiding documents
  
• Bonnie Corwin liaison support and website database expertise
  
• Liane Praza facilitation of SMF CG grants
  
• Sunay Tripathi facilitation of Networking CG grants
  
• Deirdre Straughan developer summit support
  
• Dan Price facilitation of Zones and BrandZ grants
  
• Damian Wojslaw facilitation of Software Porters CG grants
  
• Michal Bielicki townhall meeting support
  
• Mark Nelson facilitation of Tools CG grants
  
• Mike Kupfer consistent guiding document feedback
  
• Mark Martin consistent priorities feedback and meeting attendance
  
• Lisa Week facilitation of NFS CG grants
  
• John Levon facilitation of MBD CG grants
  
• Lynn Rohrer facilitation of Storage CG reporting and summits
  
• Octave Orgeron facilitation of SysAdmin and LDoms CG grants
  
• Stephen Hahn for poll.opensolaris.org and CG grant utility support
  
• Garrett D'Amore for continued CC-level participation
  
• Joerg Schilling for continued CC-level participation
  
• Martin Bochnig for continued CC-level participation
  
• Shawn Walker for continued CC-level participation
  

I'll talk a little more about thanks and recognition at the townhall tomorrow, hope to speak with you then!

My candidacy for OGB this year is based on my continued technical interest in the project and leadership. Holding the office of OGB Secretary in 2008/09 provided a valuable background for board membership and informs my decision to run again this year.

As a Core Contributor to OpenSolaris, I take seriously the notion that OGB is tasked with encouraging growth of the OpenSolaris ecosystem so that our community may long endure. If I am elected, I will endeavor to drive the following efforts to support that goal:

Outreach

I would reach out to key members of the OpenSolaris community, including the executive liaison, past members of the board, sister communities, and internal Sun groups on behalf of OpenSolaris. I would expect to attend and host meetings and events to open lines of communication, demonstrate listening skills, provide useful feedback, and enable follow through.

Planning

Planning and scheduling plays an important role in execution of our project goals. I would work to plan the 2009/10 OGB calendar within the first month of office so that more members and contributors join in our meetings and events to provide feedback on the big-picture board directions for the year.

Implementation

Pending a statistically valid vote to ratify the OpenSolaris Constitution 2009, the 2009/10 OGB will be tasked with implementation of new processes that impact the at-large community. Integration of new processes and interpretation of the 2009 Constitution will be essential to success for developers who want to start new groups or those who wish to become members. I will bring energy and enthusiasm to these efforts and use the learnings from my OGB role to drive effective website content development related to the new processes.

Recognition

In our project, there are many unrecognized champions, developers, and contributors who grow the ecosystem and improve OpenSolaris technology without reward or mention. I will work on simple mechanisms we can all use to recognize the efforts of contributors to motivate the team.

As always, I would be honored to serve on the OpenSolaris Governing Board this year!

Tomorrow is the end of fiscal year 2008 here at Sun, what a year it has been for me. In this final quarter, I made a job change, added a new governance role and started a new group, as follows:

OpenSolaris.org Content Program Manager

My new job as content PM for OpenSolaris.org is in full swing now, I'm working hard to update and improve the common pages of the site in my first months. So far, we have a review process, roadmap, draft best practices, and the beginning of a usability study script. These foundation pieces of collateral are hosted on the Website Project. We're conducting review conversations on the Website Content mailing list. Feel free to join us or send along your ideas!

OpenSolaris Governing Board Secretary

My new role as OGB Secretary was at first bitter-sweet, as I came in 9th in the general election. I was still very proud to have campaigned so well this year, surviving several more rounds of voting than in the first general election. When our new executive liaison requested that I serve as Secretary I accepted the position, knowing it is an important office and key to the success of the board. I'm responsible to maintain the agenda, publish minutes, and add new contributor and core contributor grants to the polling system. For a summary of our first 16 meetings, have a look at the OGB Meeting Minutes, IRC logs, and Recordings. We meet each Monday at 2pm pacific, do call in and say hello!

San Francisco OpenSolaris User Group Leader

My new adventure as user group leader has only just begun, but of the three, this one is surely the most fun and inspirational. It is a total recharge. We meet informally at Kate O'Brian's bar in the city on the 4th Monday of each month. No presentations, just beers, bangers & mash, and laptops. You can read all about it and subscribe to our mailing list on the SFOSUG Project. Come enjoy a pint with us on August 24th!

If I am elected to the OGB, I will bring communication and program management skills to the Board. 'Program' is bigger than a release, so I will drive projects that have impact beyond the scope of a singular release on behalf of OpenSolaris (the community).

I will advocate on behalf of the community to Solaris management and stand in their offices to enable conversations we must have, and indeed, to inspire new conversations we should have as a governing board. I will bring standing conversations I have inside Sun to the OSOL lists in a manner that enables the community to be successful.

I will advocate on behalf of Sun to facilitate constructive electronic conversations, meetings, and projects that serve Sun's business goals to the delight of the non-Sun OSOL community. These projects, like others I have completed (see below), will highlight and reward the hard work and innovations of our community and simultaneously meet business goals for Sun.

Summary of my work on OpenSolaris this year
---------------------------------------------------------------------------

• Attended first OSDevCon and first OpenSolaris Developer's Summit and blogged my notes of each. I've also represented OpenSolaris at LinuxWorld San Francisco, JavaOne, FOSDEM, SIGCSE, SIGDOC and regularly attend SVOSUG.

• Delivered source for 4,300 SunOS man pages under OSI-approved CDDL to the opensolaris man page consolidation with bi-weekly builds of changed files.

• Delivered source for 36 technical manuals under Public Documentation License v1.01 to the opensolaris docs consolidation with monthly updates of changed books.

• Delivered 7 versions of the OpenSolaris Starter Kit. The OpenSolaris Starter Kit includes Nexenta, Schillix, Belenix, Solaris Express Community Edition and documentation in nine languages for each distro. We have shipped nearly 100K copies of the kit to 106 countries in nine languages (de, cn, pl, it, ja, es, ptbr, ru).

• Delivered two complete updates to the OpenSolaris Student Guide, distributing 40K copies in pocket-book size in nine languages. Contributors to the book are named on page 12. This guide was used to create a High School course for OpenSolaris in Brazil and serves as a starting point for university operating system curriculum with OpenSolaris in all the examples.

• Initiated creation of the first and only source repository hosted on the Indiana Project to date, ssh://anon-AT-hg.opensolaris-DOT-org/hg/indiana/docs1
  

--------------------------------------------------------------------------

I'd be honored to serve on the OGB in 2008!

I recently attended the ACM Special Interest Group for Design of Communication conference in El Paso, Texas. There were about 40 attendees from academia and corporate worlds both.

I attended only the first day of proceedings and the Bofs following. I led a Birds of a Feather (Bof) session about open source documentation for a small group that was very informal. It was great to talk with folks who are so keenly interested in pubs and who have so much experience and passion about information design and architecture. I discussed with one professor of Rhetoric and Writing studies at UTEP the online component of his courses and how it is used by students today and how they might interact in an open source project. He is most interested in giving students a way to customize their experience of the web site. If you watch the website-discuss alias on OSOL, you'll see the same sentiment. Folks want to change look-and-feel first.

I think the Academic and Research Community on OpenSolaris.org would be a great playground for writing students who need real software to document. I know that I was most interested in the real-world projects I was given to document as a technical communications student. However, open source in academia is still quite new and because I am from Sun, the professors generally thought of my comments about developers as being comments about customers and therefore not applicable to their situation. So, I learned a great deal by discussing opportunities with them that will hopefully result in a published article on the subject. Following are my notes on the talks.

Agency, Invention, and Sympatric Design Platforms, Brian J McNealy

WebCT is the online course tool used at UTEP and other Universities. Wikis are also in use for some components, but WebCT is the secure platform that enables electronic assessment. Brian talked about agentive potential being stifled by existing online tools and then tied this back to biology theory of speciation. He posited that online tools that foster invention and agency mimic speciation theory. He submitted WebCT as the alopatric component and compared writing for interfaces and databases with sympatric components in that they involve not just the individual and include multiple layers of writing. In general, he pointed out that meaning-making is visual and limiting the ability to alter or customize visual elements likewise limits innovation and agency.

Preference Based Queries for Course Sequencing, Penklis Georgiandis, Greece, University of Crete

The motivation for the system described in this talk was driven by personalized curriculum. The Skill and courses described included an atomic skill and the schedule of courses. The preferences gave priority with regard to descriptions and included a theme or thematic area of study. The sequencing was ordering according to pre-requisites, alternative course for atomic skills and extensions. This talk was very interesting because it described all of the math behind the preferences used in the course sequence queries with charts describing the priority choices as you walk through the scheduler.

The Decision Pattern: Capturing and Communicating Design Intent, David Wright, North Carolina State University

The problem solved by this paper and resulting course is one of determining how design decisions are made. The constraints are to minimize overhead of capturing the following elements of design decisions:

• context
  
• root cause of problem
  
• constraints on solution
  
• how problem is solved
  

Pattern: decision, intent, context, forces, resolution, predecessors

This talk was interesting because the speaker described the impact of the course and the feedback from his students. In general, computer science students either dropped the course because there were no coding assignments, or they really liked the class because it opened new doors to their own design patterns and helped them to gain much greater understanding of how and when in the development process design decisions are made and the factors at play. It also gave students a low-overhead mechanism for questioning and deconstructing their designs that many put into regular practice during the semester.

Chromatic Prototypes for Information Systems, M. McCool

This presentaiton began with a review of Newton's Optiks, 1704 and discovery of primary colors or 'colors unto themselves'. The presenter then referred to the work of Berlin & Kay and Mussell color chips, an array with cultural implications of color. the Mussel color chips resulted in a chromatic sequence that follows black/white: red, green/yellow, blue, then grey/orange/indigo/pink. Neuroscientific visual system for humans color spectrum matches closely the chromatic sequence. So, the paper asks if it is possible to use the chromatic sequence to code hierarchy of information to apply themes, improve retention, search, and navigation.

Information Salience and Interpreting Information, Mike Alberto, East Carolina University

Current problems include search, information overload, finding the chunk you need and making it linear. Information salience and problems that diminish described in the talk, as follows:

• Information occupies too much of the display
  
• Information is hard to integrate
  
• Remembering subtle cause and effect of information relationships
  
• Difficulty of unseen information
  

Designing for salience takes into account the following:

• Difference between designer and reader
  
• Not one-size-fits-all
  
• Timing of presentation (too early vs. too late)
  
• Signal to noise ratio of information
  

The effects of presentation:

• Cues get attention
  
• Privileged in order viewed
  
• Users think they use more information than they do
  
• Readers look for confirmation of assumptions
  
• Invisible or unseen is ignored
  

Redundant information can increase salience, but can also overemphasize problems or cautions.

Summary

Overall, a really interesting set of talks and I wish I'd stayed for the following day of presentations. Partly because the content was so excellent, but also because being on campus was really fun and I would have enjoyed a quick trip to Juarez while I was so close. But, I jumped on a plane next morning, extremely tired after four conferences in same number of weeks, very happy to be heading back home.

Santa Clara California, USA
October 15-16, 2007
~150 Attendees

I attended the SMI Open Source Summit in Santa Clara last month, following are my notes.

I was a speaker at the event, so I got to sit up front at the speaker tables, but it was like a Lutheran congregation, with everyone filling up the back pews, and only a few folks daring enough to sit front and center. I saw Flip up there though, so I joined him. Flip and Emily and the rest of Simon's Open Source Group did a great job scheduling the event, keeping presentations timely, and explaining the activities. Kudos to the team for pulling it all off in such short time. Everyone's a critic, of course, so here are my wish list items for next time: more advance notice, fewer executive presentations, and more women on the panels.

Keynote

Simon Phipps kicked off the event by introducing Johnathan Schwartz. Johnathan got some familiar and tough internal questions right off the top, that he answered in a familiar and tough manner. I wrote down that, as CEO, Johnathan's main responsibilities are threefold:

• pick good people
  
• allocate budgets to them
  
• tell people his vision
  

Plus that blogging thing he does in his spare time. Note to self, this gets one out of answering a lot of specific questions swiftly. I think that, for this audience, more answers would have been better. Johnathan does know leadership and to him, leadership = courage. The courage to innovate, question, collaborate, develop leaders, and act first.

10 Ways to Kill Your Community: Josh Berkus

Josh's talk was the best presentation of the event, in my opinion. His presentation style is expert and the content was referred throughout the following two days of talks because it was so damn good. Here are the nine ways that I wrote down:

• Be Silent
  
• Document Nothing
  
• Stop outside commits
  
• Obfuscate Governance
  
• Hold closed meetings
  
• Legalese
  
• Encourage Poisonous People
  
• Make Tools Difficult
  
• Change Licenses
  

I guess I was laughing too hard to note down that tenth way to kill your community. In many ways we've all done all of these things and it was nice to have a good laugh about it and be reminded how deadly these are for communities trying to build software together.

Josh was followed by two expert panels on joining, forming, and working in communities. For good reason, we work in teams and organizations inside Sun and there is strict hierarchy everywhere, so community work is very different and very new and the experts did a good job of describing how to walk the lines of the corporate life of assignments and community life of contributions. We must always do both corporate and community and finding a balance while getting both into agreement is the core competency of the group who attended this summit. I was proud to be one of them.

Lightening Talks

I proposed a lightening talk on OpenSolaris documentation that was accepted, so I presented one slide entitled Credibility and Communication. I introduced my talk with the most important function of documentation: providing new information types.

If you do nothing else, develop new information types to address the biggest software problems you face. In OpenSolaris, the first big problem is learning, so we created a mini-curriculum. It is a small 5X7 hard-copy guide to OpenSolaris communities, user groups, core features, userland, processes, scheduling and debugging, with ~20 labs on ZFS, Zones, Networking, and DTrace in seven languages. It also has a companion instructor guide for professors. The second big problem was installation. So, we created a starter kit to provide LiveCDs, training, documentation, videos, step-by-step instructions, and resources for installing OpenSolaris and we translated it into seven languages. These two new information types (mini-book & starter kit) touched 100,000 Solaris newbies this year in a fresh, informal manner that we hope will bring them back to our technology and build out our community.

The rest of my five-minute lightening talk was bread & butter:

• Change acceptance process (CAP) - Internal writers need processes, exercises, meetings, and web pages to help them learn how to work in the open, how to transition to using new tools and foremost, how to understand licensing of their content and how their job changes.
  
• Outreach - You must reach out to other groups and projects to offer them documentation services, advise, support, and to answer questions and comments on mailing lists. This includes attending user groups and conferences and introducing yourself to developers, sysadmins, and enthusiasts in order to understand their use cases, problems, and needs.
  
• Contribution - You must contribute your documentation source files to the commons so that developers can use your stuff and make cool new stuff with it, translate it, re-spin it, and redistribute it to anyone anywhere who wants to know about your technology.
  
• Recognition - You must recognize and praise and cheerlead contributors and their contributions and welcome them and their valuable skills to your projects.

  Press Panel

  
  Simon followed with a panel of the press, Tony Wasserman of Carnegie Mellon, Ashley Vance of The Register, Fabian of OpenJDK governing board and Brazilian Java Enthusiast, and Dalibor Topich of OpenJDK governing board.

  What is going well: Relationships, developer conferences, open processes and descriptions of processes.

  What do we need to fix: Make processes more transparent and figure out decision-making.

  What do we need to overcome: Sun and other HW company histories

  How are we doing with users: Don't oversell and improve services

  In general, the press panel was very positive on our open source efforts, finding very little fault with the efforts behind OpenSolaris and OpenJDK and declaring that we've completely turned around perceptions of Sun software in two years time.

  Ian Murdock

  
  Ian followed with a short talk about OpenSolaris, and he specifically talked about the support model for OpenSolaris. Some in the room questioned how this support model will be in place by March, and he assured that it would be ready. Ian also talked about articulating the relationship between OpenSolaris and Solaris. DAY 1 closed with a fish bowl exercise, which is a free form discussion between anyone in the designated chairs (fish bowl).

Santa Cruz, CA USA
October 13-14th, 2007
~90 Attendees

I attended the OpenSolaris Developer's Summit in Santa Cruz last month. It was a great chance to catch up with folks I met last Feb. in Berlin, meet new members of the project, and take time to be with local friends and co-workers. Ian Murdock gave the keynote, followed by presentations from Stephen Hahn, Ph.D., Dave Miner, and David Comay on the first day. Here are my notes and impressions.

Keynote

Ian opened with his intention to host an informal face-to-face meeting in preparation for Milestone1 of project Indiana. He introduced himself in the context of his work on the Linux Standards Base. He then discussed the problems we face, what we should emphasize and how to attract mind-share.

Problems:
-Packaging and presentation; how to lower barriers to immediate productivity

-Distribution model; regular schedule

Emphasis:
Unique OSOL features: ZFS, Zones, DTrace, etc.

Mindshare:
Attract users with OSOL uniqueness

He then opened the room for introductions and we all stated our purpose for being there. It was really great to hear from everyone right at the start, kudos to Ian for keeping it short and allowing all of us to know a bit about the group. Take a look at here for the complete list of participants and their affiliations. Pretty impressive list, I was thrilled to see that five individuals who attended the conference affiliate with the Documentation community.

Image Packaging System

Stephen Hahn followed Ian with a presentation of pkg(5) slides that describe the new packaging technology he's been working on. Check his blog above for slides. I was really impressed by the talk, I haven't seen Stephen speak publicly, and it was a pleasure to hear his oral presentation of the technology, the problems it solves, those it does not, and all the thought and consideration that go into this type of new system and implications for the existing system. Refer to pkg.opensolaris.org and the documentation.
A snapshot of useful commands:

pkg freeze
pkg refresh
pkg status
pkg install


Installation and Upgrade

Dave Miner then described Slim install, Snap upgrade, Distribution Constructor and Caimen projects. He demonstrated the LiveCD and it booted in under a minute. Just like that. Dave is really a friendly person face-to-face, with a great sense of humor and a gentle manner that you might not expect from his online presence as a technical expert.

Note: A message came across the opensolaris-help discussion list today from a Windows user with the subject line: I have installed Solaris: Now what? Kudos to Dave and his team for making this situation possible. The same operating system that is used on supercomputers and Project BlackBox is now installable by mere mortals who've never even used Linux. Two years ago this reality was a pipe dream, that a windows user would be stuck trying to figure out what to do with our commercial-grade OS at the ready from their laptop! What will the next two years bring?

Decision-Making

We broke out for sack lunches in the courtyard. Santa Cruz campus is really beautiful, moist from the ocean, sitting atop a hill that overlooks the Pacific and nestled in among Redwoods. Deer and wildlife were mingling all around us each morning as we arrived and bedding down as we returned to our hotels.

Ian sat next to me, confirming recent reports that I am 'approachable'. He began a discussion of decision-making practices in OpenSolaris, and specifically wanted to know how decisions are made for commercial Solaris inside Sun. The answer is a combination of black magic, funding models, business owners, committee approvals, and technical feasibility. Do we model this process in OpenSolaris? Answer: not yet. The crux of this discussion was the need for partners to have a voice in decision-making for OpenSolaris if they are to participate in the community and code-base development.

From a bottom-up perspective, I perform decision-making on behalf on the Documentation community, largely by polling members for opinions, taking those data points back to technical experts, rounding it with management strategies, then proposing solutions back to the community. When I hit a roadblock, I adjust and communicate it all again until it hits the roadmap. Then, I schedule the work and bang through issues until we make the delivery of best possible solution. Solution becomes obsolete, wash, rinse, repeat. This is how to survive and thrive in software, you just stick in there, knowing that the new solution is better than the last, and understanding that tomorrow, you'll need to begin work on something better.

Modernization

David Comay presented his work on modernization, describing what is supported vs. unsupported, interface stability, and matching processes to user expectations. Discussion was very lively and my notes are limited. We talked about moving commands, SFW and usr/bin. David described evaluating replacement of commands and how to engage with the community in all cases. He presented the case for compatibility and took us through the strictness required to preserve it and where we need to make informed choices and do refactoring. See Familiarization for a more complete perspective on all the topics and issues that are at play in this area.

Evening Events

We broke for steak dinner and drinks after this final session. The atmosphere was lovely, candles lit, fancy appetizers, free beers and wine, the works. I have to hand it to the Indiana team here. In my six years at Sun, this was far and away the most expensive event I've ever had the privilege of attending. I felt truly appreciated and it was a bit of heaven. We all mingled and took photos, laughed and talked about what we could contribute to Indiana. We discussed naming in advance of the talk we knew would happen the following day. We broke bread together under the stars and it was just a real delight. We headed for the hotel for brief stop, then about ten of us went out in downtown Santa Cruz for drinks and more mingling until it got late, and we all found our way back to the Coast to rest our brains.

DAY 2

Sunday morning began with a discussion of naming and branding. Boy howdy, I hate naming and branding, inside Sun, outside Sun, my own songs never even have titles. I once had a band and our entire set list was a numeric list, songs were named in the order in which we wrote them, because I so hate naming. So, I slept in on Sunday. So did Martin Bochnig, and I picked him up on his way up the arduous hill climb to the University. Not because I thought he would leave the community this week, of course. Martin, if you read this, you can always come back. We understand you. I do, at least. I've been broke and dreaming of a job at Sun too, I get it. Let's meet up in Poland next year, OK? Goddamn, my approachability...

Naming & Branding

Anyways, I came in late to the naming/branding presentation and the tension was palpable. So thick it could be cut with a knife, and me with barely a cup of coffee in my belly. Difficult to stomach it was in person as it was on list Oct 31st. We continue to stink at naming and terminology. Let's just admit it. OpenSolaris was poor choice from the start, because it infringes on existing Sun trademark. But, it stuck, of course. Now, we have multitude of meanings for OpenSolaris, none of them technically = binary except in the minds of every new person who wants OpenSolaris. I don't envy the position of Ian and Sarah in this mess. But, of course, I see a way out of it--so easy when it's not my job nor my core competency, more like my core deficiency! Here is my opinion anyways.

First, we let go the dream of 'one' binary. We have five to eight Solaris binaries today, so a goal of ONE is lofty at best. Let's go for two or three, then iterate until we get to one. This will require discussions, roadmaps, meetings, and voting, BTW. This needs an owner who will not give up for the next two years in their quest. And who will at every turn, be there to bring up the cause of proper naming and branding in all public and private discussions. I mean a nag that never ends until we reach agreement that serves the user. Notice the font. Ian and Sarah are dead right that we need one thing, to get rid of confusion for users.

We just need to phase it in. Right now, Solaris Express is the reference distribution. Deal with that first. Handle Community Edition next. Then, grapple with Developer Edition. SXDE was the original Indiana, came down from on-high and incorporated the first contributions into a Sun binary at behest of executives. What is that quote about history repeating? Now, what about Nevada? There's a train we need to understand most and has again different cadence from all the rest.

• nevada=bi-weekly code
  
• SXCE=monthly binary
  
• SXDE=quarterly binary
  
• S10Updates=quarterly binary
  
• Indiana=bi-quarterly binary
  

Above is the scary truth, folks. The same engineers, writers, testers are delivering into all of these releases simultaneously all year long. What this feels like is getting run over by a different train every two weeks. After five years of this, you really don't care what the train is called, you just know it is coming and avoid the tracks. Seriously. No one gets that all these releases are different, but same individuals are making them happen all the time. I can't say this enough. Deal with this problem and the naming/branding issue solves itself. Naming is a red herring to the problem of too many release trains.

Documentation

After the naming discussion, I broke out for my unconference talk on Documentation. We had eight folks in the room to discuss the topic, so I was pleased with 10% interest. Here is the list of potential Documentation community contributions to Indiana that I presented for the group:

• Consolidations: Docs Man Pages
  
• PDFs
  
• Indiana docs
  
• HowTos
  
• FAQ
  
• Glossary
  
• Specs
  
• Articles
  
• Printable manuals
  
• SMF doc
  
• Starter Kit
  
• Curriculum

  I presented each of the areas above and we discussed them as a group. We talked a lot about man pages, these are truly critical to the success of OpenSolaris and we need to engage with the Emancipation project on some of the issues raised. We talked about the Desktop experience and desktop documentation that users need beyond that which is provided by GNOME today. We discussed repositories and usage for documentation. We discussed BigAdmin resources and MediaWiki to DocBook XML. I passed around the curriculum mini-guide and the latest Starter Kit. It was exciting to talk with folks in person, hear from them and feed off of their excitement. Irene, from Beijing, responded to me right away with question about the desktop doc requirements, so I'm working on a plan to help her help us create a great user experience.

  Website Redesign

  
  Finally, I attended the Website Redesign discussion led by Derek Cicero. This was pretty interesting, considering where we are today with the website. This is where the seeds of the change that happened on the front page on Oct. 31st began. This is where it was publicly discussed, in a single meeting at the Developer's conference on October 14th, attended by about ten members of the community. Within 10 working days a change was mandated, so Derek designed it and put it up there, and pulled it down again when the community reacted unfavorably. Pulling the new front page was a good-faith effort by Sun and the OGB and others are still discussing/determining next steps for defining the reference distribution. What I do know is that new graphics and designs are likely to be underway or contracted in coming weeks. We need to get on this as a community right away, like yesterday, if we are to have our say. Let's not wait until March to have this happen all over again. Let's talk about it on website-discuss, propose our ideas and iterate before it is too late and Sun feels the need to act independently again. We must be faster than ourselves! my ideas:

  Co-opt the branding of solarisinternals.com, using the car as our motif/icon. We can have Jack, but listen-up, we must also have Jill, Jack's quick-witted countepart, testing his faulty code/configurations and writing everything down. Just my opinion. In the 'auto' motif, we have the two cars: Nevada and Indiana respectively and if you want the truck (BlackBox) you go to Sun for that. One car is blue one is orange. If you need support, go to the various pits: sunsolve, docs.sun.com, sun.com/training. Just my ideas. I plant seeds.

  Summary

  
  Overall a great conference! I learned a lot, met new folks I will know for a long time, and just got inspired and energized around Indiana and the opensolaris community all over again. I look forward to the next conference, to incorporating more of our doc offerings into pkg(5) packages for download and updating the Starter Kit for the new world.

The founder of Lotus speaks at Berkeley in a three part series, following are my notes from the first part.

Mitch identifies most strongly with Long Island in the 1960's and the Pastrami sandwich. He enjoyed a white, middle-class education with special access to computers in his youth due to Sputnik1. Today, Mitch supports important programs like SMASH and Ideal Scholars, both summer programs at UCB for underrepresented youth.

After college, Mitch spent time in Boston, where DEC built mini-computers in the 1970's. Now DEC is totally gone, mini-computers having been completely replaced by PCs. How does this 'disruption' happen?

Disruption occurrs in print media, taking Computer LIB / Dream Machines as an example of how a document can be totally inspiring and dead wrong all at once, yet still herald a new era.

Disruption occurrs in hardware, the Altair 8800, first PC in 1975, Basic, and papertape. Then the AppleII in 1977. Mitch told classic story of how he crossed state lines to buy an AppleII because he only had enough money for it without the sales tax. (He was just working as a DJ and giving talks on transcendental meditation at this time during his 20s.)

Disruption occurrs in new communities, with the AppleII and the first Basic software product, a community begins to form out of programmers who hang out at the computer store (presumably between meditation sessions). AppleII user group is formed.

Then, disruption in software, Visicalc, the first spreadsheet, legitimizes the industry. Mitch worked on a product called TinyTroll that he sold to Visicalc and that money seeded the beginning of what we now know as Lotus.

Then, more hardware disruption, IBM's 16-bit machine. Mitch ported Lotus to this 16 bit machine and took it to COMDEX. Wrote $1 million in orders on the show floor. Did $50 million first year and 100 million the next. He was part of a bigger phenomenon, a new platform.

What else worked, besides hanging at the computer store, joining a user group, and porting good software to new platforms?

• Ads in the Wall Street Journal
  
• Help screen
  
• Usability
  
• Hired hands to demonstrate and sell product for dealers
  
• Building humanitarian company values around constant change
  

Q&A session:

What are the differentiating factors that lead to longevity of Lotus?
A: leadership, willingness to change, strong culture

Why didn't Rickland patent the spreadsheet?
A: IANAL, but patent was not a legal option in 1979 (further discussion with very techie guy who still has his Altair 8800 about the first true spreadsheet...)

What did you take for granted in your life that has helped you to be successful?
A: family stability, location stability enabling freedom of long-term planning

What makes a humanitarian company?
A: Respect, humor, and Managment bonuses that are tied to value-based behavior as seen in the eyes of their employees. Set up an anonymous communication channel with actions required. Disallow superiors from pushing others around. Mitch feels that the culture of Lotus had more lasting impact than the product.

What is the future of disruptive technologies?
Robots, virtual worlds, what is a game? and Skepticism. More in part II.
Note: I missed partII last evening, but will attend final partIII.

What can you say about proprietary versus open source?
Open source has unique value, but is a mistake to rely on that entirely, because you need the right incentives to get the right things done. The challenge is how they live together (os and prop.).

Sept. 29th, 2007 (where does the time go?)
------------------------------------------

The 2007 Fall event proceedings of the Sun Enigineering and Enrichment mentoring program were both well-attended and inspirational. I completed my six-month term in June and blogged about the SEED program here. The Fall event is the largest of the year and presents a great opportunity for any SEED alumni to attend, hear from new and old leaders, learn about global programs outside their own specialty, and get a sense of the questions on the minds of Sun's up-and-coming, uh, seeds.

This event began with a talk by Whitfield Diffie. Unfortunately, I missed his talk, and only caught the end of Q&A related to concerns about electronic voting and security in a contract/outsource model. Needless to say Whit has strong concerns about both areas and I can only hope to hear more on his thoughts at an upcoming wine tasting, where he is often found.

Jud Cooley presented following Whit, on the topic of Project Blackbox. The Blackbox tour has now been extended to South America and plans for Asia tour next year are underway. The box has an 8-12 week build cycle and regular production will begin with 2-3 boxes per month.

Jud talked about two major trends in the data center:

• Getting people out of the DC
  
• Over-provisioning so any failures are simply replaced globally at a set time later

Worldwide data centers produce 200M tons of CO2, Sun's contribution is 10K tons. Two blackboxes have been put into production so far. The first in Russia (Glycol installation) at MTS, the second in California at Stanford Linear Accelerator. Two more were expected in October time frame. Eleven have been built so far and 3 more are under construction.

The Q&A session about BlackBox included the following topics:

Q: What about Rackable and their recently announced competing Concentro product?
A: It is not released yet, currently is more of a one-off implementation which only supports Rackable hardware.

Q: Is there a try & buy option for Black Box?
A: (laughter)

Q: What about reliability?
A: There is no real data on reliability yet, but conceptually, reliability should be better because of increased control of the environment provided with BlackBox.

The SEED showcase followed with a presentation of Open Provisioning Toolkit (OpenPTK) by Fehrman and Sigle of SSO/Identity space. OpenPTK is for provisioning users, not software. This toolkit enables you to control and provision user interfaces with backend access, directory services, and identity credentials.

Seema then followed with a higer-level discussion of open source work. She defined the various aspects of a project that you need to be successful:

• Roadmap - voting and forums
  
• Project mgmt - timing of fixes and features
  
• Development - branches and main gate
  
• Evangelism - within and outside communities
  
• User community - trials and feedback
  
• Documentation - developer role
  
• Localization - developer role
  
• Marketing - formal events and branding
  

I was so impressed with Seema's ability to synthesize into one manageable list the most important aspects of an open source project.

Diann Olden (my new VP) began the afternoon talks with an overview of management basics that have served her well in her career path to VP of Global Product Development and Operations, currently under Rich Green. Two core values are:

-Aim High: this is your vision and mission
-Collaborate: this is teamwork and processes

To achieve 24X7 support for customers, for example, the most important processes are the hand-off processes. Efficiency and effectiveness of hand-off processes in 24X7 service world will save your bacon.

Cascading down from there, you might have committees, as follows:
-Weekly TCE: technical steering committee that ensures the strategic vision meets tactical actions
-Partners: technical managers and ppl managers, tech. mgrs. assess risk, timing & roadmap;
ppl managers are in charge of morale

Golden rule: hold yourself accountable for what you said you would do.

Always expect the following:
-The unexpected! When you get the unexpected, adjust and communicate again.
-To measure the business goals, in order: people, process, customer, quality.

Greg Papadopoulos, Ph.D., CTO, Executive Vice President of Research and Development wrapped up the day of talks. He started with open source and processes. Greg referred to Innovation Happens Elsewhere, and talked about how free software (like freedom) encourages others to work on your software, but most importantly, free software is cool and helps others to build cool stuff. Cool is the sticky part, not free.

Greg then talked about copyright and patent briefly, reminding that copyright is the right to copy, patent is the right to stop build. License is the community agreement. Greg was going to get into his 8 core values of innovation management, but took questions instead. All but a few questions were related to OpenSolaris. I'm on OSOL all day every day for two years, so I found this an interesting, but not earth-shattering discussion. At Sun, lots of questions is just lots of questions sometimes. There is a tension between S10 and Indiana, that much we know. Go to to get involved in the 200+ projects and forums underway.

DAY2-------------------------------------

Mike Splain, CTO office, started off our second day of SEED talks. He discussed the culture at Sun and defined it in simple terms: bottom-up creation; top-down synthesis. From a business strategy perspective, Mike views internet ubiquity as main driver of demand for Sun innovations. He cites the current portfolio, margins, awards, and Recommend Sun Index (RSI) as positive indicators. Negative is developer growth.

Technical alignment across enterprise and consumer functions is what we need to help adoption and to address deployer problems of today (not enough of everything: space, cooling, power). We are supposed to use CTO, PACs, and technical review committees to inspect the portfolio and then create a strategic plan. Most recently, that order has become reversed, such that we set a plan before we define the strategy and CTO office needs to fix it. What can the rest of us do to help?

• Align across Sun, reach out and make good choices about what you work on each day!
  
• Understand urgency
  
• Stay energized and aggressive
  
• Learn and tell the Sun story often
  
• Recruit
  
• Understand customers
  
• Speak up!
  

Above all else:

• Integrity and honesty
  
• Look in the mirror first
  
• Manage your own career
  
• Choose your boss and peers as carefully as you choose projects
  
• We are here to do reasonable things
  
• Get a life outside of Sun.
  

I attended the rest of the morning sessions, then had to return to regular duties that afternoon. The engineers from Beijing were wonderful to hear from, they talked about globalization, the user groups they've started in China, and University involvement there, very exciting and interesting presentation. The SEED program is just a great way to recharge worn batteries every six months by hearing from thought leaders and technical superstars at Sun, I will always make time in my schedule to participate in this awesome event.

I attended the 2007 CEC as a pavilion staffer in support of OpenSolaris documentation and my department, Information Products Group (IPG). CEC was attended by about 4,000 other folks between October 7-10.

It was my first time at this conference and I spent all of it talking with sales, professional services, engineers, and partners about documentation and Solaris. The Las Vegas location meant that it was very sunny and warm, but none of us actually went out into it. That is, most folks I met didn't leave the hotel for the first 48 hours. Vegas is just like that, so sunny on the inside, there is no reason to go out.

My first day was full of registration details, orientation, and preparing for the pavilion floor evening event. They provided buffet dinner in the pavilion Sunday night, so that night was the best attendance in the pavilion by far. The pavilion was setup for demonstration pods and was a gathering place between conference sessions to check out new technologies and offerings.

The IPG pod was staffed by myself, Dwayne Wolff, and Ken Harper. We had a multi-media kiosk with new videos, screencasts, and documentation hubs to showcase. This kiosk was also compressed to fit on USB, so we had lots of folks download it for later use. I had the OpenSolaris Starter Kit running on my laptop and a copy of the English OpenSolaris student guide.

The highlight of visitors to our pod was Radia Perlman, best known for the creation of the Spanning-Tree algorithm that is used in all network bridges and switches. She is just so inspirational and having never met her before I was very excited. She is very personable, kind, and easy-going. She talked with us for a long while, indulged my request for pictures, and told us funny stories about how she became a Sun Fellow. It was a delight!

Customers and partners I met who are using Solaris 10 08/07 were very excited to see someone from documentation. In my very short two years in this job and just a handful of conferences, I've never had folks so excited to meet me. Reason: DOCS DVD. For Solaris 10 08/07 there is available a DVD ISO for download that includes 400+ PDF documents covering stem-to-stern S10U4 and every other Sun software product you can run with S10U4. Customers are so thrilled with this Doc DVD, they lit up when I introduced myself as a pubs person and then went on to tell me how tickled and surprised they were to have that ISO available and how much we deserve more kudos in tech. pubs for all the awesome documentation we provide for Sun products. They were gushing unsolicited.

I talked with data center system administrators about the Solaris installer. Overall, the feedback was good, fdisk is still a sore spot, and some default ports are not recognized by one particular NIC on a newer box. The video of the new installer was a great way to facilitate this conversation, we had it running on the big monitor while we talked and at each new frame, the sysadmin would describe the particulars of his most recent DC experience.

I work on OSOL all day every day, so being surrounded by customer engineers who serve a huge percentage of Sun customers running Solaris 9 and earlier releases was a new perspective for me. It might have hurt my overall 'sense of urgency' somewhat because I realize the gigantic number of customers who still haven't touched even Solaris 10 yet. Heck, I ran S9 U5 untouched for better part of 5 years on my SPARC box and was clam-happy, so I understand why folks don't move to new environments rapidly. But, this is where hardware really comes into play and why Sun is unique company to have strong portfolios on both sides. New hardware platforms disrupt, and software that aims to disrupt must keep up with those new platforms. More on that topic in a coming entry...

In general, at these conferences, I ask one opening question that leads down many roads: Do you run Solaris? Sometimes this leads to the starter kit, sometimes to a discussion of SPARC/x86, sometimes a long-winded explanation of an installation attempt that failed or an application that only runs on another browser. We talk about porting, Caimen, LiveCDs and eventually office product suites. At CEC, I heard more complaints about calendaring and diagrams than ever before. These are the pain points for engineers who support our blue-shift customers: calendar tools must be equivalent to outlook and graphics tools must import to-from Visio and be readable in Visio. I asked about the Thunderbird calendar plug-in and was told it is too hard to setup. I asked about StarOffice and was told they need to provide Visio format. These are the same guys who don't particularly like OpenSolaris because they can't find a way to sell into it, but I still think the pain points are probably valid barriers to their use of Solaris on x86.

What I also learned was that our customer engineers need training and getting started information about Solaris 10. They could use a cookbook for learning Solaris 10. Maybe a top 10 topics would include: default shell, SMF tips, zones basics, ZFS basics, soffice suite, thunderbird & calendar, firefox, networking & FireEngine, FMA, and DTrace?

I'm about to bang out several interesting blogs about my recent attendance at local and regional conferences in support of OpenSolaris documentation, but before I do and because Patrick requested it, I give you two songs of my own:
Home Again
Katie's Song