Andy McFarlane - Campus Ambassador @ Edinburgh University, UK Steadily Sunward

I recently had the pleasure of doing my first ever podcast for Sun. CampusCast - which is produced by the Sun Developer Network, and hosted by the amiable Tina Bhasin and Jordan Slott (thanks guys!) - is a monthly global podcast in which a campus ambassador is invited to share their experiences of the role.

The podcast was a great forum for reflecting on the challenges and successes of the job to date. Great questions from Tina and Jordan led me to wax lyrical (and sometimes wanderingly!...) about Sun's open source strategy and what students make of it. We looked at ideas for running and growing the OSUM community, and I explained how coming from a predominantly non-technical background can actually add value to the CA role. Jordan and my shared love of good Scotch whiskey also gets a mention. :)   

You can listen to the whole thing here.

Enjoy! :)

I held my first Sun tech demo just before leaving for the beautiful city of Chicago in October (thanks for the pic Cathy! >). This was the first of a series of events planned for this semester. More to the point, it was the first opportunity for the OSUM community to occupy physical, rather than virtual, space together. So...how did we get on?

Let me say that it proved to be a really great evening for us all, as is documented by the many photos and video that were taken, and which you can find posted here. The fifty students who turned up enjoyed their free pizza, but they were also introduced to Sun and the Sun Academic Iniative (SAI) through my custom-made presentation. They were told how Sun is giving them the tools and the know-how - the software and the free training in that software - to innovate and participate effectively on the network.

That is a vision students found compelling. What inspired them from the presentation, they said, is the idea that Sun invests in them, with no obvious catch. What I tried to communicate through talking about Sun's founding and history, and its commitment to open source software development, is that Sun does not see them as simple receivers - as people to throw free stuff at in the hope they will soon find themselves locked into using paid-for software which they stand little hope of ever influencing the development of.

Adoption is of course important; and business strategies must always bear the desired fruit if companies such as Sun wish to remain on the wavefront of innovation. But the point I like to stress in conversations with people is that the open source model Sun has chosen allows students to see themselves as agents rather than 'patients' with regards to software and its development. Sun's investment through the SAI equips them to be active contributors to the process. And this not in isolation, but as part of a like-minded community that shares the same core values.

As someone involved in the education of others, I find this an appealing vision, and therefore one that is easy to share - whatever the eventual pay-off for Sun. Indeed, if recent Gartner reports are right, then the open source path may well be a risky one for Sun to tread, but it would appear to be no less virtuous for that. 

Find more photos like this on Open Source University Meetup

Since my first event, I've been thinking about how to further build my OSUM group, and how other student groups within my department, such as the Computer Society (CompSoc), might help with this challenge. In truth, CompSoc at my Uni has been more than helpful. Our collaboration has boosted numbers and extended the reach of the OSUM beyond what could have been realistically envisaged at the start of term.

So how did this constructive synergy forge, what form does it take, and what benefits can similar ventures impart to ambassadors and their communities? The long and the short of this particular tale is as follows.

CompSoc at my university runs single-interest groups often geared to web development or robotics projects. So I got CompSoc's committee to formally approve my OSUM as one such group. The agreement between our groups runs thus. On their side, CompSoc gets the kudos of being associated with a company as prestigious as Sun and having regular events added to its calendar. It resultantly receives a boost to its membership and increased attendance at its own events. I also promote their events at mine, and they promote mine at theirs. And all this at no cost to them: event overheads are paid for by Sun, and any time cost associated with maintaining websites and the mailing list is mitigated by the Campus Ambassador, whose responsibility that remains!

In exchange for this, my OSUM takes advantage of the support infrastructure offered by CompSoc to evangelise. In a nutshell, I get practical help in the organisation of events and am able to utilise their mailing lists to communicate my message. So, rather than one person eeking out a forlorn existence in the corner of his department, the ambassador's effort is galvanised, critiqued, and driven forward by the invaluable contributions of the CompSoc committee. What's more, the cost savings enjoyed by CompSoc makes the free space the ambassador needs to direct the OSUM.

Let me take the long view for a moment. The task of building a community on campus is one fraught with difficulties - progress can evaporate as quickly as it is made. A group functioning well one year can find it difficult to get itself off the ground the next. So the biting question is what makes a community endure? How can progress be sustained over a period of years, given that ambassadors will leave and others will fill their place?

Here I think we can and must learn from analogues to community building that exist in other spheres. I can point to the challenges involved in building a regular Friday night youth club, for instance. A team of youth workers parachuted into an area for two weeks may well generate a vibrant youth community. But experience shows that after they leave, such communities often dissipate, normally because the area lacked the infrastructure or interest to sustain such activities long-term. In contrast, surely part of the reason youth clubs in the UK (e.g. The Boy's Brigade) often survived across generations is that, apart from the hard work and dedication of their leaders, they were linked to something stable within an existing local community, whether that was a school, church, or community centre.

The lesson to learn from this is that establishing links - or better put, good relationships - with fixed points in the departmental community can only benefit the long-term health of our OSUM clubs. These 'fixed points' can be student or staff groups, research seminars for PhD students, CompSoc, and the rest - and these will likely morph over the years, too. To draw on my particular example, I've linked the OSUM with CompSoc, a recognised fixed-point in most UK CompSci departments (despite poor attendance in some!).

In conclusion, I am keen to admit that what I have described is only part of a coherent response to the question of how to build lasting OSUM communities. Indeed, one must also identify the core values around which OSUM communities should form and persist, as well as grasp the mechanisms by which such values keep a community together. So there remains work to do - and much reading to be done! :)

However, what we can say is that, when effectively executed, this part of the strategy works to secure Sun's continuing presence in the student sphere. That is, by tying our OSUMs to these fixed points we formalise or consolidate awareness of Sun within the department. In and with that, the formal nature of the sort of agreement described above should allow future ambassadors - theoretically at least! - to benefit from the support infrastructure offfered by CompSoc. Hopefully, they won't have to start from square one precisely because key relationships are already identified and in place.

This week sees the Sun social at Edinburgh kick into gear, with the first gathering of the OSUM taking place on Thursday. This event will introduce students to Sun, and to the vision that drives its commitment to student developers. I believe that commitment manifests itself in two clear and connected ways. First, in Sun's willingness to provide, under the open-source model, the tools and technologies so that student developers can forge the pioneering apps and utilities of tomorrow. And second, in the Sun Academic Initiative, a scheme whereby students can develop competency in using these tools through free on-line courses, with Sun certification the desired goal for many.

This event marks the beginning of a renewed attempt to further embed Sun into the consciousness of students and staff at the University. Indeed, I'll be working hard on three fronts this year: with students, academic staff and researchers, and IT infrastructure staff. Yours truly is hosting follow up tech-demos for students in the near future on OpenSolaris and ZFS, and is co-hosting another on MySQL. But those aside, what will undoubtedly breathe extra excitement and life into my OSUM's activities is the slew of eminent guest speakers who have agreed to visit the Athens of the North this year. In the spring of 2009, Dr. Clive King will hold a seminar on DTrace and HPC, and shall hopefully address the IT Professionals' Forum on the topic of risk management. He is one of several visitors I am looking forward to hosting.

Being a CA, I'm well aware of Sun's commitment to students in Higher Education, but this summer I was pleased to be given the chance to help my mentor, Stuart Caie (bottom picture), run a Sun stall at a careers fair for secondary school pupils aged 15-17. Apparently, numbers of people entering the IT industry are falling in the UK, and so the fair is part of a country-wide attempt to redress the situation. Its aim is to pique youngters' interest in the industry by getting them to meet and ask questions of people from world-famous IT companies.

Our gargantuan Sun stand sat boldly alongside Google, Oracle and IBM's stalls – and a large, enthusiastic crowd soon gathered. Tech-savvy teenagers excitedly told us of their latest programming feat, whilst others were simply interested in working out what computer science promises for them. And success! All pupils knew the Java brand name and could identify its use on mobile devices – although most would not have associated it with Sun. Pupils were also intrigued to learn of the other pioneering things Sun does, and were impressed with Sun's commitment to its employees' well-being.

To engage the broader picture: from the small sample of pupils we met, interest in IT amongst the younger members of UK society is alive and well. What the event showed Stuart and me is that their imagination can and will be captured by companies that appear to them as socially-responsible, highly innovative, and willing to shun restrictive practices. But the question is how to translate the relatively short-term gains made at careers fairs into increased involvement in the IT industry. The factors are complex and rob us of easy answers. Pupils themselves say that if their interest is to be held and deepened, then the curriculum of secondary school courses in Computer Studies must, for one thing, be adapted to more accurately reflect their enthusiasm for web technologies.

(Originally posted on Saturday May 31, 2008)

Recent months have seen my trusty old IBM Thinkpad R32 become something of a Solaris sandbox. It is used weekly – and, periodically, daily – to give on-the-fly demos of Solaris features to students at the University. Of the many questions I get asked, there is none more frequently voiced than, ‘how easy is it to configure wireless network access?’ Up until now – goes the  reluctantly offered answer – it has not been straightforward: the default manual GUI network configuration utility does not support some encryption protocols that are in use today.

However, I was able to show my students just how all that is changing with the introduction of nwam(1M)– the network auto-magic utility. For those not yet up to speed, the nwam daemon automates the task of connecting to wired and wireless networks, offering a simplified approach to configuration whilst overcoming the limitations of the default network utility. Nwam is an exciting and ongoing OpenSolaris project; progress can be tracked here, and via its dedicated wiki. 

It was a real pleasure to show this off; it really is a great feature to have on a laptop!! Here's how I got it working...

Getting Started

To use network auto-magic, the advice from opensolaris.org is that you must first identify whether the system is currently using it or the standard manual configuration utility to handle network configuration. Do this by checking the status of the network service. Type:

    % svcs svc:/network/physical

If /…/physical:default is listed as online, then the system is using the manual utility. You will need to disable it, and then set the network service to use the nwam daemon instead. Do this by issuing the following commands:

    % svcadm disable svc:/network/physical:default

    % svcadm enable svc:/network/physical:nwam

Once enabled, the nwam daemon will look for a wired connection, and if none is found will then scan for available wireless networks. The results of that scan are presented to the user as a detailed list in a GUI window. After selecting the desired network, you will then be automatically prompted to enter security credentials, if any are required by the chosen network.

Once successfully connected, the daemon will in future automatically connect the user to that network when in range, without requiring the user to re-authenticate. A list of known wifi networks is stored in the file /etc/nwam/known_wifi_nets, and this can be edited to add, remove or modify entries as the user sees fit.

http://opensolaris.org/os/project/nwam/phase0/nwamd_1m/

Notes

• My experience (using a Cisco Aironet adapter - pcan0) is that nwam has problems switching from one known wireless network to another in the same session, with the result that it enters maintenance mode. I have resolved this by issuing the following command to bring it back online:

% svcadm clear svc:/network/physical:nwam

• nwam does not support two simultaneously active network connections.

• Users with onboard Intel networking have reported problems connecting to WPA protected networks using nwam.
• How to use nwam with Solaris zones is covered over at Solaris Desktop (blog).