Kool Aid Served Daily

It was the tail end of a internal OpenSolaris Storage Developer Program meeting. My office window was open, the AC wasn't on, and it was very muggy. In short, I wasn't paying total attention. They started talking about asking for something on one of the discussion forums. I still wasn't paying that close of attention. Jeff was volunteered to do the post. He pointed out that another Jeff, say Bonwick, would have more credibility.

Now it may have been muggy, but I never pass up a chance to tease someone. I told Jeff this was how he could start to make a name for himself. He could one day be just as famous as Bonwick. And Jeff replied that he had read my recent blog entry on how to make a name: What does it mean to contribute to OpenSolaris Communities and Projects?. And I would be perfect to make the posting. I said I'd do it, still fuzzy on just what I agreed to.

And yes, I understand Jeff is going to read this entry, that my management is going to see I was fuzzy in a meeting, etc. :> And I fully expect Jeff to tease me about this entry in the next meeting.

I was quick to put together that I had agreed to ask on storage-discuss what the wishlist of the community was for new projects. You can read (and reply to it) it here: Thread: OpenSolaris Storage Wishlist.

The title of this entry doesn't refer to the above part of the entry. I'm perfectly okay with people knowing I'm not perfect. No the title refers to the fact that I had a hard time writing the request because I realized I was effectively doing product marketing. What else do you call it when you ask your customers what new features they would like in your next release?

I never signed up to do marketing. I'm okay going out to meet customers on an escalation, but I'm not trained for this type of interaction.

But this is exactly the way Sun has to change if we really want OpenSolaris to be, well, open. It isn't enough to just dump code out there and declare that we are open source. We have to build working communities and we are hampered by the fact that the majority of our developmental population is inside Sun. It rubs open source purists the wrong way.

The reality is that we need the communities to evolve and we need external contributions. My request describes a very internal process development goes through periodically. We typically may not directly engage marketing in the lowlevel roadmap discussions. That isn't to say that marketing doesn't have a voice in our final roadmap - that would be suicidal. The final directional decisions are fully made with the marketplace in mind.

But the request is also an effort by Sun to change the process. We could still meet internally and push things over the wall. But we don't want to, we want to engage instead. I don't think we really know how to effectively engage the community. You can see that in my thinking it is product marketing. It really isn't. Instead it is changing some of our customers to contributers. But instead of contributing code, they contribute ideas and ways that development can help them deliver solutions to their customers.

And finally, we need to help developers interact with external people through forums, blogs, and email. I may not have been trained for this type of customer/contributer/community member interaction, but I need to do it. The fact that external people can converse with internal developers is very empowering to the community.