OSCON Community Leadership Summit

I've just come back enthused from having spent my entire weekend working.

Of course anyone who works in open source will recognize the effect: someone gives you a chance to learn from and inform a couple of hundred like-minded individuals and there goes the weekend. Didn't even go to the PyLadies informal Saturday gathering, normally a fixed point of the weekend when I'm at home (a sadly somewhat too rare occurrence still).

OSCON is celebrating its fifteenth anniversary this year, and four years ago Jono Bacon of Canonical engineered the first Community Leadership Summit. I participated in this fifth run more fully than in previous years, and have benefited from much collective wisdom.

As is my practice at conferences I spent a lot of time in the hallway track. I acquired this habit from years of organizing PyCon, when I would frequently be waylaid on my way to some session and end up having an amazingly interesting and informative discussion, meeting new people, broadening my knowledge of Python and the open source world generally. If I could hire all the people I know in the open source world (which I couldn't, even with unlimited capital, since many of them are pursuing their own dreams) I would be able to build an unbeatable distributed information systems engineering and operations team.

A couple of interesting facts appeared as the weekend went by. First of all, perhaps fifteen to twenty-five percent of those attending had no direct connection with the open source development world. Some of these people were enthusiastic users of open source projects, and others were community managers who have started to realize that the way the open source world uses a diverse distributed open toolkit to achieve its goals could be useful to them too.

Secondly, and perhaps largely as a result of the first, the open source crowd began to realize that as the community continues to become more diverse (yay, diversity!) we have to stop talking in jargon about things like "cloning git repositories" if we don't want these brave spirits who are here to learn about the social and organizational side of open source to be completely turned off by our inability to speak plain English*.

We might also need to consult with UX teams to ensure that our current technologies can be used as the basis of a layer that makes sense to people who don't have our intimate knowledge of the technologies but are nevertheless keen to learn and use our methods. That could represent a substantial challenge.

The lightning talks were uniformly inspiring. Jono was kind enough to say he really enjoyed mine, which was called Making Small Positive Differences. The tradition at the CLS is to set the talk times to accommodate everyone who signed up. I didn't know this, so like many of the other speakers I entered the room expecting a five-minute slot.

Fortunately I was fifth on the list, so I had time to go through my slides (did I mention there was no projector? another surprise, but what the hey, this is mostly an unconference) and extract the salient points into notes for a three-minute talk in my extremely convenient (and free) O'Reilly notebook.

Some of the gems of the lightnings for me included:

• Kevin Johnson's appeal to share our technology to the benefit of all
• Britta (?)'s suggestion that barriers to entry weren't always a bad thing, with examples of how they could work in a community's favor (without discouraging diversity?)
• Josh Hibbet's talk about CityCamp, which could become a nationwide (worldwide?) series of events to promote citizen participation and government transparency
• Gribble, an IRC bot built by SourceForge to be friendly and welcoming to new IRC community members
• Selena Deckleman's invitation to go and speak in a K-12 classroom
• Aaron Wolf's promotion of the Snowdrift Co-op
• A talk by someone [whose name I need to research so I can introduce him to a colleague with a keen interest in such matters] who has developed a way (if I understood correctly) to codify the law and represent legal entities engaging in contractually-bound mutual obligations.

I also attended sessions on how to attract a more diverse skill set into the open source world (something I have been banging on about for a while now in keynotes up and down), and discussions about how, when you are building teams with people who have never worked together before, it's difficult to manage projects because things can get blocked when person A doesn't even know that person B cannot proceed until A's part of the task is complete.

This last discussion raised many interesting aspects of how people working on project teams communicate, and we realized that training was one important way that people with diverse skills can learn to work together effectively and harmoniously.

All in all this was an excellent start to OSCON, and I feel more in touch with the hot-button issues of the collected open source communities as the convention proper begins (tutorials are the main activities today and tomorrow). I'm looking forward to a great week, and hope to round it off with a reprise of last year's OSCON Survivors' Breakfast. Drop me a line if you'd like an invite.

* No holier than thou here. The best I can do at short notice is:

If you just need to use project X, go to [some web page] and click the "Install" button. Then follow the instructions on that page to make sure the installation has succeeded, and the follow the [tutorial web page] or browse [web search for currently best-rated and/or most popular blog posts about Projct X]

If you are a project X user who finds it unsatisfactory in some way we would love to hear from you. Only by being keenly attentive to feedback from our dedicated users can we ensure that project X continues to become more useful to a wider range of people every time.

If you would like project X to do things it currently doesn't please let us have your ideas on [ideas@projectX.hostingsite.example.com]. We will always attempt to acknowledge input and respond to feedback.

If you would like to help project X become more capable then please ask us how you can support the open source communities who built and help to maintain it. We are always happy to welcome new project members, who can provide the one thing without which open source could not be possible: the willingness to build software to raise the tide and level the playing field [see what I just did there]. 

By creating new infrastructure open to all we hope to improve humanity's lot more effectively.  Project X is available under the [link to OSI-approved license] and its documentation is available under the [some sort of Creative Commons license] on Read The Docs.

 

Python at OSCON 2011

The OSCON organizers have asked me to help them recruit more Python talks there this year. It seems that maybe PyCon is the principal venue for those who are already using Python, but there is a vast audience of people who are interested in open source but not necessarily yet committed to Python, and such people are much more likely to attend OSCON, which runs July 25-29, to stay in touch with a range of open source technologies rather than ust Python alone.

Unlike PyCon OSCON is a full commercial conference. Tutorial speakers get help with their travel as well as an honorarium for talking, regular speakers get a free regstration. Both times I have attended I have managed to cover the majority of my costs. And, of course, OSCON is back in the wonderful city of Portland for the second year after a brief flirtation with California. It's a great place to visit, and by the time the conference comes around I hope to be living there.

If you are interested in going one further and would like to join the team that puts the Python syllabus together then drop me a line or simply make a comment here. That's another way to pay your way to OSCON!

Python Booth at OSCON

For the first time this year Python will have a booth at OSCON, thanks to the good offices of Aahz. If you'd like to keep the Python banner flying over the exhibition hall I am sure he could do with some help.

What's the point? Well, certainly it will help to raise awareness of the language, which can only be a good thing. Having a booth puts a human face on Python and gives people a chance to get first-hand information rather than being filtered through other people's prejudices. OSCON is probably the largest open source conference in the world, so it's a good place to advertise the best open source language in the world.

The Python Software Foundation will be funding a large banner, and whatever else is required. I am sure Aahz will be happy to have suggestions and (most especially) offers of assistance. I've spent time in the past manning exhibition stands, and while it's interesting to meet a wide range of people it can be surprisingly tiring, so a one-man effort won't be enough. You can subscribe to the Python OSCON mailing list if you are interested in helping with either or both of the planning and execution.

Microsoft at OSCON

The last session I attended before leaving for the airport was the Friday morning plenary session. Sam Ranji of Microsoft announced several new initiatives (documented in his Port 25 blog), including sponsorship of the Apache Software Foundation. This doesn't mean Microsoft are abandoning IIS development.

After the keynotes were over there was a Q&A session, but it seemed like the AV technicians (who seemed to do a pretty awesome job overall) hadn't set up monitor speakers, and so those on stage found it difficult to hear the questions. Which were mostly for Sam, and sometimes a little hostile!

I tried to ask him how it would be possible to change the corporate ethos so that stupidities like the recent OOXML debacle aren't repeated, but I'm not sure the desire to help survived the mangling by the sound system. Microsoft have been a sponsor member of the Python Software Foundation for some time now, and they are as welcome as all our other members.

It was clear, listening to Sam speak with delegates after his talk, that he "gets" open source. It's frustrating to read people complaining about Microsoft without being prepared to engage and argue that open source and full interoperability can actually help the company meet its business goals more effectively. By doing so we can help Sam get the ears of the business-line managers, and thereby promote open source from within.

I left him with a business card and an offer of assistance. It remains to be seen whether anything comes of it.

Where's Sean Reifschneider When You Need Him?

Another conference, another sucky network. OSCON's wireless network hasn't performed as well as I'd have expected it to from my experience four years ago. With roughly 2,500 delegates in a large area there's no reason why I should be unable to associate with an access point.

Sean's setup and management of the 2007 PyCon in Dallas remains the best conference network I have used.

All this seems very effete, of course, given that ten years ago there was no such thing as a public wireless network. But as technology moves on expectations move up, and many people this week have suggested OSCON's network will need to improve for next year.

Is My Nose Borked ...

... or do all Portland Conference Center hotels smell of stale fried food?

I am having a great time, and the PDXers are wonderfully hospitable, but I suspect the hotel staff need to take a week off and smell the places they work with a fresh attitude.

I have stayed in many hotels that don't have this problem, but the two I have visited so far this week (including the "conference hotel" I am staying in) aren't the freshest environments I have ever encountered.

Robert (R0ml) Lefkowitz at OSCON

There don't appear to be any methodologies that are specific to open source projects: methods like scrum are agnostic as to whether they are used on open source or proprietary software.

Lefkowitz has spent a long time trying to encourage large organizations to adopt open source techniques. His current employer uses the Microsoft solutions framework. This has a process model and a team model, and it's difficult even to get everyone in the organization to sign up to the models. Before the company used that they used another methodology with four phases, and Kent Beck's "Extreme Programming" uses six phases. All these methodologies are different, but subtly similar.

How do we define a methodology that everyone can use? R0ml believes we need to drive the development of the process broadly based in the open source world. He referred us to Quintillian's five-step rhetorical framework, which might have been lifted directly from the Microsoft framework had it not been written in the first century AD.

Rhetoric	MSF
inventio	Envision
dispositio	Plan
elocutio	Build
memoria	Stabilize
pronuntiato	Deploy

Other techniques or methodologies can also be mapped on to the rhetorical framework.

The architect Alexander observed that the events that take place in a place are primary in determining its fitness for purpose. Juggling uses two different notatiopositional notation, but some jugglers use "causal" notation, which focuses on throwing a club when it must be thrown to maintain stability. 70% of the MVS operating system is dedicated to exception handling, which is why they are so stable.

R0ml suggests starting with "release early/release often" as a starting point. Next, you use it (which you will notice is completely ignored by traditional methodologies). Bug and exceptions reports and patch submissions are then followed by triage and integration. The difference here is we don't have "requirements". There is no development, there is only maintenance; it's just that some maintenance is more radical that others (laughter).

XP puts some stress on the customer by requiring them to make decisions, write user stories, write functional test specifications, and so on. But the most powerful input from the customers is their complaints when the software doesn't do what they want. (More laughter).

This was an amusing talk, which anyone who has seen this speaker in action before would expect, but I'm not sure there were many pieces of practical advice for open source developers. I got the impression from a somewhat abrupt finish that Lefkowitz didn't have enough time to fully expound his thesis. A shame, since the last talk I saw was informative as well as amusing.

For some reason a number of posts were stuck in the blog as drafts. This one is from July last year.

Mark Shuttleworth at OSCON

Mark, an accomplished speaker, started by confessing that he had no doubt that Linux would be the platform of the future, and suggesting that tools like Firefox and bazaar had claimed ownership of their application space by providing extensibility in a modular way: conform to the interfaces, and the application becomes a platform. All the same, he insisted there is also a need to work with Windows (which makes sense since there are so many Windows systems around).

One of the issues Mark discussed was how we can extend agile techniques in ways inspired by community-driven processes. Architecting your tool set and your enterprise for collaboration and communication is essential. Ubuntu's governance is entirely separated from Canonical's, and Mark suspects that might turn out to be a best practice.

Tools must be extensible, and whether they are open source or proprietary they must be usable as components in diverse systems. The ultimate goal is "permissionless" development - new people coming in wanting to do new things need to be able to take the tools and run with them to implement their own ideas. His ideal for Ubuntu is for any developer worldwide to branch the Ubuntu code and publish their version in ways that other people can in turn pick up and run with.

Another best practice Mark has identified is time-based releases, which lend a rhythm to the development process and allow developers to keep track of what's happening in the trunk, which should be releasable at any time. More and more projects are thinking about synchronizing their releases. Imagine if a multitude of Linux distributions could collaborate to release at the same time, providing a "development cadence", encouraging individual tool developers to finalize their own releases for incorporation into a multitude of distributions.

Mark sees todays open source development world as struggling to provide free software, but the questions is how will the economic models support this? Free software is easy to love: it costs nothing to acquire. But who will fund the development of the free software? This will require innovations in economics that will, with a historical perspective, possibly be one of the more significant changes in these turbulent times. Having three almost-monopolies each controlling their own distribution would be counter-productive, and advertising on the desktop is offensive.

At Canonical they are hiring people to work on the desktop to build tools that benefit the providers of services. This will fundamentally change the world.

The challenge of the next two years is to lift the Linux desktop to a level where it is effectively art! How do Linux distributions not emulate Apple, but blow right past them. Jamie Zawinski says we should be aiming to build software tools that help their users get laid! The only doubts Mark had about that as a goal were related to Jamie's stated goal of making software that his mother could use ...

The Web 2.0 explosion has taught us that to survive in the web world a software product needs to be instantly attractive, and deliver functionality immediately in a profoundly usable way. Canonical have been investing in the process and the technology, and they are now trying to
realize the dream that Mark so elegantly elucidated in his presentation.

OSCON Bound

Flying out to Portland tomorrow arriving late evening (I only just got back from California, and I wanted a little time at home). I am giving a Python in 3 Hours tutorial on Monday morning, but don't have many other set commitments during the week.

Anyone who wants to get together for a meal or a drink, just leave a comment here, or email me.