Hernan Saltiel wrote: > Well...we are a young community, we have a lot of improvement > opportunities. Let's learn the lessons we have from the other, maybe > older communities.
I agree that we should learn from others. I attended Jono Bacon's talk on community building (Ubuntu) at C1. I don't know much about their governance issues, but they have 200 or so user groups, which they call teams. What's interesting about their teams is that they are designed to reach out to new people, welcome them in to the community, and get them contributing. That last bit is important because that's the foundation community itself. He also used the term "gifts" to describe contributions, which I though was interesting. It's a different perspective than we have, I think. In general, I like Ubuntu as an example since they have a large user community and take lots of non-code contributions. Since that's one of the directions we are going, I'm sure we can learn a thing or two about how they are building community. Having said that, I was also impressed to see that we do actually have many of the components in place that Ubuntu has, but I think our culture is vastly different, our community is obviously much smaller, and we don't communicate well across our community. Our communications seem more vertical than horizontal at this point in our evolution. This is where I think the OGB, the Facilitators, and the OSUGs can help a great deal. These are not problems, per say, but things from which to build and grow. > the features Sun included in it, but I didn't see much at all > about > the community itself. > > > In the next event we can think in some "Communities Pavilion" to > promote our efforts, not as a brand, then as communities...agree? I like this idea. I think I read on some list a few months about about this. Someone mentioned it or something similar. > > Sun's contribution to the community was to bootstrap the project > with source code, tools, engineers, infrastructure, exposure, and > some initial community development programs. That's quite an > investment, actually. And other companies are starting to > participate, too, which is adding a new element to the mix. > > > It would be great if the "other" companies take this as a worldwide > policy. That may come with time. For now, I think those companies are more focused on their own respective engineering projects. And that's fine to start, of course. Their contributions are extremely valuable at that level. Over time, however, they may see it in their interest to help build community more generally as well. > > But we as a community of people need to assert much more of a role > in organizing /ourselves/ rather than always looking to Sun to do > it for us. > > > I don't know in other places, but here (Argentina) there are only > three Sun employees in our community. We organize our meetings, > events, tech talks, etc. interacting with other LUG's, PUG's, etc. Yep. We do, too. We do a lot of interacting with Linux now. Heck, us OpenSolaris guys are part of the Linux UG in Tokyo, and we hold Linux UG meetings right in this Sun building. And the Linux guys come to the OpenSolaris meetings, too. In fact, I'm modeling what Linux has already done. There is no single company sponsoring the Linux community, so when you hang out with them you clearly see a different attitude toward community building than we currently hold. That's what I was getting at in my earlier note. > By the way, later this week we will be exactly 4 years old. On > June 14. > > > Time for margaritas! Works for me. And sake here in Japan, too. :) Jim -- opensolaris.org transition: http://opensolaris.org/os/community/web/
