collaboration - Page number 14

I’ll admit, it’s a bit of a sensational headline. But if I put the word “equilibrium” in there, you might not have reached this point.

Last year while presenting at a technology and disabilities conference, I answered a question about participatory government, gov 2.0, so on, in a way that reverberated in tones of heresy on the faces of some people.

I said something to the effect of: “There are people who don’t want to participate. We have a representative democracy and people paid to run things, and in many cases I want them to do their jobs and let me do mine.”
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Two years ago, I blundered into open source because I wanted my students to build educational games for the One Laptop Per Child community. Much of that history has already been told by opensource.com. I didn't expect this effort to be so sticky--for myself or my students--when we started. » Read more

It's true. If you think about the characteristics of open source and the qualities of a successful relationship, you will find a lot of overlap.

OPEN: You have to be open and flexible to make a relationship work. Going back to my favorite analogy in regards to open source software and proprietary software--proprietary software is like buying a car with the hood welded shut. Oh, you need to change to oil? Too bad. Buy a new car. If we aren't flexible and open to change--if our hoods are welded shut--it makes it extremely difficult to keep the (love) engine running.
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A few years back, a good friend recommended I pick up a copy of Designing Brand Identity: an essential guide for the whole branding team by Alina Wheeler. Now in its 3rd edition, it's a beautiful book, well designed and easy to read or to use as a reference. » Read more

Open source software is becoming a dominant force in the software world and the world in general. Unfortunately, many universities still teach computer science without any mention of this recent advance. In the fall of 2007, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI) set out to change this.

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You might already know about GreenXchange. It’s a specialized sort of commons specifically for innovations (or yet to be applied innovations) for environmental sustainability.  For now, that means an on-line space to post patents and supporting materials under one of three pledges.   » Read more

Shortly after we published Telling the open source story - Part 1, Jelly Helm--the creator of the the Wikimedia Foundation videos discussed in that piece--came to speak to the People and Brand group at Red Hat. Jelly talked to us about how he approaches finding a brand narrative--the story that anyone, anywhere in the world can understand and connect with. And then we talked about the best ways to reveal those kinds of stories.

It was an interesting encounter and a few general themes emerged. » Read more

Recently, fellow opensource.com writer Chris Grams remarked that our collection of articles and tips on community-building was getting rather large. Perhaps we had the material to write a set of best practices for building communities. So here’s my stab at it. » Read more

In the first session of FUDCon talks this past weekend, Diana Harrelson reported on her anthropological study of the Fedora community, which she used to find ways to sustain and grow an open source development community. She studied the group from the Fedora 12 launch through the Fedora 13 development cycle while she was a master's candidate at the University of North Texas. (She now has that degree and is working towards a PhD in human computer interaction.) Here's are a few of her findings, much of which certainly apply across open source communities, not just to Fedora. » Read more

A few weeks ago I gave a talk entitled "Breaking the Software Death Cycle with Domain Driven Design" at the New York DDD Meet-up at Microsoft. Domain Driven Design (DDD) is a way of thinking and a set of priorities, aimed at accelerating software projects that have to deal with complex domains. My talk was both an introduction to DDD and a story about turning a large failing project around. As we analyzed triggers that enabled my team to be successful, I couldn’t help but notice the overlap in what DDD promotes in an organization and the core values of open-source.

But first, how does one identify a software death cycle in progress? These are my favorite symptoms: » Read more