contributor

Mirror mirror on the wall, what's the most important open source project of them all? » Read more

Meet Scott Nesbitt. He's a freelance writer and consultant in Toronto, Canada. He uses open source tools for more than 85 percent of the work he does. He's idealistic about more getting more open data from our governments. Nesbitt also contributes to FLOSS Manuals (FLOSS stands for Free/Libre open source software) by helping to document open source projects. Documentation for the win!

On opensource.com, community is very important. We want to continue to recognize our community members who contribute in ways other than writing articles--things like rating and commenting, voting in polls, and sharing our collective work on social media. We hope you enjoy getting to know Scott. » Read more

On opensource.com, community is very important. We want to continue to recognize our community members who contribute in ways other than writing articles--things like rating and commenting, voting in polls, and sharing our collective work on social media. This is the second of our community spotlight posts.

Meet Paul Booker. He's a web developer in Birmingham, England and a contributor to Mozilla. He is a big fan of Drupal and helps edit the about:mozilla newsletter. We hope you enjoy getting to know Paul. » Read more

On opensource.com, our community is very important. This is why we started the contributor spotlight earlier this year. But we wanted to also recognize community members who contribute in ways other than writing articles--things like rating and commenting, voting in polls, and sharing our collective work on social media. So this is the first of our community spotlight posts.

Meet Peter Borsa. He's a student at the University of Debrecen in Hungary. He is passionate about Drupal and Fedora. We hope you enjoy getting to know Peter and finding out what he thinks the biggest challenges to openness are and why he chooses the open source way. » Read more

Here at PyCon2011, there are quite a few open source rock stars in attendance. Software hackers of various stripes, developers from the corporate and community realms, and many other technically savvy and interested folks. » Read more

It's a busy morning here in New York City. My email inbox is full of pleasant surprises. The first is a patch for one of my open source projects. A second will appear this afternoon. A third should come late at night—or maybe tomorrow–from a new contributor.

Alongside my day job, I contribute and manage open source projects. The number of projects I work on has grown from a couple of small tools to well over a dozen in the last three years. Open source has become a great way to learn new technology, experiment with modern software development practices, and, of course, meet other like-minded engineers. I find that seeing great contributors send working and tested code provides a unique feeling of accomplishment, as powerful as having many satisfied users of my own applications or strong revenues posted by the employer that pays my bills. » Read more

In the interview with Chris Blizzard I posted last week, near the end of the article Chris attributes a phrase to Mozilla CEO John Lilly:

"Surprise is the opposite of engagement."

This may be one of the most simple, brilliant things I have ever heard someone say when it comes to creating engaged, active communities. » Read more

I've always been a fan of the Mozilla Foundation, and not just because of the Firefox web browser. As catalyst for some of the great communities in the open source world, Mozilla is something of a recipe factory for what to do right when it comes to building community. As it turns out, Mozilla's Director of Developer Relations, Chris Blizzard, is a long time friend of mine. » Read more