May 7th, 2009

Using selfishness to put crowds to work for you

Posted by Joe Brockmeier @ 4:06 pm

Categories: Building Community, Collaboration

Tags: Stock, Documentation, Derek Powazek, Open Source, Investment, Finance, Joe Brockmeier

How do you enable “the wisdom of crowds”? Part of the power of community is that a group of people can solve problems much more easily than individuals, but only if you can provide tools that make it possible for them to do so and appeal to their own interests.

Derek Powazek has an interesting post over on A List Apart that details some of the components necessary for “a crowd to be wise.” According to Powazek, you have to have simplicity, a clean interface, aggregation, and a group of people who are thinking about their own needs:

It’s counter-intuitive, but the wisest crowds are the ones made up of individuals who are thinking about their own needs, not the needs of the group. In the stock market, the participants are all motivated to buy low and sell high. Yet the markets are usually wise about finding the value of a company. Each person is thinking about their bottom line, not the health of the company or the market, but it works.

Similarly, website creators were not consciously voting for certain sites to be highly ranked, but the collective linking decisions did produce wise results. Nowadays, link spammers do try to manipulate Google’s results, which is akin to stock manipulation. Both practices are fought by the institutions that depend on unmanipulated results.

Altruism is all well and good, but people are usually much more motivated by their own interests than the interests of others. This is one reason why open source code is usually so much better than the documentation that accompanies it (unless someone is paid to produce the docs): People contribute code because they want to use the code. People write open source documentation, typically, for altruistic purposes. Which is why many documentation projects flounder — the documentation does the writer little to no good, as they’re unlikely to read it again.

Code, however, is continually useful, because it’s often produced for “selfish” purposes.

If you’re wondering how to drive participation in a project: Whether it’s an open source project, a collaborative Web site, or some other endeavor don’t think about what’s in it for you: Think about what’s in it for them. When you can find a way to let the crowd scratch their own itches, and provide the necessary tools to do so, you’re on the road to success.

April 7th, 2009

Quality improves for Google Summer of Code

Posted by Joe Brockmeier @ 6:14 am

Categories: Building Community, Collaboration, Communication

Tags: Google Inc., Patches, Security, Joe Brockmeier

The Google Summer of Code student application period wrapped up last week, and the overall number of applications is down from 2008. However, this is shaping up to be a good thing.

Googler Leslie Hawthorn blogged about the numbers, and noted that the number of proposals (nearly 5,900) is actually down from last year, but the quality is up:

We expected some decrease this year, as we heard from many of our mentoring organizations that past experience had helped them refine their application process and that they’d instituted new requirements for applicants, such as submitting a patch. A quick survey of our mentoring organizations, with 96 out of 150 organizations responding, revealed that 60% of organizations who had participated in past instances of Google Summer of Code received higher quality applications this year, with only 3% responding that application quality had decreased. We’d also heard that the number of completely untargeted applications this year decreased dramatically.

The 2008 SoC drew more than 7,000 applications — so what happened this year? Better communication between mentoring organizations, stiffer requirements over 2008, and generally a stronger overall focus on quality over quantity. Many organizations even started to require a patch as part of the application process, which seems to have weeded out some of the “spam” applications.

Speaking for one of the mentoring organizations, the openSUSE Project had both: An increase in applications, and better applications overall. We had some great applications and projects in 2008, but the overall interest and participation seemed to pick up this year.

In part, I attribute this to better communication between the project and students. At least for openSUSE, I noticed an uptick in students seeking out mentors / potential mentors and discussing the applications with them.

And this is exactly what Summer of Code is really about: Getting students involved with FOSS projects and helping them be productive within those communities. Contrary to popular belief, Summer of Code isn’t just about producing useful code — the code that comes out of the program is a result of a successful collaboration between the student and project.

November 17th, 2008

Unemployed? Five reasons to build your resume with FOSS contributions

Posted by Joe Brockmeier @ 11:54 am

Categories: Collaboration, Contributors

Tags: Web, F/OSS, Channel Management, Open Source, Marketing, Joe Brockmeier

It looks like we’ve gone from speculating whether we’re headed into recession depression, to speculating just what that depression is going to look like. Yihong Ding, over on the Thinking Space blog,predicts that we’ll have a “Golden Age” of the Web thanks to millions sitting at home with little else to do than putter around on the Web:

So, Web companies and Web investors, now it is your chance. You are going to have more users who are more experienced in real life. The input by these new users would significantly improve the quality and diversity of the Web content. Are you going to grasp this opportunity? Have you noticed their compelling capability of producing (comparing to the earlier regular Web content generators)? Are you able to provide these people new ways of value production from home?

If that’s the case, shouldn’t we be expecting a “Golden Age” for open source, with all the idle programmers and IT folks at home with time on their hands? I can think of several reasons why unemployed IT folks should consider digging into an open source project over catching up on their soaps in the interim: Read the rest of this entry »

November 14th, 2008

Will OpenID catch on?

Posted by Joe Brockmeier @ 6:06 am

Categories: Collaboration, Communication

Tags: Amazon.com Inc., Survey, OpenID, Marketing Research, Marketing, Joe Brockmeier

A survey of more than 300 people shows that few people have heard of OpenID, and even fewer are actually using it.

Chris Messina, the guy with the guitar pictured here, has written up results of a survey conducted using Amazon’s Mechanical Turk. Messina, rightly, took issue with Yahoo!’s “survey” of 9 users — which, of course, isn’t anything close to a representative sample size.

The results of the survey, where 302 users responded (one response was rejected) showed that just shy of 20% of the respondents were aware of OpenID — but only 9% were sure of what it’s used for, and only 1.3% actually used it.

In case you’re in the 81% who aren’t familiar with OpenID — it’s a distributed service to allow users to have a single user ID across multiple sites. In theory, getting rid of all the various user IDs and passwords that we have to juggle for all the sites we use online, without handing over too much control to a single provider.

As Messina points out, pulling respondents from Amazon’s Mechanical Turk gives a very good set of users to survey:

Because Turkers must have either a US bank account or be willing to be paid in Amazon gift certificates, the quality of participants you get (especially if you design your HIT well) will actually be pretty good (compared with, say, a blog-based survey). Now, Mechanical Turk actually has rules against asking for demographic or personally identifying information, but some information has been gathered by Panos Ipeirotis to shed some light on who the Turkers are and why they participate. I’ll leave the bulk of the analysis up to him, but it’s worth noting that a survey put out on Mechanical Turk about OpenID will likely hit a fairly average segment of the internet-using population (or at least one that doesn’t differ greatly from college undergraduates).

So, even among Internet-savvy users who ought to be the right demographic for OpenID — there’s very little adoption. And I’m not surprised by this.

In theory, OpenID sounds like the greatest thing since sliced bread. In practice, I’ve tried using OpenID a few times and find it less than intuitive. A few days ago I was trying to use OpenID with Twitterfeed, and kept running into errors trying to utilize my OpenID on Wordpress.com. (I eventually got it working through my Flickr ID.) My understanding is that OpenID isn’t exactly trivial to implement for Web services, either.

I’d love to see OpenID catch on, but it does still need some work to make it more intuitive and more robust. Given that the service has been around now since 2005, I have to wonder if it’s ever going to hit critical mass, or if I’m going to be stuck with dozens of usernames and passwords for the rest of my online life.

(Photo credit to “kk+” from his Flickr collection.)

November 10th, 2008

Taking productivity lessons from open source

Posted by Joe Brockmeier @ 7:04 am

Categories: Business and Open Source, Collaboration

Tags: Team, Speaker, Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols, Team Management, E-mail, Open Source, Management, Online Communications, Joe Brockmeier

Even if your organization doesn’t produce software or work with open source development, you can still take some lessons from open source communities — in particular, how to get work done with fewer meetings and less real-time.

Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols covers some of the things that outsourcing companies can learn from open source, but this really applies to any organization — whether it has remote locations or not. But they’re particularly useful for organizations with a distributed workforce with non-English speakers. In particular:

• Don’t have a meeting when an email will do. Coordinating schedules is an often unnecessary headache when an email exchange would provide the same information.
• Any method with an “audit trail” is better than a phone call or face to face meeting for those who may need to catch up later. (It’s also far better for remembering who has what action items, and what has been decided.”
• As Vaughan-Nichols writes, “E-mail and Web communication make it far easier for a non-English speaker to read or translate e-mail and Web text than to understand several English speakers chatting on the phone.” (Frankly, this is also true when all of the participants are English speakers, too. Trying to understand five people on a conference call, with several huddled around a speaker-phone, is usually less than pleasant even if they are all speaking the same language…)

Of course, the flip side of this is that it works well up to a point for a distributed team. Phone calls and the occasional face to face meeting are really necessary to form the kind of bonds that a team needs to function well. The distributed method is great for projects that don’t require a lot of close coordination, but if you have a team that is expected to function well together over multiple projects in an ongoing capacity — you need the occasional real-time meeting.

And, as I mentioned, the asynchronous methods of communication aren’t limited to distributed teams — they work just as well to help people get more work done, even if they’re just down the hall.

September 30th, 2008

Linux Foundation launches new conference

Posted by Joe Brockmeier @ 12:05 am

Categories: Building Community, Collaboration

Tags: Conference, Linux Foundation, Linux, UNIX, Open Source, Operating Systems, Software, Joe Brockmeier

The Linux Foundation will announce today the creation of LinuxCon, a conference set to take place alongside the Linux Plumbers conference in Portland, Oregon. Does the world really need yet another open source conference?

As it turns out, the answer is probably yes. At least if the LF gets it right, and I strongly suspect that they will. The Linux Foundation is aiming to address the need to get a “for the community, by the community” large-scale conference going, where we can try to get as many stakeholders together for collaboration.

Collaboration is the key point, in my opinion — the conferences that consist exclusively of presentations and exhibits have their place, but we really need more opportunities for developers to get together and get some work done face-to-face. Not to put too fine a point on it, but the conference circuit is expensive and I’m heartily glad to see a group like the Linux Foundation thinking about this problem from the perspective “how can we move this industry forward?” instead of “how can we make money off of this?”

I’m glad to have the opportunity for openSUSE contributors to get together with contributors from other distros and upstream projects to get some real work done. Yes, open source development happens quite effectively online, but sometimes there’s no substitute for the work you can get done while you’re face to face with someone else. (Which is why I’m writing this from Tokyo ahead of the Tokyo Open Source Conference, instead of from my home office in Florida…)

This won’t remove the need for smaller local conferences like Ohio Linuxfest, SCALE, Linuxfest Northwest, and other local community-run shows that cater to users and provide great content. (Speaking of Ohio Linuxfest, I’ll be attending and keynoting at OLF 2008. It’s less than two weeks away, on October 11, so be sure to register and attend if you’re in the area — it’s free and quite a lot of fun.)

But it may be a better chance for community projects to get together en masse and work on areas of mutual interest — much like the LF has already done with the Linux Plumbers conference and its invite-only Collaboration Summit, but on a larger (and no invite required) scale.