Tag Archives: open source

community

Open Source Community Metrics and State of the Puppet Community

Many of you probably know that I’ve spent the past week in Belgium for Puppet Camp Ghent and FOSDEM. I’ll be writing a blog post on the Puppet Labs blog later this week to talk about Puppet Camp Ghent, but I wanted to at least get my presentations out here while I finished writing the longer post.

Puppet Camp Ghent was amazing. I saw a few old friends and connected in person with quite a few community members that I had not yet met in person. Overall, I was very happy with the event, and the people at HoGent were great hosts. There were so many amazing presentations, and we’re getting them uploaded to the Puppet Camp page as soon as we get the slides from the speakers. Here is the presentation that I delivered on the State of the Puppet Community.

state-of-puppet-community

I had an amazing time at FOSDEM, too. I helped facilitate the Configuration / Systems Management DevRoom on Saturday along with a DevRoom dinner that evening. I love working in such a collaborative industry. The DevRoom and the dinner were organized collaboratively with our primary competitors, but we all worked together to pull it off in a way that benefited the industry. Aside from the DevRoom, I got to see a lot of old friends and had a great time!

At FOSDEM, I also gave a short version of my Open Source Community Metrics talk. If you are interested in open source metrics, you might rather look at the longer version that I presented at LinuxCon Barcelona in November. I also had a great conversation from Jesus at Bitgeria, and they are doing some awesome stuff with open source community metrics that you should look at if you are interested in metrics.

Next on my agenda are trips to Stockholm, Sweden and Oslo, Norway for two more Puppet Camps in the next two weeks before heading back home to Portland.

community

Open Source Community Metrics: LinuxCon Barcelona

I wanted to share the presentation that I will be giving today at LinuxCon Barcelona at 1:20pm, Open Source Community Metrics: Tips and Techniques for Measuring Participation. This is similar to the presentation that I gave a few weeks ago at the LibreOffice Conference in Berlin, but I have added some new data and included different examples. You might also be interested in seeing the Puppet Community Metrics that I recently started posting on the Puppet Labs website.

You can download the presentation from SlideShare.

Talk Abstract:

Do you know what people are really doing in your open source project? Having good community data and metrics for your open source project is a great way to understand what works and what needs improvement over time, and metrics can also be a nice way to highlight contributions from key project members. This session will focus on tips and techniques for collecting and analyzing metrics from tools commonly used by open source projects. It’s like people watching, but with data.

The best thing about open source projects is that you have all of your community data in the public at your fingertips. You just need to know how to gather the data about your open source community so that you can hack it all together to get something interesting that you can really use. This session will be useful for anyone wanting to learn more about the communities they manage or participate in.

community

LibreOffice Conference: Open Source Metrics

1 Comment

Today at the LibreOffice Conference in Berlin, I will be presenting a session titled, “Open Source Community Metrics: Tips and Techniques for Measuring Participation.” It has tools, techniques and examples of metrics from the LibreOffice project, Puppet and MeeGo to illustrate several ways to gather and interpret the metrics for your open source project.

If you are interested in watching the presentation, it will be on the LibreOffice Conference live stream starting at 18:00 CEST in Berlin or 9am Pacific time.

You can also download a copy of the presentation from SlideShare.

Talk Abstract

Do you know what people are really doing in your open source project? Having good community data and metrics for your open source project is a great way to understand what works and what needs improvement over time, and metrics can also be a nice way to highlight contributions from key project members. This session will focus on tips and techniques for collecting and analyzing metrics from tools commonly used by open source projects. It’s like people watching, but with data.

The best thing about open source projects is that you have all of your community data in the public at your fingertips. You just need to know how to gather the data about your open source community so that you can hack it all together to get something interesting that you can really use. We’ll start with some general guidance for coming up with a set of metrics that makes sense for your project and talk about the LibreOffice community metrics. The focus of the session will be on tips and techniques for collecting metrics from tools commonly used by open source projects: Bugzilla, MediaWiki, Mailman, IRC and more. It will include both general approaches and technical details about using various data collection tools, like mlstats. The final section of the presentation will talk about techniques for sharing this data with your community and highlighting contributions from key community members. For anyone who loves playing with data as much as I do, metrics can be a fun way to see what your community members are really doing in your open source project.

community

Crunching the numbers: Open Source Community Metrics at OSCON

2 Comments

Dave Neary and I co-presented a session about metrics at OSCON on Wednesday based on what we have learned so far from doing the MeeGo metrics.

Description

Every community manager knows that community metrics are important, but how do you come up with a plan and figure out what you want to measure? Most community managers have their own set of hacky scripts for extracting data from various sources after they decide what metrics to track. There is no standardized Community Software Dashboard you can use to generate near-real-time stats on your community growth.

Like most open source projects, we have diverse community infrastructure for MeeGo, including Mailman, Drupal, Mediawiki, IRC, git, OpenSuse Build Service, Transifex and vBulletin. We wanted to unify these sources together, extract meaningful statistics from the data we had available to us, and present it to the user in a way that made it easy to see if the community was developing nicely or not.

Building on the work of Pentaho, Talend, MLStats, gitdm and a host of others, we built a generic and open source community dashboard for the MeeGo project, and integrated it into the website. The project was run in the open at on the MeeGo wiki and all products of the project are available for reuse.

This presentation covered the various metrics we wanted to measure, how we extracted the data from a diverse set of services to do it, and more importantly, how you can do it too.

Crunching the numbers: Open Source Community Metrics at OSCON

View more presentations from Dawn Foster

conference

Open Source Community Metrics

1 Comment

Today at Open Source Bridge, I’ll be leading a session about Open Source Community Metrics: Tips and Techniques for Measuring Participation at 3:45pm in B302.

Do you know what people are really doing in your open source project? The best thing about open source projects is that you have all of your community data in the public at your fingertips. You just need to know how to gather the data about your open source community so that you can hack it all together to get something interesting that you can really use. Having good community data and metrics for your open source project is a great way to understand what works and what needs improvement over time, and metrics can also be a nice way to highlight contributions from key project members. This session will focus on tips and techniques for collecting and analyzing metrics from tools commonly used by open source projects using examples from what I’ve learned doing MeeGo metrics.

A few topics:

  • General guidance for coming up with a set of metrics that makes sense for your project.
  • Tips and techniques for collecting metrics from tools commonly used by open source projects: Bugzilla, MediaWiki, Mailman, IRC and more.
  • General approaches and technical details about using various data collection tools, like mlstats.
  • Techniques for sharing this data with your community and highlighting contributions from key community members.

For anyone who loves playing with data as much as I do, metrics can be a fun way to see what your community members are really doing in your open source project. It’s like people watching, but with data.

Open source community metrics

View more presentations from Dawn Foster

General, open source

New Open Source Conference Coming to Portland

2 Comments

Were you sad and dismayed to hear that OSCON was moving out of Portland? Are you looking for more open source events to attend? Would you like an open source conference organized by the community? Want one more tech event to attend in July? Need an excuse (any excuse) to visit lovely Portland, Oregon in July? Do you like to help organize events for fun in your spare time?

If you answered yes to any of my obnoxious questions above, I have a great solution for you: The Open Source Bridge event.

pdx group tag cloud

Selena does a great job of sharing how the idea to do this event was born, the purpose of the event, the details, and how you can get involved:

Open Source Bridge will bring together the diverse tech communities of the greater Portland area and showcase our unique and thriving open source environment.

Open Source Bridge will have curated, discussion-focused conference sessions, mini-conferences for critical topics and will include unconference sessions.

We will show how well Portland does open source and share our best practices for development, community and connectedness with the rest of the world.

Lots of ideas are buzzing around in our heads, and we’d love to talk about them with you! If you’d like to contribute to the effort, stop by the town hall event October 30, 2008 at Cubespace. We’ll have another meeting November 6th, and it will be announced on Calagator.

At the town hall, you’ll have a chance to meet the members of the core organizing committee, and pick up a responsibility or two. We’ll be breaking off into teams for each of the major areas requiring organization, and distributing the work across many people. We will create a mailing list after this first meeting for those who just want to hear about what we’re up to, or participate in some other way.

(Quote from Selena Deckelmann)

I encourage you to attend the Town Hall to share your ideas with the team and to talk about how you can get more involved in the event. The key to community driven events is that they require a lot of work from volunteers both during the planning stages and on site during the event! If you want this event to be successful, I encourage you to pitch in to help.

Town Hall

Images above are also from Selena Deckelmann.

Related Fast Wonder Blog posts:

open source

GOSCON: Government Open Source Conf in PDX

3 Comments

I was just talking to Deb Bryant about the upcoming GOSCON event here in Portland Oct 20th – 23rd, and there are some very exciting things about the event. For anyone unfamiliar with GOSCON, it is focused on providing “forums to explore both the business case and real-world applications for open technology to deliver the next generation of government services”. This is the fourth annual GOSCON event.

Here are a few of the highlights:

  • It’s really reasonable to attend: $150 – $697 depending on which activities you select.
  • Speakers include experts from across the U.S. and around the world.
  • Sessions cover a wide range of topics from implementation and management of open technologies to using open source in the public health sector.
  • Educational credits of up to 4.5 hours for Health IT professionals have been approved by HIMSS.

Anyone interested in open source and government should think about attending the event.

Related Fast Wonder Blog posts:

community

Online Community Presentations

2 Comments

I’ve been doing a few presentations about online communities recently, and I finally got around to uploading a few of them to SlideShare. I thought people might be interested in seeing them.

I will continue to upload more presentations to my SlideShare account as I deliver them. You can also contact me via email (dawn@fastwonder.com) if you would like to have me deliver a similar presentation or more extensive online community or social media training for your organization.

Related Fast Wonder Blog posts:

community

When Companies Sponsor Communities

6 Comments

Here are my notes from the Art of Community lightning talk that I delivered at OSCON yesterday. Some of this advice is geared toward open source and developer communities, but most of it applies to building corporate communities in general. We also used a 3 minute lightning talk format, so the advice below contains only my top few tips that could fit into this fast-paced format.

We’ve all seen times where companies try to sponsor communities. Sometimes they do it successfully, but other times all you can do is watch while the whole thing backfires. Here are a few tips to help companies approach community building in the right way to build successful communities and hopefully avoid the disasters that some companies face.

Tip #1 Think about Ownership:

  • The company does not “own” the community. The community “owns” the community, and the people participating own their contributions (whether it is ideas, advice, documentation or code).
  • A company who starts a community:
    • owns the infrastructure
    • facilitates the discussions
    • moderates and keeps people in check
  • It can be difficult for companies to think of a community in this way. However, if the company doesn’t play nice with the community, the community will take their discussions elsewhere and fork the community and the project.

Tip #2 Keep Sales and Marketing in Check:

  • This applies to all communities, but is especially true for developer communities.
  • Developers want detailed information without the fluff. Get rid of the marketing speak and make it easy to find the key pieces of information
  • Don’t use the community to sell anything. You don’t need to pimp your products and services within the community. If someone is already participating in the community, then chances are they can find out how to get in touch with you if they need something.

Tip #3 Make Someone Responsible for Community Management:

  • This person can make sure that everything is running smoothly in the community and work to resolve issues before they get out of control.
  • The community manager isn’t responsible for doing all of the work within the community, but they can pull the right people into discussions and make sure that the right people are participating.
  • For open source and developer communities, this person should report into the technical side of the company (not marketing)

Companies can have successful communities, but only if they take the time to do the right things and truly participate in the community.

legion of tech

Mark Shuttleworth in Portland for Legion of Talk on July 21

Mark ShuttleworthAre you going to be in Portland on July 21st (the Monday of OSCON)? If so, you won’t want to miss Mark Shuttleworth speaking as part of the Legion of Talk series brought to you by Legion of Tech. This is the second in the Legion of Talk series (Gary Vaynerchuk spoke to us last week). Mark will be talking about 2 things: Ubuntu and his experiences traveling in space. I am in geeky heaven with that combo 🙂

The Details:

July 21, 2008
McMenamins Mission Theater
1624 NW Glisan St
Portland, OR 97209
6:30pm to 8:00pm
Doors open 5:30pm (come early, have dinner & hang out with us before the talk)
RSVP on Upcoming, but also get a ticket on the Legion of Tech site

Related Fast Wonder Blog posts: