community

Companies and Communities Book Sale

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I published the book, Companies and Communities: Participating without being sleazy, in March 2009. For some reason, people are still buying it, despite it’s increasing age! I just paged through it, and while a few sections have information that just isn’t relevant now, there is still some good stuff in it. However, there is enough outdated content that I just can’t justify the original price tag, so I decided to permanently reduce the price while I decide if I want to take the time to update and revise it for a second edition.

Here are the newly reduced prices

  • Paperback book is available for $9.99.
  • Kindle version from Amazon for $4.99.
  • Buy the PDF eBook for $6.99.

Now, here’s the question. Would people be interested in a second edition of the book with updated content? I learned a lot about book formatting by doing this book and my more recent cookbook, so I know I could put together a more polished version. I could also add new content and the quick tips from my community manager tips series.

dawn foster

2011 Year in Review: Travel and a Cookbook

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Every year, I like to write some kind of year in review blog post. I started writing these in 2007 as  a way for people that I don’t talk to very often to keep up with what I’ve been doing, but I’ve found that it helps me see what I’ve accomplished (or not accomplished) that I can use to reflect on what I want to do in the next year. You can find the 2007, 2008, 2009 and 2010 editions if you want to see how this year compares with previous years.

2011 in Review

In general, I stayed much more focused this year. In past years, I’ve had a tendency to become exhausted and burned out with too many side projects. This year, I focused on a couple of things and was happier and healthier as a result.

  • I finally published my vegan cookbook: What Dawn Eats: Vegan Food That Isn’t Weird. I have been collecting recipes for this cookbook for 15 years, and I am really excited to have it published. It is available in paperback, Kindle edition and PDF format. Out of everything I did in 2011, this is what I am most proud to have accomplished.
  • I spent a lot of time traveling in 2011, which is something I had been wanting to do for a long time. After ending a relationship of 6 years in May, I realized that this was a great opportunity to combine some of my work travel with a few fun side trips, since I didn’t need to hurry home to anyone. Aside from a few trips to San Francisco, Ohio, Seattle and Austin, most of my travel was international. I went to Vancouver (BC), Victoria, Prague, Berlin, Amsterdam, Paris, Sao Paulo and Rio de Janeiro. You can see pictures from some of my trips on Flickr, but I’ve been a little lazy about getting the set from Europe posted.
  • I also had more than my share of personal turmoil this year after my father unexpectedly passed away in June. It was a sudden reminder that life is short, which also fueled my travel bug to see the world while I can. However, the silver lining in all of this is that my sister and I learned that we had another sister that we never knew about. It’s been great to spend some time getting to know her and my new adorable little niece.
  • Aside from a little slacking during the holidays, I’ve been happy with my progress toward getting stronger and healthier. Over the summer, I had a few long runs of over 8 miles (~13k), which is longer than I had ever run in my entire life! I had a minor setback in an unfortunate incident with a sidewalk (sidewalk: 1, Dawn: 0), but I didn’t let it slow me down. The doctor called me an endorphin junkie as I was sitting in his office a week later looking at the follow-up x-ray of my fractured finger asking him when I could start running again, but he gave me the OK as long I as didn’t fall on my hand. During the cold and rainy winter months, I’ve been mostly a gym rat, lifting weights and doing cardio on the machines, but it keeps me in shape until the weather improves enough for me to want to run outside.
  • From a work perspective, I am still leading the Community Office within Intel’s Open Source Technology Center. While it’s been a rough year with a lot of changes in some of my projects (MeeGo and now Tizen), I’m happy with the work. I get to work with amazing, smart people both on the team at Intel and in the community of open source developers, and I have the opportunity to work on interesting projects while traveling to new places.
  • I’ve also presented at a bunch of conferences this year. Most of the presentations were related to my work at Intel talking about MeeGo, Tizen or community metrics at various Linux Foundation events, the MeeGo conference, AppUp Elements, OS Bridge and OSCON. However, I also did a couple of presentations about Hacking RSS at SXSW and WebVisions, just for fun 🙂
  • I also somehow found time to read almost 40 books this year and am attempting to learn French.

What I Want to Accomplish in 2012

  • I plan to continue to do more traveling in 2012. I really have the travel bug, and I just want to visit places that I’ve never seen before.
  • Like last year, I want to continue to be even healthier this year to build endurance and strength with longer runs in the 8-13 mile range and more regularly hitting the gym to lift weights. After pigging out over the holidays, I also need to get more diligent about not eating too much and making better choices about what I eat.
  • In a carryover from what I wanted to accomplish in 2011, but never quite got around to it … I still want to get back into doing some light programming for fun projects. I’ve been dabbling a bit over the past couple of years, but mostly with things like shell scripts and awk that aren’t really programming, so I’d like to do more with PHP and APIs.
  • Right now, I’m at the phase in my French lessons where I know some basic vocabulary, but I want to get to a point where I can actually carry on a conversation in French that goes beyond basic greetings and travel phrases in 2012.
  • I will also try to get better about blogging here after neglecting this blog for the past few months.
elsewhere

Blogging Elsewhere

Here is a summary of links to my posts appearing on other blogs over the past couple of months while I was mostly neglecting all my blogging 🙂

What Dawn Eats*

Buy the cookbook (available in paperback, kindle edition or PDF)!

Tizen.com*

*Disclaimers:

  • Tizen: I am a full-time employee at Intel and contributing to Tizen is part of my job.
  • What Dawn Eats is a Fast Wonder LLC venture
elsewhere

Blogging Elsewhere

Here is a summary of links to my posts appearing on other blogs over the past couple of weeks.

GigaOM’s WebWorkerDaily*

What Dawn Eats*

Buy the cookbook! Get $2.00 off the cookbook using discount code: 4V76EQLR

MeeGo.com*

*Disclaimers:

community

Crunching the numbers: Open Source Community Metrics at OSCON

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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

portland

Why I'm Excited to be a Mentor at PIE

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The Portland Incubator Experiment (PIE) is in the process of reinventing itself into a true incubator from what has been mostly a cool place for startups and independent freelancers to work together in what felt more like a co-working space. The new PIE is taking applications for the first wave of startups until August 1st and will provide up to $18,000 in seed funding and office space for three months in lovely Portland, Oregon starting on September 1st.

Co-founders will work closely with startups-in-residence, successful alumni, Wieden+Kennedy,  thought leaders from some of the world’s most successful brands (Target, Coca-Cola, and Nike), and the mentor network. I know a lot of the people who have started companies working out of PIE over the past couple of years, the creative people at Wieden+Kennedy and most of the mentors. I can certainly vouch for it being an amazing group of people who can offer real, tangible advice and inspiration for these new companies joining PIE in September.

I am personally honored to be asked to join PIE as a mentor. One of my favorite things is working with smart people doing interesting and innovating things. It’s exciting and energizing to work with founders who are passionate about bringing their ideas and dreams to life in a new startup. I like to think that I can offer something useful by sharing what I’ve learned in my 16 year career that has included working at Intel and other large companies, startups and as an independent consultant. I also learned so much during my time as a co-founder of Shizzow.

If you have a startup and are looking for a way to kick it into high gear, I really do encourage you to apply before August 1.

elsewhere

Blogging Elsewhere

Here is a summary of links to my posts appearing on other blogs over the past couple of weeks.

GigaOM’s WebWorkerDaily*

MeeGo.com*

What Dawn Eats*

*Disclaimers:

conference

Open Source Community Metrics

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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

MeeGo

The Evolving Mobile Ecosystem and MeeGo on June 20 with Gail Frederick

We are less than a week away from a great topic for the next Portland MeeGo Meetup on June 20th at 6:30pm! Gail Frederick, mobile developer and MeeGo product planner at Intel will be talking about the evolution of the overall mobile ecosystem with some insights into how MeeGo fits into this broader ecosystem. RSVP on Plancast.

Topic: The Evolving Mobile Ecosystem and MeeGo

Description: The mobile ecosystem is evolving rapidly with many different operating systems, devices and applications offering choices for consumers and device manufacturers. In this presentation, Gail will offer her insights about how the mobile ecosystem is evolving and where it is going along with some insights into how MeeGo might fit into the broader mobile ecosystem over time.

Bio: Gail Rahn Frederick works at Intel as a product planner for MeeGo. In her own time, she is an author, occasional developer and evangelist for standards-based Mobile Web and mobile application development. Her mobile applications and mobile web sites have been deployed to 10+ mobile operators in North America and Europe.

Rough Agenda:

  • 6:30 – 7:00: Hang out and talk to other people interested in MeeGo.
  • 7:00 – 8:00: The Evolving Mobile Ecosystem and MeeGo presented by Gail Frederick

Logistics:

  • Date: June 20.
  • Time: 6:30pm – 8:30pm
  • Location: Kells Irish Pub at 112 SW 2nd Ave.

It would be great if you could RSVP on Plancast to let us know how many seats and snacks we should have available.

What Dawn Eats

Buy the What Dawn Eats Cookbook!

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After an additional round of proofreading and a few more tweaks to the cover to get everything just right, my What Dawn Eats: Vegan Food That Isn’t Weird cookbook is finally available for purchase! The book is 140 pages and contains more than 90 recipes along with multiple variations with different ways to make most dishes, and it includes many of the recipes already found on the What Dawn Eats blog.

It is currently available as a paperback for $12.99 or an electronic PDF download $9.99 and will be available on Amazon.com in late June. As a special reward for those of you who have been following along with my progress, if you order before June 25, you can get a $2.00 discount on either the paperback or PDF format cookbook. Learn more about purchasing the cookbook by visiting the What Dawn Eats blog post.

Open source, Linux kernel research, online communities and other stuff I'm interested in posting.