As VP of Engineering, I frequently need to translate between engineers and management and one of the areas that come up frequently is our use of SCRUM (agile development). We happen to be lucky enough to have a CEO with a technical past and one that understands development methodologies. Of course this is good and bad in that he knows enough to question me :(

Since we launched the OpenLogic Expert Community that pays open source software developers to fix customer issues (something they do for free), I'm very interested in other programs that pay people for doing things they would normally do for free.

My Virtual Library

The excerpt below came from an introduction to a talk that Thomas L. Friedman gave at MIT. His books in general are incredible and this one specifically is a must read for everyone in or entering the work place today. In a concise and very readable way he explains much about the modern world-wide work force and how it impact each and every one of us...

And here's the states I've been to from Visited States.  I'd like to point out that I visited most of these in a car first.  Quite a few of them in a VW bug with my entire family!

You can use this website to quickly make a map of the countries you have visited. Thanks to Danese for the pointer! (She's visited a few more countries than me!) Here's mine:

So I blogged about my favorite open source conference, OSCON, and about being pregnant, and I got a flood of email from people, several from my favorite open source community, GNOME.  I get asked a lot how I got involved in open source and why I'm such a big fan.  While the why I'm such a big fan has a long history in how I view software, technology and society, the how I got involved in open source and so quickly discovered what a great community it is is all due to the GNOME community.

An interesting bit of trivia for you.  The half life of an online news story is 36 hours.  So half of all the people that are ever going to read it, read it in the first 36 hours.  Goes to show you that you really need to keep your websites and blogs up-to-date!

We recently attempted to release a new product and when we got near the end we found that many of the stories were not really complete. The developer had called them complete, but there were bits and pieces hanging around that were really required if we were to release the product to customers.

Although I won't be at OSCON, we (OpenLogic) will still be there and we will be talking about the Expert Community.  Rod Cope, our CTO and founder, will be giving my talk, Enterprises and Communities: A Match Made in ...?, where he'll be talking about our experiences of bringing enterprises and the open source community together in a mutually beneficial way.  Later that evening, Thursday at 7pm, we'll be having a BOF for all of those interested in the Expert Community or interested in sharing their experiences with it. 

I'll be missing my favorite conference for the second year in a row!  OSCON is one of the best open source conferences around.  From my perspective it does a great job of bringing open source community members - those that made it all happen - together with individuals and companies interested in open source. The conference is also run by some very open source savvy people at O'Reilly so the talks are good and the conference is well run in a very open source savvy way complete with good online info, wikis, BOFs, parties, etc.