Yesterday Sandro Groganz wrote about his experience helping a customer get started with blogging to promote their open source products, and towards the end of the post he offers some good tips for common questions companies have as they enter the world of blogging. While I agree with Sandro that organizations should adhere to some basic blogging guidelines—like ensuring that different bloggers “are in line with the main marketing message(s)”—I don’t think there are any hard and fast rules around things like how often to post and whether to respond to comments via additional comments or a new post. The best rule of thumb is to do what feels right to the individual blogger and fits with the corporate culture. Bloggers in an organization often handle some of the blogging details a little differently, and that’s ok.

I’m reminded of a story I heard on NPR a year or two ago about how the social norms of email communication are still evolving. For example, if you email a question to a colleague and receive an answer in return, should you respond with another email just to say thanks? In other words, when does the email conversation end? Ask a few different people, and you’re likely to get a few different answers. The NPR piece noted that it took many, many years for society as a whole to accept norms for telephone conversations—like answering the phone with “hello” rather than “ahoy” (apparently there was quite a debate in the early years of the phone). So it may be unreasonable to expect similar conventions for email communication to be widely accepted at this point in history, and I think blogs are in a similar evolving state.

For individuals and organizations new to the world of blogging, I highly recommend Naked Conversations by Robert Scoble and Shel Israel. This book presents a number of different approaches to blogging taken by various individuals and companies, and the general conclusion (at least as I remember it) is that there’s no right way or wrong way to blog. Just be yourself, be honest and respectful to others, have fun, and understand that each time you blog you’re entering a conversation with readers from a wide range of backgrounds and experiences. You can make up the rest as you go along, and odds are you’ll find yourself blogging more frequently as you get comfortable with the process and start seeing the benefits that blogging can deliver to your company.

We have some upcoming webinars on open source governance.  There are three webinars in the series, but you can register for just the topics that interest you.  Here are the three topics:

May 20: How to Inventory your Use of Open Source Software. 

• We'll show how to use a free open source tool, OSS Discovery, to find and inventory the open source used in your company.

Jun 3: How to Implement an Open Source Policy and Approval Process 

• You'll learn how to roll out and enforcing your open source policy and approval process.

Jun 17: Understanding Open Source License Obligations

• You'll learn how to uncover and comply with open source license obligations.

We recently announced new capabilities added to OpenLogic Exchange (OLEX).  OLEX is a free portal where enterprise developers can research and download certified, enterprise-ready open source.   

OpenLogic's library of certified open source projects has now passed 400 open source projects.  Each project in the Certified Library, made available on OLEX at olex.openlogic.com, has passed a rigorous 42 point certification process to ensure it is appropriate for enterprise use.  The OpenLogic Library has doubled the number of projects over the last year.  We prioritize new projects to be added based on customer requests, so the library represents some of the most popular open source projects that are in use in enterprises. 

In addition to expanding the lbrary with new projects, we are continuing to add additional content and tools.  We often get questions from companies about what open source package they should be using.  To address this, we've created the Open Source Comparison Matrix.  The Comparison Matrix does not attempt to pick a "best" option within any given category, but rather provides information on what each project is "best for".  This will enables enterprise developers to easily select a set of projects to consider for a particular use.  Check out the Open Source Comparison Matrix for Application Servers.

I've been trying new presentation and communication techniques. I've started twittering, I've moved to Presentation Zen model slides, I've given talks to small groups, given keynotes to rooms of 700 and been on a panel in front of 3000 people. Now I'm going to try a live text chat - I think it's seriously going to challenge my typing skills but I invite you to come join me! (Maybe some of you could help answer questions in your questions like you do at talks …)

Join me 2 p.m. – 3 p.m. ET, Thursday, May 15 on Network World for a live text chat. I will answer your questions about open source and its changing role in the enterprise, or anything else you want to talk about. (Within reason - and no, I still don't know why my parents decided to call me Stormy.)

No registration necessary. Just login at 2pm ET on Thursday at www.networkworld.com/chat.

See you there! 

You can build communities but first you have to understand them, enjoy them and play in them and one of the key things is to listen at least as much as you talk. The transition from traditional business and marketing to Web 2.0 is a tough one. This cartoon shows the confusion some companies have with social networking. I'm going to add it to my Would you do it again for free? talk.

From Geek And Poke:

I had a great day at CommunityOne yesterday - Sun did a great job of putting on a good community conference. It started out with the community panel - I was a bit nervous as not only was Matt Asay moderating (and he likes to stir the pot) but it was in front of 3000 people!

The day ended up being about Twitter. We had the audience Twitter us during the panel (I did see the comment about women!)  

the_contrarian @communityone Only one woman on the panel. Is that a sign of a dysfunction in the open source community? about 21 hours ago

And although we didn't get to their questions in the panel (they came a bit too fast to read!) it was fun seeing that the audience was listening and interested. Afterwards I answered all the Twitter questions in Twitter and made some new Twitter friends: @zalez, @Ryan_Singer, @the_contrarian, @rayval.

Then I went to the RedMonk unconference - they did a great job getting lots of conversation going. If anybody could keep a conversation going in the middle of a noisy cafeteria where 3000 people are swarming around you trying to get their lunch … well, it could only be the RedMonk guys. One of the discussions was around Twitter, what you hate, what you like, what you want to see, best practices … @monkchips said he'd blog it all. His theme of the day was definitely "listen more than you talk"! Another concept I found interesting was do you see Twitter as a river or a pond? It changes whether you follow lots of people or just a few … oh and don't be offended if someone doesn't follow you. It probably has to do with the river/pond idea or they might be your boss and they just really don't want to know that about you!

I met a bunch of my Twitter friends face-to-face for the first time: @SaraD, @twleung, @tmolini, @cote, @monkchips, @imurdock, @IanSkerrett, @gstein, @aglick35, … any body I missed? And I saw a bunch of my old Twitter friends: @johnmark, @webmink, @sogrady, @jzemlin, @Silona, @DivaDanese, and I saw @laurencooney several times and never got to say hi.

Now I'm off to JavaOne. 

Cool story:  I just got out of a meeting with a VC who is a potential investor in OpenLogic.  At one point during the meeting, he asked about adoption of open source application frameworks — specifically Struts and Spring.  I pulled up the web site for The Open Source Census, went to the All Packages by Name report and found out that Spring had been found on 8% of the machines scanned so far and Struts on 16%.  The VC's mouth dropped open.  He started staring at the screen and writing all sorts of numbers down in his notebook.

This is the promise of The Open Source Census.  I know we've got a ways to go to collect more data, but the data makes people salivate.  And it's only going to get better.  Now that is cool.

In a recent post on open source business models, Fabrizio Copabianco from Funambol states his belief that a business model based solely on support won't work.

I can't believe a pure model based on support is going to scale to the one billion dollars we always talk about. A pure support and services model works for a while, then customers get comfortable with what they have and pull the plug on it. Your best customers leave you because they are too satisfied… It is sad but inevitable. Maybe you can make it with an operating system, but if you move up the stack you are screwed…

I believe the issue with open source support models is because of the way they have worked up till now …which is often too much money for too little value.  In the end, companies are willing to pay if the cost is commensurate to the value they get and is better than alternative options (eg self support or community support).  Because open source support is often significantly cheaper than proprietary license plus maintenance costs, it may be easy at first to overlook the fact that we still need to ensure that the value customers get justifies the cost.

More than once at OpenLogic we have been called by companies who had already dropped support from a commercial open source vendor because they value/cost relationship was not there.  They later ran into support issues that they needed help with.  Inevitably, when we help solve those problems, they are happy to sign up for a support subscription.  The customer was always very willing to pay for support – just not the price that the vendor wanted to charge.

 As commercial open source vendors, we need to deliver value commensurate with our cost.  Sounds obvious, but I think it's been easy to skate by on the fact that open source is cheaper than proprietary software.  I don't think that will be the case for much longer.  As the economy tightens, as customers get more familiar with open source, as the competitive landscape emerges, successful open source support companies will be the ones that deliver a lot of value at a low cost.

The old adage, "you can't manage what you can't measure" applies to open source as well.  Bernard Golden recently posted on why it is important for CIOs to understand what open source software they are using in order to adequately address both the infrastructure needs and legal requirements of open source.  He looks at the challenges that this lack of awareness can present.

Think about the risk exposure this represents. Obviously, there are questions regarding whether the company is complying with the license obligations of the open source software, so the company's attorneys are likely to be concerned.

To my mind, though, legal risk is only a small part of the overall risk this CIO faces. The far larger risk is that there is no visibility into the makeup of a significant portion of the company's IT infrastructure. How can you confidently plan for SLA commitments when you're not sure of what software you're running, its maturity, supportability, and so on? Furthermore, as a CIO, you face the very real potential of being unable to adequately map out your workforce skills planning, since you are unaware of what development and operations commitments accompany these invisible software implementations. Finally, it's hard to attest to important regulatory requirements (if you're subject to regulations like recoverability and so on, as financial institutions are), when you don't know what will need to be recovered.

OpenLogic developed OSS Discovery — a free, open source tool that finds installed open source on your machines – to address just this problem.  IT organizations can download OSS Discovery and use it to scan a sampling of machines in their organization to find out what open source they are using.  OpenLogic also provides a free inventory analysis of the first 500 machines.  This inventory is the first step to open source governance.

Once you have the data about what open source you are using, you can:

• ensure compliance with open source licenses
• determine the type of support and SLAs required
• plan for skills needed in your organization
• ensure compliance with regulations and internal policies

You can also benchmark your open source usage against that of other similar companies by taking the results from OSS Discovery and anonymously submitting them to The Open Source Census.  By doing so, you will get access to benchmark reports that show opportunities for using more open source software.

The Great Ubuntu-Girlfriend Experiment has been making the rounds and has been quite amusing from many angles.

Ironically, I received this email from my Mom a few minutes ago:

“I keep getting a notice on the screen that I should install the latest version of Flash. Seems like nothing is working right this morning on the usual things I look at like the NY Times, eBay, etc. Is this all connected? Is the Flash Update free? What do I do? Help.

Mom
“

Sounds almost identical to the failures in the Ubuntu girlfriend experiment.

The kicker? My Mom is running OS X.