Pin ItOne of the most debated things about hiring a community manager is which department the community manager should work in. Common consensus among community managers seems to be the engineering department even though most of them report into marketing. Bernard Golden suggests that they should be in the support department: Do not make the [...]
Read More »Pin ItJonathan Corbet has written an excellent guide for how to participate in the Linux kernel community. (And I heard Amanda McPherson was in on the planning.) I recommend it to anyone who is wondering how to get started contributing code to an open source software project but especially to those coming from a corporate [...]
Read More »Pin ItThursday was the first time an open source license was upheld as a valid license in US courts. People are excited! In Jacobsen v Katzer the courts ruled that the artistic license is a valid license that can be upheld under copyright law. (Note that the district courts had earlier said that the artistic [...]
Read More »Pin ItThe relationship between communities and the companies that are involved in them is always a tricky thing to navigate well. So I was interested to see that Maemo is holding an election for a Community Council that will "represent the community’s interests to Nokia, and to co-ordinate community initiatives". It's the first time I've [...]
Read More »Pin ItRobert Kaye blogged about the OSCON talk An Open Source Project Called "Failure:" Community Antipatterns to Know and Avoid. As I read it I was thinking, yep, yep, yep, and then I realized, "wait! These don't just apply to open source. They apply to any project." For example: "When no one makes a decision [...]
Read More »Pin ItSo last year I blogged about a new trend at OSCON, Donations for Tshirts. This year, free Tshirts were back. (I got four.) So what confuses me is that supposedly the economy isn't doing well now, but here were a bunch of companies with nice booths, handing out tshirts. I figure either: the economy [...]
Read More »Pin ItSo when I talk about what a community manager is, I usually mention leading by influence, advocating, explaining viewpoints, defending the community, representing the community within the company, and in general keeping the community healthy. They are ambassadors that spend lots of time communicating. Chris Brogan wrote a great post about the Essential Skills [...]
Read More »Pin ItIn my last post, I question the accuracy of the CIO.com survey. One of the numbers I was skeptical about was: Nearly half of the survey respondents, 45 percent, are using desktop applications such as OpenOffice.org That seemed pretty high to me. Until I checked out the Open Source Census site and found OpenOfifice [...]
Read More »Pin ItCIO.com did an interesting survey about open source usage in the enterprise. While I question the accuracy of some of the numbers, if you take them as a general guideline, they generate some interesting discussion. For example, as an answer to the question "do we really need support for open source software?" When it [...]
Read More »Pin ItI'm very excited – I am now officially joining the GNOME Foundation as Executive Director! Some background for those of you not familiar with GNOME. The GNOME project is: a free and open source desktop – an easy to use, intuitive interface for your Linux or Unix computer and the GNOME development platform, a [...]
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