OSS Watch held the first Community Workshop for JISC projects in St Hugh’s College. The main focus was on open communities, how to build them and what benefits they provide.
Archive for June, 2007
Building a community around an open source project takes time and effort. You need to create an infrastructure to support your community (mailing list, version control, documentation, governance model etc.), you then need to ensure people know you project exists and that they are welcome to become a part of your community and finally you need to make sure that everyone is familiar with the activities of your project by reporting all decisions and activities back to your fledgling community.
Fortunately, using community tools assists with project management anyway, so the time is never wasted. However, that doesn’t change the fact that in the early stages of community development it really does feel like you are talking to yourself since you are co-located with most of your existing community members.
So, what can you do to kickstart a community? How do you attract people from outside your initial community?
There are two answers to this. The first is applicable to most of us - not a great deal other than the hard work. The second answer is only applicable to those with with pots of money.
I assume the majority of our readers do not have pots of money, so I’m afraid you are stuck with the hard work. Build your community infrastructure and make sure your environment is welcoming and useful for your users. OSS Watch can help you here, although you will need to have the project to attract users.
If you are lucky enough to have pots of money you have another option. You still need to set up a community infrastructure, you still need to create a welcoming environment and your outputs still need to be useful. However, you can use a couple of tricks to create activity around your project. For example, you can create an awards scheme in which people get a chunk of money, with no strings attached, to do work related to your project. For example, IBM have just announced the UIMA Innovation Awards, which is part of a larger set of awards.
The nice thing about this kind of award programme is that it is available to the rest of us working on projects that are in some way related. The goal of these award schemes is to build links between projects. So, why not take a look, maybe your project should be building links with the UIMA project (and being paid to do it).
In the last 48 hours, flickr, the successful photography website has rolled out user interfaces in multiple languages, including Chinese, Korean, Spanish, German, French, Italian and Portuguese. This translation of interfaces has long been a strong-point of open source, because of the ability of native speakers to contribute their own translations incrementally. I suspect that in the case of commercial services the payment processing and localisation of legal issues are almost as much work as the translation of text. In the case of flickr, many of the licensing issues are simplified by the fact that the creative commons has already translated both their licences and their “plain English” explanations into a wide variety of languages.
It will be interesting to see how the much-vaulted flickr tagging system copes with the sudden influx of multiple languages. In some communities there is long standing cross-language tagging and it will be interesting to see whether this continues, or whether each language community goes their own way.
Some people trust market analysts, some do not. My own position is to have a higher level of trust in those who publish research about a market or product in direct competition with one of their major clients. By doing so I (perhaps naively) believe that the chance for unintentional bias is reduced.
So, when IDC published their report on the size of the open source software market and its potential for growth in the coming years I decided to take note since one of IDC’s major clients is Microsoft, a company that is certainly in competition with some of the significant open source success stories.
So what does the report say? Well, it’s difficult to say, I don’t have access to the full report, only to the press release. The highlights in the release are:
- Worldwide revenue from standalone open source software reached $1.8 billion in 2006.
- This revenue will reach $5.8 billion in 2011, representing a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 26% from 2006 to 2011.
- Software vendors are advised to consider several factors when evaluating how best to leverage open source software as a business opportunity, including the most appropriate business model, the appropriate usage of partnerships and alliances, and the characteristics of the community supporting the open source software.
OSS Watch are here to help with “evaluating how best to leverage open source software”. We are able to provide advice and guidance on how UK Education institutions can leverage open source software either as a revenue generator from spin-off companies, for cost reduction or for business and community engagement.Please contact us if you would like any assistance with any aspect of open source development.
Simal, an open source project using DOAP/RDF files to reflect and build software-oriented communities, has a release candidate for their 0.1 release and looks like we’re about to get it out the door. The idea is that Simal takes RDF-encoded descriptions of projects and uses them to build small-scale community functionality. Much of the available RDF-encoded information about projects is actually in RSS feeds (think blog feeds, version control feeds, wiki change feeds, mailing list feeds, etc), and all these will be available for inspection and aggregation, eventually.
I like to think that Simal is the semantic-web hybrid of freshmeat and planet. I’d like to be able to build freahmeat-like displays of all recent releases of all the software my software is dependent on, for instance, all their contributor’s blogs aggregated together, or all their high priority bugs. But it’s still very early days yet.
Even though only the most basic of functionality is present in the most limited of ways, we’ve already had some third party participation, which of course, is the key benefit of the “release early, release often” approach to software engineering.
I’ve attached a presentation about Simal based on the presentation I gave at last weeks Google Open Source Jam 3 in London: Simal presentation
