Async decision making # This is the second in a series of posts on inner source/open source. Bertrand Delacretaz gave an interesting talk on how to avoid meetings by introducing an async way of making decisions. He started off with a little anecdote related to Paul Graham’s maker’s vs. manager’s schedule: Bertrand’s father was a carpenter. He was working in the same house that his family was living in, so joining the family for lunch was common for him. ...
Notebook - OSS office at Adobe # tl;dr: This post summarises what I learnt at the Adobe Open Source Summit last week about which aspects to think of when running an open source office. It’s mainly a mental note for myself, hopefully others will find it useful as well. Longer version: This is another post in a series of articles on “random stuff I leant in Basel last week”. When I was invited to Adobe’s open source summit I had no idea what to expect from it. ...
Talking people into submitting patches - results # Back in November I gave a talk at Apache Con NA in Vancouver on talking friends and colleagues into contributing patches to open source projects. The intended audience for this talk were experienced committers to Apache projects, the goal was to learn more on their tricks for talking people into patching. First of all thanks for an interesting discussion on the topic - it was great to get into the room with barely enough slides to fill 10 min and still have a lively discussion 45min later. ...
Some statistics # Various research projects focus on learning more on how open source communities work: What makes people commit themselves to such projects? How much involvement from various companies is there? Do people contribute during working hours or in their spare time? Who are the most active contributors in terms of individuals and in terms of companies? When asked to fill out surveys, especially in cases where that happens for the n-th time with n being larger than say 5, software developers usually are not very likely to fill out these questionairs. ...