Notes on meetup organisation # What feels like decades ago I went to a talk at FOSDEM. One in a dev-room. And one of the very few that proved relevant for many years after. I have no idea what the title was, nor what year it was given, I do believe it ran in the MySQL dev room - in terms of topic it provided an overview on what to do and what to watch out for when organising community meetups. ...
Open Source, InnerSource, CRA? # A couple days ago on Mastodon I read a post from by Robert Sander (here translated from German): “At FrOSCon I got the impression the FLOSS community is aging together. Where are people in their mid-twenties, new people entering the community?” “Entering the open source community” - what does that even mean? Does it mean creating a public GitHub repo and publishing source code there? ...
Some useful OSPO links # https://todogroup.org/ … TODO group of Linux Foundation generally collecting material around OSPOs and getting people interested in the topic together https://github.com/github/github-ospo/?tab=readme-ov-file … OSPO policy templates as published by GitHub’s OPSO Documentation skeleton … skeleton for things to document in an OSS project. Quilin … a starter project template for Open Source, and likely InnerSource, projects Keeping the above here to not loose them when cleaning my open tabs. ...
How hard can it be: Open Source contributions # “Sharing is caring - if only more downstream users simply contributed to the open source software that they depend upon.” - a thought that has crossed my mind more than once in the past decades. Except - for your average software engineer in industry “contributing to open source” is anything but simple. In addition it’s anything but obvious why - on top of daily work - one should commit time to open source. ...
Reboot blogging? # March 2009 - according to the history of the posts that’s when I started writing entries for my own blog. Twitter was three years old and of little more use than sharing where people were at the moment, which food they were eating.YouTube was just four years old. It was also the year I started the Apache Hadoop Get Together Berlin, back then in the famous Newthinking Store - a meetup before meetups were called meetups in a co-working space long before the concept of a coworking space gained traction. ...
Children tinkering, part 2 # Roughly a decade ago I wrote a short post about children tinkering. A lot of the advice from back then is still valid today. I just noticed that ten years later there are a few more things one could look into: Instead of only being a subtrack of FrOSCon, Froglabs have turned into Teckids e.V. - including online fora, a yearly week for an off-site and several side tracks of Chemnitzer Linuxtage, FrOSCon and FOSS events in Graz. ...
A short, incomprehensive history of spam and counter measures # “… it should be clear that improvements in communication tend to divide mankind …” by Harold Innis in Changing Concepts of Time This post was triggered by multiple conversations in my big data circle of friends. All conversations agreed on some important topics: Social media sites these days are influential on the daily life of people globally. With that influence comes an incentive to use these sites to influence behaviour and public opinion. ...
InnerSource Commons Board of Directors - a retrospective # In the last years I had the honour of serving on the InnerSource Commons board of directors. I was one of the founding board members. Thank you to Danese Cooper for inviting me to that: I still remember sitting in the subway on my way to work years ago reading her question of whether I wanted to be founding member of the InnerSource Commons. ...
When it takes a pandemic … # to understand the speed of innovation. 2020 was a special year for all of us - with “us” here meaning the entire world: Faced with a truly urgent global problem that year was a learning opportunity for everyone. For me personally the year started like any other year - except that news coming out of China were troubling. Little did I know how fast those news would reach the rest of the world - little did I know the impact that this would have. ...
Apache Board of Directors - a retrospective # Last term I had the honour of serving on the ASF board of directors, better explained in context of the ASF governance structure. As quite a few directors (myself included) declined to run for the board this year again, I thought it would be a good idea to think about the past term, write that down and publish those thoughts. As I wanted to give every board member a chance to respond, I shared some guiding questions but left it to board members to choose the channel they deemed most appropriate to share their responses on. ...