Category Archives: community

oscon

oscon: day 1

This is from my notes.. no real organization.

First, I saw Tim O’Reilly do his radar talk. It seemed like a re-hash of some ideas about open data I’d heard him talk about before (last year?). His success factors for open source projects were: frictionless distro, collaborative development, freedom to build/adapt/extend and the freedom to fork.

He also mentioned something I’m interested in – getting more people involved in open source. He specifically mentioned mozilla => firefox and said that they “rearchitected for participation”. I imagine that the community took advantage of all four success factors, so that’s what he’s referring to, but I didn’t take any more notes on it.

He also mentioned memcached and hadoop as projects to watch.

The first session I attended was Josh Berkus’ Performance Whack-a-mole. He divided problem databases into three categories – Web (CPU-bound), Online Transaction Processing (CPU and/or I/O bound) and Data Warehousing (I/O bound). He also suggested that basic setup checks and configuration should take about an hour. A lot of common sense advice in one place, with quite a few tool suggestions I’m going to check out.

Next I attended the Open Design talk from the Chandler project. I really enjoyed this talk. I wish they would have had more time to discuss examples of their decision making process. Based on what I saw of Chandler, it seems like their methodology is really working. They have a lead designer (Mimi Yin) who has the final design decision making authority. They really spelled out that consensus is not required to move forward, and that voting is used to get a feel for what the voters think, not to make decisions. In design, I think that’s critical for maintaining a coherent design and direction. They said they may be releasing Chandler at the end of August. I took a lot more notes – I may post separately about this later.

I spent the rest of my time talking with people about women in open source, Perl and PostgreSQL (at the booth). The food was really good and they had beer most of the time in the exhibit hall. Good call organizers!

codensplode, gender, oscon

moving on from experiencing to changing the structure

I attended a “women in open source community ” BoF last night. I think that the intention for the BoF was good. But despite the efforts of the moderator, the discussion looped repeatedly on personal problems, and didn’t get very far into the meat of what we might really do to get more women into open source.

What if we looked beyond individual behavior and experience to the structures preventing women from participating?

Someone mentioned a recent study on a public university’s successful effort to increase female enrollment – presumably in a computer science program. We need information like this distilled from academic papers and organized as principles! Arm change-agents with facts and let them loose!

I think that our goal should aim for equal (50%!) representation across all computer-related fields. That is not going to happen without systemic change, or because a few people stop being jerks. It will only happen if the system that brings people into computer science and information technology puts a premium on gender equality.