Category Archives: community

conference, postgres, postgresql , , , , 3 Comments

Perl Mongers, Open SQL Camp and JPUG 10th anniversary coming up

Just asking.

I’ve got a busy couple of weeks in November:

  • November 11, 2009 – I’m presenting Bucardo (a sweet replication system for Postgres) at the Portland Perl Mongers group, 7pm at Free Geek.
  • November 13-14, 2009 – I’ll be helping run OpenSQL Camp with Eric Day here in Portland, OR. We’re having it at Souk, and kicking things off on Friday night at Old Town Pizza, starting around 6pm. Eric asked about having an n-master (multi-multi-multi…etc master) replication session, so I might talk with him about that there.
  • November 19, 2009 – PostgreSQL Clustering Summit in Tokyo. I’ll be giving a 5-minute presentation on the state of Bucardo development, and meeting (or seeing again!) the major contributors to replication and clustering technology for Postgres.
  • November 20-21, 2009 – Japanese PostgreSQL User Group 10th Anniversary Summit. I’ll be presenting a talk on User Groups with Magnus Hagander, President of PostgreSQL Europe.

I’m happy to say that I’ve got my slide decks done well in advance this time, and am mostly working on example configurations. I started a repo on github to hold my bucardo examples. Enjoy!

community, portland , , ,

Server Sky presentation, with Personal Telco folks, tomorrow in PDX at 6:30pm

The following email just dropped into my inbox, and I had to share. Keith is a fixture in the Portland tech community – running Linux clinics (scroll down the page for info), volunteering at FreeGeek, attending user group meetings and occasionally presenting.

He’s got this crazy idea – provide computing services from orbit. It involves ultralight discs of silicon, solar sails and launching “stuff” into orbit from a really long rail line.. and, well, some other completely awesome ideas. Keith set up a wiki, and there are great volunteer opportunities sprinkled throughout it, like “Study and simulate the trajectory and recovery of a tumbling server-sat in detail.” Seriously.

If you’ve got some time tomorrow, you should go check it out, have a beer at Roots and mingle with the Personal Telco folks, who are amazing for creating a completely free, volunteer-driven wireless network throughout Portland.

Tomorrow’s meeting at Roots Organic Brewing will feature a talk by
Keith Lofstrom about ServerSky.

See you then!

Chris Chen

—– Added by keithl ———————————————–

Roots Organic Brewing: 1520 SE 7th 503-235-7668
http://www.personaltelco.net/RootsBrewing

For Pluggers that don’t know, The Personal Telco Project is a brave
band of wireless warriors, unwiring Portland one free hotspot at a
time. A great way to give back to the community, learn about wifi
and Linux and neat gizmos like the ALIX SBC, and hang out with the
Cool Kids. The monthly meeting is a great chance to “network” 🙂
http://personaltelco.net

Server Sky is a proposal for array computing and internet service
from orbit. We are building a team of technically savvy dreamers,
then will recruit local manufacturers (Solar World, Intel, Triquint,
etc.) to build it. If you can do radios, math, physics, coding, or
even drawing or gardening or salt-water coral aquariums (!) we can
use your help. http://server-sky.com

Someday, we will feed the PTP ground mesh from the multivendor
orbiting mesh, and no longer depend on ground monopoly backhaul.

I’ve given versions of this presentation before. This is somewhat
improved, and I will be presenting it next week at the A.I. Meetup
in the Bay area, Lawrence Berkeley Labs, the Hackers Conference,
and a few other venues.

Keith

community, conference, postgres, postgresql , , ,

GSoC Mentor Summit and the new mentor’s manual

4040234286_8cfb2f4708

I’ve been in San Jose since Wednesday, working on a book and preparing for today’s Google Summer of Code Mentor’s Summit. We’re here at Google’s campus, setting up the schedule and meeting new and old friends.

A group of us – me, Jen, Alex, Bart, Jonathan, Leslie and Olly – worked with Adam Hyde from Flossmanuals.net to create a new GSoC mentoring guide. We “book sprinted”, writing the entire manual in two days. Leslie was nice enough to produce printed copies for attendees, and the whole thing is available online at: http://en.flossmanuals.net/GSoCMentoringGuide. Flossmanuals.net is pretty cool — you can create epub books, PDFs and beautiful looking printed books quite easily.

I was happy to reference the patch review process from PostgreSQL in the ‘upstream integration‘ chapter.

We’d love comments, feedback and contributions to the manual!

community, conference, open source bridge, osbridge , 3 Comments

Kicking off Open Source Bridge planning

Starting the rodeo rumors now...

Starting the rodeo rumors now...

We’re kicking off the planning for Open Source Bridge 2010, old school. We’ve got a mailing list that you should subscribe to:

http://groups.google.com/group/osbridge

Last year’s organizing team was very structured. I like to think that we managed things well, and our attendees were pleased with the results.

But, this time – we’re changing how we manage things.

We’re letting everyone in on our planning process! So, if you enjoyed Open Source Bridge last year, and want to see it be a success this year, join our mailing list now, and see if you can lend us a hand.

Thanks!

Photo courtesy of FirstBaptistNashville, via a Creative Commons license

community, complaints, conference, leadership , , 1 Comment

Responding to offensive presentations at conferences

How to handle WTF conference presentation moments.

How to handle WTF conference presentation moments.

On a couple mailing lists I participate in, people have raised the question: “When something offensive occurs during a conference presentation, what’s the right response from the audience and/or conference organizers?”

Unfortunately, at least one of these discussion lists is private, so I can’t directly quote the individuals who posted. But the content was worth sharing, so I’m summarizing the group’s thoughts in my own words below.

Here are some of the suggestions for handling offensive, unprofessional or inappropriate presentation content:

  • Train session monitors for a conference to contact the conference chair in the event of an issue, so that the conference chair can make a decision on whether to stop the talk or directly address the issue immediately (or later)
  • Conference chairs/committees make it clear to presenters up front what the expectations are (Presentation be rated G/PG-13/R, none of the “seven forbidden words” allowed, no commercial pitches, etc) — and there were dissenting opinions about this (esp G-rated issue — examples were given of things that were G-rated but also incredibly offensive depictions of women and minorities)
  • Screening presentations ahead of time (typically not something that open source conferences are able to do because of the habits of our presenters, and the rapidly evolving nature of the topics, but possible for a subset of presentations)
  • Audience members could address something that is offensive during Q&A (and audience members are encouraged to operate under the assumption that the speaker unintentionally offended)
  • Leave room for judgment on the part of conference organizers when developing community standards, as conferences are an “intentional community” and are free to set standards which are more or less strict than other conferences/communities
  • Bake a WTF cake, and serve it to the presenter (WAY underutilized tactic)

One theme that emerged was the need for some kind of immediate response that communicated both to the audience and the speaker that something was wrong. However, many situations require individuals to use their best judgment in responding, and stopping a talk should likely be left to the discretion of a conference chair.

Also, treating the speaker as though they have made an honest mistake and did not intend to offend anyone (I have yet to experience a situation where this was not the case, personally) is always the right way to start a conversation about it.

Photo courtesy of SanFranAnnie, under a Creative Commons License

community, postgres, postgresql, user groups , , , 1 Comment

User Group Idea: Present what you do for work

Ta da!

Ta da!

One consistently interesting topic for our PDXPUG meetings has essentially been show and tell. Presenters answer the question: what is it that I do for work?

We’ve had oceanography, GIS, relational algebra and even MySQL presentations that stem from this idea.

For the most part, those of us who do database work are so specialized that we might gloss over the details of our job to avoid boring our friends and colleagues to death. The fact is though, much of the work that we do *can* be made interesting for 30 or 45 minutes. And what better forum than a group of dedicated database geeks?

Some angles I’ve seen work are:

  • Giving background on the how and why of data collection (for example: Discussing probes that collect location, temperature and salinity in the ocean: how they communicate back to the mainland, data quality issues, failure modes);
  • Explaining a schema design and sample queries that work with it;
  • Going through a refactoring exercise with an existing database;
  • Describing a particularly difficult to deal with problem or incident (database migrations!) and how you did (or didn’t) solve the issues that occurred along the way;
  • Turning your meeting topic into a drinking game.

Our favorite meeting topic for drinking games is relational algebra.

The important thing about these types of presentations is that the person presenting picks the most interesting parts of their job to talk about. Enthusiasm for work shines through, and draws in the audience — a great thing when you haven’t given many presentations.

What are some topics you’ve seen, or would like to see covered related to a person’s day job?

Photo courtesy of exfordy, via Creative Commons license

pdxpug, portland, postgres, postgresql, user groups , , , , 4 Comments

User Group Idea: Patch Review Party

On Tuesday, I invited a group of people from PDXPUG over to my house for chili, beer and patch review. PostgreSQL has what we’re calling a ‘commitfest‘ every two months where we buckle down and try to review and commit (or reject) the patches submitted over the last few weeks. Webb and Gabrielle had the original idea to get everyone together for a review party, and they did a fantastic job recruiting people to join in.

Gabrielle gave the details and lessons learned on our PUG site already, so I won’t repeat that.

One thing that occurred to me as we were doing this work was how affirming and *fun* it is to work on patch review with people in person. Several people commented on how they enjoyed doing this work in the company of others, and how the tedious issues around compiling, applying patches and going through all the questions were made so much more enjoyable with a group of good-natured hackers sitting around answering questions.

The atmosphere wasn’t pressured – I gave a little background about commitfest, how it’s been run in the past and what the development group is trying to change about it (mainly, bring in more people, and make patch review faster for people who submit patches, and smoother for the committers). Then we just got down to work in pairs or groups of three.

Working in pairs is a really good idea for this type of event. I certainly learned a few things from John, and over email and in-person again, we were able to wrap our review up a couple days later after the regular user group meeting. Having another person to bounce questions off of was invaluable for the patch that we reviewed, and it was just fun brainstorming variable names, piecing together a test case and then finding a solution to a problem we found.

Another thing that happened was that I had lots of time to chat with people I hadn’t talked with before about projects they’re working on (a really exciting materialized view implementation, and a massive cleanup of our *.bki infrastructure — two very ambitious projects!). Both people are now signed up to give talks at our local user group about their work.

I’ve talked a little bit about the social benefits of commitfest on various mailing lists, and I think the opportunity for user groups to get together and review patches as a team is a great one. I’ll be gathering up some of my other observations about PostgreSQL community and posting those over the next few weeks.

I’ve got a talk about user groups to prepare for (JPUG’s 10th anniversary in November!), so now is the perfect time for me to be gathering my experiences and thoughts from the last three years.

community, open source , , 1 Comment

My thoughts about community management

David Eaves wrote about open source contributions recently, and how community managers fit into the picture.

He remixed a graph from Angie Byron, and I wasn’t completely happy with the results. A fairly long twitter thread ensued, between myself, Jeffrey McManus, Emma Jane Hogbin and Peter Krenesky. In the end, David piped up and asked if I’d comment on his blog. So I did. 🙂

Hi!

I commented via a long twitter thread that I “disagree with putting comm mgmt between user/dev. like @webchick’s ideas better.” 🙂

To flesh that out a bit — my gut reaction to the ultimate diagram you created is that it puts community managers *between* users and developers.. This is a convenient way to demonstrate a process, but ultimately, I have to disagree with the premise behind it.

I work to break down barriers between “users” and “developers”. My ideal world is one where the two overlap to a very large extent. I dislike models of open source community development which seem to promote the idea that there needs to be an intermediary.

I agree that most communities require an interface — it is rarely self-evident how one goes about joining a community if you were on the outside. Many times it is an organic process — your friends invite you, or you run into someone at a conference or bar, or you have to use or work on a piece of software for work. For those who, for whatever reason, are not already on the inside, having a single point of contact (a “community manager”, or in the amusing case of the open source developer group I primarily work with – a “liaison”) can be an invaluable tool.

However, I do not see that role as one that ultimately should belong to just one person. If I do my job right, eventually, people won’t even come to me any more. They will go directly to the individuals inside the community they most want to connect with — because I have managed to open up our community interfaces to the point that they are self-documenting, or easily found with a few clicks on our website.

Possibly, this vision is a bit unrealistic in the near term. But I’ll paraphrase my friend Audrey — it’s way more fun to craft your reality, than it is to passively experience it.