MashedPotato Tech

I just recently wrote a post talking about job titles , which got me thinking of how I would classify my current career role.  That, combined with other discussions which have been happening inside the walls of my employer, made me realize that the best way to describe myself would be as an Open Source Community Pragmatist. I can see the heads shaking, the puzzled looks, and even the sighs from some of my colleagues who are a bit more on the idealistic side when it comes to these topics.  Let me assure you, I have total respect for those folks who make everything they do in life about the ideology - it's just not the path I've chosen for my career, and here's why: The vast majority of the day-to-day work of society & business happens between the ideological extremes: Conservatives vs. liberals Proprietary vs. open source software Emacs vs. vi (a little inside joke for my technology readers) Does this mean that we don't need the extremes?  No, I think they...

[Note: edited 9/8/10 to clear up misconceptions about my involvement in Forge.gov] I'd like to talk today about why a system similar to Forge.mil is a good idea for Federal government civilian agencies. I'll preface this with full disclosure: I work for CollabNet , the main infrastructure provider for Forge.mil . The CollabNet TeamForge product is the 'glue' underlying Forge.mil, but it allows for additional services to be 'plugged in' in the future. My role in Forge.mil is that of a community management consultant (and part-time day-to-day community manager). Despite the fact that the GSA (General Services Administration) is looking to the DoD (specifically DISA ) to help them replicate the success of Forge.mil, the main point here is not to sell TeamForge, but, instead, to make customers and communities successful from a cultural and process standpoint. Therefore, I'm posting this here for neutrality rather than at the ' OnCollabnet ' blog....

Like a lot of people in the tech world, I try to read a variety of publications (both online and physical versions) to keep up with what is going on in the dizzying world of technology. Recently, I read a great article in a recent issue of Wired entitled Accept Defeat: The Neuroscience of Screwing Up . This article explains in some detail, with examples, the problem of 'failure blindness' in scientific research. This phenomenon causes scientists and researchers to ignore anomalies in their results they didn't expect, which are therefore categorized as 'failures'. The article goes on to state that one of the best ways of overcoming this bias is to involve other people from outside of your immediate speciality in discussions about your results. For me, this triggered the thought process of why it's important to encourage participation in your communities (Open Source or internal) from folks on the periphery of your project - non-specialists who have somethin...

There has been a lot of drum beating of late on the topic of the increasing irrelevance of Open Source licensing, & the loudest drummers seem to be Tim O'Reilly & Matt Asay . Matt's recent blog post touches on some great points in this discussion, not the least of which is: "The real value in open-source software is no longer the software, but rather the resultant services that are delivered over the Web" This is spot on, and we (the industry) need to move beyond the 'licensing hiccup' that seems to permeate every conversation we have around Open Source (especially in government & enterprise). While I'll preface my statements with the standard disclaimer of ' IANAL ', for 'community source', or ' innersourcing ' discussions, I think that everyone gets way too wound around the axle on what the license is, and the relative merits of each possible alternative. I completely agree with Matt's point about the licenses ...

Like many Americans, I tried to keep today, Memorial Day 2009, focused on those who have served (and continue to serve) in our armed forces. Whatever your political leanings, I think we can all agree that we owe a huge debt of gratitude to those brave men and women to put their lives (and their family's livelihoods) on the line everyday. So, what does this have to do with technology, Open Source, and social media? Given that I'm helping create a new initiative ( Forge.mil ) to enable those building technology for our troops do so in a more efficient manner, I think there is a strong connection. It should go without saying that our armed forces deserve the absolute best technology to help accomplish their mission and keep them safe. I'm heartened by the fact that technologies and methodologies that we in the consumer space take for granted are now starting to be accepted in the Department of Defense as the most expedient way to help build out the tech that our warfigh...

Thanks to Gwyn Firth Murray , Larry Augustin , and Jeff Luczcz for a very entertaining panel discussion around Open Source at the recent eBig meeting . I was a bit nervous about how this panel would come together since I was the 'rookie,' whereas Gwyn had worked with Larry and Jeff separately before. However, the commonality of the passion for Open Source brought this panel together nicely and there was an excellent exchange of ideas between and amongst the panel (as well as our audience). I think we had someone in the audience comment on the fact that it seemed like we had all known each other a long time! :) The areas we covered during the talk were: licensing, community development, and reasons for using Open Source. I think the panel all agreed on good reasons for using Open Source, with all of us giving cogent examples of what the value proposition for using Open Source is (taking advantage of the huge amount of R&D and work that goes into good Open Source project...

For anyone interested in hearing about Open Source as it applies to companies, I'm going to be part of a panel discussion at eBig (East Bay Innovation Group) in Pleasanton, CA on Monday 11/10/08 titled ' Open Source: How to Make Money and Get Money? '. Given my previous post on the pragmatic aspects of using Open Source, I think this should be an interesting discussion. It's been a while since I've spoken/participated in a panel, but this one should be a lot of fun. I'll be joined by Open Source luminaries Larry Augustin and Jeff Luszcz , with Gwyn Firth Murray moderating. So, yes, for those following, I'm the least well known of the panelists. :) Hopefully my colleagues on the panel will handle most of the questions around legal/IP, since those that follow my blog will remember that while I recognize the value of understanding licenses around Open Source, I tend to be more focused on the community building/collaboration aspects (not surprisingly, giv...

Stormy Peters, the new Executive Director of the GNOME Foundation , penned an interesting blog post today on how she got started in the computer field. Reading through it, I was struck by how similar some of the aspects of her beginnings in the industry were to mine. It is kind of scary actually. :) I fell in love with using an Apple IIe in the A/V room of my high school, and found every excuse I could to go down there between classes and at lunch to play with 'peek' and 'poke' (and yes, write everyone's favorite BASIC program which loops the phrase 'I'm awesome' forever). :) The fascination of holding data and programs on a 5 1/4 floppy drive was something I'll never forget. I too 'graduated' to IBM PC's, and wrote some early graphics programs (but, they looked kind of hokey on the 'green screen' monochrome monitors). I was very fortunate, in those early days, to know that this is what I wanted to do with the rest of my li...

First off, to my few readers, I didn't die... :) I had a very interesting couple of weeks, plus a vacation. The short version of my interesting weeks is that I've left Motorola and taken a job as an Open Source Community Manager at CollabNet , where I'll be working to help build the communities of CollabNet's current and future customers interested in Open Source development practices. When and if I end up doing a corporate blog, I'll post the link here. Now, on to today's topic - Open Source Pragmatism. I was having a conversation with some new colleagues, and I mentioned that I sometimes get a hard time from hard line Open Source folks about my use of a Macbook Pro. I look at software very pragmatically, and quite frankly, while Ubuntu has done a great job of getting the Linux Desktop to where it is, it still cannot compare (for my needs as a consumer) with OS X. Now, that doesn't mean I don't believe that Open Source (and Linux) have made grea...

Corporations and the Open Source community seem to have a love/hate relationship most of the time, and I think it stems from several key misunderstandings (mainly on the part of the companies). A lot of companies (though there are notable exceptions, such as IBM ) seem to look at Open Source as a source of free (as in beer, not as in speech) code/labor. In other words, management sees that code and those developers as a great way to shortcut the product development process, do it for less, and then 'profit ensues'. I know that sounds funny to a lot of technology people (like me) who are familiar with and involved in the Open Source community, but that mentality is very real in larger/older companies (especially those in consumer electronics sectors). It doesn't help that marketing and PR grab ahold of the notion of Open Source as a great 'hook' to make their company or product offering sound sexy and appealing. The unfortunate reality is that a lot of corporate...

In today's installment, we go in search of... well, code. This being a technology blog, searching for answers in codes seems like a natural thing to do. :) In the last year or so, I've become more convinced that detailed, accurate code search technology is critically important to developer productivity, code reuse, and helping to squash pesky bugs on projects/pieces of code that have subtle inter-dependencies. I also believe that, properly implemented, social knowledge management/networking can be applied to further enhance the benefits of accurate code search. First, let's start off with the major players: Google (of course) Krugle Koders (now owned by Black Duck Software ) Google does a fairly good job of indexing existing Open Source code from the net, but their interface relies too heavily (in my opinion) on regular expressions, and doesn't provide the flexibility of search targets that Krugle and Koders do. Additionally, Google currently doesn't offer an E...

My colleagues and I have a standing joke when we talk about what makes social networks/collaborations/knowledge management work - it's everyone's favorite radio station, WII FM (What's In It For Me). To be sure, there are some social/crowdsourcing applications out there that people contribute to purely for altruistic reasons, or to share things with their friends. However, the vast majority of attempts to harness the 'group collaborative', or 'hive mind' for business purposes or knowledge management have failed unless there was a clear win in the WII FM department. Two examples of applications where WII FM makes a huge impact are del.icio.us (social bookmarking), and Dash Navigation (crowd-sourced realtime traffic). In both of these cases, there are clearly benefits to the users of the respective applications, and the participation engendered by that benefit is the main reason the systems produce good data (search and traffic, respectively). It is very...

So, my friend Eugenia Loli-Queru, master of many interesting things, has open sourced her Mobile Browser Detection kit. Good stuff - check out her blog for more details. True to form, the community has commented, and an ongoing code review is happening as we speak. I love that immediate feedback you get from the Open Source community. :)