Colin Charles Agenda

Look at the pitches these articles give. Tell me if you get different messages from them.

The Star says Govt has stopped paying petrol subsidies: Shahrir and The Malaysian Insider says Malaysians are now paying petrol tax.

The Malaysian Insider has 28 comments at the time of this writing… Interactivity. Something traditional media should look into?

To remember in the future:

“After the station operators take their margin of 12.1sen and the oil companies take their margin of 19.1sen, we are left with RM1.69 from RM2.

“If the refinery price is RM1.30 per litre for example, the Government will be taking 39sen per litre as revenue.”

PickupPal
PickupPal is an interesting concept. Its a web tool to connect drivers and passengers, to help carpool, in various towns, all around the world. This is something I wish I’d known about had I been in Melbourne. I of course only found out about it, thanks to the city of Ontario being silly, and fining them for unregulated transportation. I say fair game for all - this is like hitchhiking 2.0? Good way to make new friends, and I’m guessing it’ll work well, if you already enjoy things like CouchSurfing, for example.

Ordering pizza from Facebook?
Ordering Pizza Hut From Your Facebook Page? It’s on the Way is an interesting read. To know that Pizza Hut crossed $1 billion in online sales in the last 18 months is valuable - to know that now you’re going to do it from your possibly favourite website, with a viral widget, is even more valuable.

Imagine you ordering a pizza, it updating your Facebook status, and another bored friend isn’t sure what to eat in another timezone, and decides to order a pizza. Highly plausible.

Ordering via text/phone[web] (they seem to focus on the iPhone), also makes a lot of sense. Cuts out the need to speak to a human. Cuts out the waiting time.

Artist scatters a thousand of his paintings around London
A great social experiment? Adam Neate left a thousand of his paintings around London, for anyone to pick up. Some people are finding them and placing them on eBay, raking in up to £1,000. And Adam is happy about it - it’ll help people during the upcoming Christmas season.

Radar and Apple
Apple’s bug tracking system is called Radar. Its been notoriously kept closed, unlike most open source projects have. Read more about Open Radar, check out the Google App.

As technology enables people to do more, and more, companies previously setting up virtual roadblocks, will face competition from the community. A lesson to learn.

Check out VoteMatch USA. This idea was developed in the Netherlands by the Institute for Political Participation, I saw it on CNN today, and now they’ve got it applied to the US Elections.

I always felt I liked Barack Obama, but now I know that I am skewed to his policies, by about 83%. I really like the idea of VoteMatch.

In 2008, Malaysians showed Barisan Nasional that they’ve had enough. March 8 2008 is a day that will go down in history books. The next general elections, Malaysians will be ready for something like VoteMatch Malaysia. By 2012/2013, there will be so much Internet penetration, even more young guns who’ve been exposed to more freedoms, and even more that will want change.

VoteMatch is a propaganda fighting machine. No matter how many adverts there are in the media, how much parties embrace social media, there’s just been no way to show clearly, whom one would want to vote for. VoteMatch seems to be the answer

The Internet is a great tool, but the problem with the Internet is outdated information. I was looking to find the famous Foh San Restaurant in SS2, and while the Internet suggested it did exist, Foh San closed down in SS2 sometime in 2007. The only Foh San Restaurant that exists now is in Ipoh (not SS2), and from what I hear, they plan to open another one in SS2 or the surrounding areas sometime in 2009.

Now, back to the outdated information on The Internet. Look at dineMalaysia. It looks like it was last updated in 2004. A lot can change with regards to restaurants and bars in a period of four years. Their database is also shared with some Expat eatery site. Another catalogue site lists it, but I wonder how many restaurants on that list don’t exist anymore.

The importance of catalogue websites is that they need to be constantly updated. It has to be spurred by someone (maybe the tourism ministry?), and have the capability to be cool enough to have a community built around it. The way I see it, is it should be That’s Melbourne! with a community.

The only clue I got that Foh San in SS2 had closed was from this blog entry - “… the new Korean BBQ shop (formerly Foh San Restaurant branch)”.

This however, didn’t help me, as I had already spent time looking for it. Searching by relevancy, which can also suggest dated content, doesn’t help when there is a lack of information, does it? I see a book about Google’s search algorithms in the bookstore, but I’ve yet to pick it up. I’m just curious, how catalogue information can:

1. stay updated, constantly
2. be relevant

(1) is easy to solve… It has to involve a community. I guess that will fix (2) too… so how do you get a community involved in catalogue information? Shouldn’t be too hard considering its food and beverage related. Bottom-line is, there needs to be traction built around it…

Sun is a huge company. So it comes as no surprise that I’m finding out about Project Kenai via Tim Bray, instead of some internal mailing list (believe me, there must be thousands).

Tim’s got a Q&A with Nick Sieger, who’s one of the chieftains behind Kenai. I find it amusing that the comparison is made against Google Code and GitHub - has SourceForge hit irrelevancy? I’m surprised Launchpad isn’t mentioned.

Very Cover Flow like UI, with slider, etc. That’s Elliot Murphy, ex-Dolphin, current Ubuntero in the pic above

Nick goes on to say “We need a place to nurture and grow our open source communities that we ourselves can control” - can control. Control is a loaded word, no? Especially in the land of open source.

The architecture is such that they’re on Sun servers (SPARC based), using GlassFish, Apache, Memcache and a single MySQL 5.0.45 database server (I’m guessing there’s a maximum storage of 146GB because they’re using SAS disks - they will implement replication soon). It seems they’re currently on 32-bit MySQL - they’re getting less than 10% CPU usage, and the query cache is working well for them (98% hit ratio). If graphs, et al turn you on, look at the slides from Fernando Castano, Achieving High Throughput and Scalability with JRuby on Rails.

Its interesting to see the mix of software offered - Mercurial and Subversion (for project hosting - there be choice, unlike the other services out there), Sympa (as opposed to common Mailman), and Bugzilla as the bug tracker. Oh, its built on Rails, so it will be an interesting experiment nonetheless, to see how Rails scales.

Why does Kenai interest me? Because for every project, you have a forum, a separate wiki, access to source code, mailing lists, and a bug tracker. Why should Kenai interest the MySQL community? Because maybe down the line, there will be integration with the Forge. Today, the Forge does not offer hosting (we have got the bits built-in, technically, but Launchpad seemed like a better bet for us, in the long run - the Forge is not in the storage business, its more a catalogue of information), mailing lists, forums, or a bug tracker.

After all, the tagline is “We’re More Than Just a Forge”. There look like there are some social networking aspects to Kenai as well - maybe some ohloh like features will make its way in due time? Maybe a Facebook application, created using Zembly will mash things up even. Who’s to say what the future of Kenai can bring.

Sparse notes, from An Open Source Project Called “Failure:” Community Antipatterns to Know and Avoid. Both lists of panel members are inaccurate (and I seemed to have forgotten to take the list down, myself).

Blocking anti-pattern
feature you really want implemented, someone blogs it saying they’re going to do it, and a few years later, there’s nothing done

Docs? We don’t need no stinkin’ docs!
Look at SQL-Ledger and their documentation… this is our hero… Project around for 10 years, and most people end up using a fork of it instead.

Don’t screw around with licenses. Licenses are a social contract defining what people can do with your code and what you expect from them when they use it. Most open source license enforcement is done via peer pressure, not court order.

Community members have emotional attachments to licenses and responses to changes in them.

Sparse notes from the talk, I noticed Sheeri recording some video, so sitting through that at some stage might make sense. There were no slides, this was a panel discussion. Suggested reading: Organic vs. Non-organic Open Source.

Does Open Source need to be “Organic”?
Brian Aker, Rob Lanphier, Stephen O’Grady, Theodore Ts’o

Taking code, and slapping a certain license on it, doesn’t a successful software project make.

Blurring the distinction, by marketing. Not doing any work to get external contributions.

Open sourcing a product one plans on “genociding”, its really bad.

“Corporate sociopathic Druckerism” — Brian Aker

“As long as the source code is open, let the market decide. MySQL is largely inorganic, and its a success. Much of it comes down to choice.” — Stephen O’Grady

Mark Shuttleworth has pushed the idea that forking is OK. Look at Launchpad: take a project, fork the project, make your change, and you can publish your tree that people can use. The wonders of distributed version control.

Its up to a company to decide if they want an organic or an inorganic project. Its your code, do what you want with it. In the future, an organic project may outstrip your inorganic project.

Netscape: inorganic piece of open source (with Mozilla). Firefox: forked the code, turned it into an organic model, then there was success.

Is Firefox really the best example? Look at what it did for Netscape Corporation or AOL? This won’t work well with the Pointy Haired Boss.

What was your goal of releasing the product under an open source license? If marketing buzz, then you make lots of PR, etc… then go home. If your goal is wanting to cut your development cost, you’re going to be disappointed with an organic model. If your goal is ubiquity, you aim for an organic model.

Commit access actually means you’re a worker bee. It doesn’t mean a free wheel to push features, it means you’re the garbage man - you collect everything, you sort everything, and so on. Let’s rethink what it means to have commit access.

Note: these are live notes. It was a great talk, I’d rate it as excellent (and I’m not just saying that because Josh and I work in the same group at Sun). I’ll have to also comment on his thoughts and talk, in due time. MySQL, as an open source project, has a lot to learn.

Ten Ways to Destroy Your Community
A How-To Guide
Josh Berkus, Community Guy

Part 1: The Evil of Communities

• you may attract and will be unable to get rid off a community
• they mess up your marketing plans, because the community goes out and does its own marketing and PR and distributes your software in places you didn’t expect to
• they also mess up your product plans, because they contribute to code and features to your project, with unexpected innovation!
• communities are never satisfied by any amount of quality and keep wanting to improve it - if you can’t make it better fast enough, they sometimes do it on their own!
• you have to re-define your partner and customer relationships… people who were your customers start contributing to your project, sort of making them partners… “confuse your salespeople” :)
• the worst part about having a community, is that they require to you communicate constantly (and who has time for that?). Emails, chat channels, web forums, you get constant pestering

10 Ways to Destroy (The Berkus Plan, Patent Pending!)

1. Difficult Tools

• weird build systems
• proprietary version control systems
• limited license issue trackers
• single-platform conferencing software
• unusual and flaky CMS

This will limit attracting new community, and eventually people will get frustrated with the tools and go away.

2. Poisonous people
Maximise the damage they do - argue with them at length! So if people give you problems, continue feeding the trolls. Then denounce them venomously, and finally ban them. Josh then goes into a funny way of making use of poisonous people, which eventually leaves your team and the troll(s).

3. No documentation
Don’t document the code, build methods, submission process, release process, install it.

4. Closed-Door Meetings
Short notice online meetings are good. Telephone meetings are even better, because of timezones and limited conference lines. Meet in person, in your secure office, is the best way! (even if you dial in on a conference line so that others can here). People that are most involved will leave your project right away.

5. Legalese, legalese, legalese
The longer and more complex the better! Hate and fear of attorneys help drive people away from your open source project. Contributor agreements that are long/complicated, with unclear implications are particularly good. Website content licensing, non-disclosure agreements (NDAs) [European developers usually never sign an NDA], trademark licensing terms (name and logo of your project… good way to dissuade people). Used properly, you can use legalese to keep out developers!

Bonus: change the legalese every couple of months without informing folk!

6. Bad liaison
A bad liaison/community manager is someone reclusive (least social, hates answering email, unplugs phone regularly, etc.). Also, someone with no time works very well. They’ll spend a few weeks, but pretty soon they’ll give up, and if you’re really lucky they’ll be snappy and make bad comments to the community!

Assigning someone with no authority also helps. As a community manager, you have no chain of command, and you just get to deliver bad news (we decide, and you just say something). That person usually leaves your company, and becomes a poisonous person, and its a win-win.

Someone unfamiliar with the technology also helps. An open source Java project, getting a PHP programmer, is the best person for you :)

Having no liaison also helps. Refer to the project liaison, but have no one!

7. Governance obfuscation
A good model for this is none other than the UN (He has a slide on the UNDP).

Get your legal team to write a governance document. Like they’re dealing with a hostile outsider. You’ll be impressed what they come up with!

Three principles:
1. Decision making and elections should be extremely complex and lengthy
2. Make it unclear what powers community officials and communities actually have
3. Make governance rules nearly impossible to change

8. Screw around with licenses
Licenses loosely translate to Identity. You’re not just a Linux contributor but a GPL person… You’re not just a PostgreSQL contributor but a BSD person…

9. No outside committers
I. No matter how much code outsiders write, only employees get to be committers. This is a surefire way to annoy contributors eventually.
II. If they ask why they’re not being able to commit, just be evasive! Talk about needing a mentor, decision not made yet, etc…
III. Make sure there are no written rules on who gets to be a committer, or that the criteria are impossible to fulfil.
IV. Bonus: promote an employee who doesn’t code to committer! Most will get disgruntled by this and go away and they’re not your problem anymore.

10. Be silent
He demonstrates out live, by giving him a minute… what silence really is. Just do nothing, be really silent.

Q&A

How does Sun score?
All of these techniques have been successfully employed at open source projects at Sun and elsewhere. He gave this talk at a Sun internal event and people came up to him asking if they were talking about their project! Sun is scoring pretty well, but not necessarily any better than other corporations.

I missed the question, but the answer was: If you are fast and clear about explaining mistakes, communities tend to be forgiving.

Examples of a successful community?

Kernel.org, and the Linux kernel community.

What about using forking to destroy community?

Combines poisonous people and playing with licenses. It fragments the outside community as people have no idea which to use. You can’t plan a fork (as it requires a lot of motivation to do the fork - finding people with that level of commitment and masochism is hard). Keep your poisonous people around and encourage them (poisonous people who are also code writers), then you sort of foster their image in the community by giving them a voice, and if you do something to really mess with the community’s mind (say a change of license), then the poisonous person will take the project and fork it.

The other way of forking, is to take a legitimate outside developer, build them up, and then after they have become a major developer, abruptly lock them out. The danger here is that they might not fork the project, and change the project back…

How do you prevent companies from supporting your project? Because this also means more developers will come to your project. And these companies are now selling services around your product.

Monkeying around with licensing. Then you change the commercial services around that. The second thing to prevent ISVs, is to play around with trademark rules, and lots of legalese. Prevent them to get code into your project, that should help too.