Jim Grisanzio

The agenda is all set for the next Tokyo Linux User Group technical meeting. It’s Saturday May 9th. It’s right here at Sun’s office in Yoga on the 27th floor. Shoji and I will be there. And after the meeting we’ll go out for some beers, of course. These meetings are generally very well attended with 45 or so people. There are usually two main talks and sometimes a third short talk stuffed in there as well. Then there is an auction to raise money for the group (for hosting services, etc), so people are always bringing stuff to, well, auction off. And speakers drink free after the meeting, too. Good all around. Great group of guys. Stop by. All open communities welcome. To get a feel for these meetings, check out the many TLUG photos I keep at this tag right here: http://blogs.sun.com/jimgris/tags/tlug

The OpenSolaris community is being encouraged to submit some lightning talks at CommunityOne in San Francisco on June 1st. Cool. See Aaron Houston’s mail and link for details. At conferences I heavily favor the lightning talks. I find the rapid-fire format promotes more direct community involvement at the event, and it also generates a great deal of humor as well. Most hour long sessions are just too quiet. I prefer quick talks full of noise. Some thunder and lightning. See you at CommunityOne.

So cool to see an article about TokyoPoint0 in the Japan Times today, and the reporter, Alex Martin, used six of my images to help illustrate the story. Even better. Nice to be part of a growing international web community in Tokyo.

Linda tells us that BSC is 5 today. That`s amazing. I had no idea. I totally lost track. Well, the truth is I can`t remember my own birthday let alone anyone else`s, so no one should be surprised. I think I take BSC for granted now. It`s just there. It just works. But I shouldn`t take it for granted at all. The application transformed my work life and enabled me to communicate with people all over the world. For that I am most grateful. We even launched OpenSolaris on BSC, and at the time that was a bold and controversial move for Sun — and it caused a few arguments as I recall as well. Back then many of us were new to blogging and communicating in the open, but BSC provided an excellent platform for those involved in OpenSolaris to tell their stories. Directly. No filters.

My first post was a on the 30th of April 2004, just a couple of days after the so-called opening. Initially, I didn`t even know the damn thing was turned on. I followed Danese into a conference room one day and it turned out to be some blogging meeting. I heard rumors but didn`t know anything. I just sat down. I met Tim Bray for the first time in that meeting. Simon was there. Will. And some others but I can`t remember everyone. Half way though, I leaned over and looked at Will`s laptop and he was poking around on BSC. I looked at the URL and said something like "Is that thing on? That`s outside? You didn`t tell anyone?" And he responded (casually, of course) with something like "Yah, it`s live. I just turned it on." You have to realize how revolutionary that "just turning it on" bit was for Sun five years ago. But that`s pretty much what they did. People found out soon enough, though, eh?

Anyway, Linda Skrocki has been one of the leaders of the BSC effort, and many of the founding members of the platform are still around and still helping guide us all. BSC helped liberate many of the voices we so freely read today because the community is based on trust. I don`t think OpenSolaris would have been quite the same without BSC. I wouldn`t either, actually. I`d be getting a lot more sleep. Like now. It`s 2:30 in the morning and where am I? On BSC.

Interesting talk from Marshall Ganz about building community and distributing leadership. At the 13:10 minute mark of the video he talks about the distinction between power and leadership and how in voluntary associations you can`t rely on political or economic coercion to get people to something. You can`t substitute power for leadership. Leaders of volunteers elicit cooperation by tapping into the shared values of the community, and that`s a much more challenging exercising than dictating orders with threats of force to back you up.

This quote at the 14:15 minute mark sums it nicely: "It`s very easy, if you are in a place where you can fire people if they don`t do what you want, to kid yourself about why people are collaborating and cooperating with you. It`s very easy if you are in a place where you can put people in jail if they don`t do what you want. When you are operating in a voluntary setting you don`t have those options so the burden of leadership is much greater because you have to elicit voluntary collaboration, cooperation, engagement, motivation, commitment, etc. So, in a sense, it`s sort of leadership on its own without the props that are often available to us to exercise authority in organizations."

The image below is an advertisement for an English school here in Japan. I shot it on a train a few weeks ago in Tokyo. I was struck by the piercing, obnoxious, pompous looks from those western dudes staring at, presumably, a Japanese person in some mythical meeting someplace. Nothing like scaring the hell out of someone to prompt them to take a class, eh? My goodness. Look at those guys.

Anyway, the text actually expresses an important concept, and it goes something like this: when you don`t agree with something while talking to these guys, you`ll be asked why you don`t agree, you`ll be expected to state your opinion, and, probably, you`ll have to defend that opinion. So, if that dynamic is a problem, many people just say yes and go along with the crowd in the meeting. I know many Japanese people do this in international meetings because expressing contrary opinions is done quite differently in English and Japanese. Westerners (Americans specifically) tend to be direct and Japanese tend to be indirect. But it goes beyond preference. Those styles are hard coded right into the structures of the languages themselves, and they are expressed in the cultures as well. There are exceptions both ways, of course, but the tendencies are pervasive and obvious, and a great deal of confusion can occur as a result. When communicating across languages, go out of your way to make sure your ideas resonate in the other language. Many times, they don`t. And you`ll miss that rather inconvenient fact if the other person is just saying yes. Yes doesn`t always mean yes, right? And there are a hundred different ways of saying no, right?

But here`s the kicker for me: this issue is also a problem within English; it`s not just a problem when communicating across English and Japanese. Many times native English speakers just say yes when confronted with aggressive people like the dudes in the image below. I mean, really, why would anyone want to talk to these guys? Especially outnumbered four on one. I think there are probably just as many communication problems stemming from command and control types within a language as there are resulting from distinctions in communication styles across languages. What always gets me, though, is why do these guys have meetings in the first place? They obviously don`t want other opinions. So, they deserve the yes they get — and the problems resulting from that yes.

This is why it`s a pleasure working on teams that value open communication, and working for leaders who use communication to discover ideas and implement ideas. Human communication is an imperfect art. You have to use it as a tool to iterate so understanding emerges over time. Teams that don`t value this painfully simple concept aren`t worth your time no matter what language you speak.

I stopped by the Tokyo OpenSolaris Study Group meeting Saturday afternoon. Nice day.

Some shots from Ebisu and Shibuya recently …

Bonnie Corwin updated the opensolaris.org roadmap yesterday. Looks really good. Our team has been keeping a public roadmap of one sort or another on opensolaris.org ever since we opened. The older roadmaps from 2005-2008 are now archived and linked from that new page. In this current version, we are documenting the portal development & website transition, the website content work, and the open development infrastructure projects. Check it out. Feedback to website-discuss.

I updated to OpenSolaris build 111a on my Toshiba Tecra M10 laptop today. The update went fine, and things seem to be working ok so far. But I was surprised to experience the new jet fast shut down in there. I’m a few builds behind on my other computer, so this was my first fast shut down. It’s quite nice. Fast. You press the shut down button, and in just a few seconds (well, 8 seconds) the computer shuts down. It took a tad longer in previous builds. See Dan Price for the technical the details — Speeding to a Halt. Cool.

Very cool to see another book out there on OpenSolaris. This book is based on the OpenSolaris 2008.11 release and assumes readers are already familiar with the user and development environments of Gnome and Linux. So, pick it up and get comfortable with OpenSolaris as well. The book list grows. Congrats to Harry Foxwell and Christine Tran.

There are 36,000 100-year-olds in Japan, according to Nightline — The Key to Longevity? Chatting with Japan’s Centenarians. That`s wild. At the moment I can`t imagine making it to 50 and these dudes are turning in a century and expecting more. Diet, exercise, and human connections are very important. I don`t doubt the diet bit. I eat a thousand times better here than I did in the US, which is very cool. My kid is way ahead of most American kids in that respect since she gets to start life eating this way. I feel very good about that. At least she`ll be healthy even if the world around her isn`t necessarily so. But who knows, maybe she`ll change the world. Regardless, these 100 year-olds are inspiring. They demonstrate that you can continue to grow well beyond what you expect, but they all seem to have a calm state of mind as well. Perhaps this is more about being than doing. Not sure. Oh, and make sure you play the video to the story. The dancing scenes are charming. And the porno scene kills.

Reminder: Vincent Murphy will be hosting an OpenSolaris Town Hall meeting on Friday April 24th at 8 in the morning California time. Dial in and participate. Should be an interesting call. Watch this page for slides and conference call details.

Wrap some packages, win an OpenSolaris Toshiba laptop. Details here.

The Tokyo OpenSolaris Study Group will meet this Saturday to talk about the OpenSolaris distribution constructor and how to build ON. Stop by. Study. This group, by the way, is a spin-off from the Japan OpenSolaris User Group. Discussions take place on ug-jposug.