Jim Grisanzio

Ashwin Bhat and Angad Singh asked me for one minute of my time outside the keynote hall at CommunityOne a few weeks ago. Hey, what’s a minute, right? Happy to. But this minute was to be digitally recorded. Uha. Video. I generally shy away from such things because I`m shy about being interviewed. But these are really good guys and they`ve done great work as Campus Ambassadors in India, so I felt safe in front of their camera (though I`d clearly much rather be behind the camera). It wasn’t too bad, though. But the 1 minute ran for 2 minutes and 21 seconds! Anyway. Thanks, guys. Great fun. Hope to get back to India sometime soon.

I’ve been checking out the Tokyo Hackerspace gmail list for a few weeks. Looks very interesting. The project grew out of some discussions at BarCamp Tokyo a couple of months ago, and I spoke to Karamoon about it at the OpenSolaris community event this weekend. In a world of ever expanding global digital communities, it seems like a nice idea to have a very local a very physical space to hang out in and hack on things that need hacking. Global and digital are fine, but local and physical are needed too. For info, check it out on the wiki.

Four members of the Japan OpenSolaris Community wrote a book on ZFS recently. It`s coming out in July, and it`s specifically for the Japanese market. The cover has not been selected yet, but here are the early details: ZFS 仮想化されたファイルシステムの徹底活用 (大型本) by Hisayoshi Kato, Michitoshi Sato, Nagahara Niroharu, and Imai Satoshi. This is quite a significant contribution to the community in Japan because it`s important to have technical content written by Japanese engineers for Japanese engineers. Translating English content from the west good, of course, but the generation of original content in Japanese also needs to be part of this community`s growth plans.

The Japan OpenSolaris Community together on Saturday. Nice day (and night). About 60 people came by for the three sessions, two of which were in Japanese and the third in English. Then all three groups came together for a nomikai. I think the model works well to start integrating the Japanese and international OpenSolaris communities.

I used a new lens for this event. My f/1.4 lens is getting fixed, so I borrowed Jon`s 50mm f/1.2, which is one scary smart lens. It`s a tad expensive, too, so I was more than a little nervous shooting with it. Anyway, at f/1.2 the focus is just razor thin. Focus on someone`s glasses and their entire face is out. I messed up a few images that way, but by the end of the night I was getting used to it. Amazing piece of glass. By the way, you can see Jon`s stuff here. He`s one of the best photographers around.

It’s excellent to see the 9th Annual Linux Kernel Summit and the 1st Annual Japan Linux Symposium coming to Tokyo in October. Check out this language from the LF website: "The Japan Linux Symposium will be the showcase Japan and Asia Pacific conference for The Linux Foundation." Showcase. This is significant. The Japanese may not shout about it much, but developers in this country are contributing to FOSS and their contributions are growing. The potential in Japan for open source is huge. I’ve been saying it since I got here. So cool that the LF clearly recognizes this potential by bringing their conferences here. Also interesting: the LF website appears in two languages — English and Japanese.

I already hang out with the Tokyo Linux User Group (here, here), so I hope to attend this event in October.

Nothing like going right to the very top, eh? My goodness. Here’s the OpenSolaris community in Brazil at FISL hanging out with Brazil’s President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva. I think this sets a new standard in government relations for the entire OpenSolaris community, don’t you think? So, each one of us around the world now has to go out and shoot some images (video is fine, too) of our country’s leader standing with our respective communities all dressed up in OpenSolaris stuff. Ok. Should be easy enough. Just send your images to osug-leaders or advocacy-discuss, and we’ll collect them there.

Absolutely. Outrageous.

I love these six videos of street photographers walking around shooting images in New York City. My fav is Sandra, who said, "Wow, this is what a father looks like when no one`s looking." She photographs day laborers. She gets that trust takes time.

A Workers’ Paradise Found Off Japan’s Coast: “Mr. Fujimoto said he would resign immediately if a serious rival appeared in an election. `That would be a sign the village has lost confidence in me,` he said.” — New York Times

Interesting. I really must visit this place.

Communicating is all about building relationships, and that`s always a two way street (or if you are in the community business, a multi-way street). Every wonder what a rapid fire relationship with Rahm is like. Check out Ring, ring, it’s Rahm:

NBC’s Chuck Todd calls the Emanuel relationship “no-nonsense.”

“He’s always trying to extract as much information as he’s trying to give,” Todd says.

But the conversations with Emanuel “can be as little as 30 seconds,” Paul Begala, the CNN commentator and longtime Emanuel friend says. “He calls, drops a few F-bombs, makes his point and hangs up.”

The shock value of his delivery is interesting (he can do that because he`s powerful), but even more important is the bit about the information extraction. Information has to flow both ways to demonstrate the value of the relationship.

When I was in San Francisco a few weeks ago, I picked The 48 Laws of Power and The 33 Strategies of War by Robert Greene. If you love history and the study of how things really get done, check these books out. I can`t put them down. I can see how Greene`s stuff would come handy while defending yourself against the packs of wild dogs running around out there. Some very nice tips in these books. Greene seems like an interesting character, too. Study hard. I am.

I love this. An excavating contractor has five or six heavy backhoes on this site ripping apart an old concrete building. And they are painted a lovely shade of pink with white polka dots. How`s that for business development for an industry not used to such style, eh? I was on a bus driving by the other day and had my little camera, so I really couldn`t get a good shot, but you get the idea. This is a contractor with an attitude, no question about it. And in Japan, too. Wild. I`d like to meet him. Or perhaps her?

I went to the Tokyo launch of OpenSolaris 2009.06 at Sun’s office in Jingumae earlier tonight. Good turn out of about 100 people. The lineup: Introduction, Akira Ohsone; OpenSolaris 2009.06, Shunsuke Kuroda; OpenSolaris Demo, Shoji Haraguchi; Solaris 10 5/09, Hiroaki Nozaki; and CommunityOne West Report, Masafumi Ohta. See videos here from Shoji. This is the third such launch of OpenSolaris in Tokyo. Both the 2008.05 and 2008.11 events were excellent as well. Tonight seemed to be an interesting mix of Sun Solaris 10 customers and the growing OpenSolaris communities in Tokyo. There was also some chatter on #opensolaris-jp on IRC. Nice night.

As part of the new schedule for the website transition, there are two important deadlines to get collective infrastructure (Communities, Projects, User Groups) on opensolaris.org:

June 30th: Hidden Collectives: All collectives in a hidden state on opensolaris.org must be opened by June 30th or they will be deleted. Mail has been sent to these collective owners who will be affected. A few weeks ago there were about 40 hidden collectives, but that list is down to about a dozen now. On June 30th it will be zero. Also, on the new site, there will be no feature for "hidden" collectives. The current site’s feature of hiding projects is a badly implemented bug. Any user logged into the site can find a hidden project if they know the URL (or are good at guessing), and repos from hidden projects show up in searchers as well. The new site will not put up with this.

July 20th: New Collectives: There will be a moratorium on setting up new collectives starting July 20th as we prepare to implement Phase 1 of the transition (Auth database goes live) at the end of July. If you have outstanding proposals for new Communities, Projects, or User Groups, you must send your approval threads to the project-setup list by July 20th. Please refer to the new Website Infrastructure: Collective Life Cycle Instructions document for implementation details when requesting new infrastructure.

At the request of the OGB (see inital thread here and follow up threads here and here), I drafted a new document to answer questions about collective life cycle issues on opensolaris.org — Website Infrastructure: Collective Life Cycle Instructions. The document lives in the Website Community Group and attempts to explain the infrastructure implementation procedures I go through on project-setup for Community Groups, Projects, and User Groups. It also points to all the other documents that are involved in various stages. We can`t unify all those documents at the moment, so I thought that a doc outlining basic procedures and putting the other docs in context would be helpful and would simplify some things. I think I got everything in there for this first cut, but I am sure it will all evolve over time. Glynn Foster drafted a group life cycle document as part of the proposed constitution in March, but that entire effort wasn`t successful so I`ll work it this way and see where we go. At the very least, it helps clarify the implementation part of the process.

Here are some images from Tokyo CGM Night Episode 5 at KDDI Web Communications the other night. The event was hosted on by Danny Choo and Andrew Shuttleworth, of course, and it was nice to see a lot of friends and some interesting new characters as well. Here is the home of CGM night at Danny Choo`s place. Strange night, though. Too much light. Just as I was starting to get used to shooting in the dark they turned the lights on. Great fun as usual, though