Jim Grisanzio

Took the day off on Friday and went up to Tokyo Bay. Found this guy skiing. Back when I skied a million years ago I actually used skis (well, usually). Skiing, surfing, boarding. All seems to blend now. Looks like great fun.

opensolaris.org will be down for about 4 hours on Monday August 3 from 5 a.m. PDT as we implement Phase 1 of the website transition to make Auth live. All web-facing services on opensolaris.org will be unavailable at various times during the 4 hour period. We will send an announcement around when the work is complete. If you want to hear more about this, we will be holding a conference call briefing on Thurs July 30 at 9 a.m. PDT. Phone numbers, slides, FAQs, and updated transition documents can be found here. And, of course, everything about the website transition can be found in the Website Community as well.

There are several active conversations taking place on website-discuss and i18n-discuss regarding the localization of the Auth application. This is very good news. The activity demonstrates the community’s direct involvement.

On our team, Alan Burlison in the U.K. wrote the application over the last couple of years, and when I got involved in the project last year I casually mentioned it would be cool if we could localize the app since the current site’s registration page is in Japanese, Chinese, and English (although it was difficult to implement those languages on the current site). Alan responded with something like, "Oh, that’s easy. Auth was designed with internationalization and localization in mind from the very beginning. No problem." Music to my ears.

I figured we’d get a half dozen or so languages, but I never dreamed about the response we’ve had thus far from the Internationalization and Localization Community. When Auth goes out next week, it will be in 17 languages and those translations were contributed by about 50 people around the world. Absolutely. Fantastic. I’ve been working with Alan and Sun globalization engineers Fuyuki Hasegawa in Tokyo and Ales Cernosek in Prague as they have been leading the Auth localization effort and walking me through their processes to engage the community via the Community Translation Interface (CTI). I’ve learned a lot. But it was the community that really came through here, no question about it. Congratulations and thank you to everyone who contributed.

For many years on this project, we’ve been wanting to get opensolaris.org properly localized. We now have the tools to begin that process. Next up will be getting more languages for Auth, getting the icons and other user interface features localized, and then it’s on to XWiki in the fall. XWiki already has content localization features built in, so that application should move along nicely after deployment.

To get involved in OpenSolaris localization projects, subscribe to i18n-discuss and check out how to get involved in translating the website.

The third annual OpenSolaris Developer Conference has been moved to Dresden and starts on Wednesday October 28th with tutorials and continues Thursday and Friday October 29th and 30th with the main conference. The German Unix User Group and the Czech OpenSolaris User Group are organizing the event in conjunction with Linux-Kongress. Excellent to see the communities getting together like this.

Here are some images from the Community Leadership Summit (CLS 2009 Retrospective by Jono Bacon) last weekend in San Jose. I’m really glad I had the opportunity to participate in this event. I didn’t have a chance to check out OSCON, which followed CLS, but I think this un-conference style of gathering better fits my interests anyway. I hope the photos came out ok …

I updated the announcements section on the Website Community today. I’ve been collecting these links for a while now since the website development and implementation projects are complex and they are being built and deployed over a long period of time. It’s easy to lose track of what’s going on if you are not directly involved, so we have been posting things in the Website Community for convenience for some time now. So, since we are only a few weeks away from Phase 1 of the transition, I figured I’d update the list. We are at 31 announcements at the moment. I may have missed a few here and there, but I think I got the major ones. I’m still fixing links and such, so I’ll continue to update.

Phase 1 of the website transition is scheduled for Monday, August 3rd. On that date, there will be a brief downtime as Auth becomes the lead user database on opensolaris.org. An updated version of the application will be available next week, and we will be posting more communications about the final switch as we get closer. See the opensolaris-announce and website-discuss lists for announcements as usual. Further details here: Website Community | Auth | OpenSolaris Website Roadmap

I’m heading to the Community Leadership Summit this weekend in San Jose, California. Jono Bacon’s gig. I’m looking forward to meeting many others who build software communities around the world. I know and respect many of the people planning to attend, so it should be great fun. And it should be a hugely valuable experience, too.

I have an agenda in mind for my time. It’s only a weekend, so I need to probe some issues as deeply as I can. I’d especially like to explore how software engineering and user communities are built across language and cultural barriers. That’s the biggest deal for me since I live the issue every day and I believe there are big opportunities involved.

Other stuff: How/why do some communities seem to emerge organically (do they really?), while others are built using significant resources and sometimes face big challenges in the process. How do you manage around community dependence issues while investing resources? I know it’s not popular to discuss, but I’ll be asking people about competitive challenges they face while building communities. Over the years, many have told me that communities shouldn’t be competitive (companies compete and communities cooperate, right?), but I’ve come to question and largely reject that line. I can point to many cases where it’s absolutely true, but I also have lots of painful experience demonstrating that it’s a lot of BS (I think it depends greatly on geography, culture, placement in the community, and politics).

More: Where is the line distinguishing building from natural evolution? And who defines the difference? On governance issues: Do you start out building with governance in place or let it emerge naturally over time? Do you build a top-down governing system, or let structures bubble up from the bottom when (and if) they are needed? And how do you resolve governance vs development methodologies? How do you measure growth or quality or whatever else you’re building? What are the distinctions between building community from the platform of a major corporation vs building community while actually living out in the community itself? How are community development and engineering operations implemented differently around the world? How is community actually defined differently in various regions? Those are some of the issues I’ll be poking.

And finally, I’d really love to see how people feel about the issue of “leadership” in communities. That’s the name of the conference, after all, and it’s an issue we’ve wrestled with on OpenSolaris forever. My opinion on leadership has evolved greatly over time, but I’m clearly moving in a specific direction lately and feel much more comfortable asserting my view on leadership.

Grace Lee Boggs puts things in perspective quite nicely in this interview with Bill Moyers. It’s all about building community and empowering people to take control of their own own lives, instead of looking to some leader somewhere to provide for them. Real change — change for the good, anyway — starts down at the grassroots and forces movement above. Not the other way around. And when economic and governmental structures break down, that’s no reason to give up and complain and get distracted, it’s simply a reason to rebuild and focus on self sufficiency and distributing power so it can be used to actually help people. That is how some people feel in Detroit. They are acting. They are building. They aren’t giving up and leaving others behind. And at least one of those community builders is 93. Ninety three. Feeling down? Call Grace. She knows no other way.

A bunch of images from the Tokyo Linux User Group Saturday afternoon and evening. Karamoon on Tokyo Hackerspace, Marty Pauley on security, and Michael Sullivan on ZFS.

I went over to the OpenSolaris Night Seminar in Jingumae earlier this evening. Really nice turn out. About 90 people came out on a Friday night. And it was great to see Nagahara Niroharu and Hisayoshi Kato, two of the four engineers who wrote the new book on ZFS here in Japan.

I work late. It’s perfectly normal for me to be on the phone with people in the U.S. and the U.K. till 4 a.m. multiple nights a week. Sometimes I go to 5 a.m. if I can`t get to sleep, which is rather inconvenient if you have things to do the next day like other meetings or just life stuff. It`s insane, I know, but it`s my reality for the time being. It will change in due time. Anyway, the longer I do this the more I notice some trends. Some bad, some good. Here`s an interesting one that keeps popping up:

Going to sleep immediately after managing or participating in active, intense, and stressful meetings (I call them "hot" meetings) or after dealing with fast breaking issues can lead to some really hairy nightmares. Keep in mind that 9 a.m. in San Francisco is 1 a.m. in Tokyo the next day, so as the Americans are gearing up for action your body in Asia is supposed to be winding down. Over time, this is a jarring experience. Generally, most normal people don’t crash immediately after these hot meetings. They drive home. They go for a run. They take a swim. They eat dinner. They play with the kids. They walk in the park. They catch a baseball game. Watch a little TV. They unwind a bit before bed. Whatever. They don’t just go from work to bed in 1 minute (and, no, checking our email at nite while watching Leno is not work, sorry).

But what’s interesting about this is that when you get through the initial nightmares and get into normal sleep you wake up with a fresh set of ideas about how to solve the problems that buried you in the meeting before you went to sleep — which was just a few hours earlier! I’ve never had this experience before, but he pattern is clear. My subconscious mind seems to be working out the details of the problems while it serves up a steady flow if dragons and murders and other such bloody and graphic fun. And when I get up, I have multiple new ideas for dealing with stuff. I now keep a notebook close by so I can jot down whatever comes out immediately upon waking. Those first few moments are critical, though. Once conscious thinking starts, all is lost and you are simply up.

Here’s the cover for the new ZFS book in Japan by Hisayoshi Kato, Michitoshi Sato, Nagahara Niroharu, and Imai Satoshi — ZFS 仮想化されたファイルシステムの徹底活用 (大型本). I have a copy here in the office. Pretty slick. The cover was just published on Amazon a few minute ago. I think it goes on sale next week. Please note: this is not a translation of a western text. It’s an original work from OpenSolaris community engineers in Japan and only appears in Japanese. 

A little OpenSolaris (at scale) in India. "Indians are celebrating a monsoon with OpenSolaris this month." — Abhishek Kumar. This booklet on OpenSolaris is going out to a couple of hundred thousand people throughout the country.

I finally got my queue of 40 hidden projects and communities cleaned out from opensolaris.org. It took about three weeks and over 100 emails of communications. All of those guys are now open or deleted (about half and half, actually). There will be no concept of "hidden" projects or communities on the new opensolaris.org in a couple of months, so that`s why we had to do this clean up. We didn`t want to miss viable projects in the move to the new site since the hidden stuff would not be moved. The hidden feature of the current site is sort of a fallacy, anyway. Any user logged in can see the so-called hidden pages if they know the URL, so the entire concept is silly. It was really intended to give project owners a little space to populate pages and such before "opening" their projects. Again, it`s silly since the entire project proposal process is public. Ah, anyway. No big deal. It`s done.

One more thing: if you have hidden pages in your projects or communities, they will not be moved to the new site. Open them or they will be left behind and eventually deleted.

More about the website transition and current schedules here.