Jim Grisanzio

Here are some images from the Fall 2009 Tokyo Open Source Conference. The OpenSolaris community participated with presentations from Reiko Saito and Masafumi Ohta and a booth full of demos for the weekend event. There are some NetBeans and Linux guys mixed in here as well. There were dozens and dozens of communities there.

Failure as a springboard to success. Nice piece there from Jono Bacon on how to fail gracefully, recover, and move on — learning all along the way. I like it. Very practical advice for managing projects — or doing anything, really — in a community environment where credibility can be earned and/or lost rapidly and publicly. Much of the issue involves just recognizing your mistakes, apologizing, and fixing things so your actions support your words. Works for me. But I think many people struggle with this concept because they wait too long and the issue gets too big and complex. Then they feel they can’t back down. Too much has already been said. So, they spin. What I have found is that if you get out there fast and correct things early — whether it’s your fault or your company’s or someone else’s in the community — it’s much more casual and normal and most people will engage pretty well. Early apologies on the small stuff tend to be more understated and easier to deliver than those bigger ones later on.

Also, Jono utters this gem in the article: “In my experience of working with communities, successes provide an incredible opportunity to learn about our strengths, but failures provide the inverse opportunity to learn about our weaknesses.” I totally agree. People have always told me that you have to fail because “that’s the only way you ever learn anything” or words to that effect. I never agreed with that. Actually, that notion always pretty much made me sick to my stomach. The truth is that you learn just as much from success as you do from failure — it’s just that you learn different lessons, that’s all. You need a balance of both. That’s obvious, right?

We finally moved to XWiki last night. I sent the opening announcement out around 4:15 my time this morning. It was a long day. I have been sick for a couple of weeks, so that marathon last night didn’t help things much. But we went out and we didn’t blow up. Cool. This is Phase 2 of the website transition. Phase 1 was the development and deployment of the Auth user management system and the merging of the tonic and poll databases all around a governance structure. Among other things. And now this Phase 2 represents the customization of XWiki and its integration with Auth and the migration and translation of the old tonic website content into XWiki. Among other things. The sequence is actually pretty substantial.

The team working on this thing yesterday was spread out all over the world — Boston, Colorado Springs, San Francisco, Manchester, and Tokyo. Some of us were up at 4 in the morning, while others stayed up till 5 in the morning the next day. The final migration took somewhat longer than expected because we had to fix critical issues (networking, performance, redirects, etc) as we went live while under real loads for the first time. We had done 31 migrations in 3 months to give ourselves and everyone in the community enough time to prepare, but going live always draws new elements to deal with. It turned out ok, though. And the performance has been very good so far (and this will improve as we further optimize the application). Anyway, not bad for a v1 attempt. And that’s exactly what this is. A start.

But it feels good to be living in one world now, instead of having to go back and forth between vastly different website architectures resolving differences between the two — all while maintaining current operations on an old site that was quite literally at the breaking point. That last part was a very big deal in this gig, and far too many people still don’t realize that that was hanging over our heads the entire time. Also, the process of migrating and translating content was dicey, and working those issues ate a pile of time out of the schedule. Now, of course, we still have many bugs to fix and features to add. There is graphics work and style sheet clean up to do. Embedded media to implement. Printing issues to solve. Editor bugs to fix. Content to clean. We are far from complete. And we have to get XWiki on a regular upgrade schedule, so we don’t let things lag. Fortunately, there is an active XWiki community out there, and we are now part of that effort. It will be good to finally focus on morning forward on new infrastructure, whereas we couldn’t go anywhere on the old platform. That’s why this was a move, not an upgrade. 

Special thanks to the engineering team for pulling this off and to Chris Phelan for leading the entire XWiki phase. Excellent job. We now have a new community development tool to build upon. And the list of community-development tools is growing. Thank you.

More about Phase 3 of the website transition project very soon.

There are two events coming up in Tokyo for the OpenSolaris community. See Shoji’s announcement. The first is an OpenSolaris Night Seminar at Sun’s Jingumae office on Friday, and the other will be activities at the Tokyo Open Source Conference on Saturday. Stop by. We’ll have some interesting presentations from Sun Japan engineers and community members. Also, there will be plenty of OpenSolaris CDs and t-shirts and such. And a nomi, too. Should be fun.

Here`s a interesting way to spend 20 minutes — TED Talk: Itay Talgam: Lead like the great conductors. Great presentation. Lots of fun. There are so many ways to lead. And you can see both obvious and subtle differences expressed in some of the great conductors Talgam profiles. Some control forcefully and dramatically. Others relax and have fun and enthusiastically guide people along effortlessly. While others are more quiet and gently create an environment where musicians can express their talent so it`s difficult to tell who leads who. Fascinating stuff because you see it all unfold as a performance. Personally, I think the best conductors (or the best anything) just blend into the music so the focus is on the music and not on them.

That last bit is important. Many leaders miss it entirely and it undermines them completely. For me, the word "leadership" has very little meaning now. Actually, I view the word largely in the pejorative. The very concept has been so thoroughly abused these days (read a newspaper lately?) I am hard pressed to find leaders I can look up to and learn from. In fact, I have pretty much given up on the exercise as a waste of time. Don`t lead. Instead, do. Just do. And if you must lead or, gasp, call yourself a leader, then lead with doing in mind. That is the only way you will ever earn any credibility among those you think you lead. It`s also the only way you will ever attract naturally those like-minded individuals who want to grow with you — not as a result of you.

The http://opensolaris.org/ website will be unavailable for a period on Monday, October 26th, beginning at 11 a.m. UTC (4 a.m. PDT) as we implement the final migration to XWiki at http://hub.opensolaris.org/. The site will re-open at approximately 10 a.m. PDT.

When the migration is complete, http://opensolaris.org/ and http://www.opensolaris.org/ will redirect to http://hub.opensolaris.org/ (just as they redirect to http://opensolaris.org/os/ right now). Also, a snapshot of the final migrated content will be available for reference at http://stage.opensolaris.org/os/ for 6 months. Editing is not supported on the stage site, though. That site will be maintained only with the final migrated content. This will enable people to check how content was formatted on the old site and manually migrate content that was not part of the automated process during the last 3 months.

Some shots from the Tokyo Linux User Group 15th Anniversary Event last night in Akihabara.

My Tokyo Linux User Group archive.

The opensolaris.org website is not just one place or one application. It’s actually a site of many applications providing a variety of services to users and developers around the world. Bonnie recently updated the OpenSolaris Site Map to better organize these services so it’s easier to understand what’s out there and how people can use these tools to build software and community. That last bit is important, too. The more tools we can provide to enable people to get involved and contribute the more we can grow as a community. What’s cool is that the list is starting to add up, the number of people maintaining these services is growing, and more is planned:

• arc.opensolaris.org: Architecture Review Committee case data
• auth.opensolaris.org: Membership/account management application
• bugs.opensolaris.org: Bugs-by-mail submission to Sun’s Bugster database
• cr.opensolaris.org: Code review tool
• defect.opensolaris.org: Open defect tracking
• hub.opensolaris.org: XWiki-based site for community editing
• jucr.opensolaris.org: Package/spec file submission
• mail.opensolaris.org: Mailing list management
• pkg.opensolaris.org: Open source package repositories
• pkgfactory.opensolaris.org: Automated collection/build/submission of FOSS to jucr
• poll.opensolaris.org: Community voting
• repo.opensolaris.org: Source code management console: Mercurial & Subversion
• rti.opensolaris.org: Open request-to-integrate tool under development
• src.opensolaris.org: Source browser
• test.opensolaris.org: Access to test farm

Since there are over a dozen applications making up opensolaris.org, the look and feel varies a bit. We’ll need to solve that as part of the next phase of work in the website transition. We’ll layer a more common graphical feel across everything. After we move off the current portal application on Monday, we will begin work on Phase 3. We are planning that work now, and we’ll update the infrastructure roadmap to reflect those changes over the next few weeks. I’m looking forward to that phase of the project because it will require working with new teams across the community and all of the owners of the services above. Once we finish Phase 3 we will have transitioned the website off of the current infrastructure entirely. We are doing this in stages, of course, while maintaining current operations. First was Auth. Then XWiki. And next will be some of the other key applications that are still currently tied to the old portal.

A note about the list of services above: one application not on the list is the Community Translation Interface. It’s not on opensolaris.org because it is a tool to facilitate community translations across all of Sun’s FOSS projects, not just OpenSolaris. This application has enabled many contributions from the OpenSolaris community, so check it out along with the others.

I rebuilt the old Sun Tech Days pages in Advocacy today and consolidated 34 pages into 2. I had wanted to get those pages cleaned up for the migration to XWiki because I have some of my own slides in there, and some people used my content as the basis of other presentations so I want to preserve that history. But many of the pages and most of the links were broken, a bunch of stuff was just missing, and what was left was not migrating to XWiki that well. Time to fix. All we really need is a basic archive of speakers, bios, venue dates, and presentations. So I just took out all the tables and graphics and broken stuff and started over. Plus, we don’t need 34 pages gumming up the left nav on the new site when we move. Simple lists work best. Now, there were about 120 presentation attachments that had to be downloaded, reorganized, uploaded, and re-linked, so I’m sure I missed and/or broke a few. I’ll clean them this week and then delete the old pages when I know I have the links right after the next migration on Wednesday. Anyway, here they are:

Sun Tech Days Archive 2006-2007 | Sun Tech Days Archive 2007-2008

Well, yesterday Bill implemented our 29th content migration in the last 11 weeks leading up to the final move to XWiki on hub.opensolaris.org next week. These migrations over the previous three months have given users multiple opportunities to check and fix their content and/or file bugs in preparation for the final move. If all goes well, toward the end of this week I will announce the final Phase 2 transition details. In the meantime, please consult these documents if you have questions as you update your content for migration:

• http://hub.opensolaris.org/bin/view/Community+Group+web/site_features
• http://hub.opensolaris.org/bin/view/Community+Group+web/content_preparations
• http://hub.opensolaris.org/bin/view/Main/site-transition-faq
  
• http://hub.opensolaris.org/bin/view/Main/user-action-faq

Also, two weeks ago, we notified all users on opensolaris.org about the upcoming date of 10/26 via individual emails. That was our fourth or fifth mass email to all users on the site regarding various phases of the transition. All website transition announcements here.

The Japanese OpenSolaris Community will be at the Tokyo Open Source Conference next week (30th and 31st). The Japan OpenSolaris User Group guys will be there with talks about their group activities, and Sun`s Reiko Saito will present on how to contribute translations to the community. Stop by.

USENIX Magazine has a review of Pro OpenSolaris by Harry J. Foxwell and Christine Tran. "As I mentioned, the chapters on ZFS and virtualization are incredibly strong, and I would certainly recommend this book to anyone interested in a Linux alternative with cutting-edge features and an active community base. " — Brandon Ching, ;LOGIN:

It`s sad to learn that so many people have been affected by the terrible earthquake in West Sumatra, Indonesia on September 30. Some of my colleagues from Sun Indonesia tell me that 750 people have been killed, hundreds are missing, and thousands are homeless. Sun Indonesia will be helping. Contact Harry Kaligis (harry dot kaligis at sun dot co dot id) and Alex Budiyanto (alex dot budiyanto at sun dot co dot id) if you`d like more information and want to help. Members of the OpenSolaris community have also been impacted by this disaster. Our deepest sympathy to everyone involved.

Images courtesy Alex Budiyanto, Indonesia OpenSolaris User Group

I updated to OpenSolaris developer build 125 today. Everything seems ok so far. Give it a try. Reminder: these are developer builds so they are works in progress. Not sure when the next product release comes out. OpenSolaris distribution conversations take place on indiana-discuss.

I subscribed to the Linux kernel mailing list recently. It`s way too technical for me to really follow very closely, but I just wanted to get a feel for the personality of the community. It`s interesting. And things move very rapidly.

But watching all this Linux kernel mail flowing by all day long reminds me that I do actually have some experience posting to the list. Twice, in fact. And it was by far the single most embarrassing moment in my OpenSolaris life, although I must admit it stings much less now all these years later. Here it is. Back before we opened the OS/Net consolidation in June of 2005 (that`s what people consider the main opening of the project), we had been collecting email addresses on our temporary site that hosted the DTrace code, which we had previously opened in January of 2005. People would enter their email addresses into a database on the site so we could then alert them when we opened the main code base. I hated the idea of doing this but obviously lost the argument. Also, I was asked to write the email that we would send to these people announcing the opening of our kernel. The whole thing made me nauseous. But, so be it. On opening day my mail shot out to well over 7 thousand people via our corporate systems. It didn`t come from my mailer, that`s for sure. I just submitted the text to another team and ducked. And did we clean the list beforehand? Of course not. We just let all fly. And it ended up in some rather interesting places — one of which being the Linux Kernel Mailing List. Here it is. I was mortified. And here is my apology to the entire Linux kernel community shortly thereafter. Like I said, I hated the idea of any mass mailing outside for just this reason. Sure, it was well intentioned, but it was also unnecessary, poorly implemented, and easily gamed. Obviously. Anyway, I did get a few private responses from list members who were very kind and understanding. That made all the difference in the world.

Lessons learned, eh? Hey, you have to go through some pain to learn this community business, right? Fun stuff.