Open Source Business Resource

Announcing the August Issue and Upcoming Changes to the OSBR

2011-08-03T11:16:00.000-04:00

The August issue of the OSBR is now available in PDF and HTML formats.

For this issue of the OSBR, we issued a general invitation to authors to submit articles on the topics of open source business and the growth of early-stage technology companies.

Anthony Casson and Leslie Hawthorn from the Oregon State University describe the Open Source Lab, which is home to many of the world's leading open source projects. They describe the benefits the lab provides to the projects it supports and the real-word experiences and educational opportunities it provides to its student employees.

Tyler Mitchell, Executive Director of the Open Source Geospatial Foundation (OSGeo), examines social interoperability as a parallel capability to technical interoperability. Using OSGeo as a case study, he highlights the importance of effective communication and relationships in enabling innovation within open source projects.

Sandro Groganz, Co-Founder of Age of Peers, shares insights into the structures and relationships of vendor-led open source ecosystems to highlight the business strategies available to partners.

Tony Wacheski, CEO of Anystone Technologies, shares the lessons he and his co-founder learned their first year as entrepreneurs. He describes the company's first applications and the valuable development, marketing, and sales experience they provided.

Chris McPhee, Editor-in-Chief of the Open Source Business Resource announces that this publication will become the Technology Innovation Management Review following this issue. He looks back on four years of the OSBR and describes the upcoming changes to this publication.

In September, we look forward to the first issue of the Technology Innovation Management Review. We welcome your feedback and invite you to submit articles on the topics of managing innovation, entrepreneurship, open source business, economic development, or the growth of early-stage technology companies. Please contact the Editor, Chris McPhee, if you are interested in submitting an article.

Redefining "Men's Work": Equality in the Playroom and the Boardroom

2011-07-29T09:23:00.000-04:00

Today's columnist is Julian Egelstaff from Freeform Solutions. He writes:

I learned a lot of things during the early years of Freeform Solutions. But not just about business and entrepreneurship. I also learned:

Two-year-olds will eventually go to sleep by themselves for an afternoon nap, if you're on the phone with a client long enough.
Not all child-proof medicine bottles are created equal.
And never, ever, ever leave a permanent marker on the kitchen counter when you're in another room answering e-mail.

I had the good fortune to learn these and many otherlessons courtesy of my twin daughters, who were born a few monthsbefore Freeform Solutions was officially incorporated. For mepersonally, and for my family, a big reason to start Freeform was tohave a flexible job that I could do at home, so I could look afterthe girls. My wife continued with her 9-to-5 job out of the house.

So, at the same time as I became a socialentrepreneur, I also became a man in the woman's world of childrearing. I think it gives me a unique perspective on some of thechallenges facing women entrepreneurs.

Make no mistake, the world of child rearing is awoman's world.

If you don't believe me, just check out a randomselection of books on how to take care of babies and young children.It won't be long before you find helpful chapters with titles like“What Dad can do to help.” Just imagine picking up ageneral business book and finding a chapter entitled “What yourwife can do to support your career.” Equality of the sexes iscloser to reality in the boardroom than the playroom.

As a society, we seem to pay a lot of attention toequality issues, at least in the workplace. They are routinely in thenews, many organizations have anti-discrimination policies, and a lotof hiring practices are specifically designed to create an equalplaying field. A lot of the articles in thismonth's OSBR issue on Women Entrepreneurs talk about theimportance of various policies and programs in supporting womenentrepreneurs in the workplace.

But when it comes to family life and personaldecisions, our society seems to have a different set of expectationsin place. These expectations are not just in the “parentingindustry” – the book publishers, the toy makers, thecompanies marketing goods and services for looking after infants andyoung children – those companies can almost justify the focuson moms by the fact that women make up about 90% of the peopleproviding child care at home. But in my experience, many individualsalso implicitly hold this idea that looking after kids is “women'swork.”

When I was out and about with my pre-school agedgirls, people would often make conversation. Twins are a realshow-stopper. If you enter a grocery store with a matched set ofbabies in a double stroller, total strangers will stop and talk toyou, several times, whether you like it or not.

A common theme of conversation would be how nice itwas that I was giving mom a break. These people were trying theirbest to be complimentary. It was just their instinctive assumptionskicking in, we're all prone to that. When you hear hoof beats, youthink horses not zebras. And when you see a man pushing a stroller,many people think dad-home-from-work, not stay-at-home-dad.

My anecdotal experience is not the end of the storyhere. Many researchers have spent a lot of time examining thesebiases, as Tess Jewell explains in herarticle in this month's OSBR.

But it's not just the everyday world outside of workthat needs to welcome and support men who provide child care. Theworkplace needs to stop viewing this as a women's issue, and starttreating it as a family issue that affects men equally.

This is touchy stuff. You won't necessarily findpeople talking about it openly around the water cooler, but in howmany workplaces would it raise eyebrows if a man took six or ninemonths of paternity leave? He's entitled under the law. But wouldn'tit hurt his career?

Breathless profiles of women executives in magazineswill not hesitate to comment on how she balances work and kids. Butfor how many men is that even a question in the interview?

Nonetheless, perceptions and behaviours aregradually changing. Since 2001, fathers in Canada have been able totake up to 35 weeks of parental leave, and a steadily growingpercentage of eligible fathers have been taking at least part of thattime – 10%in 2001, increasing to 20% in 2006. In Quebec, nearly half ofeligible fathers take at least some parental leave time. That'sprobably because in Quebec there are more generous subsidies,replacing up to 75% of your income.

This is real progress, but men are still a distinctminority when it comes to providing child care. Support for fathersin the workplace needs to keep improving. Fathers need to beencouraged to provide primary care for their children, and as asociety we need to welcome them into this role. Maternity leave isnot some kind of special trump card women get to play. Being involvedin raising your kids is a right that all parents have.

It's not just a right, it's a joy. Your kids areonly young once. So come on guys, step up and take on this wonderfulrole. Until we find a way to make it happen, women will continue tobe the only ones stuck with the challenge of balancing work and kids.As long as there's no equality in the playroom, it will be impossibleto achieve equality in the boardroom.

Women Entrepreneurs

2011-07-05T11:41:00.000-04:00

The July issue of the OSBR is now available in PDF and HTML formats.

The editorial theme for this issue of the OSBR is Women Entrepreneurs. In this issue, we examine the reasons for the relative lack of women founders and leaders in technology businesses. Our authors discuss the entrepreneurial challenges that are unique to women and what changes may be implemented to tip the balance and increase the number of women entrepreneurs. This issue features the following articles:

Tess Jewell, a PhD student at York University and Ryerson University, describes the social and environmental factors that influence women’s career choices and participation in entrepreneurship.

Roseann O’Reilly Runte, President and Vice-Chancellor of Carleton University, emphasizes the importance of women's participation in entrepreneurial activities and their impact on regional economic development, including solutions for cultivating a more supportive environment for women entrepreneurs.

J. McGrath Cohoon, Associate Professor at the University of Virginia and Senior Research Scientist at the National Center for Women & IT, describes research to determine what gender differences might contribute to the unequal gender composition of successful founders.

Janice Singer and Deborah Dexter, Industrial Technology Advisors for the National Research Council of Canada Industrial Research Assistance Program (IRAP), describe existing programs to support women entrepreneurs and introduce Lead to Win for Women, a new program to increase the number of women-founded businesses in Canada's Capital Region.

Ruth Bastedo, President of Experience Media Group Inc., answers the question: Why is there a dearth of women on high-growth technology startup teams? She describes the challenges she has faced as an entrepreneur and shares insights into the reasons for the current imbalance.

Cate Huston, Software Engineer at Google, answers the question: Should all women aspire to be entrepreneurs? In addition to supporting women entrepreneurs, she recommends encouraging and celebrating less overt forms of leadership.

For the upcoming August issue, we offer a rare unthemed issue and we welcome general submissions on the topic of open source business or the growth of early-stage technology companies. This is a great opportunity to publish your insights without having to wait for a relevant issue theme. Please contact the Editor, Chris McPhee, immediately if you are interested in submitting an article for the August issue.

Nostalgic About the Future: Open Source Entrepreneurship

2011-06-17T10:09:00.000-04:00

Today's columnist is Julian Egelstaff from Freeform Solutions. He writes:

I'm nostalgic about the future. That sounds mixed up, but it's true. The future used to be a wondrous place, full of flying cars and plastic clothes and amazing architecture. Those were the good old “world's of tomorrow.” Some of them are still with us in a sense. The Seattle Space Needle predates the moon landings, and proudly shows us the sleek, stylized future that awaited us all afterwards.

The buildings of Ontario Place were constructed less than a decade after the World's Fair that brought us the Space Needle. The Ontario Place pavilions, hovering over water, speak the same optimistic language of the future. When they were new, they were filled with previews of tomorrow; I still vividly remember being there thirty years ago, and seeing computer animation for the first time — a wireframe paper airplane floating endlessly over a blocky landscape.

Somehow, we slipped off that path to the future and ended up in a different place. No flying cars (too bad). No plastic clothes (thank goodness). The Ontario Place pavilions are now deserted, awaiting demolition.

But on the flip side, we do have the Internet, more communications technology in our pockets than anyone could have dreamed of a generation ago, and a lot of open source software underlying it all. Sure, we didn't end up where some people thought we would, but it's been a wonderful march to a better tomorrow, hasn't it?

When we look back, it's easy to see the steps, though they're not always linear. In the case of open source and the Internet, you could single out:

the creation of the ARPANET
the start of the Homebrew Computer Club
the formation of the Free Software Foundation
the invention of the World Wide Web
the start of Linux
the launch of a graphical web with Mosaic and later, Netscape
and so on through to our mobile, socially connected, always-on, future-that's-here-now.

But when we try and predict what's coming next — a key goal of any decent entrepreneur (entrepreneurship being the continuing theme of this month's OSBR) — it's a trap to look at that seemingly forward march of progress, and extrapolate to see tomorrow's technology today.

As Kierkegaard said, “Life can only be understood backwards; but it must be lived forwards.” History is the same way. It seems orderly when we're looking back, but that's just us imposing an interpretation on a series of scattered data points.

The progress of open source is not inevitable, and just because a lot of people seem to line up behind an idea, that doesn't make it come to pass. How many times have you heard people say that Linux will be “ready for the desktop” now/this year/next year/in three years? Sure, it's closer than ever before, but it's definitely not a mainstream desktop operating system, and it might never be.

Some people have suggested that there should be an open source “marketing board” modelled after the egg marketing board or the milk marketing board. This is an interesting idea, which has not yet come to pass, and which highlights the necessary interplay between technology and other forces, like business.

As technologists, those of us involved in open source see a bright future for it, and believe it can achieve great things. But the technology won't get there on its own. If you invent it, they might not come. The history of technology is full of examples of the truly sideways march of progress.

For instance, early crystal radio sets employed the first semiconductor diodes to tune in signals. This early innovation was replaced by vacuum tubes which dominated the electronics industry until the transistor came along in the 1950s.

Looking back on it now, vacuum tubes were a complete detour off the semiconductor path. How much interest and research into crystals and semiconductors never happened, or happened only later, because of the dominance of vacuum tubes? What effect did that detour have on the emergence of the modern semiconductor industry, now the backbone of all computing?

Even something that seems like a basic law now, such as having 8-bits in a byte, wasn't a natural or inevitable property of our modern technology. Before IBM introduced the System 360 in 1964, there had been computer systems using all kinds of different byte sizes, all the way up to 36! The dominance of the System 360 was one reason that 8-bits became the standard. Then came the Intel 8008, and before you knew it, the 8-bit future was here today.

We tend to view the successful technologies as somehow better than what came before. In evolutionary terms, we want to believe that the dominant forms are somehow better adapted to their environments. We search for the good reason that explains why things worked out the way they did. But history (and biology) shows that the reasons for success don't always come from the correctness of the solution.

Opposable thumbs and bigger brains no doubt provided some significant advantages to the living things that inherited them. But not all adaptations produce benefits. Some things happen by accident, or a string of accidents. Features that look useful from our point of view (hindsight), might just be side effects as far as natural selection is concerned.

Other features of organisms must have had intermediate forms, with some distinct benefits of their own, even if those benefits are difficult for us to appreciate with hindsight alone. A classic example is a wing. Wings didn't evolve because of the great benefits that flying conveys. Half a wing doesn't convey any flight benefits, and clearly wings didn't evolve in one generation. So intermediate stages must have provided some benefit of their own, independent of flight.

Similarly in the technology field, we shouldn't look at the successful technologies of today and assume they are the culmination of development that was aiming specifically for their current success. Unfortunately, real life is very messy, and technologies become successful for lots of different reasons, not just the intentions of their creators.

Taming these forces is one of the key challenges for any entrepreneur. As a wise man once said, “The universe tends towards maximum irony.” Or put another way, there's a lot of natural forces conspiring against your version of the future ever coming to pass. So if we really want open source to live up to its potential, there's still a lot of work to do. The technology won't make the future happen by itself.

That's the other reason I'm nostalgic for the future, the wonderland version of it that was going to be here today. There was a wonderfully naive air of inevitability about it, like a sure view of history, just running in reverse. Hopefully one day we'll get there, and when we do, we'll pat ourselves on the back and it won't seem like the journey was so hard. Future generations might think it was preordained. But the truth is that our future will be a close run thing. It always is.

Call for Papers for August Issue

2011-06-10T11:40:00.000-04:00

We believe there is great value in bringing multiple perspectives together to discuss a particular topic. This is why each issue of the OSBR has a theme. It gives both authors and readers the opportunity to collectively explore a topic in both depth and breadth.

However, a strict theme-for-every-month approach has a drawback. Although we often get suggestions for themes from readers and authors - and we welcome this wholeheartedly - we sometimes encounter the following problem: an author would like to write an article on a particular subject, but is quietly waiting for the right theme to come along.

This post is a call for papers for the August issue. At the moment, we have two articles planned. From Sandro Groganz, founder of Initmarketing, we have a very interesting article on the benefits of the community for partners of open source vendors. Also, I intend to write an article about the OSBR itself and some changes we are planning to improve the publication.

We would like your input on the August issue, primarily in the form of proposals for articles you wish to contribute. One option is to develop a theme of "Open Source Ecosystems". Another option is to use this issue as an opportunity to publish articles that are not tied to a particular theme - this would be like the "Potpourri" category in the TV quiz show Jeopardy. In any case, all articles should of course fit within the scope of the OSBR and be relevant to the subject of open source business or the growth of early-stage technology companies.

Let's discuss these options on twitter (@OSBR). You can also send me your article proposals by email. I also encourage you to extend this invitation to colleagues.

Please feel free to ask me any questions about writing an article. You may also wish to check the author guidelines. Note that the article deadline for the August issue is July 10th.

Chris McPhee
Editor-in-Chief, OSBR

Technology Entrepreneurship II

2011-06-07T09:32:00.000-04:00

The June issue of the OSBR is now available in PDF and HTML formats. The editorial theme for this issue is Technology Entrepreneurship. This issue features the following articles:

Robert Poole, CEO of FreebirdConnect.com, describes the benefits of starting a business that leverages an existing platform. He outlines relevant business models and describes the steps that an entrepreneur can follow to start a business on the FreebirdConnect.com platform.

Daniel Crenna shares the lessons he learned as the sole founder of Lunarbits. He argues that we have as much to learn by analyzing the causes of failure as we do from celebrating success stories.

Frank Horsfall from Carleton University's Technology Innovation Management program describes a new rapid prototyping environment to help student entrepreneurs test and refine their prototypes.

Ali Kousari, CTO of Systema Technologies in Geneva, reviews the challenges facing technology startups under traditional funding models. He describes new funding approaches and suggests ways of moving towards a new model of funding technology startups.

For the upcoming July issue, we focus on Women Entrepreneurs and welcome submissions that shed light on the particular challenges of increasing the number of women in founding and leadership positions. PPlease contact the Editor, Chris McPhee, if you are interested in submitting an article for this theme; the deadline is June 15th. We also welcome general submissions on the topic of open source business or the growth of early-stage technology companies.

Open Source Business: More Than a Question of Profitability

2011-05-20T10:21:00.000-04:00

Today we welcome a guest columnist, Martin Heitmann from the Berlin Institute of Technology, who invites you to participate in his survey on open source business. He writes:

Can open source development be truly sustainable? And if so, how? The answer depends on your point of view on sustainability. Very often, sustainability is only used as a buzz word for ecological footprints, while other definitions also include economical and social dimensions. All three perspectives might be the starting point for intriguing studies about how open source development changes and continuously will change the world in the future. But today, our question asks whether open source development can be sustainable from an economic viewpoint. How can open source generate value over time and how are such mechanisms supposed to prevail?

>Open source development has gained much economic momentum in recent years and, despite frequent misunderstandings of the terms “open source” and “free software”, no one can deny this. Studies by Black Duck Software and the European Commission have tried to estimate the cost of reproducing just the global code base, as it was available at the date of the respective study’s sample collection. The dollar ranges in these estimations range from tens of billions to hundreds of billions. This notwithstanding, studies on the economic value creation of open source business are still scarce. What we can see from the estimated numbers is that, not only single companies, but also regional and national administrations have to pay attention to open source development. Without the provision of an open-source-friendly ecosystem, a region may miss opportunities to foster sustainable open source development.

In conclusion, open source development has not even, but especially from an economic perspective much to offer for theorists, as well as practitioners from the private sector and people in charge in the public sector. Nonetheless, academic research on the business-related aspects of open source development has mainly focused on developer motivation and organizational setups. Albeit that many concept papers have asked how open source development might be profitable, rather few studies have focused on business models or even their antecedents. (Examples of the few studies that have include Bonaccorsi et al. and Perr et al.)

The lack of research into open source business models might be due to the challenge of separating and classifying these business models. Often, the concepts show signs of overlap, which hinders subsequent analysis. How can we analyze what drives decision-making toward one business model and not the other if we cannot even distinguish between them? Actually, this task appears to be achievable and yet many studies fail in their attempt for a clear cut typology. One outstanding concept for delineation is that by Chesbrough and Appleyard. It mainly sorts open source business models into four clusters: i) deployment (e.g., professional services, consulting jobs); ii) hybridization (e.g., proprietary extensions and multi-license business models); iii) complements (e.g., complementary products enabled by open source software); and iv) self-service (e.g., organizations like the Sakai project).

In our research project on open source management at the Berlin Institute of Technology, we use this cluster scheme and we investigate the antecedents of business model choice in the open source software industry. By doing this, we aim to identify which factors are or were influential for companies’ initial business decisions regarding open source. Future studies will then also focus on the link between the circumstances of business model design and open source sustainability.

Following the invitation of OSBR, we would like to point out that our survey is still open and we want to invite you to participate. If you were involved in decisions on the business strategy of your company, please complete our survey. It will not take more than 10 – 15 minutes to complete. If you were not involved in the decision-making process, please pass on this invitation to any colleagues who were.

The survey can be accessed online at:

http://strategie.service.tu-berlin.de/limesurvey/index.php?sid=18951&lang=en

The anonymity of your responses is guaranteed. All data will be analyzed and published only in an aggregated form. As compensation for your efforts, we would like to offer you a more detailed report on our findings. If you relinquish your anonymity, we can provide you with a benchmark report that compares your individual answers to the overall study results.

Further information about our research can be found at http://www.oss-research.info

With your participation you help us in our research and our efforts to gain better understanding of how the open source development model can be interlinked with the private and the public sector. Of course, business model antecedents are only the start. From this starting point, we can then dive deeper into matters like social sustainability, regional creation of wealth, and on a micro level, the profitability of open source business models.

Is a Wind of Change Blowing Through the Quebec Government?

2011-05-13T14:55:00.002-04:00

Today we welcome a guest columnist, Pierre-Paul Lemyre from Lexum. He writes:

Five years ago, I coordinated a series of meetings with IT managers within the Quebec Government. I met with senior administrators, business analysts, and software team leaders from all over the administration, ranging from the largest departments to small public corporations. The objective was to grasp their feelings toward free/libre open source software (F/LOSS) in general and, more specifically, to determine the most adequate F/LOSS licensing strategy for the government. This project eventually resulted in the production of legal guidelines for the administration. In the notes I took during the meetings, were the following insightful quotes, which illustrate the the degree of enthusiasm towards F/LOSS at that time. One goes like this: "It is difficult to replace an existing solution that works - even if it is onerous - with a cheaper solution that contains several flaws, such as a lack of support." Another one states that, "Open source solutions still need to prove themselves over the next few years."

The private sector had a different point of view. Less than one year after those meetings took place, Savoir-Faire Linux, a Quebec firm providing support services for Linux, contested the decision of the Régie des rentes du Québec to sole source to Microsoft the replacement of the operating system and office suite for its desktops. The whole affair started with a friendly email exchange about the opportunity to open the procurement process to competitive bidding. It ended three years later with a declaratory decision of the Superior Court of Quebec stating that the Régie des rentes acted illegally and should have instead undertaken a public tender. Savoir-Faire Linux definitively made its point, but the contract with Microsoft was not canceled because so much time had elapsed since it had been granted.

Although the Savor-Faire Linux decision was rendered only a few months ago, it is pretty clear by now that the wind had stopped blowing against F/LOSS in Quebec City. Maybe the timing was beneficial as the judgment followed the announcement of the complete failure of a few high profile modernization projects in the public sector (see the CSST affair for instance). Maybe the simple fact that almost all businesses are now integrating some form of OSS also contributed. It fact, it is difficult to determine to what extent the government is now seeing the value of F/LOSS, but it is clear that the Savoir-Faire Linux decision created momentum for change.

Whatever the reason, by the end of 2010 the Quebec Government adopted a new policy on the governance and management of public information resources, specifying that from now on F/LOSS should be considered on the same basis as any other software and that guiding tools will be provided to this end. In order to enforce its new position, the government is asking public bodies to complete a feasibility study on the possibilities offered by F/LOSS for any information technology expense exceeding $25,000. This approach should at least have the benefit of bringing mature F/LOSS solutions to the attention of the decision makers.

Having to state in an official document that F/LOSS will be considered says a lot about the prevailing winds. This is not to say that F/LOSS is totally absent from the public infrastructure in Quebec. As anywhere else, a portion of the servers, network infrastructure, and mainframes runs on F/LOSS. However, in most cases these solutions were acquired outside of the regular procurement process and are not supported by any vendor. And when it comes to the desktops, F/LOSS is still nowhere to be found.

Yet, F/LOSS is growing in favour. I have been asked to update the guidelines I initially produced in 2007 to guide public servants in their management of F/LOSS licenses. The updated guide should be released shortly in conjunction with procedures for evaluating F/LOSS projects and another document addressing the measurement of the total cost of ownership of F/LOSS. In addition, a training curriculum has just been setup by the government for information technology managers interested in learning more about F/LOSS. I am curious to see how many participants will turn out at the session on licensing I am giving next June.

At this stage, it is difficult to say if all these initiatives will have any effect on the software procurement habits of the Quebec Government. But even if this opening to F/LOSS can be considered moderate at best, it is nonetheless an opening. We at Lexum will continue to knock at the door as often as possible. With time and persistence, we hope that F/LOSS will find its place within our public software infrastructure.

Technology Entrepreneurship

2011-05-04T11:46:00.000-04:00

The May issue of the OSBR is now available in PDF and HTML formats. The editorial theme for this issue is Technology Entrepreneurship. This issue features the following articles:

Michael Ayukawa, founder of Cornerportal, reflects upon the shifts in his entrepreneurial world view framework and highlights the transformative effect of collectives on an entrepreneur's view of their environment and options.

Natasha D’Souza, founder of Virtual EyeSee, illustrates how the implementation of an idea depends on the entrepreneur's approach to development and commercialization. The article focuses on leveraging collectives to increase the likelihood of entrepreneurial success.

Fred Dixon, CEO of Blindside Networks, shares key lessons learned while balancing the demands of building a business and nurturing the open source project that the business depends on.

Arthur Low, founder and CTO of Crack Semiconductor, retraces the history of key advances in the integrated circuits and electronic design automation tool industry to show that a shift from proprietary to open source tools now means that viable business models exist for small companies to create advanced silicon intellectual property.

Igor Sales and Aparna Shanker from Carleton University's TIM program outline their plans to bring together freelance Android developers and software development firms using a platform that proves the expertise and reputation of developers.

For the upcoming June issue, we continue the theme of Technology Entrepreneurship. We encourage any entrepreneurs who wish to share their insights and lessons to submit articles for this issue before May 15th. In July, we focus on Women Entrepreneurs and welcome submissions that shed light on the particular challenges of increasing the number of women in founding and leadership positions. Please contact the Editor, Chris McPhee, if you are interested in submitting an article for either of these themes; we also welcome general submissions on the topic of open source business or the growth of early-stage technology companies.

To Profit Or Not To Profit

2011-04-29T10:05:00.000-04:00

Today's columnist is Julian Egelstaff from Freeform Solutions. He writes:

To profit or not to profit, that is the question. In fact, it's pretty much the only question (or maybe just the biggest one) when you're going through the legal process of setting up a social enterprise. In Canada at least, there's no middle ground. You're either a for-profit business or you're a not-for-profit (or charity) without share capital.

When we incorporated Freeform Solutions, there was never any debate about this. We literally weren't in it for the money, and one of the other co-founders, Jason Côté, had already successfully started another national not-for-profit organization (now called Actua).

Although Freeform has been pretty successful, there are times when access to capital sure would have been nice. Our legal status certainly precluded any traditional sorts of financing. And, as altruistic founders, we have forever forgone the opportunity to "cash out" in the future.

So it was with great interest that I read Stephen Huddart's column last week, in which he discussed the Social Venture Exchange being incubated at MaRS. As Huddart writes, social enterprises "are hampered by a lack of access to investment capital." (And I could share ample anecdotal evidence to back this up.) So it's not surprising that an enterprising group of folks faced with the same situation are trying to find a way around it.

This is what "collectives" in our sector do very well: they identify issues and cluster around them with solutions, trying to find one or more that "sticks." Tonya and Mark Surman wrote about the organizational and governance aspects of this behaviour in the September 2008 issue of the OSBR.

It would certainly be fantastic if for-profit social enterprises had a specialized market that catered to their needs. But given the current legal structures we're all stuck with, I can't imagine how this would help organizations that are legally not-for-profit. It is enshrined in the legislation that no one shall profit from the operations of a not-for-profit corporation. Why invest in it then?

While the Social Venture Exchange is working on the financing side of this problem, I believe that we need some parallel work in the legal and political aspects of this problem. There may be all kinds of reasons that people creating a social enterprise may not want to set it up legally as a for-profit corporation. The most basic philosophical reason is that they may want something other than majority shareholder rights to control the direction of the organization.

Yes, that diminishes the attractiveness of the venture to investors. If you can't own it and control it, are you going to be as eager to invest in it? Frankly, that lack of control is a risk to you as an investor. But it might be critical to the social entrepreneurs behind the organization.

Our binary for-profit/not-for-profit legal structure reminds me of copyright law before Creative Commons came on the scene. In the old days, things were either public domain, or they were "all rights reserved." But Creative Commons recognized that some creators may want to find a middle ground. "Some rights reserved" is the phrase used to describe this, and Creative Commons licensing gives creators control over which ones they reserve and which ones they give away.

We need the same thing in the social entrepreneurship space. Some innovators may want to keep all control in their own hands and follow the not-for-profit model we have right now. Some may be perfectly happy to give up some of the legal rights and the control they have over their organization in order to make it more attractive for certain kinds of investments, but not go completely down the for-profit road we have now.

One simple example. Governance by a volunteer board of directors is pretty much universal among not-for-profits. The board is often elected by the members of the organization, not shareholders, because there are no shareholders. Many social enterprises may wish to keep that part of the legal structure.

But at the same time, they may want to get rid of some of the financial restrictions, mainly the one that prevents anyone from profiting from the organization. If you want people to invest, they need to have some way of making money from the investment. So perhaps a social enterprise could offer something like a bond, or a dividend-paying share that had no voting or control rights.

There are all kinds of dimensions on which an organization might want to tweak its legal structure, just like Creative Commons licenses give you specific control over attribution requirements, separate from the right to create derivative works, separate from the right to use a work commercially.

I won't trot out the cliche and say that with an election on, it's the perfect time to raise this issue with your MPs. Personally, I agree with the misquoting of Kim Campbell, that an election is not the time to discuss serious issues. Sadly, our elections are all about marketing, advertising, and spin. But through ongoing work all the rest of the time, organizations like the Ontario Nonprofit Network and Imagine Canada can effect changes and we should all support them doing it.

It's a long road, and change doesn't happen overnight, as any social entrepreneur will tell you. But like I tell my daughters, nothing worth doing is easy, and this is one kind of change that all of us "changemakers" have a vested interest in seeing happen.

On-Ramping to the Next Economy: Financing Innovation, Sustainability, and Resilience

2011-04-15T09:54:00.000-04:00

Today's columnist is Stephen Huddart from the J.W. McConnell Family Foundation. Stephen writes:

According to one feisty audience member at a conference I spoke at in Phoenix recently, growing US indebtedness and a weakening dollar will result in the US dollar losing its role as the world's reserve currency. As other countries elect to price their transactions in Euros, gold, or something else, they will dump their unwanted dollars, driving the greenback even lower. Consequently, he insisted, it's time to think about creating local and regional currencies, along with the militia we'll need in order to protect ourselves when the US government goes bankrupt.

This cheery scenario was offered at the Resilience 2011 conference, where Michele-Lee Moore and I were presenting a paper-in-progress about the role of intermediaries in directing grant financing to local implementation of social innovations. We contrasted this with an ecosystem approach, where multiple funders and advisors have access to an open platform that supports innovation within a particular domain - be that geographical (e.g., Arizona), thematic (e.g., healthcare), or both.

Without subscribing to the alarmist and defeatist rhetoric of our commentator, we can agree that resilient local economies are an important element in any innovation ecosystem. This point was underlined at a roundtable I attended at the David O'Brien Centre for Sustainable Enterprise at Concordia University last week, where students and faculty spoke enthusiastically about their work on environmentally sustainable technologies ranging from micromachines to "inward-looking architecture" (an age-old concept that offers material, space, and energy gains by building around central green spaces or atria). The discussion took a despondent turn however, when the subject turned to financing. The consensus view was that the innovations they are working on are hampered by a lack of access to investment capital. "We have the ability to generate solutions," said one participant, "but there's not enough specialized funding to properly test or take them to scale."

This may be about to change. A team based at MaRS and led by Adam Spence is developing a Social Venture Exchange (SVX) - a concept also emerging in the US, the UK, Singapore, South Africa, and elsewhere - that would provide a platform for capitalizing social enterprises. To be listed, projects would have to meet financial as well as social or environmental criteria.

As Mr. Spence explained to me recently, such exchanges can be readily scaled to support local or regional economies. Eventually, they would form part of a network of similar exchanges, allowing specialization to occur - a Vancouver-based exchange could carve out a niche around open source ventures for example, while Montreal might develop particular expertise around green building technology. With a common software platform, and shared metrics on social and environmental impact, all nodes in the network will be able to speak to one another.

It is interesting to note how the Keystone Off-The-Shelf (KOTS) project introduced in these pages last year (Bailetti, 2010) and updated in this issue could help to populate such an exchange with a flow of promising ventures. As an intermediary with the ability to catalyze and add capacity to an emerging innovation ecosystem, KOTS represents a promising innovation in its own right. Its first application - Carleton Entrepreneurs - will be of interest to universities, venture philanthropists, and intermediaries who seek to develop domain-level interventions. Add an open access, crowd-accelerated innovation platform like openIDEO, and it is possible to discern the outlines of a new set of economic relationships, harnessing collective capacity to turn our complex challenges into systems of continuous social innovation.

And where will the investments come from? Well, for many individual and institutional investors, blended returns that consider financial and social or environmental goals are preferable to those that consider financial return alone. Add "local" to that mix and you have a platform that should attract patient risk capital from municipalities, community foundations, universities, pension funds, and others with a stake in creating resilient, innovative local economies. In the final analysis, this movement depends on a commitment to making a collective effort to reshape markets in the public interest, rather than to a race to protect and monopolize benefits for a select few.

Establishing such market mechanisms as a means of creating more resilient local economies should be a priority for governments, and leaders in all sectors. In Canada, this work is currently being led by The Task Force on Social Finance, whose report on the subject is an excellent primer.

Alternatively, we could consider that militia idea.

Collectives

2011-04-07T14:19:00.000-04:00

The April issue of the OSBR is now available in PDF and HTML formats. The editorial theme for this issue is Collectives and the Guest Editor is Professor Tony Bailetti from Carleton University. This issue features the following articles:

James Makienko and Antonio Misaka from Carleton University provide an update on the Keystone Off-The-Shelf (KOTS) platform, which is designed to support collectives that enable small innovative companies to grow their revenue.

Tony Bailetti and Ludovico Prattico from Carleton University describe the first application of the KOTS platform, which is the Carleton Entrepreneurs program. This program helps graduate and senior undergraduate students transform their ideas into compelling opportunities and successful businesses.

Michael Ayukawa, Founder of CornerPortal, answers the question: “What is a good deal?” by reviewing the literature on deals and deal-making processes relating to business collectives. His answer to this question was used to define the business rules embodied in a component of the KOTS platform.

David Péloquin, Jean Kunz, and Nicola Gaye from the Policy Research Initiative provide an approach to risk management that can be generalized to any situation where social actors respond to and manage risks in a multi-player environment. This “social management of risk” approach focuses on the involvement of potential actors in pursuing societal objectives in relation to risk.

Michael Weiss from Carleton University discusses a model for company-led open source projects around two dimensions: the level of control over the project and the diversity of applications derived from the project. The article reflects a recent trend towards collectives of companies that develop shared assets in the form of open source projects.

The editorial theme for the upcoming May issue is Women Entrepreneurs and the deadline for submissions is April 15th. For subsequent issues, we welcome general submissions on the topic of open source business or the growth of early-stage technology companies. Please contact the Editor, Chris McPhee, if you are interested in making a submission.

The Social Side of Co-Creation

2011-03-18T10:02:00.002-04:00

Today's columnist is Stephen Huddart from the J.W. McConnell Family Foundation. Stephen writes:

“Everyone a changemaker”
-Ashoka Changemakers

As articles in this issue of OSBR attest, co-creation is how a lot of business innovation is getting done these days. This is significant in its own right, but what happens when co-creation involves collaboration across whole sectors?

Recently in Ottawa, I took part in a roundtable convened by the Public Policy Forum to explore social innovation and aboriginal youth. Speaking under the Chatham House Rule, representatives of aboriginal organizations, Indian and Northern Affairs Canada, Health Canada, and the corporate and philanthropic sectors reviewed the dimensions of a social tsunami that will influence Canada for better or worse for decades to come: aboriginal youth are the fastest-growing demographic in the country, with the potential to make a valuable contribution to economy and community or to place heavy demands on our social welfare and penal systems. Currently only 50% complete high school, so education is key.

It was evident from our discussion that no one sector can address this complex challenge alone. There is a clear need for the continuous co-creation of new approaches, requiring aboriginal leadership, involvement of young people themselves, responsive government policy and funding for education and training, private sector ingenuity and jobs, and engagement of the community sector at every level.

Co-creation at this scale requires platforms that enable cross-sectoral collaboration. A number of philanthropic foundations and aboriginal partners have recently banded together to create The Circle on Philanthropy and Aboriginal Peoples in Canada, which meets about once a year, holds teleconferences every six weeks or so, and uses a Google site to collect and share information. Organizing a sector this way enables us to collaborate first among ourselves, and then with other sectors. This September, several members of The Circle (as it is commonly referred to), along with Ashoka Canada and private sector partners, will launch a national Changemakers competition in First Nations, Métis, and Inuit education. In effect, this is open sourcing the search for innovative programs and change strategies. In order to address system-level dynamics, Changemakers uses a “discovery framework” – a grid that plots common barriers against a typology of solutions. The competition launches with this framework already populated with prototypical innovations, to orient submissions and focus attention on thematic areas. Changemakers also encourages proponents to amend their proposals in response to public comment while the competition unfolds.

This is just the beginning. Broad, open platforms like this enable wide sharing of information and ideas, but the next step is to create high-functioning ecologies of change. To borrow from the paper by Hyötyläinen and colleagues in this issue of the OSBR, such an ecology should comprise an open innovation component, strategic networks, strategic alliances, as well as hub-spoke relationships. It should also include “change labs” where parties can come together for facilitated exploration of new models and mindsets. And where promising practices are identified, funding and policy should follow.

[A note to regular readers: At this week’s Nonprofit Technology Conference in Washington DC, founders Peter Deitz and Christine Egger announced that GuideStar will be the new home for their open source database Social Actions, which I profiled in my September 2010 column, and which they wrote about in the July 2009 issue of OSBR. Congratulations to all involved.]

Hubs and Hugs: How the Right Networks Can Create Unlimited Value

2011-03-11T11:20:00.000-05:00

Today's columnist is Julian Egelstaff from Freeform Solutions. He writes:

"You can't run out of hugs!" my girls told me, loudly. I had told them, after about a million hugs, that if I gave any more before bedtime then I might run out and there would be none for tomorrow.

It's obvious of course that some things are inexhaustible. But the lines aren't always as clear as you'd think.

My wife recently got a Kobo e-reader. She chose the Kobo in part because it's compatible with Toronto Public Library eBooks, and the Kindle is not. Yes, the library loans out eBooks. Now there's an interesting concept.

The library will give you a perfect copy of an electronic document, for use over a limited period of time. After that it will automatically expire from your e-reader. At least there's no possibility of returning it late! I wonder if they delete a copy from their own computer while its in your possession? More likely, some lawyers have simply been busy writing licensing agreements.

To make the situation more curious, there's a limit to the number of copies of eBooks that the library has to loan out. If they're going to auto-expire the documents, why can't they at least give out an infinite number of copies? Other than reading the book on a cool e-reader, where are the benefits of this being an electronic medium?

I suspect the limit on copies has a lot to do with Public Lending Rights and the inability of libraries to reimburse authors an infinite amount of money for an infinite amount of eBook loans.

Whatever the reason, at least you can get everything from project Guttenberg for free. Their copies are as inexhaustible as hugs.

It all makes me think about network effects. In my opinion, Metcalfe's law is one of the most important ideas of the last fifty years: "The value of a network goes up as the square of the number of users." I think it's a useful lens for looking at the basic mechanics of eBooks, hugs, and co-creation in general, which is the theme of this month's OSBR.

The eBooks from the library are about as useful as regular books. The lending model has effectively neutered them of all the potential benefits they could have from being an electronic medium, other than the convenience of storage and reading on an e-reader. The alternative, I suppose, would be a kind of "Napster for books", and we all know how that turned out for music. So there's no point in beating them up for it, their decisions make sense, even if they're frustrating to digital rights anarchists. The library is preserving the value of the hoard (or should that be horde... of lawyers?).

But imagine if the eBooks were an inexhaustible resource. Free for all to use and not locked up by some licensing agreement or lending right reimbursement limit. Where would the value be located then? It would be dispersed through the network. People with more books to share would be important. People with many connections to others, and therefore an ability to get more books, would also be important (as connector nodes).

Certainly, libraries would still be important because they would have more books than other nodes, though not for long perhaps, depending on the technical implementation. But regardless, the expertise of librarians, who know the "book landscape" better than anyone else, would still be a valuable commodity if libraries could figure out how to offer that value to the network.

As things stand, back in the real world, all those people are still out there, reading eBooks, but their network is not so interconnected, in most cases (more on that later). For the most part, the network is hub-and-spoke, with the libraries and retailers in the middle, and the value locked up there. All that potential, lost.

If you read Metcalfe's law more deeply, it's the connections between the users that matter, not just their number, and the community of eBook readers is all the weaker because the number of interconnections is fundamentally limited by the network model of the old publishing industry, where the libraries and book sellers are trying to dominate as large hubs among all the consumer nodes.

So-called "open business models" try to capitalize on all that network potential. Social networking is the perfect example. The value of Facebook lies in its huge number of users. Who wants to be the first user of Facebook? It's about as useful as having the first telephone. Facebook's business model (if they have a business model) explicitly tries to create value from the network by providing a way for the connections to happen and enabling the free exchange of resources and information. The users of Facebook are co-creating the value of Facebook. Every time you post a new photo, Mark Zuckerberg owes you one. Hopefully you feel justly compensated by free access to all the sharing tools he has given you.

I did say "for most", when describing the lost potential of real-world eBook networks. For some people, there is a new and growing option on the horizon: person-to-person eBook lending. This is a very exciting development that shows there may yet be a happy, truly interconnected digital future for the old business of publishing.

As Catherine MacDonald wrote recently in the Globe and Mail over the past two months, 12,000 Kindle users in the US have signed up for the "Kindle Lending Club", a service that lets Kindle owners swap copies of books they own. There are other similar services popping up, though nothing yet for Kobo users in Canada.

The huge interest and fast growth of these services should come as no surprise. It's the same open model as we see in social networking: it encourages connections between people. It's not far removed from my fantasy world of inexhaustible eBooks. It makes everything about the network – everything about owning a Kindle and having eBooks – more valuable and worthwhile to the participants. The network configuration doesn't just determine the value through some abstract process. The network configuration actively encourages different kinds of behaviour, and through that behaviour the users will co-create the value.

People only participate in old hub-and-spoke networks because they have to, since the value is being hoarded in the middle of the network and they can only get to it one way. Open networks encourage people to participate. There's something in it for them. When people sense the value of sharing information on social networking sites, when they can easily swap their eBooks with other
readers, when they get something out of it themselves, they're more motivated to participate. It's the same thing with open source software, with Wikipedia, and all the other blossoming examples of openness surrounding us. When people are motivated to contribute, the value they can create is inexhaustible.

It's like hugs. You give because it feels good, not because you have to, and that feeling never runs out.

Lead to Win for Women

2011-03-08T10:15:00.000-05:00

We are pleased to welcome a guest columnist today. Janice Singer from the National Research Council’s Industrial Research Assistance Program writes:

Today, March 8^th, marks the 100^th anniversary of International Women’s Day. As women in the Western world, we have a lot to celebrate: better opportunities, better education, better health, more choices for everything, really. We also have a lot to be concerned about - there is still a tremendous amount of work necessary throughout the developing world to increase the status of women. To set the focus right up front for today, though, this column is neither about our successes at home nor the burning issues facing us internationally.

This column is about one glaring area where women must make more progress at home, right here in Canada. For the past two years, I have worked for the National Research Council’s Industrial Research Assistance Program (NRC-IRAP) as an Industrial Technology Advisor (ITA). My role is to work with small and medium-sized innovative, growth-oriented businesses. I have a toolkit including advisory services, linkages, and funding that I can offer to clients to help them bring their products and services to market, and grow. It’s a job that I’m passionate about. I am currently actively working with about 45 clients, and I have a caseload of about 60-70 clients at any one time. Of these clients, only 3 have founders, co-founders, or CEOs that are women. That works out to about 4%. Even as a software engineering researcher in a male-dominated field, about 15-20% of my colleagues were women.

Of course, this number is based on my personal experience and may not apply overall, but in Ottawa, it does seem to hold with my colleagues. Also, this is not to say that women don’t play an important role in the male-driven businesses – we see them frequently as CFOs, heads of HR, and in high-level technical and management positions. These are important roles that drive business growth, but are significantly different than a CEO’s role.

Now here is the crux of the problem, and what I’d like to address today. I know there is a lot of research in this area, but it doesn’t seem to have increased the numbers. Why aren’t women CEOs? What is different about a woman CEO than a male CEO? And most importantly, how can we support and grow women CEOs?

To try to address these burning questions in Ottawa, we have just started a program called Lead to Win for Women, or LTW². By building on the model of Lead to Win, our goal is to offer the infrastructure necessary to help women build and then grow their businesses. To be clear, we’re not offering our services to women entrepreneurs just because they’re women entrepreneurs. We’re looking for women who are interested in significant growth, with a roadmap that brings them beyond their regional boundaries and a revenue stream that supports a significant number of future employees. If you’d like to open a cupcake shop, that’s great, but it’s not LTW². However, if you’re planning on world domination in cupcakes, then LTW²would like to help you get there.

We believe that women have the same essential needs as men when it comes to starting a business. However, we will tailor the program as we go to ensure it attracts and supports women entrepreneurs. Right now, LTW²is focusing on five key program elements:

Support to validate early product concepts;
Support to test prototypes or early stage products;
Access to a resource pool who can code, develop user interfaces, sell and market, and develop websites;

A LTW² website that can be used as a showcase and exchange for matching needs/resource pool;
Access to a board that can steward revenue growth.

LTW²is just being organized. Our official launch date is April 30, 2011. Our goal is to make Ottawa the world’s leading centre for growth-oriented businesses launched by women. And we plan to evolve our program as necessary to meet the needs of LTW²clients.

We encourage everyone to send us feedback and help us shape this program. In particular, we would like to hear from woman entrepreneurs in Ottawa who might benefit from the LTW² program. Also, we’d like to hear from any women who have launched a successful business with six or more employees – please look back on your experiences and comment on the five elements that comprise our initial focus.

Together, let’s determine what can we do now so that in 20 years, we mark the 120^th anniversary of International Women’s Day by celebrating two decades of increasing numbers of successful women CEOs.

To learn more about LTW², contact: Janice.Singer@nrc-cnrc.gc.ca

Co-Creation

2011-03-01T12:10:00.000-05:00

The March issue of the OSBR is now available in PDF and HTML formats. The editorial theme for this issue is Co-Creation and the Guest Editors are Marko Seppä from the University of Jyväskylä and Stoyan Tanev from the University of Southern Denmark. This issue features the following articles:

Marko Seppä and Stoyan Tanev summarize recent value co-creation research and identify an emerging focus on business co-creation.

Jukka Huhtamäki, Martha G. Russell, Kaisa Still, and Neil Rubens use network analysis to examine linkages between organizations and the emergence of cooperative activities in an innovation system.

Kati Järvi and Antti Pellinen examine evolving business models in mobile service production and provision with an emphasis on the shift from one-sided to two-sided markets, including the emergence of application stores as intermediaries in service delivery.

Raimo Hyötyläinen, Katri Valkokari, and Petri Kalliokoski present four models of business renewal through co-creation within networks, distinguishing between the exploitation of present knowledge for efficiency and the exploration of new knowledge for innovation.

Frederick Ahen and Peter Zettinig argue that if networks are effective mechanisms for criminal organizations to infiltrate into any value chain, then networks should also work for responsible businesses in their quests to counter this phenomenon of value destruction.

Xian Chen and Paul Sorenson examine the effect of service quality on business relationships between clients and SaaS service providers and provide an approach and tool for evaluating SaaS applications.

Taina Savolainen and Sari Häkkinen present two case studies that illustrate the importance of trustworthiness as a leadership trait and managerial skill.

The editorial theme for the upcoming April issue is Communications Enabled Applications. For subsequent issues, we welcome general submissions on the topic of open source business or the growth of early-stage technology companies. Please contact the Editor, Chris McPhee, if you are interested in making a submission.

Civic Hacking

2011-02-18T14:13:00.000-05:00

Today's columnist is Christopher Sean Morrison from BRL-CAD. He writes:

"The three principles of transparency, participation, and collaboration form the cornerstone of an open government."

Peter R. Orszag, Open Government Directive

A couple months ago, a friend of mine at the Oregon State University's Open Source Lab asked if I'd heard about an upcoming "Civic Hack Day" event happening in Baltimore. I'm usually pretty in tune with the tech-happenings and other events going on in the city where I live, but this was rather surprising news that affected me personally. Not only was this event being held in the same city, it was in my own neighborhood, less than a quarter mile from my house, and I was learning about it from someone more than 2500 miles away on the other side of the country. It couldn't have been arranged more conveniently.

I had been following Baltimore's Open Data Initiative that was announced just a couple weeks earlier in January, but hadn't yet put much thought into the possibilities. Not a whole lot of cities have made their information available online, including less than a dozen in the United States. What does one do with data on things like parking tickets, city drainage routes, and property tax values? Even with my ignorance -- or perhaps especially because of it -- I was more than happy to sign up for this all-day collaborative coding session that had been arranged to get the mental juices flowing. If anything, I figured that amongst the few dozen developers in attendance that there'd at least be a few interesting ideas I might be able to help with.

This wasn't the first time I'd worked with civic data, to say the least, but this was the first time with data that I had a personal connection to. With the various federal and state data sets I've poked at, (for me at least) the information very quickly becomes collections of impersonal statistics that one has no control or influence over. Even when you find trends or correlations, the information is often just not particularly useful. It can be informative, newsworthy, and fantastic for government accountability but unlikely that it will affect your day-to-day behavior unless you work in politics.

There's something alluring about city data, though. The numbers and records are no longer aggregate information, it gets personal. Not only was my house tax valuation easily found, but there was the data for my property line, my building plot, streets through my neighborhood, and so much more. It was "my" data. Sure enough, a quick search through an XML text file even revealed that parking ticket from last fall.

The publishing of civic data in conveniently consumable form has been ongoing for several years now. Tracey Lauriault introduced OSBR readership to civic data back in February 2008. A year later, Jennifer Bell wrote about how open data and government transparency are affecting our role as participatory citizens. Companies, non-governmental organizations, and private individual software developers are springing up around the data to help manage, characterize, visualize, and repurpose this information in meaningful ways. Today, you can find numerous governments at the city, state, province, and federal level digitally publishing all kinds of raw data on how they operate, where money is spent, what information they track, when transactions occur, and who they interact with. It's a new level of access to data that is only beginning to be realized.

At the federal level, the amount of data being made available and the rate at which it's increasing is staggering. The United States now has more than 300,000 data sets available with more being added on a daily basis. In January 2009 on his first day in office, President Obama issued an Open Government Initiative memo committing the U.S. federal government to "an unprecedented level of openness" in order to establish "a system of transparency, public participation, and collaboration." A little less than a year later in December 2009, that became an Open Government Directive, the http://DATA.gov website was established, and federal agencies were mandated to develop a plan specifically towards improving transparency, participation, and collaboration with the public. Now a little more than a year since, 17 of 29 government agencies fully meet the requirements set forth by the directive with others making significant progress towards openness.

Cities, however, have actually taken much longer to publish their data. Perhaps it's due to local politics or funding, but more than likely it's at least in part because the information is more personally identifiable that they have to be more careful. If someone reports a pothole that needs to be fixed, it is useful for their request to be geotagged (i.e., have the exact physical location annotated with the report). Service personnel will know which streets to focus attention on and you'll know which ones to avoid. Similarly, geotagged crime data makes it very easy to create a visual graph of the crime hot spots in a city. Certain types of crime reports, though, might give away a victim's location and make them susceptible to repeated crime offenses. The datasets have to be carefully reviewed before they can be made available to the world.

That said, there are several big and small cities alike now that publish their civic information to the Internet. Having published substantial repositories of information in 2009, San Francisco continues to be a great example on providing excellent civic data openness. They followed on the heels of the massive data repositories released through the Washington D.C. Data Catalog. For more than a year, London has also published hundreds of datasets. Toronto is yet another. The city of Ottawa recently wrapped up their Open Data App Contest where developers competed for cash prizes as they looked to find innovative and useful things to do with their city's data. New York similarly sponsored a BigApps 2.0 contest to make use of their civic data. The list goes on and on as city governments around the world increasingly open up access to their civic data.

As "Civic Hack Day" came to a close in Baltimore, I was left awestruck at the abundance of personal, professional, and commercial possibilities. In that single day of coding, we'd collectively developed numerous proof-of-concept applications that leveraged Baltimore's available civic data. One guy had a crime density map working while another had an animation of crime incidents over time. Another group created an application that listens for people tweeting 311 support requests (with geotagged pictures attached) via Twitter.

What did I end up with? I developed a working geometry importer for my favorite open source CAD system to read in shapefile data as 3D geometry. By converting the city data into 3D geometry, it becomes easy to procedurally generate an accurate model of the entire city based on any number of criteria. Perhaps it'd be useful to model each tax district with buildings scaled according to their recorded tax value. An analytic visibility analysis might show if there's a correlation between light poles, public video cameras, and crime levels or whether the crime is merely shifted around the corner out of sight. Maybe, just maybe, it'll even help avoid that next parking ticket.

Recent Research

2011-02-01T13:48:00.000-05:00

The February issue of the OSBR is now available in PDF and HTML formats. The editorial theme for this issue is Recent Research. This issue features the following articles:

Carlo Daffara, head of research at Conecta, describes the factors to consider when selecting a license to suit both business objectives and licensing constraints.

Monique Bardawil from Carleton University's Technology Innovation Management program outlines her recent research to identify key players in the mashup ecosystem, where businesses must develop appropriate strategies based on an accurate understanding of the structure of the ecosytem and the role of its key players.

Amanda Shiga, CMS Practice Lead at non~linear creations, presents her research into the competitive actions taken by API providers in the mashup ecosystem.

Islam Balbaa, Technical Business Analyst at Kinaxis, describes his recent research into the fit between software-as-a-service products and the requirements of particular business units.

Chulaka Ailapperuma, Senthilkumar Mukunda, and Shruti Satsangi from Carleton University's Technology Innovation Management program illustrate how social network analysis can be used to study online communities, including free/libre open source software developer teams.

The editorial theme for the upcoming March issue is Co-creation. We have invited authors from the Research Forum to Understand Business in Knowledge Society to contribute to this special issue. The Guest Editors will be Stoyan Tanev from the University of Southern Denmark and Marko Seppä from the University of Jyväskylä.

For subsequent issues, we welcome general submissions on the topic of open source business or the growth of early-stage technology companies. Please contact the Editor, Chris McPhee, if you are interested in making a submission.

The Definition of Open?

2011-01-28T10:18:00.000-05:00

Today's columnist is Jason Côté from Freeform Solutions. He writes:

On December 8, 2010, Andy Rubin, Google's Vice President of Engineering (and co-founder of Android prior to Google's acquisition of it in 2005), tweeted: “There are over 300,000 Android phones activated each day.” This was the first time Google's claim for Android surpassed Apple's for the iPhone.

Having upgraded to the Samsung Galaxy S Captivate only days earlier, I played a very small part in this growing trend; Samsung has already sold 10 million Galaxy S smartphones. As an advocate for free and open source software, I am inclined to support any Android-based device on principle, even though my first Android phone, the HTC Dream (or G1 as marketed in the US), was certainly not as polished as the iPhone available at the time.

Two months earlier, the same Andy Rubin offered the following definition of open via twitter: “mkdir android ; cd android ; repo init -u git://android.git.kernel.org/platform/manifest.git ; repo sync ; make”. A few simple keystrokes and I have the entire Android source code at my fingertips. This definition is great in theory, but what is the reality?

For me, reality is that my Samsung phone is running Android 2.1, currently the second most popular version. Android 2.2 is currently the most popular in use, and is now available for some carriers in Canada and the US, but not others. The latest release of Android is 2.3, and Android 3.0 is expected to be released “soon.” When 3.0 is released, my phone will be a full three versions behind the state of the art.

So, while the codebase is open, it seems that software patches and operating system updates are not guaranteed to be made available... or work when they are; my HTC phone was stranded with Android 1.5, with no chance for upgrade. Even worse, after a required software update to re-enable 911 service, the phone never worked reliably again, although there was much finger pointing between Rogers and HTC about these issues. So much for all bugs being shallow.

I also recently bought Samsung's Galaxy S Tab (tablet). I thought it would be the same as my Samsung smartphone. However, the tablet is running on Android 2.2, one version ahead of my phone... yet some applications have been added or removed, and others modified to work with the larger screen size. On top of this, Google has insisted that Android 2.x is not ready for tablets, and most manufacturers are waiting for Android 3.0. As with my previous mobile phone, a similar uncertainty already exists as to whether future versions of Android can, and will, be available for my new tablet.

The installed version is only one consideration. Google offers a “pure” Android experience on phones it markets itself. There are no less than ten variants of the Galaxy S smartphone in Canada and the US alone, one available for each major carrier. Some of the hardware differences are necessary to support the various cellular network technologies deployed, but many other changes are simply for marketing purposes, to allow each carrier to “differentiate their product offering.” Each carrier can customize the device, including by adding their own applications.

All this “differentiation” is not always a good thing. While my tablet is fully capable of making cellular phone calls, and has a front facing camera for video conferencing, the phone functionality has been disabled. Yet, “cell standby” is regularly among the top uses of my tablet's battery. Do I personally modify my tablet to enable the features or operating system I want to use? It is open, right?

In the case of mobile devices, these business issues, and hardware issues, compound the question of openness. But it's not all wine and roses in the pure software world either. In our daily work with nonprofits, just like the Google versus Apple question, we are sometimes asked what is the “right” content management system (CMS) to use. Idealware produces an annual report comparing open source content management systems, including four popular systems in use in the nonprofit sector: Drupal, Joomla, Plone, and Wordpress. We usually pick Drupal. Even with a broad mandate to support the use of IT by nonprofits, Freeform Solutions cannot be an expert in everything, just like cellular carriers cannot offer all versions of Android.

We generally prefer any open source CMS over a proprietary one, if only so that we can modify it to meet the unique needs that nonprofit organizations often have. We limit such modifications as much as we can, though, since software development is expensive. But, we like having options and choices, and we enjoy the opportunity to build on the effort of others, and then share our efforts in support of developing the community.

But while we rarely face hardware issues and only a few marketing “differentiation” issues – choosing which Drupal distribution, for example ― we have produced, and maintain, many sites in Drupal 5 and 6. Drupal 7 was recently released and Drupal 5 is no longer supported. Jumping two versions is never simple, so what do we recommend for our Drupal 5 websites? What if the organization that owns the site cannot afford the upgrade work? Do we leave clients stranded with an obsolete version that may have security or other unresolved issues?

And regardless of these kinds of versioning issues, if Drupal misbehaves, our clients are often pointing at us, like my post-911-upgrade situation between Rogers and HTC, even though we are neither the carrier nor the manufacturer in this example. Regardless, we often feel responsible for addressing these issues, so we usually do whatever we can.

By embracing “open,” there are many benefits that come your way, but clearly there are also many hurdles if you expect to reap all those benefits. On the flip side, there are clearly benefits to Apple doing everything it can to limit options and choices in favour of creating a predictable, repeatable experience for users across numerous hardware devices. Steve Jobs believes the real issue is not open versus closed at all, but fragmentation versus integration; he thinks that Android is fragmented and becoming ever more so. Perhaps the diversity of hardware platforms makes a version of the forking problem inevitable.

In our case, every website we produce is different, and each modification we make might take the underlying software in a different direction. Nonetheless, I prefer the complex and diverse ecosystem of Android – and open source; it is much like the nonprofit sector, where diversity is most often a strength.

Opening Up to the Future

2011-01-21T10:15:00.000-05:00

Today's columnist is Stephen Huddart from the J.W. McConnell Family Foundation. Stephen writes:

My colleague at Social Innovation Generation, Al Etmanski, asked everyone he’d mentioned in his popular blog over the past year to contribute a piece to a special year-end issue, on the theme of “What would you like to see more of in 2011?” Fifty-eight responded, and the results constitute an impressive range of hopes and ideas about the future. I recommend it.

With a nod to Al, in my first OSBR column for 2011, I want to share some things that I am looking forward to seeing more of in the coming year, before reflecting on what they might portend for the world of open source software.

1. Companies going beyond corporate social responsibility to create “shared value”. In Cali, Colombia recently, Mark Lundy, a researcher and policy analyst at the International Centre for Tropical Agriculture, told me about an evaluation the Centre did on the impact of fair trade and organic programs on coffee growers. “To our surprise,” he told me, “in the programs we looked at, growers’ families were going hungry between 10 and 50% percent of the time.” Lundy went on to work with companies, intermediaries and growers to create eco-efficient and economically beneficial supply chains. In a 2008 report, he reflected on one such process: “...it was very powerful to see that […] there are no bad guys and good guys. We are all in the same system and we are all operating under constraints, particularly information constraints. And that negatively affects how the whole system performs.”

As Porter and Kramer point out in a seminal paper in this month’s Harvard Business Review, while fair trade improves producers’ share of revenues, the resulting 10-20% increase in income pales in comparison to the 300% or more that can be generated by investments in efficiency, yield improvement, quality and the building of resilient local economies. Such investments are more costly at the outset and take longer to develop, but the resulting clusters of suppliers, technicians, physical infrastructure, and social services constitute a more robust and enduring approach to creating economic, social, and environmental value. As implementation of the landmark Boreal Forest Agreement gets underway in Canada this year, similar investments in local economies will be needed to shift an extractive, non-renewable business model to one designed for sustainability and productivity.

2. Educational institutions partnering with community organizations. Cindy Blackstock is an aboriginal leader dedicated to improving the lives of First Nations children and families. As the Executive Director of First Nations Child and Family Caring Society of Canada (FNCFCSC), she has pioneered programs to guide the community sector in working effectively with on-reserve partner agencies (Caring Across Boundaries); treat critically ill children first and figure out which jurisdiction will pay for it later (Jordan’s Principle), and invest in aboriginal education (Shannen’s Dream). Cindy and the FNCFCSC are bringing the federal government before the Canadian Human Rights Commission, alleging discrimination in the provision of education and health services to aboriginal children. As a result, the FNCFCSC has had to forego federal support, and keeping the doors open has been a constant challenge. Then, on January 1st, the University of Alberta made her an Associate Professor, encouraging her to continue her role at the First Nations Child and Family Caring Society. As Cindy recounted recently, “When the university first approached me I did not see how an academic appointment could foster equity for First Nations children and families. As discussions evolved, it became clear that the University’s commitment to citizenship and scholarship meant it was willing to creatively bring the strengths of these two independent organizations together to advance the rights of First Nations children.” Cindy will be seconded to the FNCFCSC while she develops a graduate course on social policy advocacy to mentor a future generation of social policy activists. “Universities are supposed to be places where our democracy is protected by academic freedom so that scholars can freely investigate matters and engage in public policy advocacy, even when that might be unpopular with the government of the day.” Cindy said, “The university’s decision to partner means that FNCFCSC has a new partner and a new platform from which to advance our shared vision of supporting First Nations children and families.”

Over the past five years, university-based community service learning and scholarship have become widespread in Canada. The U of A Faculty of Extension/FNCFCSC agreement establishes a new high-water mark for this kind of partnership – bringing community expertise into the academy and funding its sustainability.

3. Sectors learning and acting together. Working on complex issues across sectors, and at different levels of scale, is not something we’ve grown up knowing how to do, but it is becoming an essential twenty-first century competency. In September, the University of Waterloo and York University’s Shulich School of Business (with support from the J. W. McConnell Family Foundation), will offer a Masters Diploma in Social Innovation. It is designed to enable a cohort of students drawn from the private, public, and community sectors to collaboratively explore and then generate new approaches to complex challenges. Much of the program will be offered online, and curriculum content will eventually made available to other institutions interested in offering it.

In the co-evolutionary spiral that integrates open source technologies with social innovations, developments like those described here herald an era in which systems and institutions increasingly open their boundaries – and their internal processes – in order to learn, to innovate, and to co-construct a more humane and sustainable world. As companies come to recognize that their social license to operate depends on creating shared value, it is essential that there be open lines of communication between what is happening on the front lines, the executive suite, and in the board room. As our educational institutions invest in deeper partnerships with community, the feedback loops between learning and action become shorter; and as we learn more about working together on our biggest challenges, we become a more innovative and resilient society.

Happy New Year!

There Is No Creative Commons License

2011-01-14T10:01:00.000-05:00

Today's columnist is Jordan Hatcher from the Open Knowledge Foundation. He writes:

People often talk about using “the Creative Commons license” or suggest that a business or government body “uses Creative Commons” for their licensing. The problem: there isn't one Creative Commons license. Creative Commons (CC) isn't a single license but rather is a collection of them.

There are a set of six main CC licenses, plus other legal tools such as CC0 and the Public Domain Mark. CC also has its own version of the BSD license, and several deprecated licenses, such as the Developing Nations license. Creative Commons therefore doesn't make "a license." Some of these licenses are open, some aren't. In my opinion, they are generally inappropriate for software and are also inappropriate for databases, for most users. For the most part, CC offers content licenses.

Here, I want to focus on the six main CC licenses because they're the most popular. The six main CC licenses consist of combinations of four license elements:

BY – Attribution (giving credit)
NC – Non-commercial (banning commercial use)
SA – Share Alike (copyleft/reciprocal licensing)
ND – No-derivatives (restricting remix of the work)

CC doesn't offer these main licenses without attribution, so the set of six looks like:

Attribution (BY) (OPEN)
Attribution | No Derivatives (BY-ND)
Attribution | Non-Commercial | No Derivatives (BY-NC-ND)
Attribution | Non-Commercial (BY-NC)
Attribution | Non-Commercial | Share Alike (BY-NC-SA)
Attribution | Share Alike (BY-SA) (OPEN)

Two of the above license elements don't meet the Open Knowledge Foundation's open definition because they restrict the field of use – the non-commercial (NC) element – and the ability to reuse and create derivative works – the no derivatives (ND) element. As a result, only two of the six main CC licenses can be classified as open licenses: CC-BY and CC-BY-SA.

So let's say you've decided which of the six licenses best fits your needs as a creator. The license variation doesn't end with that initial choice. Even within the six main licenses, there are many variations of each, though each still accomplishes the core goal of that license type. Public licenses, such as those published by Creative Commons, get upgraded as the law changes or as bugs in the license text are fixed, and each of the six licenses has been through multiple versions. All past versions remain active for people who licensed their work under those versions, though of course new licensors should choose the most current version. So the six licenses change through time, with past versions still potentially active. Licensors should always consider how they will upgrade their CC content when new license versions come out as part of their adoption plan.

In addition to versioning, these six licenses also get "ported" to the national law of many different jurisdictions. Intellectual property law is generally national in nature, but the Internet is global. Canada, France, Germany, Scotland, England & Wales, USA, Mexico, and so on all have their own adapted version of these six licenses. Currently CC has projects around their licenses in more than 70 separate jurisdictions. Also, CC offers an “unported” license for uses that aren't specific to any one jurisdiction. So, when discussing CC licenses, be aware that CC has multiple jurisdictional variations across both the six main license types and version types – a CC-BY Scotland and a CC-BY Canada for example.

Broadly, each license type does what it says: a CC-BY license should only require attribution, regardless of whether it's a Scottish 2.5 version of the CC-BY license or the latest unported 3.0 version. However, the process of adapting a CC license for a particular nation goes beyond language localization; the licenses get mapped onto national IP laws, and so there can exist important legal differences. For instance, the European Union CC licenses may be silent on areas such as the EU's sui generis Database Right or may explicitly waive the Database Right (depending on the jurisdiction and version), or there may even be a choice of law and jurisdiction clause, such as the Scottish CC licenses.

So when licensing and discussing CC licenses, make sure you're specific as to what you want and what you mean: It can have an important impact on the end result.

The ABCs of Humane Organization

2011-01-07T14:45:00.000-05:00

Today's columnist is Christopher Sean Morrison from BRL-CAD. He writes:

"Who we are in the present includes who we were in the past."

Fred Rogers

For a variety of reasons, the start of a new year is a perfect time for "digital cleaning." I always spend a little time making sure everything in my home directory is properly filed away, categories all make sense, duplicates are weeded out, and everything is fully backed up. The process is similar to the Getting Things Done task management approach, with a notable exception. Since it's all digital, the storage costs are so close to zero that you really don't ever have to purge! You can be a guilt-free digital pack rat as long as it all gets properly organized into your archive.

I have a copy of practically every piece of electronic data I've ever worked on. Everything. Included in my massive data archive is everything from the obvious "keepers" such as source code repositories, family pictures, and OSBR articles, to the exceedingly mundane and trivial: emails, old university assignments, notes on my favorite scotch whiskies, log files, and more. If you've ever sent me an email, chatted with me over IRC, or observed my habit of taking pictures of fire hydrants while on travel, you can rest assured that particular piece of data is filed away in the archive.

Why? I love information. The obsessive data historian in me is fond of the information that I've created, written, and modified over the decades as that work and experience brought me to where I am today. It's a treasure trove with gems I can reflect upon, (re)learn from, and build on. The obsessive digital pack rat in me defends the archive as a vault of exceptionally useful information worth preserving because it's often and unexpectedly useful later on. Even with well over a million files, I can quickly find what I'm looking for when I need it. Neither my obsessive data historian or pack rat mentality, however, would be effective if the archive was a burden to maintain or if the data wasn't organized.

How does one keep everything they've ever done on a computer organized? Well that's the same as asking how does one eat an elephant. The smug answer is "one bite at a time." Pun intended. Human-user interface expert Jef Raskin of Macintosh fame and author of The Humane Interface said, "An interface is humane if it is responsive to human needs and considerate of human frailties." Start small and build up infrastructure as you need it. Don't start with a complex web-based content management system tied to an SQL database. Adopt a simple organization scheme that fits your needs. That brings me to my ABCs of data archive management: Attics, Basements, and Cupboards. As your data-organization demands grow, progress from the attic stage, to the basement stage, to the cupboard stage to meet your growing needs.

The Attic: The first simple step you can take towards organizing your personal or business data is to create an attic. Software developers that have used the CVS version control system know the concept well as 'Attic' was the graveyard files went to when they were deleted. An attic is a place you really don't go to very often. It's not pretty, rarely smells good, and will likely have "unwanted visitors" that will turn your data into useless shredded bedding if left unattended for very long. But it's a start.

A data attic can be as simple as a directory on your filesystem where you toss files as a backup every now and then. For businesses, it's a shared directory on a network file system. The key organizational trait you've introduced is that: there is one, and only one, place for everything. The maintenance overhead is exceptionally low because you're not spending time organizing your data, but if you had to find something, you at least know where to look. The downside, of course, is that you're not really organized yet and it can be practically impossible to find anything. If you're one of those people that has hundreds of desktop icons, you know what I'm talking about.

The Basement: As the data in your attic grows, so should your organizational strategy. For those who live in a part of the world that isn't familiar with subterranean accommodations, it's generally a cold simple space albeit much larger than an attic, often used for storage, but usually haphazardly organized.

A basement is where files get grouped together. You need to organize now that your files are no longer "in plain sight." It doesn't have to be pretty or efficient, but it should roughly categorize common types of information into at least 1/10th chunks. How you categorize will depend heavily on the data, but start vague and refine as needed. Documents, Pictures, Projects, etc.

Even though you not putting in a lot of organizational effort, you have to put in some effort (and your time is priceless) so it's time to think about the other B word: Backups. There really should be backups during the attic stage, but the reality is that most naively or ignorantly don't. By the time you start investing time and effort into your system, though, you definitely should be thinking at least about catastrophic data recovery. An effective simple backup strategy I used for many years was simply an automatic sync of my archive onto another hard drive nightly. That drive was replaced with a bigger drive as the size of my archive grew and the old one was stored off-site in case the house burnt down. That (along with a RAID 5 filesystem) was more than enough infrastructure to save me from any minor fat-fingering mistakes and hard drive failures. The level of effort required to restore data was roughly proportional to the level of disaster.

The Cupboards: Once your data is really big, you're invested. Your storage system is to the point where it's used frequently, maybe even many times throughout the day. From an efficiency standpoint, this is where you want to get to because it's where your data becomes the most convenient and easy to access. It should be a fully organized and easily perused storage system that you and others could work with on a daily basis. Your setup should be pleasant and efficient to work with with. There should be only as much complexity as is called for. It takes more regular maintenance to keep cupboards organized and more effort to put things away, but they are the most humane organization.

Keeping business data organized at this level can be a very challenging given the rate at which most organizations generate and process data, so you may need to collaborate with your workforce on establishing something that works for them. Don't just dictate a usage policy.

It takes a lot of time and effort to preserve digital knowledge after a job is over, whether personal or professional. It's overhead and nobody else is going to pay for it so it has to become common culture. Avoid wasting time reinventing, relearning, and rediscovering. Philosopher George Santayana said eloquently that, "those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it." You will reap rewards on your organizational investment in the long term.

A few tips to leave you with:

Don't store stuff you didn't touch. I too have been tempted to download an entire human genome dataset just for the sake of having it, but data doesn't belong in an archive until you actually do something with it.

Separate out other people's stuff that you do touch. That way, if you ever need to ditch evidence in a pinch, it's all in one place. I got sophisticated and use a directory named "notmine.”

Make a complete backup at least once a year. Portable USB drives make for great off-site storage.

Have a solid search mechanism. If you can't find your data quickly, the archive will turn into a graveyard. Be adept at find, grep, and awk. Leverage Spotlight, use virtual folders, set up a file index - whatever works quickly for you.

Clear your home directory once a year. Make the archive your central file store. Put everything away at least once a year. Take out only what you're actively working on. It helps to purge your email inbox at the same time.

Use human-readable directory names. If might have saved you all of 4.2 seconds when you created "oldfmpxs" to store your old family pictures, but you shouldn't have to perform a mental somersault five years later trying to remember what you were thinking.

Share your organizational and backup setup with others. Be proud of your data collection. Help others preserve their digital possessions too.

The Business of Open Source

2011-01-03T13:23:00.001-05:00

The January issue of the OSBR is now available in PDF and HTML formats. The editorial theme for this issue is The Business of Open Source and the Guest Editor is Michael Weiss, Associate Professor in the Technology Innovation Management program at Carleton University. In this issue, we have the following articles:

Mark VonFange, Professional Services Manager at iXsystems, and Dru Lavigne, Director of Community Development for the PC-BSD Project, provide evidence of the increasing use of open source solutions in enterprise IT infrastructures. With its advancements in availability, usability, functionality, choice, and power, free/libre open source software (F/LOSS) provides a cost-effective means for the modern enterprise to streamline its operations. The article quantifies the benefits associated with the use of open source software.

Ian Skerrett, Director of Marketing at the Eclipse Foundation, identifies five best practices for multi-vendor open source communities. Multi-vendor open source communities such as Eclipse, Apache, or Linux enable companies to lower development costs and gain access to wider addressable markets. The article also discusses the importance of foundations in implementing multi-vendor open source communities.

Michael Ayukawa, Mohammed Al-Sanabani, and Adefemi Debo-Omidoku explore the relationship between companies and open source communities. The article identifies the ways in which companies can participate in open source communities and how they can benefit from engaging with the community. It also asks how open a company should be.

Ali Kousari and Chris Henselmans weigh the benefits and risks of companies moving from a private to a private-collective innovation model. In this model, a company collaborates with other companies by making its project public and, in turn, may benefit from higher-quality, decreased time to market, and maximized revenue.

Robert Poole discusses how companies that rely on open source may fear losing control over the execution of their product development strategy. Understanding the mechanisms of control inherent in open source projects and the benefits of hybrid approaches helps companies articulate those fears and make appropriate strategic decisions to match their business objectives.

John Schreuders, Arthur Low, Kenneth Esprit, and Nerva Joachim present Nokia’s Qt product (initially developed by Trolltech) as an example of a hybrid business model. They illustrate how the hybrid approach was implemented and the extent to which the approach has been effective for Nokia. The Qt story illustrates how F/LOSS business models were developed during a period when participants were just beginning to understand how to make money with open source.

The editorial theme for the upcoming February 2011 issue of the OSBR is Recent Research and submissions will be accepted up to January 15th.

For the March issue, we have invited authors from the Research Forum to Understand Business in Knowledge Society to contribute to a special issue on Co-creation. The Guest Editors will be Stoyan Tanev from the University of Southern Denmark and Marko Seppä from the University of Jyväskylä.

Advancing Open Source for Humanity

2010-12-17T09:36:00.000-05:00

Today's columnist is Jason Côté from Freeform Solutions. He writes:

“Because people who change the world need the tools to do it.”

The Nonprofit Technology Network

IEEE, the world's largest technical professional association, unveiled a new tagline earlier this year: Advancing Technology for Humanity. The tagline is intended to showcase the organization's belief that, “IEEE and its members across the engineering, computing, and technology community worldwide advance innovation and technological excellence for the benefit of humankind.” While reading the press release, my faith in my undergraduate engineering education, and my membership in the IEEE, was suddenly renewed.

The belief that people use and develop technology to benefit society, and the specific and natural alignment of the open source movement toward this effort, is well evidenced in this month's issue of the OSBR, including through other IEEE initiatives. Still, while “humanitarian open source” might be narrowly defined as the application of open source in support of humanitarian response efforts, a broader, more inclusive definition is at least consistent with the expansive meaning of open source itself. Thankfully, the shared values evident in open source are increasingly evident in other areas of society, especially in the nonprofit sector.

Perhaps one timely example is the Humanitarian Coalition, a network of Canada's leading aid organizations, including CARE Canada, Oxfam Canada, Oxfam-Québec, and Save the Children Canada. During humanitarian emergencies, these agencies coordinate their efforts, share resources, and provide information to everyone about the disaster and their response efforts, all while doing what they each do best. On January 12, 2010, a 7.0-magnitude earthquake struck near Port-au-Prince, Haiti's capital, reducing much of it to rubble. An estimated three million people were affected by the quake; the Haitian government originally reported that “an estimated 230,000 people had died, 300,000 had been injured, and 1,000,000 made homeless.”

The Humanitarian Coalition and its members responded immediately, and have continued to work together with Haitians, in communities across Haiti, to help rebuild their country and restore their livelihoods. Canadians continue to follow these activities and are sympathetic to the continued struggle of the Haitian community. Now, approaching the one-year anniversary of this catastrophic earthquake, the Humanitarian Coalition has launched the Haiti Portal, a website to share the progress that has been made, and send messages of support and hope from Canadians to survivors in Haiti. The fact that the website uses the Drupal open source content management system is likely of little consequence to most people.

Thankfully, such events lift us beyond the various challenges that otherwise make it difficult for us to coordinate our efforts and collaborate to achieve a greater social impact. Still, what about our daily efforts to bring about systemic change? In my daily work in the nonprofit sector, I see many passionate people working to create change in their world. In the following three examples, there is an emphasis on intentional sharing and on building ecosystems that naturally produce social innovation.

1. Inspired by the participatory culture of open source, the Centre for Social innovation (CSI) in Toronto is a shared physical space where over 250 people work, meet, and connect. CSI has now opened a second location, buying a beautiful old building in downtown Toronto that will be home to another 400 people; you can even invest in the project through a community bond. They have recently released Shared Spaces for Social Innovation, effectively open sourcing their model, and offer specific templates and tools to help other people get started. They are also working to scale their social finance innovation (i.e., the community bond) across Ontario.

2. The Ontario Nonprofit Network (ONN) is a network of networks of organizations working for public benefit on a variety of issues relevant to the nonprofit sector. ONN facilitates cross-sectoral collaboration, in part through their use of the Constellation Governance Model as a framework for organizing. The model promotes action through “coordinated, mutual self-interest,” and without requiring the creation of another nonprofit organization. Each constellation is a “self-organizing action team” that is led by whomever leads. Accordingly, constellations appear when needed and disappear when their work is complete.

3. The Nonprofit Technology Network (NTEN) recently released their strategic plan for the next few years, and invited the community - “a community transforming technology into social change” - to openly discuss its future. The conversation will continue at the 2011 Nonprofit Technology Conference, the next annual three-day gathering of nonprofit professionals from around the world. Conference participants will learn about becoming networked, building networks and networks of networks, and representing the technology needs of nonprofits as a community that speaks with a single, unified voice.

With a focus on nonprofit technology, open source, and social innovation, my organization is a member of CSI, ONN, and NTEN. I personally do what I can to participate in their physical and virtual spaces, sometimes as a follower, and sometimes as a leader. It never seems like enough. Collaborating takes time and requires effort; it is hard work! It requires persistence and patience. It can be immensely rewarding when it works, and intensively frustrating when it doesn't. Simply put, collaborating is a journey. For me, I expect, a lifelong one. I feel particularly grateful, especially at this time of year, to be travelling among so many wonderful people. Together, I believe we are advancing humanity.

On Symbian, Communities, and Motivation

2010-12-10T15:04:00.006-05:00

Today's columnist is Carlo Daffara from Conecta. He writes:

I have followed with great interest the evolution of the Symbian open source project - from its start, through its tentative evolution, and up to its closure this month. This process of closing down is accompanied by the claim that: "the current governance structure for the Symbian platform – the foundation - is no longer appropriate."

It seems strange. Considering the great successes of Gnome, KDE, Eclipse, and many other groups, it is curious that Symbian was not able to follow along the same path. I have always been a great believer in OSS consortia, because I think that the sharing of research and development is a main strength of the open source model, and I think that consortia are among the best ways to implement R&D sharing efficiently.

However, to work well, Consortia need to provide benefits in terms of efficiency or visibility to all the actors that participate in them, not only to the original developer group. For Nokia, we know that one of the reasons to open up Symbian was to reduce the porting effort. As Eric Raymond reports, "they did a cost analysis and concluded they couldn’t afford the engineering hours needed to port Symbian to all the hardware they needed to support. (I had this straight from a Symbian executive, face-to-face, around 2002)."

But to get other people to contribute their work, you need an advantage for them as well. What can this advantage be? For Eclipse, most of the companies developing their own integrated development environment (IDE) found it economically sensible to drop their own work and contribute to Eclipse instead. It allowed them to quickly reduce their maintenance and development costs while increasing their quality as well. The Symbian foundation should have done the same thing, but apparently missed the mark, despite having a large number of partners and members. Why?

The reason is time and focus. The Eclipse foundation had, for quite some time, basically used only IBM resources to provide support and development. In a similar way, it took WebKit (which is not quite a foundation, but follows the same basic model) more than two years before it started receiving substantial contributions, as can be found here.

And WebKit is much, much smaller than Symbian and Eclipse. For Symbian, I would estimate that it would require at least three or four years before such a project could start to receive important external contributions. That is, unless it is substantially re-engineered so that the individual parts (some of which are quite interesting and advanced, despite the claims that Symbian is a dead project) can be removed and reused by other projects as well. This is usually the starting point for long-term cooperation. Some tooling was also not in place from the beginning; the need for a separate compiler chain - one that was not open source and that in many aspect was not as advanced as open source ones - was an additional stumbling block that delayed participation.

Another problem was focus. More or less, anyone understood that for a substantial period of time, Symbian would be managed and developed mainly by Nokia. And Nokia made a total mess of differentiating what part of the platform was real, what was a stopgap for future changes, what was end-of-life, and what was the future. Who would invest, in the long term, in a platform where the only entity that could gain from it was not even that much committed to it? And before flaming me for this comment, let me say that I am a proud owner of a Nokia device, I love most Nokia products, and I think that Symbian still could have been a contender, especially through a speedier transition to Qt for the user interface. But the long list of confusing announcements and delays, changes in plans, and lack of focus on how to beat the competitors like iOS and Android clearly reduced the willingness of commercial partners to invest in the venture.

Which is a pity - Symbian still powers most phones in the world and can still enter the market with some credibility. But this later announcement sounds like a death knell. Obtain the source code through a DVD or USB key? You must be kidding. Do you really think that setting up a webpage with the code and preserving a read-only Mercurial server would be a too much of a cost? The only thing that it shows is that Nokia stopped believing in an OSS Symbian. As a small side project, I am now dumping the full Mercurial repository, and will create a Google Code project for preservation. At least, it will remain visible without having to ask Nokia for a DVD.

UPDATE: The repository is now available at http://sourceforge.net/projects/symbiandump/files/. It is a substantial, massive archive – I had to drop all Mercurial additions to make it fit in the space I had available, and still it amounts to 6.1Gb, Bzip-compressed. I have performed no modifications or changes on the source code, and it remains under its original licenses. I hope that it may be useful for others, or at least become a nice historical artifact.

Humanitarian Open Source

2010-12-01T13:17:00.000-05:00

The December issue of the OSBR is now available in PDF and HTML formats. The editorial theme for this issue is Humanitarian Open Source and the Guest Editor is Leslie Hawthorn, Open Source Outreach Manager for Oregon State University's Open Source Lab.

In this issue, authors in Canada (Ottawa and Toronto), Sri Lanka (Columbo), and the United States (Brunswick, Hartford, Indianapolis, New York, Portland, and Seattle), draw upon their experiences to show the role of the open source approach in meeting humanitarian needs in the past, present, and future.

Chamindra de Silva, Director and CTO of the Sahana Foundation, explores the landscape of humanitarian free and open source software and the natural alignment between the humanitarian and open source domains.

Mark Prutsalis, President and CEO of the Sahana Foundation, describes the role of the Sahana project in disaster-relief scenarios and the need to build a service industry based on supporting HFOSS in order to sustain the ecosystem.

Glenn McKnight and Alfredo Herrera from the Humanitarian Initiatives Committee describe IEEE Canada's efforts to produce open hardware solutions that provide reliable sources of electricity to address humanitarian needs in developing countries.

Adam Feuer, Director of Engineering for the Grameen Foundation’s Mifos Initiative, discusses how Mifos open source banking software helps alleviate global poverty through microfinance and serves as a model to address other humanitarian challenges.

Dawn Smith, Project Coordinator for the OpenMRS medical record system, examines the role of OpenMRS in the formation of a health information business ecosystem for resource-poor environments.

Ralph Morelli, Professor of Computer Science at Trinity College, Allen Tucker, Professor Emeritus at Bowdoin College, and Trishan de Lanerolle, Project Director for the Humanitarian FOSS Project at Trinity College, discuss the Humanitarian FOSS Project and its initiatives in undergraduate education to benefit both global and local communities.

Mike Herrick, Executive Director of the Collaborative Software Foundation, traces the history of the TriSano project and its business model refinement to illustrate how collaboration can lead to sustainable software and communities that benefit global public health.

The editorial theme for the upcoming January 2011 issue of the OSBR is The Business of Open Source and the guest editor will be Michael Weiss, Associate Professor in the Technology Innovation Management program at Carleton University. For upcoming issues, we welcome general submissions on the topic of open source business or the growth of early-stage technology companies. Please contact the Editor if you are interested in making a submission.

Open Sourcing Philanthropy

2010-11-26T10:23:00.000-05:00

Today's columnist is Stephen Huddart from the J.W. McConnell Family Foundation. Stephen writes:

While the private sector has developed a broad range of business models and financial instruments over the past 150 years, Canada’s community sector is limited to a narrow range of tools for achieving its objectives: grants and donations, fee-for-service, and a low level of entrepreneurial activity. No bonds, few bank loans, and with the exception of co-operatives, no access to share capital.

As innovations like micro-lending or the Registered Disability Savings Plan (RDSP) have shown, financial instruments can have a big impact on social problems. By adopting approaches already proven in the US and the UK, we could be doing a great deal more to build low-income housing, improve school completion rates, and reduce healthcare costs. On November 30 at MaRS in Toronto, the Task Force on Social Finance will present several recommendations to spur fresh approaches to complex social and environmental challenges. Provided regulatory support follows, we could be looking at a period of unprecedented innovation and creativity in and around Canada’s community sector. Full details will be available shortly on socialfinance.ca, the must-read blog on financial innovation.

For the sector to attract new resources - to warrant the trust of patient investors, and to meet the scrutiny of public and private boards - it will need to demonstrate higher degrees of transparency and accountability for results. Unlike private sector companies whose profit and loss statements can be used to compare performance and attract investment, the community sector generally lacks social impact measures, or even the means to compare one organization with its peers. Well meaning but misguided efforts to simply compare “administration costs” obscure the fact that social change is complex and demands measures that take this into account. Pioneering efforts in this space include Impact Reporting and Investment Standards (IRIS) – used by a growing number of blended value (financial+social or environmental) investment funds, such as Acumen.

Together, philanthropy and the open source community have an important role to play in this unfolding scenario. The Knight Foundation’s support for the Drupal platform is a good example of what core funding, shared learning, and collaboration can do to make open source tools available to those who work for the public good. We need similar support for accessible (low cost, easy to learn, open source or at least open architecture) operating platforms that provide access to suites of compatible tools. Take a look at the Framework Foundation’s technology and operations portal at it.timeraiser.ca to see what one leading Canadian organization is doing. By making its policies and practices visible and open to comment, Framework is contributing its tacit knowledge about cloud computing tools to anyone who can use it. Imagine what an expanded platform of this kind could do to save time and money for community agencies.

Other platforms could aggregate data from organizations working on similar issues and share promising practices among them. At Boys and Girls Clubs of Canada, work is proceeding on a set of metrics that will allow its member clubs to track progress on dozens of operational and programmatic variables, eventually enabling sophisticated analysis of individual clubs and the entire association. When these kinds of metrics are adopted across a sector - say "youth-serving agencies" - and the results are shared openly along with the learning that accompanies social innovation across levels of scale, the result will make our work in the social sector today look two-dimensional.

The Task Force on Social Finance is about to propose a set of lenses for seeing past the restrictions of the grant economy. One of the next things to appear should be open operating systems for social agencies. Together, they would accelerate the rate at which we accomplish beneficial change in society, through continuous social innovation.

Pitfalls of Open Government Data Licensing

2010-11-19T11:00:00.002-05:00

This week, a new columnist joins the OSBR: Jordan Hatcher is a lawyer, academic, and entrepreneur working on Intellectual Property and Internet law issues in the UK and worldwide. He writes:

Drafting new open licenses is not something to be taken lightly. The recent announcement of the Italian "Open" Data License (IODL) drives this point home quite effectively. I use quotation marks around "open," because this new license is not open and should be avoided for open data licensing. While the group behind the IODL are to be applauded for taking the initiative for making more government data accessible, the story of the IODL's development offers a topical lesson for the open licensing community.

A Tale of Two Open Government Initiatives

The UK recently announced a new Open Government Licence (OGL) for a broad range of public information. The UK government crafted this license only after examining existing open licensing solutions such as Creative Commons and Open Data Commons and concluded that they required, based on their needs, to draft their own legal tool. Why? Their reasons are their own, but my understanding is that this is because they wanted a single license for both data and content and CC licenses didn't fit due to issues with database rights and Open Data Commons only applies to databases. This is a sensible reason from my perspective. The UK government went about drafting their new license in the right way -- by consulting many people in the open licensing community and gathering input from experts -- and the resulting document makes for an excellent example of how to go about this process. The OGL complies with the Open Definition, which is an important standard for defining the rights behind openness, and is effectively an "attribution-only" style of license. The OGL applies to a broad range of information produced by the government, but specifically takes into account some of the unique situations that come up with open (government) data.

The recently announced Italian Open Data License is neither actually open as the Open Definition defines it -- it contains a non-commercial restriction clause -- nor does it appear to have been drafted with a great deal of attention to the specific problems of open data. Data and databases are a bit like software and a bit like content in terms of what users do with them, and data/databases have some unique legal rights, particularly in Europe where we have the Database Directive. This means that open licenses in this area should take into account the particular legal and technical challenges of open data when addressing this area.

This problem doesn't arise just in newer, greenfield, areas of open licensing such as open data. It's a problem that has a history in software as well.

License Pollution

Drafting workable open licenses is hard work, but the good licenses make it look easy, which is perhaps why so many people take on the task of writing their own terms. These range from the practically public domain WTFPL, and all the *ware licenses: sisterware, catware, beerware, tacoware, all the way to much more restrictive and complicated homegrown licenses.

By tweaking a term, adding an addendum, or contributing a clause, you create a new license. A perfect example is the so-called BSD/MIT group of licenses, where there are limitless variants. Many of these are relatively innocuous; these licenses weren't drafted for mass consumption and so each time you change the "licensor" it produces a variant. These generally get lumped as "BSD-style" licenses. However the temptation is great to add just an extra clause or restriction on to these licenses (since you're tinkering with them anyway...).

Each change increases the chance that you are defeating legal interoperability as opposed to technical interoperability. This means that you may have the perfect technical solution -- the best dataset or functioning code for the job -- but the license doesn't allow its use. We inadvertently build "license silos", even within the open licensing community that prevents use and reuse between licensed content, code, and data. This situation frustrates both lawyers and techies alike.

The Pollution Solution

Thankfully there's an easy way to avoid license pollution and thus license silos: use an existing open, public license. Public licenses -- licenses drafted for mass use and often maintained by a host organisation -- offer many advantages:

an upgrade path for bugs and for changes in the law or prevailing practice, such as GPLv2 to GPLv3
public comment periods, allowing for open source style "all bugs are shallow" development for the open licenses themselves to come into play
communities of users that help each other define common practice and approaches. Eben Moglen often describes the GPL as the "constitution of the free software community," and constitutions only become living, working documents through active participation. Using an existing open public license taps into that and helps your business.
increased user uptake: using existing solutions simply makes it easier for your users as they no longer have to stop and invest significant resources into figuring out a new license.
less cost: rolling your own and doing it right costs money and time. Take advantage of someone who has already done the hard work for you.

All of these reasons aren't all that different from open source software development itself. Somehow I think we end up with a blindspot for these very same advantages when looking at open licensing. Self-drafting an open license should be a court of last resort, but sometimes it is a valid and justifiable option, such as with the UK's Open Government Licence. However, instead of having all of the UK's hard work and good drafting only be used within the UK, should we instead be looking to roll this document as a template across Europe? It certainly would help initiatives such as those in Italy avoid the pitfalls of lone open license development.

Pono Practices

2010-11-12T09:09:00.000-05:00

Today's columnist is Christopher Sean Morrison from BRL-CAD. He writes:

"Do the right thing. It will gratify some people and astonish the rest." - Mark Twain

Do the right thing. That simple phrase means a lot of different things to different people, but the driving motivation is the same. Figure out what you should do, and do it. Whether there is some altruistic ideal that can be acted upon to help humanity or whether you're trying to figure how many pieces of toast to eat for breakfast, you make decisions every day that affect yourself and others in often very subtle ways. Those subtleties can turn into habits and complacency or can be the pinnacle of productivity and excellence.

In the realm of open source, figuring out what is right and wrong can be tricky business. Particularly for commercial business, what is right in an open source community context might seem to be outright bad for business. Decisions that ignore the greater good or result in purely self-serving actions, however, are still almost universally frowned upon. You instantly become a pariah. Oracle's (mis)management of the MySQL, Java, and Solaris communities after purchasing Sun Microsystems is a prime example. Perhaps that is why Google adopted the slightly less ambitious philosophy of do no evil instead of doing what is good, right, or just. The difficulty in figuring out what should be done, however, is unfortunately and perpetually fraught with bias, speculative fear, misaligned priorities, and negative reactionary behaviour. It keeps people (and businesses) from doing unto others with the best of intentions.

Pono is a complex polyseme that embodies the concept of doing what is right into a single word. It's a native Hawaiian term that can be translated roughly, albeit tersely, into righteousness or more descriptively into doing that which is good, correct, proper, moral, fair, and equitable with careful consideration and fair use of resources. It focuses not just on what is right or wrong but on making things "better" for everyone, finding that spiritual zen connection with your environment, and acting in balance accordingly. Pono is particularly fitting with the open source ideals.

Putting the concept of pono into practice is a simple yet effective reminder to work with others towards a greater good. In my own actions, I strive to adhere to the old adage that if something is worth doing, it's worth doing well. That often means taking the long road, working hard, and keeping a constant focus on goals that are far beyond reach. That said, it's not about being a martyr, sacrificing ideals, or giving up profit. It's a long road, but it's also the high road that one can take pride in and derive satisfaction and appreciation by being uncompromising in doing what is best.

Recently, I was scheduled to be a speaker at the 6th annual Government Open Source Conference (GOSCON 2010) in Portland, Oregon, USA to give a talk on BRL-CAD. The conference is an exceptional gathering of open data, open hardware, and open source software proponents within the U.S. Government. It's a prime example of academia, industry, and government "business" all coming together and putting pono into practice by sharing stories, educating others, and working towards a common goal. That said, I suffered a personal loss -- a death in the family -- the weekend before and had to cancel my talk. In that instant for me and with the respectful understanding of the conference committee, pono involved taking a step back to be with friends and family.

Pono is approaching problems from a holistic perspective that considers the socio-economic ecosystem within which you operate as well as your own needs. I'm sure many of you reading are thinking, "well, that's obvious" and I agree. However, the obvious decisions such as the one I had to make are rare and, by definition, obvious. Most are much more subtle and often fraught with complacency.

It can be as simple as not accepting mediocrity, putting forth active effort to collaborate, and respectfully considering how your decisions affect others. Do you put in the quick hack bug fix or do you refactor the code and fix the underlying problem? Do you release your utility code as open source? Do you press to get a patch accepted upstream even when their process seems burdensome and nobody is paying you to do it? Fighting mediocrity can be particularly difficult as it's pervasive in some communities that focus on making things just "good enough." Collaborating with others can be hard and time-consuming. The rewards of doing the right thing, however, far outweigh the effort.

Most business decisions are socially detached from their impact unless the decision is so bad that it makes news headlines and affects profit. If that's a problem in your domain, consider getting involved with organizations or communities that promote open source such as Sunlight Labs, Open Source For America, or Redhat's community service. They all work to promote open source in a balanced, transparent, and collaborative manner. On an individual level, you can seek out, attend, or even host a local hackathon such as this one. Being engaged with others, engaged with your community, and aware of what's going on are some of the first steps towards making balanced "correct" decisions.

Pono is admittedly a complex proposition for businesses but still easily achieved. Within business culture (which includes academia, industry, and government), corporate rules and management set the tone by allowing or disallowing activities. The concept of pono reminds us of the importance of individual behaviours in determining corporate actions. Managers should establish rules and guidelines that promote community interaction while protecting your core business. They must also recognize, take responsibility for, and correct bad decisions. Workers acting in a pono manner require a higher level of understanding of the business needs. They must be genuinely inspired to engage the community and work within their culture to foster change constructively.

So back to the question of toast. How many slices? Well pono would have you consider how hungry you are and when you last ate. Maybe you shouldn't eat any slices right now. You'd might also consider how many slices remain and who you might want to share your toast with. You don't have to share, but it'd be considerate to offer unless you know they're gluten intolerant! Perhaps a quirky analogy, but similar logic applies to open source software development. Should you interact? How much? With whom? The next time you need to make a decision, be astonishing. Do the right thing.

Economic Development

2010-11-01T13:37:00.000-04:00

The November issue of the OSBR is now available in PDF and HTML formats. The editorial theme for this issue of the OSBR is Economic Development and the Guest Editor is Saad Bashir, Manager of the Economic Development Branch at City of Ottawa. The authors include:

Robert Poole, entrepreneur and business intelligence consultant, describes the creation of a new economic development platform for regional governments and related stakeholders.

George Brown, President of the Ottawa Community Loan Fund, describes the importance of microcredit for small businesses and illustrates how it acts as a stimulant for economic development.

Bob Yates, Senior Partner at Yates, Thorn & Associates, examines the costs and benefits of major event hosting on economic development, including the decision-making processes and long-term strategies.

Sonia Riahi, Manager at Ottawa Innovation Challenge, reviews the diversity of Ottawa's youth entrepreneurship programs to illustrate their benefits to economic development.

Ian Graham, Founder of TheCodeFactory business incubator, proposes a stakeholder-based model of business incubation to meet the challenges of a knowledge-based economy.

David J. French, intellectual property attorney and CEO of Second Counsel Services, explains why intellectual property will not save the economy and encourages businesses to focus instead on innovating to deliver value and meet the needs of their customers.

The editorial theme for the upcoming December issue of the OSBR is Humanitarian Open Source and the guest editor will be Leslie Hawthorn, Open Source Outreach Manager at Oregon State University Open Source Lab. Submissions will be accepted up to November 15th. January's theme is The Business of Open Source and submissions are due by December 1st. Please contact the Editor if you are interested in making a submission.

DrupalCamp Toronto 2010

2010-10-22T10:24:00.000-04:00

Today's columnists are Julian Egelstaff and Herb van den Dool from Freeform Solutions. They write:

If you have less than ten people in your company, and you send four of them to a conference, you probably consider it a large expense. Yeah, we do too. But we believe we gained much more from DrupalCamp Toronto 2010 than we put into it. We gained a deeper understanding of the open source ecosystem we're working within; new contacts with colleagues; and even met people who want to help improve our project management system for free! It's all an integral part of our pro bono practice.

Recently, we wrote in OSBR about how, at Freeform Solutions, we spend 20% of our time doing work that is not directly paid for by clients. Contributing to the open source communities that we, and our clients, rely on, is the focus of this pro bono work. Following this philosophy, we took a very active role in DrupalCamp Toronto 2010. It turned out to be a good example of the hows and whys of our approach to supporting open source.

First, as one of the organizers of the event, we helped get the website up and running. Arvin Singla spent several evenings and weekends putting in overtime with other DrupalCamp volunteers to make it a reality. Besides this contribution, we were also an event sponsor.

As participants both days, we talked with lots of folks who we have otherwise only seen as usernames, including Dries Buytaert, "user #1 of Drupal." There were people floating around our sponsor table for most of both days, reading about Freeform or talking with us about a potential project, a partnership or a technical issue.

We saw presentations that covered the full spectrum of using Drupal, from Everett Zufelt's talk on Accessibility in Drupal, to Joe Murray's presentation on CiviCRM's integration, to theming with Panels by Emma Jane Hogbin. Aidan Foster's presentation on "How to plan and project manage a small to medium sized Drupal website" was particularly interesting, since we've recently worked with Aidan's consulting firm Foster Interactive on a project.

Jeff Eaton of Lullabot did a presentation on the Drupal "ecosystem" and how the result resembles a platypus: it may look weird at times but it works!. This struck a chord with us. Drupal may have some nifty open source code, but what keeps the code alive is the healthiness of the ecosystem of modules and developers. That is the true measure of the strength of Drupal. We see this everyday as we work closely with clients - and other contractors - who rely on us to connect them with knowledge and people in this ecosystem. We don't control it all, but we've got a map!

Jeff's presentation really showed why focusing effort on supporting the community is critical to the health of Drupal-the-project. The strength of the Drupal community lies in the zillions of interactions between all the people in the community, and how they evolve over time. It's just the same as how the strength of Drupal code lies in the interactions between all the modules and the Drupal core.

Besides participating in both days, we presented on two different topics: our agile project management tool, nicknamed "Fragile," and combining the Formulize data management system with Drupal. In order to manage everything we do through an agile process, we've taken a bold step of leveraging Drupal and pushing it to the edge to create Fragile. Something between an experiment and a necessity, Fragile has shown us where the edges are, but most importantly, provides a great starting point for engaging with others in the community grappling with similar needs. We were thrilled with the positive responses, and look forward to collaborating on making the tool even better.

Formulize 4 got its first public showing at DrupalCamp, including the Drupal module that makes it a snap to publish Formulize applications inside Drupal. It was a real pleasure to see how well received the version 4 improvements were, as well as the general interest in Formulize from Drupal users.

All of this represents opportunities for Freeform that we couldn't have got any other way. We improved our profile in the community, we got the word out about what we're doing, and we helped produce an event that put us in direct contact with the leaders in the community. It was good for us, it was good for the other participants, and it was good for Drupal too. A win-win-win. This is how open source works, and why we're proud to be part of it.

See photos of the event:

Set 1
Set 2

Open Source Codeathon for Humanity

2010-10-15T12:27:00.003-04:00

Today we have a guest columnist: Shruti Satsangi from Ericsson. Shruti writes:

I’ve just returned from the Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing (GHC) in Atlanta and had the opportunity to experience my first open source mini-codeathon and learn about the humanitarian open source project, Sahana Eden.

Sahana Eden is an open source disaster management platform that can be used in a wide variety of ways to provide organization on the ground in the aftermath of a catastrophe. Developed in the wake of the 2004 Indian Ocean Tsunami by the Sri Lankan free/libre open source software community, Sahana has since matured to encompass multiple systems, including Person Management (Disaster Victim Identification, Missing Person Registry), Aid Registration, Inventory/Resource Management, and Communications. It was also used in Haiti and Guatemala after the recent earthquakes in these countries.

At GHC 2010, the Sahana Foundation organized a two-hour session, modelled after the actual one or two day codeathon events that the organization has held in the past. This event, called the “Codeathon for Humanity,” provided an opportunity for about 150 of the conference participants to get a taste of how open source development works and to learn about the Sahana software and web-based deployment model.

The Codeathon was well organized and, in my opinion, used the little time we had to do two things very well:

Providing help for setting up the development environment in advance of the event. Before arriving in Atlanta, the organizers provided webcasts, Internet relay chat (IRC) sessions, and wiki documentation on how to install the tools necessary to participate in the coding activities. What I liked best was that they used a virtual machine image that contained the required integrated development environment. Although there were still a few hiccups to getting started, this image simplified the setup process and avoided much of frustration a newbie would have faced, enabling them to engage quickly with the task at hand.
Providing projects for all backgrounds, skill sets, and skill levels. The Codeathon provided for differing levels of programming experience by offering a variety of projects in which participants could help. For developers, these projects included bug fixing, UI improvements, test automation, and mobile phone integration. Non-coders contributed by performing usability assessments, adding documentation, and providing localization (translation).

In these ways, the organizers did an excellent job in including all participants and making them feel like they could contribute something meaningful to the project. It is a testament to this that many people returned to continue working on the project even after the session was over.

I believe this codeathon was an excellent example of the practical techniques that can be used by open source projects to engage a diverse mix of contributors to create a strong community. The realm of humanitarian open source is one where a rich community can go a long way to provide effective solutions. This is one area that will definitely benefit from having a variety of skills at the table.

Images courtesy of Terri Oda.

Editor’s note: Humanitarian Open Source is the theme for the upcoming December 2010 issue of the Open Source Business Resource.

Opening Research on Open Source

2010-10-08T10:02:00.000-04:00

Today's columnist is Carlo Daffara from Conecta. He writes:

Fresh from the wonderful OpenWorldForum in Paris, I had again the pleasure to meet many colleagues and researchers in many fields related to open source software, be it security, adoption practices, or business aspects; experts like Dirk Riehle, Matthew Aslett, Martin Michlmayr, and several others that have greatly contributed to the current state of the art in OSS research.

It was an interesting meeting, with some peculiarities: first of all the recognition that there are relatively few people working in the field; I think that we can count the publishing participants in such a group to be less than 100, substantially less than those working in other related fields. The other aspect is, that despite the relative friendliness among all of us, most researchers still have to collect data and process it on their own.

There are of course some exceptions. FLOSSmole provides large sets of data extracted from many popular source collaboration sites like SourceForge. The Free/Open Source Research Community began creating a database of papers from the community, but unfortunately the site has not been updated since February 2009. Beyond these exceptions, there is not much more. I believe that, after talking with a few fellow researchers in the area, it is possible to do something better.

For this reason, I propose an effort for sharing reusable data on open source, especially in areas that are on the boundaries between open source, management, and social aspects, to extend the existing efforts that are more focused on software engineering aspects, like FLOSSmole. In particular, I believe that we can share data like:

lists of open source companies, their markets, and the adopted business model
internal measurements, like data on use and reuse of OSS components in internal software production
parameters like conversion or monetization ratios and margins for companies using open core or freemium models
equations and tables for those interested in econometrics

I believe that such an effort can help in maintaining fresh and updated data sources, extending the efforts that every individual researcher or research group has to do to prepare a data-backed paper, or even for those companies interested in these kind of data to estimate markets and receptiveness of specific business models. We will try to jumpstart the effort by releasing the data of our survey on open source business models created in the context of the FLOSSMETRICS project. We will start soon a cleaning and reformatting activity to make the model clearly understandable for those not in the project and to foster additional contributions from external groups.

I would gladly accept suggestions on where and how to host such an effort. What kind of structure do you think may be more amenable to such a collaboration method? Google Documents? A wiki? Any suggestion is welcome. Write me at cdaffara@conecta.it, and let's try to apply the collaborative approach to our work!

Sales Strategy

2010-10-01T13:00:00.001-04:00

The October issue of the OSBR is now available in PDF and HTML formats. The editorial theme this month is "Sales Strategy" and the authors include:

Matthew Aslett from The 451 Group and Stephen Walli from the CodePlex Foundation demonstrate the pitfalls of attempting to convert open source community members into customers.

Stephen Davies, entrepreneur and lecturer at the Sprott School of Business, describes the steps to create a business-tobusiness sales process and how these steps are used to build a sales funnel.

Jason Côté and Julian Egelstaff from Freeform Solutions describe how pro bono work can be part of an effective sales strategy through contributions to the open source projects upon which the company and its clients depend.

Patrick O'Halloran from Xilinx Inc. reviews literature on service-based solutions to show that an effective sales strategy comes from a rounded analysis of both the customers' needs and the opportunity potential for the service provider.

The editorial theme for the upcoming November issue of the OSBR is Economic Development and the guest editor will be Saad Bashir from the City of Ottawa. Submissions will be accepted up to October 15th. December's theme is Humanitarian Open Source and submissions are due by November 1st. Please contact the Editor if you are interested in making a submission.

Pulling a Kanban

2010-09-24T10:03:00.000-04:00

Today's columnist is Christopher Sean Morrison from BRL-CAD. He writes:

"So in war, the way is to avoid what is strong and to
strike at what is weak." - Sun Tzu

A couple months ago, I eagerly made my annual pilgrimage to SIGGRAPH. If you've worked in the computer industry within the last quarter century, you might have heard about it by now. It's the Association for Computing Machinery's Special Interest Group on GRAPHics and Interactive Techniques. Basically, it's the technical conference of the year where anyone and everyone that has anything to do with making computers display pretty pictures all get together for a week. It's an invigorating paradise of information, collaboration, inspiration, and fun. Included amongst the tens of thousands in attendance are folks from the movie industry, gaming industry, academia, commercial industry, government researchers, student volunteers, and more. For most computer geeks, you spend the week drinking from a fire hose, exhausted, and loving it.

For me, I'm very methodical in my attendance, making sure to soak up as much information as possible, find the latest and greatest I can apply to BRL-CAD, renew connections with fellow researchers, take notes to share with others when I get back, and generally try to get the best value for the people that thankfully send me there year after year. Naturally, every SIGGRAPH has it's own particular flavor of surprises and delightful discoveries that make for a memorable and productive experience. This year, however, the surprise came during a small Birds of a Feather (BoF) session -- curiously unrelated to graphics -- that was tucked away in a far corner of the convention center at the end of the last day. The session was entitled Agile in Production.

The BoF session certainly piqued an interest given the pervasive nature of agile techniques within many open source communities and businesses alike. I was curious to hear what others in industry were doing in their production environments. Subconsciously, I was hoping to find a golden goose laying project management best-practice eggs that I could carry home with me.

The session was informal and informative with dozens of topics being covered over the two hour timeframe. For the most part, though, the talks were surprisingly unsurprising. There were the usual questions from people who have never heard about agile software development and the usual answers from others on what the optimal sprint length is (there isn't one). Various agile project management techniques were compared and contrasted with numerous people (including yours truly) sharing anecdotal accounts on things that worked and didn't work for their teams. The trend, however, was clearly reinforcing. Namely, there is no "one size fits all" solution and there are plenty of misconceptions to go around.

If you're one of those that hasn't been following the industry buzz, the short story on using agile methods for project management is that it's another lean or lightweight process. You collaborate, communicate, and iterate with a relatively high frequency so that you can respond to changes quickly. Nothing is fixed in stone, at least not for very long.

There's a lot of the core principles spelled out in the Agile Manifesto, but most new implementors will still find themselves facing lots of ridiculous terminology such as pigs and chickens, scrums, burn downs, and sprints. That gets to the heart of where this particular SIGGRAPH BoF made an impression on me. I learned a new silly word to add to my repertoire: Kanban.

You see, most every summary of agile "best practices" you'll find on the net has one thing in common: you have to select and tailor agile methods to fit your needs. How you do that depends on numerous factors such as your team size, personality dynamics, work environment, technical proficiencies, production requirements, customer needs, and so forth. Unlike how eXtreme Programming (XP) made the need for process adaptation explicit, it's assumed to be a given with agile methods because you'll invariably find something you don't like! That notwithstanding, another best practice that usually follows is to start very small with some aspect of an agile method that you DO like and see how things go from there.

One of the most frequently adapted agile methods is the rugby-inspired idea of a "Scrum". Without obsessing on how the game inspired the concept or pedantic roles, at the heart of the process is the idea of breaking your development work down into relatively small tasks, prioritizing them, working on a subset of the most important ones for a very short period of time, and then wrapping things up before starting the cycle over again. At every iteration, then, priorities are re-evaluated and new tasks are assigned -- except, not necessarily with Kanban and not with our development team. If you want more information, there's a ton of great websites and books on the subject including Poppendieck's Lean Software Development and Cohn's Succeeding with Agile: Software Development Using Scrum.

Instead of assigning tasks, our development team self-assign their tasks. With my open source heritage, I found it particularly unnatural and unrealistic to have tasks assigned to developers because you generally can't make open source developers do anything unless they are paid to work for you. Even if they do work for you, some developers mysteriously perceive such marching orders as an assault on their professional discretion. Moreover, many people really just don't like being told what to do.

If you want your open source project to encourage and expand an international community of contributors, you might provide incentives, encourage, plead, or even beg but you usually can't realistically assign tasks. You especially cannot reasonably do so repeatedly and while expecting they meet deadlines with any sort of accountability! Kanban proponents sometimes describe this reverse selection as pulling instead of pushing.

Tasks are pulled forward by developers, not pushed onto developers. As a development method, Kanban is considerably more complicated, but that particular detail resonated with me during the SIGGRAPH BoF session. I discovered that our various scrum process modifications – which include taping up index cards into prioritized categories on a wall – not only already had a name but had an entire production mantra behind it. Kanban literally refers to visual cards in Japanese. Who would have guessed?

So what's the point? Well SIGGRAPH is, of course. As I excitedly reminisce about all the awesome research, agilities, kanbanging, and more from this year's SIGGRAPH, I'm reminded that next year will be the first time ever that the main conference will be held outside of the United States. SIGGRAPH is heading a little farther North in 2011 to make Vancouver home through the second week of August. That's right, Canada. SIGGRAPH will be in your neighborhood, so start writing those travel requests, justifications, and registrations to drink from the information fire hose. If you need help with directions, send me a line.

Here are some brief exemplar videos to enjoy from SIGGRAPH 2010:

Under the Volcano: Social Actions and Canada's Digital Future

2010-09-17T09:14:00.000-04:00

Today's columnist is Stephen Huddart from the J.W. McConnell Family Foundation. Stephen writes:

Last April, on his way back to Canada from the Skoll World Forum on Social Entrepreneurship at Oxford, Peter Deitz ran into a roadblock in the form of Eyjafjallajökull, the Icelandic volcano that halted flights over Europe. As a result, he spent a few days cooling his heels in London. He wasn't going anywhere and neither, he realized, was his plan to turn Social Actions into an independent and sustainable social enterprise.

As detailed in the July 2009 issue of the OSBR, Social Actions hosts an open source database that aggregates opportunities for people to make a difference on social and environmental issues. It draws content from over 60 online sources, including Canada Helps and Kiva. Its application programming interface (API) enables third-party developers to build web and mobile applications, such as the Related Ways to Take Action WordPress Plugin

Since its launch in 2007, Social Actions has achieved an impressive string of accomplishments. In 2008, it was a finalist in the Stockholm Challenge and won the Case Foundation's Donate Now Challenge. In 2009, it collaborated with NetSquared to host the Change the Web Challenge, a global competition that attracted over 30 new fully developed open source applications for improving the philanthropic content of the internet. Monthly "click-throughs" to actions are running around 20,000 and there are 100+ members in the Social Actions developer community.

However, despite the acclaim and the growing number of users, Social Actions didn't have a business plan. Over lunch recently, Peter reflected that, "for the first eighteen months, I avoided the whole idea of this being a business. If I were doing it again, I'd sort out the business model early on." In January, he and close collaborator, Michigan-based Christine Egger, realized that to keep going, they needed a reliable source of sustaining revenue.

Opportunity, or at least a way forward, came in the form of a personal encounter with author Nilofer Merchant, who gave Peter a copy of her book, The New How: Creating Business Solutions Through Collaborative Strategy. Peter reviewed it in the Stanford Social Innovation Review, and then he and Christine set about applying its framework to open sourcing an integrated funding strategy for Social Actions. They created a wiki to document the process, and discussed it on BlogTalkRadio.

Then the volcano spoke. While stranded in London, Peter realized that building a stand-alone institution was going to be a lot more difficult, and probably less impactful, than finding a permanent home for Social Actions within another organization.

A mentor, Allen Gunn of Aspiration Tech, advised Peter not to abandon the core values of Social Actions while looking for its new home. In Peter's words: "Gunner told me that he'd seen too many people walk away from their dream projects only to regret it. He also said that I should remember that, in the open source world, when everything is running smoothly, there are fewer opportunities for others to get involved. He helped me see the challenges of a transition as yet another chance for Social Actions to fulfill its mission of making the web more philanthropic."

A call for proposals was issued, and expressions of interest came in from major media companies, philanthropic institutions, and organizations already represented on the Social Actions platform. A shortlist of three finalists has emerged, and an announcement will be made soon. None of them is Canadian.

The story of Social Actions has some important lessons for those concerned with open source and the community sector in Canada. The sector is undergoing transformation on a global scale, and digital platforms are an important part of this. "A robust philanthropic web is certainly emerging and a variety of initiatives – both independent as well as embedded in larger organizational homes – are making important contributions to that ecosystem," Christine wrote to me, "At the same time, we're clearly not yet at the point where this web fully surrounds and supports social change projects regardless of where they're housed. But we’re getting there and Social Actions – from its new vantage point – will continue to be an important part of that evolution."

As we await the federal government's soon-to-be-announced digital economy strategy, let's hope that it supports investments in innovative open source projects, like Social Actions, that enable the web to further the public good.

There's More to IT Strategy than Just Choosing the Better Mousetrap

2010-09-14T09:18:00.000-04:00

Today's columnist is Julian Egelstaff from Freeform Solutions. He writes:

If you build a better mousetrap, the world will beat a path to your door... or so the saying goes. I think this is part of the reason open source projects sometimes enthusiastically announce that their new version is a complete re-write of the code. They're building a better version of their own mousetrap. Do people beat a path to their door?

Well, to continue the metaphor, only the people who have some mice to deal with are interested in mousetraps. These days, there is an open source project for pretty much every issue and challenge you can face in IT. Some are still pretty far from their commercial competitors. But others are market leaders.

This embarrassment of riches is great from a marketing and evangelizing point of view, but it doesn't automatically translate into IT success. At the technical level, open source is simply a development methodology for software. It is not a panacea. The fact that you have a dozen database platforms to choose from does not mean you're going to have a terrific database in the IT system you're building, or that you know how to implement the one you need, in the right way.

So one moral of the story is that you need to know your mice, and understand your traps, in order to deal with this situation. But there's more to it than that. As another old saying goes, when all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail. We've done enough cleanup projects, after the initial developers have left the building, to know that technical expertise is not enough to guarantee success. Designing successful IT systems requires a particular set of skills, what the business world has long described as the "Business Analyst" role.

In the open source world, everything is supposedly a meritocracy where the best ideas rise to the top. Consequently, there are a lot of technically capable people in the open source world, focused on using and improving the technology. But it's equally important to integrate this technical knowledge with the real-world needs that organizations have. When a project lacks this ephemeral ingredient, there is a risk of failure.

At Freeform Solutions, we have learned this in a few different ways, including "the hard way." We now require all projects to go through an agile project management process, which de-emphasizes the technical parts of the work and focuses on the needs of the users and the organization. We use "user stories" as the base unit for organizing requirements and our work. We have found this to be a very flexible approach and one that clients can engage in regardless of their own technical knowledge, since the stories are all about the users and what they need, rather than how we're going to reconfigure the flux capacitor.

I think there's a natural affinity between open source methods and agile methods. This may sound strange, since agile methods owe their existence in part to a lot of big companies, including the automotive industry, which is not known as a bastion of open thinking. But I see a kinship in the focus on value. Open source solutions are ultimately driven by a desire to solve a problem, to meet some specific need. They're not fueled by marketing agendas or business deadlines. Agile processes focus on delivering value as the only measurement of success. It doesn't matter if the database is 90% configured, what matters is whether the user can do what they need to do.

We believe open source software is an essential part of a flexible and effective IT strategy. But we also believe there's more to effective IT than the technology. It's also important to focus on the value, from the user's point of view. It's the difference between building a better mousetrap and recognizing the right time and place to use it most efficiently.

Keystone Companies

2010-09-02T13:18:00.000-04:00

The September issue of the OSBR is now available in PDF and HTML formats. The editorial theme this month is "Keystone Companies" and the authors include:

Michael Weiss, Associate Professor at Carleton University, compares the use of the term "keystone" in different fields to show that the concept is poorly articulated in the business literature.

Tony Bailetti, Associate Professor at Carleton University, introduces a project to create a toolkit that includes everything that is required to support a new approach to grow the revenue of a platform owner.

Michael Ayukawa, founder of Cornerportal, describes the creation of a platform to anchor a global deal-generating business ecosystem.

Elias Majic, founder of Ottercall, describes the development of a multi-sided platform for language learning as his company's market entry strategy.

Eduardo Moraes from non~linear creations presents his research to demonstrate how opinions of trust can be measured and how they affect a customer's uncertainty and belief in solutions presented by suppliers.

Howard Rosenblum from Carleton University shares his experiences helping an existing business decide whether it should migrate from its traditional, standalone approach to become the owner of a multi-sided platform.

James Makienko from Carleton University answers answers the question, "How do you motivate potential participants to pay to join a platform?" by sharing his experiences helping a technology company define a set of value propositions for a multi-sided platform.

The editorial theme for the upcoming October issue of the OSBR is Sales Strategy and submissions will be accepted up to September 15th. November's theme is Economic Development and submissions are due by October 1st. Please contact the Editor if you are interested in making a submission.

Three SME-ready Open Source Projects

2010-08-27T11:20:00.000-04:00

Today's columnist is Carlo Daffara from Conecta. He writes:

The incredible wealth of open source projects available has one unfortunate side effect: some real jewels can become lost in the shuffle. Efforts are underway to automate the search and retrieval of the best tool for a specific situation and the FLOSSMetrics project in the European Union in one example of these efforts. However, sometimes the dreaded “10 Best” lists are a good, initial tool to learn a bit more about an application that may be useful.

Knowing that there are bound to be some under-appreciated open source jewels that could benefit small companies, I revisited a list of the most commonly requested applications that were developed in another, older project called OpenTTT. I found that three of the most popular requests were for project management, document management, and storage solutions. Here, I have tried to present three new open source tools that best meet these needs, but might be less well known than they should be.

Project Management

If there is one thing that most small companies would like, but usually can't afford, it is project management software. While there are some good tools available, most have not been updated for a long time, such as OpenWorkbench. One of my favourite tools under active development is an Austrian project called OnePoint, which either runs locally as a Java application, or it can be located on a server and accessed through a web browser. The open source edition provides a good set of features, even for large scale projects. It is also fairly easy to use, with good documentation and examples.

Document management

Alfresco is the clear market leader in OSS document management, but despite its fame, most small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) are still unaware of it. Even some consultants are not pushing some of its more interesting features. For example, Alfresco is unique in managing documents through its SMB interface, which means that it is possible to load and access documents through any Windows or Linux machine directly from the desktop. This greatly simplifies the bulk loading of documents that usually happens when a document management system is installed for the first time. Other open source document management systems restrict this mode to commercial users only.

Other features of Alfresco are even less well known. For example, it is possible to access the document base through any email client, with full search and viewing of documents as a single email, with all the metadata preserved. Another interesting feature is the Sharepoint-like view that provides easy-to-manage sites with wikis, lists, integrated document workflow, and more. It basically includes all the things that made Sharepoint an instant success. It does provide native support for the Sharepoint protocol in Microsoft Office (if you still use it, instead of OpenOffice), along with workflow features and much more, even in the open source edition.

Storage

When asked for the best storage solution, most readers would stop and shout “Samba!” like a bunch of festive participants at a Brazilian-themed party. Actually, Samba is an extraordinary example of open source software in action, but is only part of a solution and it still requires enough work to need a consultant for installation and management in most SMBs.

There is an alternative, which has been developed on the basis of OpenSolaris (recently under the spotlight for the Oracle Google lawsuit). The alternative is called NexentaStor, and it brings a feature that really is great for SMBs: deduplication, or the capability of recognizing identical pieces of files (or binary sequences) and transparently “pack” them so that they need very little space. Given the incredible number of copies that are part of the common SMB workplace, deduplication greatly increases the amount of usable space, especially for distributed workforces. The best way to install it is to use the VMware (or Xen) image that is already configured and ready to go; it also can be executed under VirtualBox without losing significantly in terms of efficiency.

So those are my top three hidden jewels. Do you have any suggestions of other tools that may be useful for SMBs? Write to me or send a tweet to @cdaffara!

Addressing Enterprises Need for Microsites: Enterprise Drupal Gardens

2010-08-20T08:17:00.000-04:00

Today we have a guest columnist: Thomas Erickson from Acquia. Tom writes:

Organizations no longer have one website, they have many websites and the number keeps growing. Microsites are those websites that don’t fit neatly into larger IT priorities. This is typically because they are too small and short-lived to task core development teams to build and often are viewed as a distraction. One CTO we recently spoke to referred to these as his “rats and mice” sites. At the same time, microsites can represent new business opportunities; they can be effective sales and marketing tools that can be tied to revenue and other important business goals.

Early last year, shortly after I had officially joined Acquia as an employee, I was thinking about critical issues that enterprises face when confronting the interactive web. Acquia had heard from several corners of the market about their headaches with current technologies.

For example, the head of NBC digital had spoken at a conference in Boston, and talked about their number one issue: creating microsites. At the same time, we at Acquia had also been having conversations with a large university that has over 400 websites. Each professor, department, library, etc. had their own site. The vast majority of these were reasonably small, falling into the microsite genre.

Finally, a major branch of the federal government also had hundreds of sites and over 30 different content management systems. In all cases, these organizations faced a nightmare of branding and maintainability, not to mention security.

The stories repeated themselves over and over. Acquia heard about them because we support Drupal, and Drupal was being used at varying levels in all of these cases. The pain point was clear: It’s extremely hard to create, sustain, and maintain microsites.

I asked a friend of mine, who works for a large digital agency, for his thoughts. He had an interesting perspective, taken from his experience with consumer brands. Here’s the scenario he gave me:

A product manager is tasked with achieving goals for awareness and market share for their product and is given a budget to accomplish it. A creative boutique demonstrates a cool capability to the product manager, who decides they “have to have it.” The underlying technology is of no concern, and the product manager spends $X and Y weeks on the project.

Other product managers in the organization do the same thing. Assume 30 product managers, and soon $30X is spent on 30 websites with 20 different technologies; some of them are reliable and secure, and others are less so.

The CMO looks over the properties, each perhaps with differences in look and feel and consequently in branding. The CMO wonders if there is a way to get consistent branding, spend $15X or less instead of $30X; do them each in substantially less time and leave the saved sums for other creative programs.

One or more of the sites gets hacked, the CEO finds out, and barks at the CIO. The CIO maintains the primary websites in the company, but has little to do with these creative microsites. The CIO also wonders if there’s a way to avoid having 20 different technologies, each with their own knowledge curve to maintain and sustain. But perhaps even more importantly, secure.

Alas, the dilemma plays out.

There are solutions for microsites. Many of them are promising, but there have always been substantial barriers that remained difficult to overcome, including:

Existing in-house content management systems (CMS) are specialized, with a dedicated team whose first priority is a long work queue associated with the organization’s primary web strategy.
Procuring machines to host microsites internally is a painful and long process. Sometimes so much so, that the economics of the microsite are negated before it even is created.
Quality control is always a sore spot, particularly within IT departments. Even though sales and marketing may be the drivers behind the concept and content of the microsites, without a seamless process, quality assurance can get lost in the mix and it’s ultimately IT that is left holding the bag.

In the end, any of these hurdles lead to the following scenario: IT cannot provide sales and marketing with a system to drive revenue, sales and marketing staff depend on IT staff to get everything done; a bottleneck ensues, and ultimately sales and marketing adopt other platforms and run the risk of undermining brand consistency.

I think that SaaS is the way to go and I believe enterprises are recognizing this. However there are many options, all with their positives and negatives.

One direction is to go with something like WordPress.com. Marketers are already comfortable with it because it’s both easy and user friendly. WordPress has made it simple for anyone to create a blog. The trade off here comes with functionality. While WordPress.com is great for blogging, it doesn’t offer the flexibility enterprises need to build effective microsites.

Alternately, enterprises may choose to go with a more robust CMS solution such as Clickability, which gives them the content management functionality lacking in other solutions. However, because these platforms are proprietary, they come at significant cost and yet still trail the pace of innovation that open source communities like Drupal and Wordpress are able to maintain. The result? These solutions fall short for both economical and technical reasons.

It’s in the shortcomings of these existing solutions that we at Acquia see the opportunity for a Drupal-based SaaS solution with an open source twist. By that I mean, it's a solution that’s priced right, offers robust social publishing capabilities, and provides an approachable user experience for non-technical users.

Drupal has long been recognized as a great development platform for web content management and social collaboration. However, our mission at Acquia is to present Drupal’s rich social features not only as a great developer solution, but an answer to many of the challenges I have outlined above. Our approach to broadening Drupal’s adoption and specifically addressing the need for a better microsite platform is Drupal Gardens.

Drupal has proven itself as a very capable system for microsites. Sony Music, Intel, Proctor & Gamble, and hundreds of others have used it. But it has a learning curve and it still needs to be hosted. What it lacks in ease, Drupal makes up for in flexibility and capability.

Our founder, Dries Buytaert, had always envisioned creating a Drupal-as-a-Service platform, and now we had worked out the perfect use case for the product: enable organizations of all sizes to easily create, sustain, and maintain tens, hundreds, or even thousands of microsites. By leveraging Drupal and building a robust SaaS platform for it, each of the personas in the first scenario could be satisfied:

The product manager has the creativity necessary to build unique, compelling websites. A SaaS offering means a minimum of fuss in licensing and procurement.
The CMO can establish guidelines on branding, using templates and themes to enforce consistency. Using open source in a repeatable way also drives cost down dramatically.
Acquia ensures the security, reliability, sustainability, and maintainability of the entire platform right up to the application, providing comfort to the CIO.

We launched Drupal Gardens in public beta in July. Today there are over 15,000 sites built on the product. Drupal Garden’s ThemeBuilder brings a powerful, but simple-to-use suite of tools to design websites, dramatically reducing the learning curve without taking away the flexibility. We also created an export capability, so if your microsite grows up and needs to do more, you can easily take your entire site – the code, content, users, and design - and move to a custom hosting environment. Users have complete flexibility to work the way they want to work. After all it’s the open source way.

Security and Opportunity in Turbulent Times

2010-08-13T13:28:00.000-04:00

Today's columnist is Stephen Huddart from the J.W. McConnell Family Foundation. Stephen writes:

It’s Friday the 13^th. Feeling lucky? Nervous? Let’s see... massive flooding in Pakistan, the warmest year in recorded history, rumours of a new superbug, the largest oil spill ever, a threatened double-dip recession, and who knows what’s next, other than it’s sure to be something.

We live in turbulent times, the nature of which is to throw up surprises, to be erratic, and to be non-linear. We have a clear choice: reach for that lucky charm and trust that things will calm down, or tune in to what turbulence is telling us – that we need a new planetary operating system. As Peter Drucker wrote thirty years ago, management in turbulent times is about:

Surviving
Adapting
Taking advantage of new opportunities.

Canada, we’re told, has come through the financial crisis rather well. You might not agree if you were downsized out of a well-paid manufacturing job, but as a country we fared better than many others. We were lucky – this time. However, we shouldn’t become complacent. Unfortunately, the billions of taxpayer dollars that we’re pouring into “stimulus funding” is, in many cases, going to prop up what Harvard Business Review blogger Umair Haque terms the “Zombie Economy.” This refers to big industries that ignore new social and environmental imperatives and are going the way of the dodo, especially if they depend on cheap oil. In short, we’re helping them survive, but if they don’t adapt, it will be unlucky for them, and for us.

If adaptation opens up new opportunities, where do we find them? One answer is in the new hybrid world of social entrepreneurship – ventures that integrate two types of bottom line: financial and social. Talk to anyone working in one and you get a sense of how genuinely lucky they feel to be earning a living while doing good.

Michael Porter pointed out in his seminal 1998 piece on Clusters and the New Economics of Competition that the “advantages in a global economy lie increasingly in local things – knowledge, relationships, and motivation that distant rivals cannot match.” The clusters he refers to arise from the confluence of investors, visionaries, companies, and universities for whom innovation is oxygen. In the world of social entrepreneurship, they are also value driven, and we’re seeing a lot more of them. For example, witness the rapid growth of B Corporations.

This combination of ingenuity and values is percolating up in Canada too. MaRS Discovery District is an example where the focus is on science, technology, and social innovation. Waterloo’s Capacity Waterloo Region, which is co-located with the Communitech enterprise incubator, is another. Halifax’s Hub serves as operations base to a diverse array of community organizations, social entrepreneurs, and techies. An example is Apps4Good, which builds applications to benefit charities and hosts an annual iPhone Hackathon, pairing up with folks in Saskatoon.

Rural areas are getting into this too. Prince Edward County, at the eastern end of Lake Ontario, is reinventing itself as a creative hub that offers fine wine, art, and local food. On a recent stay, my wife and I enjoyed the award-winning products at North America’s first LEED Platinum dairy, the Fifth Town Artisan Cheese Company, and spent time at Small Pond Arts – an “art farm” where national and international artists-in-residence create installations and performances for an appreciative public. We also had pretty good luck with the wine.

In Managing in Turbulent Times, Drucker wrote: “The greatest danger in times of turbulence is not the turbulence; it is to act with yesterday’s logic.” In the face of insecurity and rapid change we can either invest in the next economy, building stronger neighbourhoods, communities, and local economies designed to withstand the inevitable shocks to come, or we can trust our luck by turning back to the safeguards of yesteryear. Spending $9 billion for new fighter jets won’t do much for our security in this age of turbulence. The likelihood of armed invasion is way down the threat list. Given the innovation payoff that military expenditure yields, why not just invest directly in health care innovation or the next generation of high speed rail? Likewise, the planned $10 billion to build and upgrade prisons to house the uncharged, unidentified perpetrators of “unreported crimes” would be better spent improving education and social supports for the young aboriginals who make up such a disproportionate percentage of our prison population.

So, on this Friday the 13th, let's put superstitions and shibboleths aside and take advantage of the new opportunities that these turbulent times provide.

- and good luck to us all!

GLOSS

2010-08-06T09:48:00.000-04:00

Today's columnist is Christopher Sean Morrison from BRL-CAD. He writes:

"If the Trojan horse had been made of glass, Troy never would’ve fallen."

Scott McNealy, Sun Microsystems Co-founder

High atop an office building on the outskirts of Washington D.C., a bunch of U.S. government software developers from around the country got together this week with a common vision: more open source. I was among this collection of geeky, coffee-drinking, sandal-wearing patriots, most of whom work directly or indirectly for the U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) where we're part of a grassroots movement to promote the use and development of open source by government organizations. This was the second working group meeting of the Mil-OSS community, where a collection of civilians, military, and contractors gathered to discuss topics of policy, philosophy, legalities, life, liberty, and the pursuit of open source. The wealth of insights, planning, case studies, recommendations, and even a bit of coding on the spot are helping to establish a growing trend towards the establishment of GLOSS: Government Libre Open Source Software.

From the traditionally secretive military industrial complex has blossomed a belief that the old way of doing business is fundamentally changing. It's changing fast. By necessity, to remain competitive and productive, development is becoming more open, dynamic, collaborative, and social. The open source proponents working within the DoD have been laying a foundation to facilitate change not only within the military, but throughout all branches of the U.S. government. This change is reaching a tipping point as more and more agencies adopt strategies for managing open source software, realize how much open source they already use, and observe the benefits being garnered by others that adopt and promote Free Libre Open Source Software (FLOSS).

So what makes GLOSS different from FLOSS? Why the GLOSS vs. FLOSS distinction at all? While it is very true that most of the same principles of open source apply, governments around the world are faced with unique challenges as participants in an open source arena. A primary distinction is one of intellectual property and rights management. Most governments must abide by a completely different set of rules and regulations than those that apply to individuals or businesses. Most governments are not in the business of competing with commercial industry. To the contrary, many are explicitly prohibited by federal statutes to do so. The legalities can be considerably complex to navigate.

Consider a "simple" matter of copyright. In most countries, someone who writes some software automatically has a set of intrinsic rights as the author or creator of an original work. One of the most basic intellectual property rights is the ability to authorize others to use your original work on agreed terms. Unlike the fair use and fair dealing doctrines that attempt to ensure that individuals have some basic protections of their own as users, copyright holders have considerably broader rights on their work in part due to protections ensured by the Berne Convention. The Berne Convention is an international agreement signed into law by most countries to help ensure that copyright protections are completely automatic in most countries, without the need to register or notify anyone. When a government produces a work, however, different laws come into play and can vary wildly from country to country.

For example, the United States considers works by U.S. government employees as being not entitled to domestic copyright protection. The U.S. government can claim copyright on their works in other countries, just not with their own citizens that paid for that work. To make matters more complicated, the U.S. government can be assigned copyright, but the circumstances of those rules are governed by a body of federal acquisition laws with numerous complexities. In Canada and other commonwealth realms, the government does make a claim of copyright -- a "Crown copyright" -- on works produced by government employees. The rules can be particularly complicated and vary substantially from country to country, but you get the idea.

So with all of that complexity, why does GLOSS even matter? The reason is simple. Governments around the world employ a massive number of people and affect the behavior of an even larger proportion of industry. Well over a million people work for the National Health Service (NHS) in the United Kingdom. More than 1.6 million people work for Indian Railways, the state-owned railway company of India. At nearly two million civilian employees and 2% percent of the entire national workforce, the U.S. federal government is the nation's largest employer with a majority working for the DoD (and that doesn't even include the Postal Service, intelligence agencies, or government contractors). Around the world, governments are spending time and money developing massive amounts of software, but in only exceptionally rare contributions are those released as open source.

The past couple years have been particularly exciting for the Mil-OSS community as a new trend has been emerging within the U.S. government to shift more towards open operations. On his first day of office, January 21st, 2009, U.S. president Barack Obama gave guidance to the federal workforce that a presumption in favor of disclosure should be adopted for Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests. That was immediately followed by another memo calling for "an unprecedented level of openness in Government." That transparency memo reads like a HOWTO for directly supporting open source with visionary claims that:

Government should be transparent
Government should be participatory
Government should be collaborative

This guidance, while long overdue, ultimately reinforced and helped accelerate a trend towards open source that was already under way. Open source is in pervasive use throughout most governments. Like many corporations, governments rely on popular open source software products such as Linux, Apache, Bind, GCC, Firefox, MySQL, Kerberos, and dozens more as part of critical IT infrastructure. The accelerant has been notable direct contributions to open source by government agencies releasing their own source code as open source software.

Examples of open source contributions include NASA's extensive suite of open source projects, the U.S. Army converting BRL-CAD into an open source project, the NSA developing SELinux, and the White House releasing numerous Drupal modules after deploying a new website built on Drupal. Many departments and agencies within the U.S government now have one or more notable open source projects.

There still remain many challenges down the road ahead. Most governments are terrible at interactive participatory communication, collaboration, and transparency even after directed to be that way. Individuals can help, however, by engaging agencies with specific requests and attainable goals. Canadians can file a request for access to unclassified records under the Access to Information Act. If you're in the U.S., you can file a FOIA request for specific data. With source code in hand, citizens are empowered to help their governments adopt a GLOSS perspective on their works by releasing it for them. GLOSS will become a major player across the diverse FLOSS ecosystem.

Interdisciplinary Lessons

2010-08-03T15:46:00.002-04:00

The August issue of the OSBR is now available in PDF and HTML formats. The editorial theme this month is "Interdisciplinary Lessons" and the authors include:

Teresa Jewell, a researcher at York University, recounts lessons from the history of the feminist movement and applies them to the challenges faced by open source communities.

Mekki MacAuley, Principal of OSStrategy.org, reviews select lessons from other disciplines, applies them to open source contexts, and suggests approaches to uncover further lessons in other fields.

Michael Ayukawa, Founder of Cornerportal, and Julie DuPont, Cultural Planner for the City of Ottawa, describe an ecosystem approach to multidisciplinary event organization and facilitation with the aim of solving existing and emerging problems, and strengthening Ottawa’s position as a creative city.

James Makienko and Leonard De Baets, researchers from Carleton University, describe a project to create a deal development platform by extending an open source customer relationship management tool.

Frank Horsfall, Founder of EnTeraSec, uses a real-world case study to describe Bloom, an open source relationship visualization project for complex networks and business ecosystems.

The editorial theme for the upcoming September issue of the OSBR is "Keystone Companies" and submissions are due by August 15th. October's theme is "Sales Strategy" and submissions are due by September 1st. Please contact the Editor if you are interested in making a submission.

The Development Commons Approach

2010-07-28T09:19:00.002-04:00

Today's columnist is Julian Egelstaff from Freeform Solutions. He writes:

There's this myth that open source software is built by an army of volunteer programmers around the world who all collaborate in fixing bugs, adding features, and generally raising the bar.

It's true for some large projects, like Linux and Firefox. It's not true for the vast majority of code that has been released under open source licenses. If you count all the projects on major open source code repositories, the overwhelming majority have only /one/ developer.

At Freeform Solutions, we have a mission to help not-for-profit and public sector organizations use technology more effectively. We advocate for open source, as one way to achieve that goal. We use and promote some software that does have large groups of programmers. Drupal is a perfect "middle weight" example. It's no where near as big a project as the top open source solutions. But it is a very successful project, with people supporting and working on it around the world.

But if promoting open source comes down to advocating that people use the best mid-sized or larger open source projects, then all we're really doing is promoting successful open source "products" as alternatives to proprietary products. We don't simply believe open source products are competitive with proprietary counterparts. We believe in the power of the underlying principles of open source. We believe that it empowers people to have access to software's source code. We believe collaboration and sharing makes better software.

So if we truly believe that, how can we extend those benefits to the organizations we serve, who can't collaborate at a technical level? This is an ongoing challenge and we have come to label our solution the "Development Commons".

The Development Commons works at a number of levels. Sometimes, we view it simply as the activity of providing a way for the different organizations we work with, to work with each other to solve common problems. We act as a connector node in a network and bring people together so they can benefit from each other's insight and experience. Sometimes we view it more technically, as the activity of enabling the participation of our non-technical clients in the technical business of contributing to open source software.

At this technical level, Freeform Solutions is essentially acting as a proxy developer for the organizations we work with. They cannot engage in the code themselves, but there are benefits to be had if their experience with the software can be translated into new features and other improvements. At the end of the day, this requires commit access, either directly or indirectly. You can't participate in an open source project if you don't have a way of sharing your code.

So it's no surprise that our most extensive Development Commons project, at a technical level, is the Formulize data management and reporting system. We are the lead developers on Formulize and guide the roadmap for the software, so there's no barrier at all to getting code changes into the software. We have used this position as an opportunity to translate the various needs of our clients who use Formulize, into new features and improvements that benefit all users. Instead of adding a feature to meet need X of a particular client, we add the capability of meeting needs like X to the software, and then everyone benefits from that one organization's contribution. This is a powerful way to facilitate contributions from non-technical participants, who often have the most experience in using the software, but the least ability to engage in its development.

After six years of development, Formulize is now on the cusp of its fourth major release. Over the years, many organizations have contributed in large and small ways to the project, sometimes as more passive users simply making their needs known, sometimes as active sponsors of major features. The cast of characters is diverse and international, ranging from science outreach organizations in Canada (Let's Talk Science and Actua), to child welfare groups and projects (the Ontario Association of Children's Aid Societies and the Maltreatment and Adolescent Pathways research project), and to non-profit associations in other countries (the Australasian College of Sports Physicians and the Frontier Airlines Pilots Association).

None of those groups has the technical capability to develop software. But through a Development Commons model, they have all contributed to the creation of innovative web-based software for collecting, managing, and reporting on data. Their subject areas are diverse, but their technical needs have enough in common that they can collaborate through a well-managed development effort to meet their individual needs through shared action.

The latest organization to join the commons is among the most surprising of all: Microsoft.

Perhaps realizing that desktop dominance will never be the one true path to monopoly that it once was, Microsoft has been ramping up its profile in the open source community as much as possible in the last few years. Earlier this year, representatives from Microsoft Canada approached us about including Formulize in their "web platform installer", basically a simplified way for people who use Microsoft's web server software to install and use web-based applications. If you've ever installed Wordpress through one click in your ISP's control panel, you know what I'm talking about.

The beautiful thing about open source licenses is they make it possible for anyone to contribute, and they require that anyone who does, plays by the same rules. The old "embrace, extend, extinguish" tactics that Microsoft has used in the past can't work against proper open source licensing. It's a level playing field and anyone is welcome to play, to the benefit of all.

We are very excited to see what directions lie ahead. The fact that the cast of characters keeps growing in different directions is a good sign. Version four of Formulize is a major consolidation release that caps six years of Development Commons work. We see it as validation that open source methodologies themselves can provide value when you find ways to engage all kinds of participants, even without an army of developers.

References:

Formulize
Number of F/LOSS projects by team
size:

A Different Approach to Thin Client/Thick Client Deployments

2010-07-23T09:41:00.000-04:00

Today's columnist is Carlo Daffara from Conecta. He writes:

I have had the opportunity to work in many different migration experiments in the financial, educational, industrial, and health care sectors. The reasons for migration are varied, but the single strongest motivator is usually: "let's save some money." Some migrations succeed and some do not, or at least not completely. All of them are difficult.

Yes, all of them. Even with the best practices (and we have written some), the effort required to migrate is always substantial because you are replacing something that works with something that may or may not work better. Humans estimate risks poorly and in IT, the devil you know remains the preferred one, even if you have to reboot that devil daily to make work. A CIO faces a conundrum that is similar to a roulette player. Where the roulette player says, "I have lost so much, I can't stop now or I will lose everything!", the CIO says "we have worked so hard to keep this house of cards standing, we can't stop now or all that work will have been for nothing!"

In reality, our research has shown that it is usually much better to avoid trying to supplant something that exists and works; it is much better to invent something new and different. The huge success of the iPad is not due to the fact that it replaces netbooks, or notebooks, or PCs: it is a different media. Like TV didn't replace radio but created a different channel, you have to go outside the basic competition model to find a market that may be much easier to grasp.

A fitting example may be the mobile environment, where Android surged rapidly by filling the need for a low-cost, easily sourced operating system for mobiles, allowing personalization and adaptation. These are fundamental differentiation factors since most phones share similar hardware functionality. At the same time, I believe that by simply looking to replace Windows on the desktop is in itself a uphill battle. This doesn't mean it shouldn't be done, but it may be easier to find other routes.

One such route is to create an intermediate level between thin clients (easily managed, high structural cost, low flexibility), virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI; moderately easier to manage, high structural cost, high flexibility) and traditional PCs (difficult to manage, high flexibility, low structural cost). The problem with "high structural cost" is that performing an adoption or migration experiment requires you to bring in the whole enchilada: virtualization or remotization infrastructure, server, licenses, and a great deal of effort to join all the dots together. One of the reasons for the great success of the PC was that adding one more PC was possible with limited costs – basically the cost of the hardware and software itself, and some configuration work. A good example of the costs and infrastructure necessary for VDI can be found here, to which project management, licenses, and consulting work must be added.

Also, the recent trend towards remotization (such as Terminal Services and Citrix) and VDI is encountering an unexpected difficulty: the rise of Web applications that are inherently location-transparent and work perfectly on the client. Rich interfaces, Flash, and Java applets place high demands on the server and are best executed directly on the client. So, you pay extra to use software like Citrix HDX that basically moves some of the execution work back to the client. And, if you need "detached mode" and have a large enough hard disk, you can use local virtualization and have the virtual image streamed to your PC for local execution – at a price, of course.

What I propose is a different approach: a mid-zone between a rich, full-install client and a thin client. Most applications would be executed locally, particularly the important ones such as the browser, OpenOffice, and conferencing applications. Also, remotized applications could be accessed and, if necessary, could execute Windows applications almost seamlessly using virtualization with tools like VirtualBox or KVM. The VM image of Windows could be stored remotely at merely the cost of storage and could be replicated in multiple sites using a WAN-compatible system like XtreemFS. This would ensure any change to the image is transparently replicated to another office for nomadic users, allowing them to execute those applications that are not portable or web-accessible.

With this method, the install image can be very, very small. It also means that you can store it in a small USB key and the user can try it without having to install anything. If they like it, they only need to image their hard disk and move it to a remote VM. They can live off that USB key, which can travel with them anywhere. Windows remains, but as more and more applications become web-enabled or transported to Linux, its role becomes smaller and smaller – up to the point where it can disappear.

I believe that this can be a worthwhile experiment. In fact, as a spin-off of our EU research activities, I started doing something similar a few months ago with a fully open source project called EveryDesk. I hope that other may find this approach interesting – and join us in making it useful.

Search Engine Optimization: Plug Your Nose and Fix Your Site

2010-07-16T13:05:00.002-04:00

Today's columnist is Emma Jane Hogbin from HICK Tech. Emma writes:

This week I was almost completely consumed by search engine optimization (SEO). It's the topic for a chapter in my new book on building Drupal websites and it's the subject of an SEO class that I'm teaching at the beginning of August. As a result, I was studying the competition and comparing search results for phrases like "php drupal" and "php drupal help" and I was obsessing with click-through and conversion rates.

And then I got side tracked.

Using Google, I looked up the following terms:

If we compare the results of these four searches we'll see most people use the term "software" with occasional forays into "program" and that the most popular regions for any combination of these terms are from India, South Africa, New Zealand, and the UK.

GIMP ranks well in all four search phrases, but only the first link yields a top-ten result for Inkscape. What's up Inkscape? Why aren't you in the top ten and how can we make you do better? SEO to the rescue! Before you get covered in hives and think that SEO is just for marketing wonks, let's take a look at how all projects, products, and businesses can benefit from a little bit of site optimization.

What is SEO?

One of my top-favourite SEO specialists over at RankStudy defines SEO as "the process of enhancing both the content and the reputation of a Web page in order to improve search engine rankings and meet your top prospects at their immediate point of need." This definition gives us four key areas of focus:

Content: this is the quality of the words and phrases you use on your site, including the semantic value you give that content. Headings are more important that plain text; page titles are more important than headings.
Reputation: this is the quality of incoming links, including the key phrases used in the link text as well as the popularity of the sites who link to you.
Top prospects: who's got the potential to become a user, a developer, or a raving fan that gives presentations at user groups? You want to create content to attract the people who will do the most for your project.
Match visitor needs to site content: this is the pairing of your "most wanted outcome" with your visitor's "point of need." If your visitor needs a tutorial to help them with their user group demo and you want them to become a developer there's a mismatch between what you want and what your visitor wants.

Seeing Your Site Through a Search Engine's Eyes

Every single page of your Web site should have a purpose with an intended audience and a most-wanted outcome. Whether you're trying to attract users or developers, take a good look at every page on your website and ask yourself the following questions:

What's the point of this page? Who needs to read it and what should they do after reading it?
What are the key phrases or keywords for this page?
What's the Wordle for this page?
Does the Wordle have the key phrases it needs for the right type of visitors to find this page?
What are key search phrases that visitors are currently using to get to my site? (If you're not using some kind of analytics package, shame on you! If you're looking for an open source alternative to Google Analytics, take a look at Piwik. Their demo looks amazing.)

Find out what keywords your competitor sites are using. You can "view source" of individual pages to look for the meta tag that holds the keywords for that page, or you can have Google scrape out the keywords they think are important using one of their free tools:

Not only will you get a list of terms, but they'll also tell you how popular the term is and how heavy the competition is for that keyword. Find terms that are high on search volume, but low on competition.

Need even more ideas? Try the suggestions that Wordtracker gives you.

Making Your Site Better

You should now have a huge list of all the key phrases you should be using and it's time to apply them to your site. Here are the steps to getting your site ranking highly in search engines so that you can find more top prospects at their point of need:

Add keywords from the mega list to relevant pages.
Give your pages unique titles and juicy keywords. Inkscape: this is a cheap win for your site. Make those page titles unique and I bet your key phrases will (almost instantly) jump way up in the search engine rankings.
Add markup to content to improve the semantic value of your keywords. Break your page into content that has headings and otherwise emphasizes important text.
Monitor your site's stats for search phrases people are using to find your site.

Give it a week or two and then re-test your search engine ranking for the key words and phrases that are important to your top prospects.

With these few simple tips, any open source project can help propel their website to a higher ranking in search engines. It will help you attract new users and keep your existing users happy.

Innovate or Perish: Redrawing the Business and Social Landscape

2010-07-09T11:36:00.000-04:00

Today's columnist is Stephen Huddart from the J.W. McConnell Family Foundation. Stephen writes:

"We’re at a moment when the boundaries of capitalism are being reshaped."

Michael Porter, June 28, 2010

Economist and business guru Michael Porter was in Montreal last week as the guest of Sustainable Prosperity, to speak about the "Porter Hypothesis" he developed 20 years ago. The hypothesis posits that, contrary to the naysayers who hold that economics and environment are mutually exclusive domains, strict environmental regulation of the economy generates an innovation effect that triggers the development of new technologies and improvements that confer competitive advantage on companies and countries.

For the assembled Deputy Ministers, CEOs, and researchers, plus thousands more tuned into a webcast, the evidence was clear. Governments and companies applying this hypothesis are leading value creation in the global race to build sustainable economies. They do so in at least three ways. First, on the principle that pollution + waste = inefficiency (and liability: hello BP!), they make companies more efficient. Second, they use collaborative policy development to foster market-leading technology clusters. Third, they preserve natural capital.

So, what about the next 20 years, a period when futurist Ray Kurzweil predicts as much change will take place as occurred in the last 100? Just as businesses now compete to reduce environmental impact, Porter says that the next wave of innovation will occur as private, public, and non-governmental organization resources are directed to solving social deficits that condition economic performance, in areas such as community economic development, employee health, and gender equity. Addressing these deficits reduces operating costs and enables quantifiable increases in productivity.

Porter illustrates the point with worker safety, where its absence indicates poor process design and lack of training. Address those issues and business is both more competitive and humane. Consider what this means to any number of other pressing issues and soon it becomes possible to imagine a future you wouldn’t mind leaving to your grandchildren. Sustainable Prosperity and others have already taken Porter's Hypothesis to its logical conclusion on the environmental side, by making the case for a carbon tax. Porter supports it because it is simple and transparent - better in his view than complex cap and trade schemes. But we all know what happened to that idea in the last election: a key reason for the Liberals' defeat was their support for a carbon tax that proved unpopular with voters. Another good example of how not to solve a complex social challenge is the government's plan to reduce crime by building more prisons and removing judge's discretionary sentencing powers. Perversely, this kind of thinking only exacerbates the underlying problem, while reducing the resources available for prevention and remediation. Compare this approach with the UK Social Impact Bond - which enables innovators to raise funds to introduce proven innovations that do things like reduce recidivism rates and thereby reduce the burden on taxpayers. The point to highlight is that the bridge from injustice and vulnerability to sustainability and resilience is built with a sustained commitment to innovation (technical, social, and regulatory), rapid learning, and open collaboration.

In a recent talk presented by SiG@Waterloo, MaRS Discovery District CEO Ilse Treurnicht made the point that addressing the social context of technological innovation presents Canada with a unique advantage. With a diverse, well-educated population that generally gets along together across a wide geographic area, we can position ourselves as leaders in developing technology that is socially sustainable. So, not the next expensive medical machine for the privileged few who can afford it, but the disruptive technology that improves population health. By hosting events like the Business of Aging MaRS is demonstrating that cross-sectoral collaboration on complex challenges is at once socially innovative and economically advantageous.

It is up to us - innovate this way or fall further behind in the global race to compete on productivity and and sustainability. Undoubtedly, Mr. Porter would agree.

Go To Market

2010-07-05T08:03:00.000-04:00

The July issue of the OSBR is now available in PDF and HTML formats. The editorial theme this month is "Go to Market" and the authors include:

Corien Kershey, a partner in Marketing Magnitude, discusses the importance of market segmentation to early-stage companies.

Fred Holahan, Founder and President of Open Source Advisory, outlines a volume market strategy to help commercial open source companies bring their products and service to market.

Susan Riekki-Odle, Founder and President of ChannelGain, highlights the role of ecosystem analysis, economic modeling, and creative go-to-market development in creating successful partnership strategies.

Craig Fitzpatrick, Vice President of Products at SWIX, describes how open source, community-based software projects can improve product-market fit by integrating users into the development process.

Thomas Prowse, a partner in Gowlings' business law department, answers the question "what business models are currently used with open source software?"

The editorial theme for the upcoming August issue of the OSBR is "Interdisciplinary Lessons" and the guest editor will be Mekki MacAulay. Submissions are due by July 15--contact the Editor if you are interested in a submission.

New Managing Editor

2010-06-21T09:45:00.000-04:00

I'll be leaving the OSBR on July 5 for a bit of a holiday before starting as the Community Manager for the PC-BSD Project. I'm pleased to announce that Chris McPhee will be the new managing editor for the OSBR. I'm confident that Chris' extensive editing experience will serve the OSBR authors and readership well.

I've really enjoyed bringing the OSBR from an idea to a monthly publication with a solid readership. The initial idea was brought up three years ago, when there was very little information available about open source that was non-technical and business-oriented. Since then we've explored 36 editorial themes and published the works of over 230 authors.

Please join me in welcoming Chris to the OSBR. I look forward to future issues, this time enjoying them as a reader :-)

Making Open Source Profitable

2010-06-18T09:00:00.001-04:00

Today's columnist is Sean Morrison from BRL-CAD. He writes:

From economics, profit maximization is a process used to maximize a return on investment. It's a process that looks at sales prices, production costs, and other factors in order to find a sweet spot where you make the most with the least. Profit, in its most basic form, can be described with a simple equation:

Profit = Sales - Cost

That's all good and well, but what does it have to do with free/libre open source software (F/LOSS)? For many free software developers, the mere idea of making money is an affront to their ideals. Business journalist Dana Blankenhorn of ZDNet notes in The open source tea party that there are drastic differences in what motivates contributors to F/LOSS: "In its starkest terms there is a divide between idealists and realists, between those who see FOSS as a creed to be adhered to and those who see it mainly as a business model, a route to profit."

But this isn't about money. Especially for software that is freely (in every sense of the word) and openly shared, talking about sales and profit may seem a bit peculiar. Developing an open source community, however, has substantial parallels with developing a small business and many of the same concepts and tips still apply. The main difference is a translation of terminology.

So what does profit mean? In general economic terms, Wikipedia tells us that profit is the total revenue (i.e., the sales) minus the total expenses (i.e., the costs). Except we're still in unfamiliar territory. Open source projects are not usually expressed in terms of monetary value. Open source projects are compared with a myriad of metrics such as popularity, project vitality, code metrics, and overall utility of the software itself.

That being the case, consider what profit means to a business. For commercial industry, a successful business is a profitable business. A successful open source project, however, is one that offers something of sustainable value. Therein we begin to see how the same equation can be applied in a more generalized form:

Profit = Revenue - Expenditures

Revenue for open source is value coming into the project and value is derived by interest in the project. Value comes from the utility of the code itself; it comes from the open source community around that project, its developers, and its users. Growing the community, increasing downloads, and making improvements to the source code represent an increase in that project's total revenue.

Expenditures for open source is a little more tricky as the software itself is free (as in beer and freedom), but there certainly are still "costs" as there are expenditures of time and effort. In terms of development, there is effort expended publishing releases, maintaining infrastructure, developing the code, reviewing contributions from others, and keeping the code maintained. The community at large spends time learning the software and sharing their knowledge with others.

The open source software movement may be relatively new, but running a small business is not. Evaluating profit, increasing revenue, and decreasing expenditures are terms commonplace in business. It would be highly disadvantageous of growth-bound projects to ignore the existing wealth of business resources available. One such resource is the non-profit SCORE Association which focuses on providing free business mentoring services.

SCORE provides a plethora of resources and advice for growing business that can be applied to most open source projects with a simple translation of terminology. For example, their top five categories for improvement include: 1) improving your web site, 2) building a local presence, 3) preparing for growth, 4) conserving capital, and 5) enhancing sales. All of those can be readily described in terms of our aforementioned profit equation.

Improving a web site amounts to increasing revenue by attracting new contributors while reducing expenditures through improved support. Their tips on building a local presence and preparing for growth aim to reduce project expenditures by leveraging outside help, delegating responsibilities, and recognizing people that consume more than they contribute. Conserving capital is particularly interesting as a project's developers, community, and code are open source capital. Included in their tips on conserving capital are suggestions of being frugal with developer resources, knowing your users, not reinventing the wheel, and encouraging reuse. Enhancing open source sales (i.e., value coming into the project) refers to improving user awareness and education, cultivating new contributors, being persistent, and demonstrating your project's value to the community at large. The breadth and scope of applicable sound advice is abundant.

Why are you involved with open source? Maybe you are looking to turn a software asset into a commodity that is hopefully updated, maintained, and improved by a legion of contributors around the world. Perhaps your goal is to develop or even commercialize some open source asset. Or maybe you've developed useful code but since it's not your core business, you realize that there is still a potential public relations benefit.

Reduce your open source expenditures. Improve your open source revenues. When looking for ways to make open source successful, increasing your open source profit is a great place to begin.

Open Everything

2010-06-10T14:49:00.001-04:00

Today's columnist is Jason Cote from Freeform Solutions. He writes:

The underlying focus of my career is a belief in leveraging the benefits of technology to serve people, organizations, and networks working to better the world.

In the beginning, this was not a conscious intention. My participation in an international network of bulletin board systems, first as a user, then as a SysOp (system operator), opened my eyes to a larger world of possibilities. I willingly released the fruits of my programming labour, long before I truly understood what public domain, shareware, and free software meant. Certainly, the Internet has helped to usher the concept of open source into today's mainstream, even if the term is now so overloaded as to be confusing. Still, I wonder how many of us know how long this concept has been around.

Eventually I came to understand how my preference for starting, leading, or otherwise engaging with not-for-profit and charitable organizations was related to me giving away for free the software and other artifacts I produced. It is becoming increasingly clear that the parallels between open source and the not-for-profit sector are many. There is the obvious use of free (as in beer) software by organizations which are least able to pay. More importantly, there is a sense of community. In particular, there is a voluntary engagement in disseminating information, increasing awareness and accessibility, collaborating, building networks and ecosystems, and producing social innovation.

Through many interesting ventures that produced a variety of social innovations – including a network of accessible science programs for youth, high performance computer networks for international research, and online donations to any charity – my consulting practice has ebbed and flowed. Today, I am engaged with a number of kindred spirits and together we are striving to bring increased consciousness and intention to our work. Freeform Solutions is the embodiment of this work, and provides an enduring vehicle for supporting our mission: help not-for-profit organizations use technology to build their capacity and increase their effectiveness in pursuing their own mission. We are a not-for-profit organization ourselves, and we're also quite actively engaged in using and developing open source software.

We were recently contacted by a prospective volunteer, whose interest in free software and the not-for-profit sector lead her to our website. Our invitation to work with us prompted her contact. As a participant in several open source communities, the lead developer of Formulize, and being a not-for-profit organization, we certainly rely on volunteers. Our prospect said she was glad to see that granting organizations are supporting the potential of free software; she noticed that we are receiving a grant from the The Ontario Trillium Foundation.

Support from The Ontario Trillium Foundation is helping us to build our capacity to use and develop open source software and otherwise engage the not-for-profit sector in this social movement. More broadly, we are producing new knowledge, software, and solutions relevant to the needs of today's not-for-profit organizations. In other words, we are open sourcing more than just software. We are also witness to the increasing application of liberty (free) and transparency (open) to a growing number of fields of endeavour.

In September 2008, I had the privilege of attending a gathering of like-minded thinkers, and tinkerers, at an Open Everything event at Hollyhock, an educational retreat centre on scenic Cortes Island. It is difficult to be in such a magical place and not be inspired. Kris Krug took this picture of me staring toward the ocean, reverent. This event was part of a series held around the world and the application of “open” to “everything” clearly marches on. In a way, these events may no longer be necessary. The future is happening now.

We have some ideas about where we're headed, but we know we have much to learn and to do. We could use your help as we continue to develop our theory of change. This column is an opportunity for us to expose our interests and what we are currently working on, particularly as they relate to current trends and topics of interest to you, our readers. So, let us know what you think! Emboldened by one prospective volunteer who stumbled across our website, I'm sending this broader invitation to the like-minded thinkers and tinkerers who are reading this now. Let's engage.

A Modest Proposal: A Structured Tax-Exempt Structure for Corporate OSS Development

2010-06-04T08:30:00.002-04:00

Today's columnist is Carlo Daffara from Conecta. He writes:

One of the most common observations in the open source marketplace is related to the low level of contributions by companies, especially small and medium sized businesses, to the projects behind the open source software (OSS) they use within their embedded systems or as part of an internal IT infrastructure. Looking at the Eclipse Foundation, one of the best run open source projects, it is possible to see that most contributions are from large companies that use Eclipse as a basis for their products or from open source companies that are aware of the strategic importance for code contributions to OSS projects.

What is missing is the large number of companies that may be interested in contributing and who perhaps are already sponsoring some internal developer's work on the project. However, they are not able to structure their contributions in a formal way. The reason is threefold: knowledge, legal, and economics.

Knowledge: most companies are unaware of the fact that they can contribute back or do not know how to do so. Maybe an internal developer is able to submit patches, but the company itself does not understand how to fully engage with the open source project. For this reason, many contributions are from individuals using a company email. Company managers are often unaware of the use of OSS inside of their own products or infrastructure, and do not understand what advantage may be obtained by giving back to the project. In fact, most companies are limited in the first step of the OSS adoption ladder identified by Carbone and moving up the ladder from "use" to "contribute" is a much rarer step.

Legal: companies are often wary of backfire from an "official" contribution. They fear that internal intellectual property (IP) may be revealed. Some licenses provide implicit patent granting, which may limit the ability of a company to ask for licensing fees later. Some companies avoid this scenario accurately; for example, some of the contributions to OSS by Microsoft were developed by external companies that held no IP under contract from Microsoft, and were released in an indirect way.

Economics: why should a company contribute? What economic benefit can it bring? Unless there is a clear business advantage, most companies will not face the risks and costs of contributing code, and prefer taking the "developer did it" approach.

I would like to propose a blue-sky experiment: a clearinghouse for code contributions. It can be imagined as a traditional software development company, but under non-profit and tax-exempt status. This would be similar to the Mozilla Foundation, but would aggregate development activities from many different companies and covering a wide spectrum of projects. The clearinghouse can accept tax-exempt donations, clearly marked towards a development objective, and visible through a project dashboard, such as the one used by the Eclipse project. The clearinghouse can then parcel the work out with a bounty system, if the work is small, or directly by paying the developers of the original project for the activity. This way, the OSS project can receive an immediate benefit.

The biggest difference between current structures would be the:

coverage of a large number of projects, increasing the sustainability of the clearinghouse itself

legal coverage, as the development would be done by a third party, not impacting any potential IP held

efficiency of the structure, reducing the ramp-up effort for internal developers to become proficient with the source code itself

tax-exempt status of the donation, providing an economic benefit on top of the increased efficiency of open source development

Such a structure can be made in a relatively simple and cost-efficient way, one per continent to simplify the legal process. In my opinion, this can be a first step towards increased participation by those companies that now use open source, and still are unaware of the potential impact of contributing. We tend to overestimate the impact of large contributions and forget that, for example, in the Linux kernel 25% of the change sets are from unaffiliated developers, the single largest group. If we can turn at least a small part of that 25% into paid services under a tax-exempt umbrella, we radically increase the economic market for open source services.

Growing Business

2010-06-01T12:37:00.003-04:00

The June issue of the OSBR is now available in PDF and HTML formats. The editorial theme this month is "Growing Business" and the authors include:

Tony Bailetti, Director of Ontario's Talent First Network, discusses a novel strategy for growing the revenue of technology companies and startups through active participation in a business ecosystem. He introduces a blueprint to grow revenue, an inventory of growth formulas, and briefly defines business ecosystems, keystones and platforms. He then describes the business ecosystem approach to grow revenue, comparing it to traditional approaches and identifying when the business ecosystem approach works better, as well as the benefits and risks of implementing the business ecosystem approach. He highlights the differences between business ecosystems and development communities and outsourcing.

Mekki MacAulay, Principal of OSStrategy.org, outlines seven strategies that use open source to grow revenue and provides examples of successful implementations for each.

Tomas Marko, a researcher for Lead to Win, describes the challenges that entrepreneurs in startup companies must overcome in order to grow successfully. He examines both the risks and benefits of growth as well as the importance of short and long term strategic planning.

Ram Mohan, Executive Vice President and Chief Technology Officer at Afilias, tells the story behind Afilias' continuous growth and the open source product and community that were leveraged to support it. His article also examines the importance of partnering with and actively contributing to an open source project to support the growth of both the project and the company.

Tarus Balog, CEO of The OpenNMS Group, answers a question frequently asked of open source proponents: namely, how to make money with open source. He describes the successful model used by the OpenNMS Group to generate sustainable revenue for growth, while focusing on open source.

The editorial theme for the upcoming July issue of the OSBR is "Go to Market" and the guest editor will be Corien Kershey. Submissions are due by June 20--contact the Editor if you are interested in a submission.

Artifacts

2010-05-21T16:20:00.002-04:00

Today's columnist is Emma-Jane Hogbin from Hick Tech. She writes:

I have the most interesting conversations while at open source conferences. A few weeks ago at CMS Expo I had a great conversation with Jeff Eaton about open source as it relates to things other than code. I'm not sure where Jeff came up with the phrase, but he recently realized that many of the best third party contributed Drupal modules are "artifacts of paid work". Unlike many open source projects where a developer "scratches their own itch", much of the Drupal ecosystem of code has been built by people who were paid for their time.

While this could open up the conversation to all kinds of interesting comparisons and rebuttals and agreements and disagreements, let's head off in a different direction. Contributing artifacts has made the Drupal code ecosystem incredibly healthy and a wonderful place to dive into when you are looking to deploy a Web site with a shoestring budget. There are, however, two main problems that we've not yet solved: i) designs can never be artifacts; and ii) training has no residual artifact.

For the most part, code is generic enough that it can be easily dropped into a new design and re-used without compromising the brand of the original site. This is not true for design. You can't design a new theme for Drupal and then drop it into the community for others to re-use. Design is not an artifact. Design components may be artifacts, but there is currently no way to store these artifacts on Drupal.org. Contributed components relevant to Drupal include Lullabot's icons (Lullacons) and Top Notch Theme's snippet and style repository. The Lullacons can be used outside of the Drupal project, but the theme snippets are only relevant in very specific use cases.

To help designers share their work in the Drupal community, we need to define what an artifact is to a designer. Is it a font? An edge style for a div on a page? Is it a set of icons? What are the abstracted parts of design that, like the contributed code, can simply be artifacts at the end of the design process? With the artifacts defined, we then need to find a way to give as much weight in the Drupal code hosting system to these design artifacts as we give to code artifacts.

The second challenge is that of training. artifacts of training may be the "learning objects" used to train students. Smart (or is that lazy?) trainers will find as many objects as they can from within the free Drupal resources. Teach developers to use api.drupal.org and you have trained them for life. But these objects, or artifacts, do not teach people how to choose a few relevant modules from the thousands that are available. They are about as useful as the .tar.gz file containing a contributed module without the Drupal core code base. To make training work, you need to have a curriculum with defined learner roles and tasks and progression. Many companies (my own included) train people on how to use Drupal. Due to the pace of change in the Internet world, it is unlikely our curriculum will ever become an artifact.

There are projects within the Drupal community that are looking to collaborate on an open curriculum. The Curriculum and Training Group has started meeting weekly on IRC. The Ubuntu project has an equivalent group. But these curriculum projects are not simply releasing artifacts of their paid work---they are trying to generate something for others to use. This changes the dynamic of the participants substantially. For the professionals who train others for a living, what is the incentive to participate? Their own itches are being scratched each time they teach their curriculum. If they release their artifacts, will they lose students? The risks to sharing for the paid professionals is an interesting challenge that I do not have an answer to.

Are you a designer that can list artifacts of design? Help me share the leftovers of your paid work. Are you a paid professional with an open source curriculum, or at least freely licensed curriculum? How did you do it and how has it affected your business?

Big Problems, Small Solutions: Polycentric Governance and the Power of Mass Localism

2010-05-14T07:22:00.001-04:00

Today's columnist is Stephen Huddart from the J.W. McConnell Family Foundation. Stephen writes:

Marlo Raynolds, Executive Director of The Pembina Institute, a national environmental think tank, commented to me after the Copenhagen Summit on Climate Change that for the first time in his professional life, he had come to the conclusion that our best efforts at adapting to the inconvenient truth of climate change are insufficient. “We’ve made good progress on all kinds of big issues up to this point ”, he explained, “from protecting endangered species to putting limits on pollutants. But this is different. It’s time to press ‘reset’ – we need new strategies”.

For central governments wrestling with persistent and pernicious problems like climate change, escalating health care costs, or school dropout rates, the question is where to find the policy lever that will introduce transformative change before it’s too late. Anything too drastic, or ‘top down’ and the likelihood of electoral defeat looms. There is also the problem that a decision at this level commits huge resources to a limited set of alternatives, with consequent escalation of risk, and rigidity arising from fear of failure. The contemporary paradox is that our challenges have become too big to address at anything less than a global level, but that to a worrying degree, we lack the means to effect meaningful change at this scale.

Political scientist Elinor Ostrom has devoted her life to addressing this dilemma and was recognized for her efforts in creating 'Polycentric Governance' with one half of the 2009 Nobel Prize for Economics. Her work is as good a starting point as any for understanding that our environmental and economic crises are inextricably related, and that solutions that address the common good must take account of this. Her prize speech should be required viewing for every municipal, provincial and federal politician and policy maker. And as a basis for educating the next generation to do a better job than we have at managing the planet, 'Design Principles for Long-Surviving Systems', cited in the same lecture, would be a good place to begin.

One of Ostrom's observations is that small to medium sized cities are more effective monitors of program performance and cost than larger centres. In a wonderful illustration of this principle, the UK National Endowment for Science, Technology and the Arts (NESTA) recently ran a contest called The Big Green Challenge for communities to come up with the most effective means of reducing greenhouse gas emissions. In a paper titled Mass Localism: a way to help small communities solve big social challenges, NESTA’s Public Services Lab documents the results: the three winning communities and one runner-up achieved reductions of 10 to 32% in a very short time span, and shared a one million pound prize.

This type of community-led innovation involves an open approach. At the outset the goal is not to scale local solutions up to the national level, but to support locally determined projects at numerous sites, which deliver their own solutions and learn from one another. To participate in the Big Green Challenge it wasn’t necessary to be incorporated as a charity or municipality. As a result, 20% of the entrants were groups of people who wanted to work on something together, thus diversifying and expanding the pool of ideas.

NESTA points out that central governments pay little attention to local solutions in the misguided belief that they are marginal to today’s social and economic challenges, which from their perspective require massive and costly intervention. Furthermore, concerns about perpetuating inter-regional disparities often produce ‘one size fits all’ solutions that undermine local ownership.

NESTA outlines five principles for successful local initiatives:

1. Establish and promote a clear, measurable outcome.

2. Presume community capacity to innovate.

3. In the early stages, challenge and advice are more valuable than cash.

4. Identify and remove barriers to participation.

5. Don’t reward activity, reward outcomes.

It is worth emphasizing the last point. For national politicians, funding local activity is politically expedient, but it leads to dependency and a lack of confidence that anything significant can be accomplished. The Big Green Challenge rewarded results.

Is this a way to design interventions in the social sphere? In Canada, the ALLIES (Assisting Local Leaders with Immigrant Employment Strategies) program takes a similar approach to integrating skilled immigrants in urban labour markets. ALLIES is a partnership between Toronto’s Maytree Foundation, which co-founded ALLIES predecessor and partner, the Toronto Regional Immigrant Employment Council; The J.W. McConnell Family Foundation; and Citizenship and Immigration Canada. Groups are provided with small grants that enable them to document the challenges facing foreign-trained professionals in their community (defined as a Census Metropolitan Area). They are then supported in creating a working coalition that includes the private sector, government as employer, and the community sector. At this point they can apply for program funding to introduce one of an available list of programs for mentoring, organizing temporary placements, and so on, or to create their own local versions of such programs.

In addition to constituting a framework for action on multiple levels of scale, ALLIES is a peer network, a learning community, a policy originator, a platform for continuous program innovation, and a growing marketplace for ideas and toolkits for employers.

One of the features of such programs is their relatively low cost. Engaging citizens and leaders from all sectors in generating solutions to complex challenges is by order of magnitude less expensive than many alternatives, including that of doing nothing.

For more on this theme, and in particular on how it can be applied to civic participation in government, see Accenture’s paper on e-governance.

Speaking with an Open Source Tongue

2010-05-07T08:57:00.002-04:00

Today's columnist is Christopher Sean Morrison from BRL-CAD. He writes:

"A slip of the foot you may soon recover, but a slip of the tongue you may never get over." Benjamin Franklin

Communication is central to the vitality of an open source project. It is one of the key characteristics that separate and distinguish a healthy open source project from the vast clique of abandoned ideas, defeated plans, and failed forks. Healthy projects communicate, and they do so extensively and openly. Yet, each project has its own etiquette conventions and interaction protocols; unfamiliarity with these can result in an unfavourable experience that can be particularly devastating to newcomers and outsiders.

The benefits that open source offers, however, are still proving to be exceptionally compelling. In particular, commercial industry is becoming increasingly aware of the vast potential held within open source communities and the millions of lines of source code written by impassioned developers around the world that improve and maintain those codes for free. Business institutions often get involved in order to make modifications that support their needs and quickly find themselves ill-prepared to be thrust into the realm of open source software development.

Business institutions tend to structure and manage projects very differently from open source projects. Dan Woods wrote about this "collaboration gap" for Forbes, describing how the difference in management styles and communication mechanics often creates a distinct collaboration disconnect. Learning to bridge the differences makes it considerably easier for business institutions to garner the greatest long-term benefits of participating in open source.

A successful open source project thrives on extensive and pervasive communication and on sharing information. Most businesses are not good at sharing information -- at least not for free and rarely without monetary gain. Some organizations avoid sharing as a means to protect their business secrets. Some don't share in order to minimize risk - legal, competitive, or otherwise. Others don't share simply because that takes time and they don't perceive a financial benefit.

Institutions venturing into the realm of open source for the first time often have difficultly figuring out how to communicate effectively, particularly beyond the domain of their marketing departments and while keeping their risk-averse management happy. Many fail to interact effectively due to significant differences in priorities and protocols. So, how does a company share information without giving away business secrets, without taking on additional risk, and while still realizing a financial gain? The key is to find common ground for communication and collaboration.

Delegate Individual Responsibility

Business institutions tend to participate in open source projects differently than individual open source contributors. Understanding how to communicate with an open source community provides the greatest benefits to an organization and helps establish a long-term mutually beneficial relationship with the largest potential gains. The first crucial step along that path is to delegate responsibility down to individual contributors.

Open source communities don't care about the company behind an individual or effort. They care about contributions and the abilities of contributors. Often, great open source communities are meritocracies. The best ideas win because they are great ideas, not because they are from someone important. Corporate reputation holds little credence. In a meritocracy, individuals with a reputation for good ideas are in charge. Companies have to empower and pay their workers to make connections and network. Individuals make contributions, not institutions. Realizing this difference is a big first step.

Go Where they Go

Open source communities have a plethora of resources at their disposal for interaction. While private e-mail communications and face-to-face meetings may be the norm for corporate business, most open source projects operate over chat networks, discussion forums, and other internationally-accessible on-line mediums. When getting involved with a new community, figure out where the existing contributors predominantly interact.

Three of the most common communication mediums that developers use are e-mail mailing lists, on-line discussion forums, and Internet Relay Chat (IRC). Some projects operate exclusively over one medium while others will utilize multiple mediums simultaneously. IRC is particularly interesting as the medium provides group discussions in real-time. Users are often connected to an IRC network 24/7 and communication etiquette can be unfamiliar, strict, and unforgiving to new users. The Freenode IRC network is a particularly common home for many open source projects due to the network's focus on open source software communities.

Know How to Talk

Once you find them, there are still several matters of etiquette that have to be taken into consideration. Failure to follow common etiquette, rules of conduct, and interaction protocols is viewed by many open source developers as an unforgivable offense. Responses can range from helpful guidance to correct misbehaviour to outright permanent bans without warning. Here are some summarized tips for establishing good communication rapport and hopefully avoid some of the more common pitfalls:

DON'T WRITE IN ALL CAPITAL LETTERS: this is considered SHOUTING. It's considered rude. Don't do it.

speling n grammr r imprtnt: poor grammar might work for talking to teenagers over text messaging, but most open source developers are pedants for accurate communication. You don't necessarily have to capitalize your words or end every phrase with a period, but using shorthand is usually a big no-no. It's viewed as lazy, distractive, and annoying.

Don't top-post: one of the most common reply styles in business e-mails will infuriate many open source developers. Instead of replying at the top of a message, reply in-line or at the bottom. Particularly on open source mailing lists, be conscious of how you reply to messages.

Be concise: and get to the point. Basic context is helpful, but many open source developers consider their time more sacred than yours. If you need help with something, say what you need help with and only the details that are immediately pertinent and relevant. Whether you're developing a source code patch or asking for help, don't mix topics.

Do your homework: if a quick Google search will answer your question, you are wasting the time of others by asking. Read the README file, read the developer guidelines, read their forum FAQ. If you think your question might be covered somewhere but you're not sure where, then specify what you've read that pertains to the problem at hand. This will prove that you have been doing your homework and will also help them refine their documentation.

Be polite: the project does not owe you anything. Many open source developers have a tendency to provide very blunt or tort responses, but your tone, particularly as a newcomer, should always remain cordial. Leave cynicism, arrogance, egos, and emoticons at the door.

Be patient: while you may be paid to talk to them, they are often not paid to talk back to you. Particularly for IRC, responses are often instant but they can come hours or even days later. You are expected to wait patiently and quietly if you are seeking interaction.

Ask smart questions: see How To Ask Questions The Smart Way for a good overview.

Communicate Early, Communicate Often

It's a rare open source project that enjoys someone showing up, dropping off a patch file, and disappearing. If you're working on a modification that you intend to contribute back to an open source community, you should be communicating as early as possible. You will be seen as an active participant, not just a passing visitor. Discuss your goal, your needs, and how you currently plan to proceed from a technical implementation perspective. Be flexible, prepared to work with others, and willing to adjust your plans. Ideally, you should be communicating continuously while you're working. Daily updates while you are working are encouraged. The more the better.

Be Honest and Earnest

The final note I'd like to leave you with is about the forthrightness of most open source communities. Many open source participants have a highly tuned BS sensor and low-tolerance for masked intentions. Honesty is highly valued and reflects directly back onto the contributor. An individual contributor's merit within a meritocratic community will grow if: i) they are contributing constructively to the project and ii) they are deemed trustworthy through openness and honesty. It should go without saying, but a little common sense honesty can go a long way towards earning respect.

Communications Enabled Applications

2010-05-01T12:31:00.000-04:00

The May issue of the OSBR is now available in PDF and HTML formats. The editorial theme this month is "Communications Enabled Applications" and the authors include:

Craik Pyke, Senior Technical Architect at Nortel, examines the shift in traditional telecommunications business models.

Daniel Cardenas, Software Architect at Rezact Inc, demonstrates how a small company improved customer service and increased operational efficiency by implementing communication enabled applications.

Andrew Ceponkus, a project manager within IBM’s Tivoli Provisioning Manager Quality Assurance team, provides an overview of lessons learned from an investigation of collaborative telehealth systems delivery in Canada.

Patrick O'Halloran, a Staff Design Engineer with Xilinx Inc., presents the key licensing considerations when using CEA building blocks.

Jean-Pierre Poulin, an entrepreneur, discusses the lessons learned by his startup's approach to communications enablement.

Elias Majic describes his startup's experiences in integrating communications services.

The editorial theme for the upcoming June issue of the OSBR is Growing Business and the guest editor will be Mekki MacAulay. Submissions are due by May 20--contact the Editor if you are interested in a submission.

Open Source: A Symptom of our Own Nirvana?

2010-04-23T09:01:00.000-04:00

This week's columnist is Julian Egelstaff from Freeform Solutions. He writes:

Which is more incredible? That a group of people who have never met face to face can build a piece of software together over the Internet, or that the economics of the situation actually work to make that activity sustainable?

We spend a lot of time in open source circles navel gazing about the technology and how cool or incredible it is. But the technology doesn't exist in a vacuum. New business models arise because of some peculiar economics that are literally the opposite of everything that came before, and they don't just affect the Internet and open source. Our whole world is changing as we gradually turn many aspects of our lives from being based on scarcity into being based on plenty.

About 18 months ago, comedian Louis CK became the latest Internet meme with his "Everything is amazing, nobody's happy" story. I think it's another perspective on this same issue. He says: "Everybody on every plane should just constantly be going, 'Oh my God! Wow!'" Air travel is just one example where we now have a plentiful, accessible solution to a problem (long distance transportation), which used to be very difficult and impractical for most people to solve.

This inversion of scarcity is the economic hallmark of the Internet and open source. A lot of traditional economic models are built on premises about scarcity: things have a value because they are in demand, because there isn't enough to go around. This is a proud tradition in human society. Archaeologists tell us that some of the earliest writing and mathematics was basically an exercise in accounting, to keep track of what was yours and what was mine, since there was a limited supply of pretty much everything. Cognitive psychologists have learned that human beings have a naturally keen sense of what is fair play and what is cheating, and evolutionary psychologists theorize that this is a product of developing complex social structures where successful interactions with others are a key part of survival.

In the past, it would not only be technologically impossible for people all over the world to collaborate on producing something, it would be completely unsustainable for them to then give away the product of their labour. But that is exactly what open source developers do every day.

One major reason why they can do this is that digital media is infinitely reproduceable at essentially zero cost. The artifacts produced by the labour on open source projects, have no intrinsic scarcity. The labour may be scarce, but the products of that labour can be shared infinitely.

It's not that simple though. CDs were first introduced in 1982, and from that moment onwards, music was available digitally, and infinitely reproduceable in theory. But it wasn't until the late 1990s that a few other conditions were met, which in turn led to the seismic shifts in the music industry over the past ten years:

1. affordable home computers

2. large enough hard drives

3. a compression algorithm (MP3) that made the digital media small enough for easy transport

4. commonly available high speed internet connections

Whether you're talking about music or open source or something else, rest assured that once infinite reproducibility pairs up with a technological infrastructure that enables sharing on a mass scale at low or zero cost, scarcity is on the way out and plenty is on the way in.

All this sharing produces another kind of plenty: plenty of knowledge. Successful open source communities do not hoard knowledge, they put it out there for all to see and contribute to. Keeping secrets has been, and still is, an important part of many value-producing systems. But in open source, secrets are bad.

In open source, the way to get ahead is to out-share and out-contribute everyone else. In such an open economic model, value comes from being embedded as deeply as possible in the ecosystem of the software or project that you're working with. Being at the epicenter means that you have the most opportunities to connect with others.

We live in an amazing world full of examples of the transformation of scarce resources into plentiful ones. It's not just open source and the Internet, although they provide the most radical examples to learn from. The green revolution in agriculture is another example where drastically altering the availability of a resource changed the whole world. Renewable energy sources promise a world of truly limitless power. When that happens, will the economics of plenty be unstoppable?

Facilitating Non-Code Contributions

2010-04-16T09:02:00.002-04:00

In today's column, Carlo Daffara continues his discussion on non-code contributions:

In a previous column, I mentioned how a substantial amount of contributions in large projects are not provided in the form of code, but in many other forms. Examples include documentation, knowledge (maybe enclosed in mailing list posts), graphics, and so on. Code is actually one of the last, and most complex, form of contribution as it does require substantial skill and knowledge. While it is true that most projects provide a structured form to submit and contribute code, there are very few projects that make it easy to submit other types of contributions.

A good start is to show that you actually want contributions. There are countless open source projects that never mention in their web page or documentation the fact that external participation is welcome. Having a page like “contribute” on your project website is a good start. A perfect example is the Fedora Project page.

In this example, the join page is really a contribute page and is found just after the link on how to obtain the distribution – a very visible and clear position. The page also shows the many different ways someone can contribute: by writing text or documentation, contributing graphical elements, by being an ambassador or representative, and so on. In the single subpage, the complete description is simple and allows latitude to adapt. As an example, in the “People Person” page there is a welcoming text that says “Remember that you have complete freedom to do less, more or different tasks in the many projects and teams. Only your imagination sets the limits.”

A similar approach appears in the Funambol participate page. While simpler, it conveys a similar message: participation is not exclusively about code.

We can provide, based on these examples, a few suggestions to improve your project visibility in this area:

Explicitly mention the opportunity to participate in your project, and if possible add a participate page to your website.

Before listing what you want from others, think about what may be considered a contribution, even if it may be small. For example, mentioning the use of your project's software can be considered the smallest, but still a significant, form of contribution. In the case of Funambol, it provides an indirect economic value to the commercial project that is based on the open source code base, as it demonstrates market viability and the fact that there is an established user base.

List explicitly all the possible contributions, and for each present an example. Instead of simply mentioning “graphic contributions”, list a set of possible tasks, like “a new splash screen”. Try, if possible, to list potential contributions of different sizes, listing the easiest ones at the beginning. This provides an immediate frame of reference for the amount of time or effort that may be necessary for a contribution, and gives even first-time participants the opportunity to work on small activities.

Whenever possible, provide tools for specific tasks. For example, Bazaar provides a translation tool that helps in creating localized strings. In larger scale projects, creating a sub-project for a specific activity may help in coordination and in reducing duplication of effort.

There is a huge world of potential contributions, and just a little effort is needed to assist potential contributors in materializing those potentials.

Open Source and Computer Science Education

2010-04-09T09:44:00.000-04:00

Today's columnist is Ralph Morelli from the Humanitarian FOSS Project. He writes:

In his March 2006 column in the Communications of the ACM, ACM President David Patterson urged Computer Science (CS) educators to "Join the open source movement." Despite the widespread use of the open source development model in the software industry, Patterson observed that "most schools still teach 'write programs from a blank piece of paper' programming."

Patterson noted that students could be inspired and attracted to CS by getting engaged in open source development projects in the real world.

That was in 2006. Today there are several college-based initiatives that have taken up Patterson's charge. This article describes three such efforts.

In January 2006 as part of an independent study project, a small group of students and faculty at Trinity College downloaded the open source Sahana disaster management system, installed it on their server, and began studying the source code. Sahana was developed in Sri Lanka by a group of volunteer programmers in the immediate aftermath of the 2004/5 Asian Tsunami. Over the next several months the Trinity group designed and built a Volunteer Management module that was incorporated into the code base in December 2006.

In addition to learning how to manage and use the tools of the typical open source development environment such as Eclipse, Sourceforge, CVS, and SVN, Trinity students also learned how to interact with programmers and developers in Sahana's development community, most of whom are based in Sri Lanka. Two students eventually went on to earn committer status in the Sahana project, thus becoming full-fledged members of the Sahana project team. You can't really get more 'real world' than that.

Building on Trinity's Sahana experience, a group of faculty at Trinity, Connecticut College, and Wesleyan University sought funding from the National Science Foundation under its CPATH (Computing Pathways to Revitalized Undergraduate Education) program and started the Humanitarian Free and Open Source Software project (HFOSS). The project's goal is to get undergraduates engaged in building F/LOSS that benefits the public good ("humanity") as a way to help revitalize undergraduate computing education. To date, F/LOSS concepts and practices have been introduced in a variety of introductory and advanced undergraduate courses.

Since 2007 the HFOSS project has engaged undergraduates in several F/LOSS development projects, including OpenMRS and GNOME. Source code from these projects has been studied and used in courses, independent studies, capstone projects, and summer research internships. CS students have learned about the F/LOSS movement and the F/LOSS development and distribution model. And HFOSS students have made real contributions to these projects, including helping to deploy Sahana in China during the 2008 earthquake and in Haiti during the 2010 earthquake.

Reactions from HFOSS students have been overwhelmingly enthusiastic and positive. A typical sentiment expressed in course evaluations and questionnaires is: "after taking this independent study I realized that I can be in the lab, doing what I am interested in, and still make a humanitarian impact and help society."

This summer the HFOSS project will expand to several new schools, including a woman's college (Mount Holyoke College, in Hadley, MA), a community College (Bergen Community College, in Bergen, NJ), and a traditionally black college (North Carolina Central University in Durham, NC). The goal is to be able to provide summer internship opportunities to students around the country, getting them engaged in building software that serves their communities -- a kind of Computing for America.

A second project that is helping promote open source education is TeachingOpenSource.org (TOS). TOS was established in March 2009 "to serve as neutral collaboration point for everyone involved in Teaching Open Source." Lively discussions on TOS's mailing list focus on open source education models, funding opportunities, community relations, and other issues. A group of TOS participants led by Greg DeKonigsberg of Red Hat has just finished a new textbook: Practical Open Source Software Exploration: How to be Productively Lost, the Open Source Way. The book is freely available under a Creative Commons BY-SA license.

TOS is also sponsoring a number of week-long immersion experiences for CS faculty. Several POSSEs (Professor Open Source Summer Experience) are being planned this year at Worcester State University, RIT, CMU, and elsewhere. And through TOS's efforts there will be an Education Track at this year's OSCON (O'Reilly Open Source Convention) in Portland, OR in July.

In addition to HFOSS and TOS, open source projects and centers are springing up at other colleges. The Rensselaer Center for Open Source Software has started a number of FOSS development projects that are used to anchor classes in computer science and other disciplines. The Center's goal is to support "the development of open software solutions to promote civil societies in the United States and around the globe."

Rochester Institute of Technology has the FOSS@RIT initiative, which hosts an One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) users group and focuses on educational game development. At the University of Waterloo, the Undergraduate Capstone Open Source Projects (UCOSP) brings together undergraduates at several universities in Canada and the U.S. to collaborate on open source capstone projects. This term, participants from nine different schools in Canada and the U.S. are collaborating on seven different F/LOSS development projects.

As these examples show, there is a growing interest in F/LOSS within academia. It is estimated that students make up around 30% of contributors to F/LOSS projects. CS faculty are beginning to recognize that it's time to incorporate the F/LOSS model into the undergraduate curriculum. While CS educators are still well short of Patterson's call to "join the open source movement" things are clearly headed in the right direction.

Big Blue Button

2010-04-05T13:48:00.000-04:00

One of the open source projects to come out of Carleton University is Big Blue Button (BBB), a WebEx-like solution for long distance learning or any other application, such as tele-conferencing, which requires remote users to interact and collaborate. Unlike some "open source" solutions such as DimDim (which doesn't provide all of its src or all of its features in the open source version), all of the src and APIs for BBB is open, fairly well documented, and has attracted a very active community of developers and translators.

Last week I attended Big Blue Button day and was very impressed at how far the quality of the software had progressed. Developers from China, France, and Louisiana attended the celebration using BBB and were able to interact with the attendees. Some movies of the event, showing the software demonstration, are available here.

If you're a student looking for a Google Summer of Code project, Big Blue Button has its project ideas here. Note that applications for Summer of Code end on April 9th.

Getting The Work Done

2010-04-02T08:59:00.002-04:00

Today's columnist is Emma Jane Hogbin from Hick Tech. She writes:

Several weeks ago I decided it was time to delegate some of my work. I needed a set of notes from one of the classes I taught converted into an eBook. I knew that I wanted to be able to edit the material myself and that I wanted everything to be done in an open source tool. "Easy," I thought. "I'll just hire a F/LOSS person to do this for me." It turns out: not so easy after all. I asked my network of people if they knew any graphic designers who did book layout and worked in open source tools. What came back was the sound of crickets. Inconceivable! How could there be no one who matched my criteria?

A colleague of mine told me that he often uses online "freelance" networks to job out some of his tasks. He recommended both Elance and oDesk. My job description was short:

I need someone to do layout work on several short ebooks (~20 pages). Due to their technical nature (HOWTO programming guides) I need to be able to edit the documents easily if mistakes are reported. Even though it's not a layout tool, I would prefer the work to be submitted as OpenOffice.org documents with styles correctly applied (not manually adjusted per heading/paragraph etc). 1. Are these constraints you are able to work within? 2. Approximately how many hours do you think it will take to create and apply a style guide to a short ebook?

The list of applicants was even shorter. On Elance I received three applicants, one of whom asked me, "Do you have MS Word? It has excellent layout capabilities, and I prefer to work with that program." oDesk returned a much longer list of applicants from Asia Pacific. None of these candidates seemed to know what OpenOffice.org was. I had thought that open source software was big in India, Thailand and Malaysia. I ended up hiring a Belgian through Elance with a Masters in Graphic Design who'd never used OpenOffice.org before. She was a delight to work with and caught on quickly. (Look for "anndesign" on Elance.)

While oDesk and Elance both have a lot of open source software tools listed for server-side tasks, they are devoid of people offering desktop publishing skills. Fewer than a dozen providers on Elance have DocBook listed, and only one provider has listed OpenOffice.org. It's possible that there are swaths of people with desktop publishing skills who are looking for work elsewhere, or perhaps they are so busy with work they aren't using sites like Elance or oDesk. Either way, this makes it difficult for me to get my work done.

Even though I have an excellent graphic designer who sends me all source files for business cards and other graphic work, eBooks does not have an easily converted source file. Most graphic designers these days seem to use In Design. While the open source application Inkscape can open Illustrator files, there is no crossover application for book layout. There are perfectly viable open source tools, yet the demand is simply not there for graphic designers to take the plunge. Here's what we need to do:

If you are someone who works with open source desktop tools, please register your services in one of the online freelance marketplaces. If you already are registered, please let me know where to look for you.

Ask your graphic designer to return source files in an open format.

Seek out professionals who work with open source tools. Name specific F/LOSS applications as part of your job posting. My Elance provider saw the software name and downloaded it before replying to the job posting.

We need to show that there is a new demand for skilled labour with experience in open source applications. We've done a good job of getting server-side F/LOSS tools into the language of the server room, now we need to do the same in the front office. It's up to us to ask for the skills and educate our workforce--it will give higher visibility and increase adoption of our applications of choice. There is no easier way to affect change than to simply make it part of our daily routine.

Cloud Solutions

2010-04-01T08:59:00.001-04:00

The April issue of the OSBR is now available in PDF and HTML formats. The editorial theme this month is "Cloud Solutions" and the authors include:

David Linthicum is the CTO of Bick Group, an author, and thought leader on cloud computing. Dave's article starts with a discussion on the causes of the shift to cloud computing. He then clarifies the meaning of the broad term of cloud computing by identifying its key characteristics, different deployment models, and various components. Dave finishes with an important discussion on the value and economics of the cloud.

Fred Waldner is an independent consultant and a Certified Professional Project Manager. His article discusses how the shift to cloud computing mirrors the same challenges that we witnessed with the shift to enterprise adoption of the Internet in the 1990s. He identifies some of the adoption obstacles that must be overcome.

Daniel Crenna is an award winning developer, author, and active entrepreneur. Daniel articulates the value of open source in hosted solutions as companies adopt cloud computing. He examines the reasons why companies use established open source software or give away their proprietary code as the seeds of new open source projects.

Ronald Schmelzer is a Managing Partner at ZapThink LLC. His article addresses the debate about private clouds. There are many companies that are afraid of deploying critical applications and/or data in a public cloud environment. Instead, many are contemplating building their own internal cloud which goes against much of the value proposition of cloud computing and keeps their dependency on expensive commercial software. Ron argues that the concept of private clouds is a marketing term used by vendors rebranding their products.

Tom Lounibos, CEO for SOASTA, discusses how the pay-as-you-go cloud computing model allows SOASTA to simulate performance tests with loads that were simply not feasible in the on-premise world. Low cost, on-demand cloud computing services allow companies to deploy more reliable and scalable solutions because they can now afford to test peak loads and fix bottlenecks before they happen in the production environment.

John Crupi is CTO and Chris Warner is Vice President of Marketing at JackBe Corporation. Previous articles discuss how the lower levels of the stack are becoming a commodity and that IT's focus should be on business functionality. John and Chris provide some examples of how organizations are leveraging mashups to aggregate data from various locations into composite applications.

The editorial theme for the upcoming May issue of the OSBR is Communications Enablement and the guest editor will be Chris McPhee. Submissions are due by April 20--contact the Editor if you are interested in a submission.

Canada--Social Innovation Nation?

2010-03-26T12:57:00.002-04:00

Today's columnist is Stephen Huddart from the J. W. McConnell Family Foundation. He writes:

It seems that everywhere you look these days, people are calling upon Canada to invest more in innovation. Here for example is Preston Manning on the topic and here is former Privy Council head Kevin Lynch. Such commentaries typically focus on the roles of business, government and universities – but either barely mention or completely ignore the community or voluntary sector. For those of us who work and volunteer in this sector, this is a regrettable and all-too-familiar oversight.

Tim Brodhead, President and CEO of the J. W. McConnell Family Foundation, has provided a helpful reminder of this sector’s powerful role in innovation, as well as a comprehensive analysis of the sector’s recent history and future potential. As he notes in the former document, the most recent Speech from the Throne makes a break with the usual pattern of omission, and refers to innovative charities working in concert with business and government to solve persistent social problems. The speech states that:

Every day, the power of innovation is seen at work in communities across this country, as citizens, businesses and charitable groups join forces to tackle local problems.

Too often, however, grassroots efforts are hobbled by red tape. Too often, local solutions are denied access to government assistance because they do not fit the bureaucratic definition of the problem. Too often, the efforts of communities falter not on account of a lack of effort or heart, but because of a lack of expertise to turn good ideas into reality.
Our Government will take steps to support communities in their efforts to tackle local challenges.
It will look to innovative charities and forward-thinking private-sector companies to partner on new approaches to many social challenges.

Before we can consider the community sector’s role in catalyzing innovation, we need to look at business model innovation within the sector itself. As Bill Drayton points out in Massive Change, from 1700 onwards business innovation has generated compounded productivity increases of 2 - 3% per year, while the social sector’s tightly regulated operating system of grants and donations has hardly evolved since the 1800’s. To support the passion and entrepreneurial energy that shape bold new ventures, innovative models and methods are essential.

First Steps: Creating Time and Space for Innovation in the Community Sector

Continuous innovation in the community sector has only emerged in the last couple of decades. Within this timeframe, McConnell developed a suite of national programs that tested, adapted and scaled up new approaches over periods extending up to a decade or more. In fields ranging from community economic development to arts in education, breakthrough results came about because a funder was prepared to accompany grantees through cycles of testing, failure and adaptation rather than put them all to sleep in a Procrustean bed. Tides Foundation Canada, established in 2000, introduced shared back office services so that social and environmental innovators could spend more time on their mission-related work and less on operating redundant, resource-intensive administrative structures. The Kahanoff Centre in Calgary and the Centre for Social Innovation (CSI) in Toronto introduced co-location for non-profits so that they could benefit from access to shared services, economies of scale, and convergence innovation – the unexpected results of people and ideas bumping into one another. Today CSI is home to over 100 nonprofits and is linked to centres like the Hubs in Halifax and London, England. A second site is in the works. The model works in smaller centres too - the Creative Space in Barrie operates on similar principles. Counter to this promising trend - and to the government’s stated intentions in the Throne Speech - Industry Canada has just announced that it is ending support for much of its Community Access Program. This noble effort to bridge the digital divide ensured that low income and transient people had access to the net and supported innovations like Homeless Nation.

Next Steps: Building a Culture of Social Innovation

Social Innovation Generation, a partnership between McConnell, MaRS Discovery District in Toronto, the University of Waterloo and the PLAN Institute in Vancouver was designed to enable closer collaboration among institutions with complementary capacities for supporting social change. At the risk of oversimplification, McConnell contributes funding, convening and several communities of changemakers; MaRS adds support for social entrepreneurship and social finance; Waterloo brings intellectual leadership, research capacity and new tools for organizational learning; and PLAN’s work with the disability sector exemplifies how an entire domain can be shifted from ‘problem’ to ‘promise’.

New operating systems for the community sector are about to emerge. One set of strategies is clustered under the heading of social finance – funding and organizational models that support hybrid organizations generating both profits and specific public benefits. Shared reporting platforms are needed to streamline relations between funders and grantees. We need a new marketplace for good ideas in this sector – one that removes some of the barriers to bringing good ideas to the attention of funders, and to scaling up the best ideas. When one funder has done due diligence on a proposal it can often save others the trouble – here's an idea from Philanthropy Australia that might be worth building upon. Other areas in development include tools for measuring social impact, and open software platforms that enable multiple organizations to share data and learning.

To take this work to the next level, we need public, private and philanthropic investments in these areas, plus an accessible, adaptable architecture – an ecology if you will – that supports new players entering the field - locally, regionally and nationally. With social innovation partnerships and hubs in place, and networked, a whole new set of capacities and possibilities emerges.

For the open source community – volunteer developers, teachers, students, entrepreneurs – the needs and opportunities are boundless. In addition to the work involved in connecting the community sector with new, networked means of getting things done, whole new frontiers are opening up: working with open API databases to create new data sets for analyzing and tracking social innovations will generate new knowledge and enable innovation collaboratives to learn and adapt quickly.

When private and public institutions collaborate with the community sector, disruptive innovation can take place, saving scarce resources, improving services and deepening civic engagement. An illustrative example is PLAN’s Tyze program, which enables collaboration between the formal and informal health sectors. This one social innovation, developed in Canada, has garnered attention and support from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation in the US and is also being piloted in the UK. Imagine what could be accomplished with a pipeline of such ideas, as Mexico is building with its Oportunidades program.

Canada: Social Innovation Nation?

As a uniquely diverse society with a strong community sector (the second largest in the world as a share of the economically active population according to The Canadian Nonprofit and Voluntary Sector in Comparative Perspective; Imagine Canada 2005), we have some natural advantages when it comes to social innovation. Observers who have rightly pointed out that innovation = productivity = social wellbeing have often missed the fact that the community sector provides invaluable social R&D, and that hobbling it with outdated business models is a serious drag on the economy.

The open source software community is part of this picture too, although often overlooked because it isn’t organized into ‘charities’ where things like volunteer hours can be counted. Unleashing the generative possibilities among open source technologies, new social process tools and the community sector ought to be a priority component of our national innovation strategy, and would help Canada to define and occupy an advantageous global niche.

Go Green: Reduce, Reuse, Refactor

2010-03-19T08:54:00.001-04:00

Today's columnist is Christopher Sean Morrison from BRL-CAD. Sean writes:

I recently had an epiphany. Go Green. At least, that was what initially came to mind. I wasn't thinking about recycling soda cans, planting trees, preserving rain forests, or reducing my carbon footprint -- however honorable and beneficial those activities may be. I was thinking about open source. Open source needs to Go Green.

Before I lose you on the metaphor, let me rewind back and set the stage a little. A few weeks ago, I found myself doing what I love most, in an intense coding session working on one of my favourite open source projects. I was "in the zone", working in code for hours and hours on end without any distractions. Intense maybe isn't the right word for it, though. Painful. Yes, painful and frustrating. That fits much better. You see, instead of writing something cool and awesome during my insular zone time, I was hunting down a rather elusive bug. No epiphany to be had there.

It was the sort of frustrating grunt work that one loves to hate. I can usually isolate a bug in source code pretty quickly, but this bug was not cooperating at all. Quite rude. If fact, after many hours of hunting across dozens of debugger sessions, recompiles, and testing, I eventually threw in the towel on a direct approach.

Contrary to the vast array of debugging tools and experience at my fingertips, I found myself manually hunting through commit history in a binary-search fashion so that I could at least pin-point the change that caused the bug in hopes that the cause would be evident. After about four hours of hunting, I had finally narrowed it down to within a mere 1000 commits. Add a couple more hours and I'd finally found the exact problematic commit, isolated the bug, and a fix was in place by the end of the day. Still no epiphany.

I originally avoided manually searching history as I knew it would be tedious, boring, time-consuming, and most importantly, I knew that this non-critical bug had been there for a while. Our regression test suite caught the bug the moment it happened and -- while I'm sure there was a perfectly reasonable justification at the time -- it was duly ignored by all developers and it stayed that way for many months.

No epiphany necessary there either. It's obvious in hindsight that the bug shouldn't have been ignored. It would have probably been less costly to fix had it been addressed the moment it was detected during regression testing. Kaner, Bach, and Pettichord write about how bugs are cheaper to fix the earlier they are found in Lessons Learned in Software Testing: A Context-Driven Approach. McConnell strongly reinforces this notion in his book Code Complete. That decision blunder isn't the highlight, though.

A couple days later as I was tidying up the loose ends, finishing bug fix verification, and updating documentation for our release notes, I was flabbergasted by what I found. Not only was the bug already documented, there were notes on the cause, details on why it wasn't immediately handled, and thoughts on a proposed fix, all conveniently offered in plain sight exactly where it was supposed to be. Not only that, the commit log added insult to injury: I was the one that documented it.

You see, this particular open source project is a large, complex software suite with more than a million lines of code, dozens of libraries, and hundreds of tools. There is a lot of documentation. So much so that when some contributors started translating some of our documentation to another language, I was astonished to discover that we had somewhere between half a million and a million words. That's at least a few thousand pages even without pictures! Even still, what is written is considered insufficient and many features are still not documented despite our efforts.

Epiphany realization begins.

I started thinking hard about documentation and software complexity. If I had just overlooked that little piece of developer documentation that was succinct, easily accessible, in the right place, and even written by me, how awful might the situation be for our users that have to wade through a sea of unfamiliar documentation in a myriad of formats and locations. The organization, clarity, and complexity of the documentation is in direct correlation with the software itself. This is a software ecosystem problem.

The ecosystem software developers deal with is a complex world where toxic and eco-friendly practices for managing software share common ground. The structures we erect and fields we sow are impacted by ingrained complexity of features and complexity of implementation which in turn affect the manner in which they are managed. The more complex the environment, the harder they are to make easily navigable by others, the more overhead and infrastructure are required to provide basic services, the more costly they are to maintain.

Applying similar concepts of environmental responsibility, going "green" is about making real and lasting changes to the way software is managed. A few basic guidelines can be applied to pretty much all software projects, including open source, with relatively minimal effort. Eco-friendly developer activities strive to minimize complexity, maximize value, and optimize efficiency. This philosophical conservancy is aimed directly at improving the environment of all open source through Reduce, Reuse, Refactor.

Reduce Complexity

Complexity is acquired in open source projects in many ways but none as harmful (to users) as through the proliferation of options. If there's a request that can be solved with one more checkbox, another menu option, or just one more tool, there's generally a developer willing to implement it. The user gets their feature. Everyone else pays the price.

Source code complexity increases to implement the feature. The complexity of the user interface increases to present the feature. Documentation complexity (if even updated) increases to annotate how it works. All of those increases have implicit long-term maintenance and associated support costs.

In the commercial world, there are often managers, corporate culture, designers, and marketing teams to keep the proliferation of options in check. Apple has consistently demonstrated a strong capacity to produce relatively simple interfaces that expose a relatively minimal subset of options. While most open source thrives on freedom and choice, that does not mean that every option under the sun has to be presented to the user or that usability should be an afterthought. Ubuntu Linux is a great example within open source where usability is a primary focus.

Pay more attention to usability. Your users will thank you. The OpenUsability initiative specifically focuses on improving the usability of open source software by helping pair usability experts and designers with open source software developers. Open source projects need to organize their information, categorize features, and carefully consider the impact of exposing every feature to the user. Get rid of functionality that provides marginal value to users.

Reuse Components

Consolidate and collaborate. Instead of reinventing the wheel and writing things from scratch, spend that extra time trying to make someone else's code work. Most open source developers hate to hear this, thinking they can write what they need from scratch faster than they could integrate someone else's work. The truth of the matter is, though, that it's simply not nearly as much fun to read code as it is to write it yourself.

Reusing components doesn't just refer to other people's code. Reuse your own code and make it modular, well documented, and reusable by others. Joel Spolsky of Fog Creek Software wrote a fantastic article on this very subject entitled Things You Should Never Do, Part I where he writes about not being delusional that code written from scratch is inherently any better than code that already exists.

Even if a component is not directly usable or might take longer to integrate than it would to write from scratch (regardless of that claim generally shown to be a fallacy in the long-term), there is more aggregate value adding through reuse. In other words, you are being socially responsible to the open source environment by helping improve the existing landscape rather than merely adding to it. Collaborate with others.

Refactor Functionality

There are now several excellent books and an abundance of online resources that cater to code refactoring. Kerievsky talks about "bad smells" in his book Refactoring to Patterns where he points out a series of common source code issues that are indicative of potential problems. Martin Fowler and other authors provide a compendium of about 70 different improvements that can be made in Refactoring: Improving the Design of Existing Code. Particularly with regards to code duplication, adhere to the principle of "Don't Repeat Yourself" (also known as "Duplication is Evil"). Hunt and Thomas articulate this and other concepts in their book The Pragmatic Programmer where they characterize how to make code flexible, easy to adapt, and reusable.

From a practical developer perspective, there are a plethora of basic guidelines that will help future development and maintainability. Eliminate duplicate code. Break large complex functions up into smaller simpler functions. Remove classes and structures that don't provide value. Simplify complicated design patterns. Use clear, consistent, and simple naming conventions. For open source projects, this is an optimization-minimization problem. Refactor to improve usability. Refactor to encourage reuse. Refactor to improve maintainability.

Disaster DIY: Adventures in Free and Open Source Software

2010-03-12T10:48:00.001-05:00

This week's columnist is Jason Cote from Freeform Solutions. He writes:

Do you like to Do-It-Yourself (DIY)? This is a homage to all the DIY-ers out there. While I was being sucked into the black hole of my latest DIY adventure, I had the marginally comforting epiphany that despite it eating up all the time I had thought I would use to write this article, it also gave me a (cautionary?) tale to share.

First, the background. In October 2006, I set up my first Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) phone system using Asterisk. It is amazing what you can do with open source software. In this case, a truly ancient machine (circa 1999) had been pressed into service once more, after a life of file and web server drudgery. This time, the exciting horizon of VoIP beckoned. Maybe the hardware liked being on the cutting edge, since this little machine kept ticking over the years since then, through a failed power supply and a couple of failed hard drives.

My memories of the many frustrating hours spent learning how to put it all together have long since been romanticized, thanks to the time that’s passed since then. I do remember that I had wanted to set it up for some time, and I certainly remember discovering that I needed to know about a great many more things than I had originally anticipated. Nonetheless, eventually, I installed the necessary software and tucked the machine under my desk and tried to forget about it.

Cut to the present day. This week, the power supply failed again, or so I thought. I replaced it with another spare; the motherboard lit up, but the power supply would still not power up. I pulled what I could off the motherboard, and still no joy. No problem, I thought, this motherboard has been running 24/7 for a decade – I'll look at it later. In the meantime, I'll put the drives in another, newer, spare computer, and get the phone system back online.

If this were a movie, you would hear the spooky music right about now.

With the drives in another computer, Linux refused to initialize the storage. I was beginning to sense the black hole way in the distance. Hardware drivers are still the final frontier in open source software. There could be a firmware or other update required. Or, I may have missed changing some obscure system setting. Decision time: continue fussing with the old hardware, or spend my time installing a completely new system?

The old hardware never really stood a chance in this reckoning. For a long time, I have been wanting to install a new phone system, as a virtual machine on hardware located in a data centre. Now, with the old phone system sitting in pieces all around me, it was all too easy to fully commit to this new DIY adventure. I was firmly in the grip of the black hole.

I did not really want to spend much time discovering, evaluating, and comparing the options all over again, but so much has changed in the VoIP landscape over the last three-plus years. I needed to pick something, now. But so many choices. How should I choose? Should I follow the same direction as my original approach, or try something new? Should I support a purely community-driven effort, or one supported by commercial interests? Should I stand my ground on what license was being used? Should I pick something that looked pretty, or something that sounded well engineered?

One of the hardest things in using open source software effectively is knowing when to stop evaluating. If you dive into several projects and look at all these factors, you can be simply spoiled for choice. You’ve got to pick something, and go for it.

I remembered that clock timing issues had been a real problem when running in a virtual server the last time, so I looked for Asterisk-based distributions that seemed to have their virtual house in order.

I like the real or perceived performance improvements provided by paravirtualization over full virtualization, and this preference limits my options. I looked at one distribution, and it was clear they were not supporting paravirtualization by default. I looked at another distribution, which had documentation explaining how it could be paravirtualized; I tried it, but it did not work as advertised. If their website and documentation had been more polished, I would have tried harder. Instead, I found another distribution that claimed to make virtualizing fast and easy.

I was beginning to orbit the event horizon with alarming speed, so I committed.

Let me be clear in saying that this distribution did not work as advertised either. I was quite disappointed, since, other than new learning, my pursuit of the ready-to-run distributions left me empty handed. They did not deliver the value they promised: it was not faster, and it was not easier, unless you wanted to run it on a dedicated machine.

So, having gone through three explorations already – the original failed hardware, the inability of new hardware to boot the old drives, and attempts at virtualizing ready-to-run Asterisk distributions – I turned to the core open source software itself: Asterisk.

In the end, it only took a few manual tweaks to various Asterisk configuration files, and the use of the FreePBX configuration GUI. I quickly and easily created a VoIP telephone system, with all the trimmings – system recordings, a digital receptionist, inbound and outbound routes, extensions, etc. – in only a few hours. By just rolling up my sleeves and diving in with the core open source software I needed, eventually I made it through the black hole and emerged in a whole new universe of working VoIP goodness.

For this, I am extremely grateful. My sincerest thanks to all of us in the free and open source software community, for making things for DIY-ers to do. This is how my tale turned out. Others might end up in completely different places when starting at the same point. That’s a core strength of open source software: it gives us all choices, and the freedom to pursue them in any direction (including around in circles).

There is More than Code in Open Source

2010-03-05T08:07:00.004-05:00

Today's columnist is Carlo Daffara, the Italian member of the European Working group on libre software. He writes:

Even among researchers, when you talk about “contributions” to open source software you invariably talk about code. Packages, patches, lines of code, whatever: code. In my view, this is quite restrictive, and it is important to start to think about all the possible contributions that are outside of pure code, and how to incent these contributions within projects.

When we think about an open source project, what types of contributions can we find? During a presentation, Aaron Seigo of the KDE project discussed these:

artwork

documentation

human-computer interaction

marketing

quality assurance

software development

translation

Software development is one of the aspects, but not the only one. After all, if the software is ugly, few people will use it. If it does not work in your language, you may find it less useful, and so on.

Matthias Mueller of the Open Office project published an interesting graph with a similar story. The graph shows the number of active participants in each OpenOffice.org project, with each area proportional to the number of committers. In other words, the larger the area, the more people are active in that area of contribution. The yellow area on the left is related to code, while the coloured part on the right is related to everything else. If you look carefully, you will find that the number of people working on the code aspect is less than the “non-code” part!

In a report published in 2006, one of the project managers of OpenCascade.org (a sophisticated library and toolset designed to create computer aided design (CAD) systems, based on the commercial CAD sold by Matra Datavision) published an interview. Among other things, it stated: “In the year 2000, fifty outside contributors to Open Cascade provided various kinds of assistance: transferring software to other systems (IRIX 64 bits, Alpha OSF), correcting defects (memory leaks…) and translating the tutorial into Spanish, etc. Currently, there are seventy active contributors and the objective is to reach one hundred. These outside contributions are significant. Open Cascade estimates that they represent about 20% of the value of the software.”

The reality is that non-code contributions are significant, and should be encouraged in any possible way. In your open source software project, create a place to help those that are willing to give you more than source code, because that value will get lost if not properly collected. Even small things, like knowing that the code is used by someone, is a positive contribution.

In the next column, I will talk about possible strategies projects can use to improve non-code participation.

March Issue on Mobile Published

2010-03-01T10:03:00.000-05:00

The editorial theme for the March issue of the OSBR is Mobile. The guest editors are François Lefebvre from Communications Research Centre, Canada and Thomas Kunz from Carleton University, Ottawa. This month's authors include:

Andreas Constantinou is the Research Director at VisionMobile. His article discusses the importance of governance models to understand the dynamics of an open source product, constrasting it to the better understood role of licences. Using the mobile industry as an example, he demonstrates how governance models can be used by open source sponsors to control the development of open source products, and argues for more education and clarity on governance models.

Jason Kridner is the open platforms principal architect at Texas Instruments Incorporated. His article discusses the challenges and successes in establishing a vibrant ecosystem around the BeagleBoard, a low-cost, fan-less single-board computer. The efforts within this community have allowed the BeagleBoard to become a versatile and powerful open embedded device.

David Burgess of the OpenBTS Project discusses the project's experiences, which will probably become the first case of a free software GSM basestation in a public cellular network. The article focuses on the challenges of the project, as well as the advantages of having followed the open source route.

François Lefebvre leads the Mobile Multimedia Broadcasting team at Communications Research Centre, Canada. His article surveys CRC’s attempt to increase collaboration and innovation in the field of mobile broadcasting by developing and offering complete end-to-end free and open source software toolsets.

Carl B. Dietrich, Jeffrey H. Reed, Stephen H. Edwards and Frank E. Kragh discuss OSSIE, a university-based open source Software Defined Radio project at Virginia Tech. OSSIE software has proven useful for rapid prototyping by industry as well as for published research and education of hundreds of graduate and undergraduate students. In addition to examples of OSSIE’s successes, the project’s challenges and approaches to mitigating and overcoming them are described.

Hal Steger, Vice President of Marketing at Funambol, inc., introduces the cloud computing paradigm as a way to deliver mobile applications and data. His article discusses trends that are driving the adoption of the mobile cloud, important components of mobile cloud infrastructure, and the role of open source.

Bradley M. Kuhn is the Policy Analyst and Technology Director at the Software Freedom Law Center. He briefly reviews the history of free software in the mobile device space, focusing on both software and hardware. A review of the available alternatives to-date leads him to conclude that users, while able to access open code bases from major companies, are at the mercy of these companies. For a number of reasons, true software freedom on mobile devices is, as yet, an elusive goal.

Minimum Viable Product

2010-02-19T09:51:00.002-05:00

Today's columnist is Emma Jane Hogbin (who, BTW, will be speaking at the Women in Open Source conference in a few hours). She writes:

A few weeks ago Eric Ries, author of Startup Lessons Learned, taught me my new favourite term: Minimum Viable Product (MVP). I learned the term during a session at an unconference. I was pretty sure I wanted to learn about micro-businesses, not startups, but Eric's session was as close as the schedule came to combining "small" and "business." The session was fantastic. If you're like me, you have a bit of a morbid streak that loves to commiserate with other businesses about your failures.

The session was full of delicious new ways to fail. My favourite example was tied to the explanation of a MVP. After weeks of working on features, a project was made available for download. No one downloaded it. The MVP in this case was actually a download link. It would have told the developers no one was actually interested in downloading the product they were creating. The link could have been empty and it would have taught them the same lesson.

Let's take a look at the definition of an MVP: "The minimum viable product is that version of a new product which allows a team to collect the maximum amount of validated learning about customers with the least effort".

There are a few key words and concepts in here that deserve special attention. "Minimum" and "maximum" are of course completely subjective. Your team will need to decide what balance needs to exist between these two terms. The second part of this idea is that you are looking for validated information about your customers. You don't need a lot of people to tell you things about your product, but you need to have enough to tell you whether your assumptions about your customers were right or wrong.

MVP, is similar to the well-known open source expression, "release early, release often." It goes a little farther though--it's not just about getting your code out; it's about getting your code out with the intention of learning something about your customers. In other words: it's not about your code; it's about your users. Just this week someone told me they pushed code they knew was broken to motivate another developer to complete a task they'd promised to work on. Ouch! Of course I knew they weren't actually pushing broken code out to the customer, just out to another developer. Their MVP was broken code. They knew broken code would be more successful at getting a feature implemented over having no code at all. Don't make this mistake with code you push to your end users. It will teach you only that broken code makes users angry, discouraged and it may even make them switch to another product.

Your product has to work for you to gain information about your customers. You must fully complete a task before starting the next. In my experience, 100% of a useful feature is better than 80% of 5 potentially useful features. Mobile text messaging and microblogging, when done right, is the simple exchange of 140 or so characters. There are all sorts of extra things that you can add to this but, at a minimum, the message needs to get from one person to another. If you think up a new feature to add to the first, make sure it too works before you ask the public what they think of it.

MVP doesn't need to be limited to code. Examples that may be relevant to your project include:

A/B split testing on marketing pages: what is the minimum feature list that will get people to sign up for notifications about your project?

AdWords: what feature description makes people click through an ad to get to your project's website?

Documentation: Do people really want to read an entire User Manual? What's the minimum documentation you can produce which does not result in support requests?

Take a look at the project you are working on right now and find your minimum viable product. Finish up that one little thing you're working on. Push your product out and learn the lessons your customers have to teach now. Stop fussing and start getting real feedback on what is going to make your project succeed.

You can read more about the concept of the Minimum Viable Product on Eric's Web site.

TIM Lecture: Project Students Present on CEAs and Ecosystems‏

2010-02-13T09:40:00.003-05:00

The next TIM lecture will take place on Feb 17. This lecture highlights the projects of MEng students on communications-enabled applications (CEAs) and vendor-neutral business ecosystems. Please join us for an opportunity to meet and talk to the students. Planned presentations:

• Daniel Cardenas, A practical CEA implementation: the ActivityBox event registration system
• Andrew Ceponkus, Opportunities for CEAs in the healthcare sector
• Ihab Khalil, Managing security within a vendor-neutral business ecosystem
• Patrick O'Halloran, How should assets be managed within a vendor neutral ecosystem?

Time and location of the lecture:

Wed, Feb 17, 2010
4:00 p.m. to 7:00 p.m.
Carleton University
Room TBA

The event will also be broadcast over the web. See the event website for instructions. Please RSVP here.