On Symbian, Communities, and Motivation

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.

Open Source Codeathon for Humanity

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:

1. 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.
2. 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.

Sales Strategy

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.

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

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.

Talking Book Program Launched

Yesterday, Literacy Bridge launched their Talking Book pilot program in Ghana. OSBR readers will remember Literacy Bridge from Cliff Schmidt's article in the October 2008 issue entitled "Reducing Global Poverty and Disease with Community and Technology: An Open Source Perspective". The Talking Book is an excellent example of using open source and technology to tackle problems like global poverty.

What Does it Mean to be an Open Source Business?

Nelson Ko of Citadel Rock has a blog post by that name. His first of top two lessons is interesting:

The community is more important than your company.

If you like his blog post, check out his OSBR article Open Source as Community.