Sign up today and I’ll see you there.

Cheers,

Herlo

Just a quick reminder to all of you out there who might be considering submitting a paper for the Utah Open Source Conference coming up this October 7-9.  The call for papers is coming to a close on August 1 so hurry up and get it submitted :)  I’m planning on submitting a paper for FreeSeer and will likely also present on the State of UTOS at the conference.

Cheers,

Herlo

How do we address this problem?  Who does it?

In other words, how do small to medium communities battle Apathy?

In all honesty, I don’t have the answer for this question.  If I did, I’d be preaching it to every community group that would listen.  But it does occur to me that the/re are a few things the folks in charge can do to help.  And some of these are documented by the larger communities too.

1. First thing that comes to mind is to build a proper structure.  A meritocracy where those who do the work can decide what gets done.  As most will note, this is no different from any other Free Software development project.  But we need to state it out loud.  If you do the work in the community, you get to decide how the community functions. As part of this process, community leaders can define a loose structure where others can join up, and help build where they find holes.  It’s a definite organic structure, but one that really works well when encouraged.
2. Have something people want, and give it to them.  For us, it’s the Utah Open Source Conference and the other events the Foundation has been providing, like hackUTOS, Nerds in the Sun, Geek Lunch, etc.   Most of these events are free and for anyone to enjoy, learn and network.  However, I can see the need for even more events and services that UTOS can provide.
3. Remind people regularly that community is here.  Reminders are very important.  It’s like what Coke and Pepsi do, constantly remind you they are out there.  The only real difference is that they are looking to sell you something for money.  UTOS and other communities are really here to help you grow and learn.
4. Constantly invite people to join the community and help.  The community is a process that is always evolving and growing, people are needed to make it evolve and grow the way they see it.  Notice I said the way they see it.  It’s up to the community members to decide where the community goes.
5. Get out of the way.  This is somewhat of a corollary to step 4, but it’s really important to point out.  Once the community machine is going, don’t put process and leadership in the way.  The community can do what it needs to do if we just get out of the way, don’t be an obstacle to progress of the community.

As UTOS, we’ve excelled at some parts of this list, and failed at other parts.  I suspect many of the other communities around have succeeded at some of the parts as well.

Mostly, I wrote this to help me understand what the goals for UTOS will be as we start to expand into a more regional community.  But I think these things can help us all deal with apathy and encourage others to get involved.  I hope to hear from the community on this as my article is definitely a work in progress.  I believe I’ve got a good set of problems and possible solutions, but it’s definitely not me that is going to implement most of them.

Please take a few hours out of the month of June and help us grow and become an exciting, active prosperous community.  You’ll feel better for it, and you’ll definitely make a few friends along the way, grow your skillset, and possibly even encourage someone else to join up and help.

I have never attended Agile Roots before, nor have I been a big part of the Agile community, but I have to say that spending time listening and learning has been very intriguing and I can see the definite value of using agile methods.

The morning keynote was pretty awesome, sharing how to collaborate and improving processes by letting others, including customers be involved.

Also, the afternoon keynote was incredible, Diana Larsen is a really bright and eloquent speaker who can really get you excited.  It seemed to me that she was really interested in solving some serious deficits with Agile methods.

I attended a great session on user experience design (UxD) and branding.  One where we branded a flavor of popcorn.  We had a cinnamon popcorn and branded ours with Jessica Rabbit driving a candy red convertible Volkswagen Rabbit to a Speakeasy in Toon Town.  The presenters really drove home the concept about branding and making sure it all made sense.  Very well done.

But I won’t say it was a perfect day of presentations….

The first half hour of the first presentation of the day (after the keynote) started out interesting and promising.  I really enjoyed the idea of playing Dracula vs Humans and the idea that the oppressor (management) actually felt relieved when they became oppressed.  I also enjoyed the idea that the oppressed (employees) were generally nervous about becoming the oppressor.    It’s an interesting concept to understand and valuable lesson learned.

The next hour of the workshop however, was confusing and frustrating because it didn’t make sense at all.  Why would making a sculpture of what you feel during certain work situations and then resolving them by making short simple movements in rhythm solve anything?  I just didn’t get it.  I’m sure there was value to some, but not to me.

Lightning Talks and the Food Rocked!

At the end of the day, we spend a bit of time doing lightning talks.  I really enjoyed the Su-Ha-Ri talk, the Architecture Haiku, Pigeon Sign Language (though I couldn’t keep up) and several others as well.  That was one of the best hours spent at Agile Roots.

As for the food, you cannot go wrong with Pat’s Barbecue!  One of the best choices the conference team could have made for a dinner.  Everything was excellent and I enjoyed a very nice conversation with a fellow from Version One.  He was from Atlanta and had never been to Utah before.  As usual, he thought it was very beautiful, and we spent a bunch of time talking about the need for a coach to help get Agile started in a large company like Backcountry.com

Agile Roots Day 1: Success!!!

Cheers,

Herlo

One of the coolest things to attend has arrived here in Salt Lake City.  That’s Agile Roots next Monday and Tuesday!  I’ll be going this year and am very excited to see presentations that will likely enlighten and excite me to do more with Agile.

I look forward to seeing you all there.

Cheers,

Herlo

Why don’t more people actually volunteer 2-3 hours per month?

One word, Apathy.  Yes, apathy.

I believe apathy is what kills communities around the globe.  They don’t have to be any specific type of community, but when someone, or enough people stop caring about a particular activity, event or cause, the community will die.  I don’t have any cold, hard facts on this, just my experiences, what I’ve read and my gut telling me it’s so.

If it were up to me, as an individual running a medium sized community conference based around Free and Open Source Software, I’d suggest that everyone come and spend 2-3 hours volunteering at the event.  While I know that’s not realistic, it can combat the apathy of which I speak.  But that’s kind of a problem too.

Where are we heading with this discussion?

For one, there are only so many volunteer positions available at the Utah Open Source Conference, or at a LUG meeting, or any such event.  But there are events that are currently not happening.  Imagine if everyone in the FOSS community in the Mountain West spent those 2-3 hours each month either helping a particular event, or creating their own special event or group.  What would the FOSS community landscape look like?

Each month I run into at least 5 people who want to help out within UTOS.  Each time I tell them the same thing, we have lots of things we need help with, we meet here at this time each month and would love to have you attend.  On rare occasion, we get a new volunteer coming to our meetings.  Sometimes they stay, sometimes they realize it’s too much and other things are a priority, and sometimes, they get so excited, they become one of the Utah Open Source Foundation’s ‘Core Team’.  So far, it’s been working well, but recently, we’ve been experiencing growing pains of our own and a little apathy as well.

Another thing to note, larger communities tend to have already dealt with this problem and have a plethora of answers for dealing with things like Apathy, a lack of knowledge and all of the other standard problems that smaller communities must deal with to thrive.  Most of those answers aren’t documented anywhere, at least not very well documented.

How does a community suffer because of apathy?

I am going to use the Utah Open Source Foundation to give some examples of where we fail.  Currently, I fear that our community suffers from apathy for a few reasons.

1. The economy.  While it’s definitely important for people to have jobs, a paycheck and a promise of more work, I find that this is among the lamest excuse people use for not helping.  If you aren’t participating in the community, you are doing yourself a disservice.  Just think of all of the lost opportunities for employment, education, skill improvement (aka resume material) and networking.
2. Family.  Again, I find that a lot of people in our community use their family as an excuse for not participating.  I’m not saying that families aren’t important.  In fact, I would say that participating in the FOSS community is a perfect example of how to show your family what you do, as well as encourage them to be part of a community and volunteer their time to their passions.  Families do take time, but I can guarantee that everyone can find 2-3 hours per month to volunteer.
3. Time.  While possibly related to the other two issues, time itself can get in the way of volunteering to help the community.  People regularly fear that they can’t dedicate enough time to help, when a community really just wants people to dedicate a few hours a month.  If you are spending a couple hours a month in front of your TV, you could cut that down and spend it helping your community instead.

Watch for part three of this series next week.

Cheers,

Herlo

I spent the morning at PodCampSLC 2010, including my presentation at 10am entitled ‘Capturing audio and video on the cheap’ or ‘How to keep the wife happy while buying lots of electronic equipment’.  I’ve been tinkering with audio and video recording equipment for several years now as part of the Utah Open Source Foundation and the Utah Open Source Conference and figured I had a lot to share.

My presentation slides were pretty basic, but cover some of the equipment I have purchased on the cheap.  In addition, we recorded the presentation using FreeSeeR, a free software application for  recording the desktop screen, external video and/or audio.

Enjoy the presentation slides and video as I really enjoyed presenting and am looking forward to PodCampSLC 2011!

Cheers,

Herlo

It’s clear that Mel has done some incredible work, getting a good number of people to Raleigh this weekend.  I’m looking forward to giving my input and listenting to others as we come up with better ways to handle such things as the EventBox, recording and streaming different presentations, encouraging users to join Fedora and the overall professionalism we portray at each of our events.  There are so many things to get done this weekend, I’m looking forward to seeing what comes out the other side.

As for what I will be doing most of the time.  While I plan to help with the initial brainstorming on FUDCon, external events, etc., I really plan to spend most of my time focusing on improving the way that we record and stream our events.  These events can be as simple as a Local User Group (LUG) meeting to something bigger, like the Southern California Linux Expo (SCaLE), the Ohio Linux Fest or Pycon, and of course, somewhere in there, is the Fedora FAD and FUDCon.

Now mind you, I can see hundreds of other uses for this concept of recording and streaming.  Including live video podcasts, recording for redistribution, ad-hoc collaboration sessions, troubleshooting a problem with code and many, many more use cases.  However, I think I’m going to try to limit my use cases to those specifically around our events.  Things where we can easily set up our recording equipment and share it with those interested, whether in real-time, or making it available later on to the general public.

The software we plan on using to get the recording and streaming off the ground, is called freeseer.  It’s been put together by some folks who help organize and run FOSSLC.  Andrew and Thanh have been hacking hard lately, altering their code to move from the patent encumbered ffmpeg, to the more open and free gstreamer library.  They’ve also been busy moving from a gui with a command line behind it, to using the python gstreamer bindings.  Much cleaner, much easier to manage and alter in real time.  I’m very excited to see how we can improve freeseer over this weekend.  I actually think we’ll be able to do quite a bit with freeseer to improve external participation in Fedora.

Well, the pilot just announced that we’ll be landing in Raleigh in about 20-30 minutes, and that I need to pack up my electronics.  I’m looking forward to seeing all of my Fedora friends and making an amazing events solution.  I’ll try to keep you updated, with pictures and text, over the next few days.

Cheers,

Herlo

I am very sad to report, there will not be any pressed F12 media at FUDCon this time.

However, I expect the financial details to be sorted out sometime between now and Monday.  If this happens, it’s quite possible we can deliver media starting next week.  Still pretty fast, considering.

I guess every FUDCon can’t be perfect, but we’re still going to make this a great event!

If you are in the area, or wish to participate from afar, we’ve got ways for you to get involved.  FUDCon is always free and I’ve got two remote microphones and two mixers that I plan on using to record and stream the audio from two rooms.  I’m also working on a way to stream/record the desktop of the presenter at the same time so we can have audio and video from the desktops in real time (we’ll see if this part happens).  I might even suggest a hackfest on Monday to make it more solid if I can’t get it working tonight/tomorrow.

I’m excited to see all my friends at FUDCon.

Cheers,

Clint

This project was dreamed up by Mr. Ian Weller and he graciously let me tag along to get the thing going.  At the Utah Open Source Conference tomorrow, we’re going to be digging into a workflow and concept around the items needed to make FES work.  We’ll be hanging out from 12:30-5pm in room 209 while we work on the project, feel free to drop by and ask questions as well.

So if you are interested in FES, come join us at UTOSC or remotely in #fedora-fad on irc.freenode.net

Cheers,

Herlo