1. Mateusz Loskot CASCADOSS.eu Meeting 16 June 2008, Warsaw How the FOSS4G projects stimulate building of the communities Mateusz Łoskot (mloskot) mateusz@loskot.net CASCADOSS International Symposium 16 June 2008 in Warsaw, Poland

2. Mateusz Loskot CASCADOSS.eu Meeting 16 June 2008, Warsaw mloskot's background in FOSS4G ● OSGeo Charter Member (2007) ● GDAL/OGR Project Maintainer (2007/2008) ● FOSS4G Advocate, User and Developer – GDAL/OGR – GEOS – Feature Data Objects (FDO) – libLAS – Shapelib, MOSS4G, libtiff, Quantum GIS, GeoTIFF, libgd,...

3. Mateusz Loskot CASCADOSS.eu Meeting 16 June 2008, Warsaw Questions ● How does it work? ● What makes FOSS projects running? ● What makes FOSS projects successful? ● Who makes the decisions? ● How to gain operational health? ● How to survive a project community?

4. Mateusz Loskot CASCADOSS.eu Meeting 16 June 2008, Warsaw The FOSS Movement ● Free and Open Source Software ● 1983 – Richard Stallman's announcement: “if I like a program I must share it with other people who like it” ● “Open Source is a development method for software that harnesses the power of distributed peer review and transparency of process” - Open Source Initiative, late 1990 ● Communities of developers and users

5. Mateusz Loskot CASCADOSS.eu Meeting 16 June 2008, Warsaw Principles of FOSS Communities ● Participants ● Project Management ● Communications ● Technical Infrastructure

6. Mateusz Loskot CASCADOSS.eu Meeting 16 June 2008, Warsaw What makes a FOSS community? ● A group of people – volunteers, freelancers & contractors ● Participants are individuals ● People earn their position and privileges ● Higher level actors: companies (RR, ADSK, DMSG), governments, universities and research institutes ● Communication adhering to these values: – politeness, respect, trust, humility

7. Mateusz Loskot CASCADOSS.eu Meeting 16 June 2008, Warsaw Motivations for Working on FOSS ● 50% of contributors do not earn any money for their work on Open Source ● Learn and develop new skills (50%) ● Share knowledge and skills ● Personal sense of accomplishment ● Code should be open ● Improve OSS products to solve problems that couldn't be solved by proprietary software ● Job opportunities (2%), make money (4%) ● Source: FOSS/OSDN reports

8. Mateusz Loskot CASCADOSS.eu Meeting 16 June 2008, Warsaw Roles of Community Members ● Project leader(s) ● Developers – Maintainers – Patch managers – Testers ● Writers and documentation managers ● Translators ● Users ● Paid and unpaid contributors

9. Mateusz Loskot CASCADOSS.eu Meeting 16 June 2008, Warsaw Project Management ● Many forms of a project governance – Formal and less formal structures – Benevolent dictator vs Democracy ● OSGeo approach: Project Steering Committee ● Provide overall guidance and direction ● Define basics of culture: procedures and habits well understood by everyone ● Improperly organized PSC can create more problems than it solves

10. Mateusz Loskot CASCADOSS.eu Meeting 16 June 2008, Warsaw Project Steering Committee ● Made up of individuals consisting of developers and users ● All important decisions/events should be public – Use technical infrastructure and communication channels ● Amplify the power of horde ● How OSGeo projects make decisions: – Regular meetings – Request For Comments (RFC) – Motions & Voting

11. Mateusz Loskot CASCADOSS.eu Meeting 16 June 2008, Warsaw Principles of Communication ● Mostly, FOSS community members communicate by writing ● Write it all down (decisions, resolutions, meeting minutes) ● Make all communication public, avoid private discussions ● Take care of format, structure, content and tone ● Post with purpose and try to be precise ● Make a use of archives ● Avoid flame and holly wars

12. Mateusz Loskot CASCADOSS.eu Meeting 16 June 2008, Warsaw The Importance of Infrastructure ● Technical infrastructure - a virtual actor of FOSS communities ● Successful FOSS communities take care of a good information management ● Project sustainability based on infrastructure ● Helpful for new members to get involved ● Reduces duplication, implements DRY concept

13. Mateusz Loskot CASCADOSS.eu Meeting 16 June 2008, Warsaw Basics of Technical Infrastructure ● Mailing lists (-devel, -users, -announce) ● Real-time Chat (IRC) ● Bug Tracker (Trac) ● Version Control System (Subversion) ● Wiki ● Website is a glue

14. Mateusz Loskot CASCADOSS.eu Meeting 16 June 2008, Warsaw Common Problems ● Most free software projects fail and nobody knows the precise number of failures ● People come and go ● Participants have unique motivations ● Forking ● Poisonous people

15. Mateusz Loskot CASCADOSS.eu Meeting 16 June 2008, Warsaw OSGeo Community ● February 4, 2006 - Organizational Meeting in Chicago ● 15 software projects ● 109 mailing lists ● 9000 uniques subscribers – OSGeo discuss and announce, each about 700 – grass-dev and gdal-dev, each about 1000 – mapserve-users 1800, mapguide-users 750 June, 2008

16. Mateusz Loskot CASCADOSS.eu Meeting 16 June 2008, Warsaw Examples of Healthy Communities ● The Apache Software Foundation ● The Mozilla Foundation ● The GNOME Foundation ● Linux Kernel Developers and hundreds of Linux distributions (Debian, Ubuntu, Mandriva, Red Hat,...)

17. Mateusz Loskot CASCADOSS.eu Meeting 16 June 2008, Warsaw Thank you! Any questions?

18. Mateusz Loskot CASCADOSS.eu Meeting 16 June 2008, Warsaw License of the document This work is available under the terms of the Attribution-Share Alike 2.5 Generic http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.5/deed.en © 2008 Mateusz Łoskot, Poland