See the weblogs of David Boswell, Frank Hecker and Gerv Markham for additional reports.

This Week

• Many small tasks. Worked on my Go Open 2008 keynote (slides are at http://www.slideshare.net/zakgreant/go-open-08-floss-what-and-why). Minor administrative work. Got ready for travelling to Go Open 2008 in Oslo. Chased after various Mozilla folks on behalf of community members. Participated in discussions on Mozilla's 10 year anniversary plans - participating in physical meetings via phone sucks. Worked on OSCON participation plans.
• Misc. Discussed BytesFree.org (an initiative to help ensure that citizens can access their data) with John Mark Walker - as BytesFree.org plans to lobby, I don't think that the Mozilla Foundation can support them; however, the initiative is still interesting. David Ascher and Shane Caraveo started planning a MozCamp near the dates for the Open Web Vancouver 2008 conference. Light coordination work for the upcoming FLOSS Foundations meeting at OSCON. Read interesting summary of a report on the habits of wired wealthy donors (via David Boswell); avoided the full report which was behind a sign-up form.

Next Week

• Travel to Norway for Go Open and related press and industry meetings;

See Also

• My Open Source Initiative Report for Week 12 of 2008

The following is a list of people I talked with (or listened to) along with the interesting or exciting things that they shared with me or that they're working on:

• The unassuming Adrian Bowyer, whose RepRap presentation (and entire project) blew my mind;
• Anders Werp, IT progressive mayor of Øvre Eiker and chairman of the Norwegian National Competance Center for Free Software.
• Bjørn Remseth, a participant in the EFN (Electronic Frontier Norway) who chatted with me after the event about what the EFN is up to these days;
• Bob Jolliffe, a saavy South African electronic frontierist who shared musings on questions big and small over dinner with Steve Pepper and I; Here is a video of Bob speaking on the state of patent rights in Africa at the Digital Freedom Expo (with an introduction by Vint Cerf.)
  
• Chris DiBona and Simon Phipps, top Open Source hominids for Google and Sun respectively, with whom which I spent some time talking shop;
• Christer Gundersen and Heidi Arnesen Austlid from the Norwegian National Competance Center for Free Software, who were the ringmasters of the circus - congratulations on a great event!
• Håkon Wium Lie, who is enthusiastically fighting The Power (in this case Microsoft) by resisting OOXML and — through his work at Opera Software — participating in an upcoming antitrust complaint against Microsoft. Håkon and I also agree to do an interview about the Mozilla Manifesto;
• Martin Bekkelund, a Norwegian electronic frontierist did a great job of documenting parts of the conference and the anti-OOXML protest;
• Øystein Jakobsen, who is working on developing the tools people need to be informed consumers in societies where there are deep, complex and strange production chains;
• Øyvind Hauge, key author of a recent study on open source and free software integration in Norway.
• Rikke Holten, from communitybuilder, who handled many of the logistics for Go Open and who I am sure has other excellent conferences up her sleeve.
• Steve Pepper,  former chair of the Norwegian OOXML committee and current protester against the process used to approve OOXML (though we can still appeal). One of his major projects is Topic Maps, the description of which blew my mind just an hour or so after I managed to reset my me mental fuse after seeing Adrian's RepRap session;
• Trond Heier, CTO of Linpro, who always has interesting ideas to share. We talked a bit about the Mozilla Manifesto and I will follow up with an interview with him on the topic;

There is more, of course — these are people who came to mind.

Demonstration against OOXML, originally uploaded by Martin Bekkelund.

It is a day after the Go Open conference in Oslo and I am still holed up in a hotel nearby. Blearily stumbling down to breakfast, I was confronted with a mix of lukewarm meatballs, easy listening radio — both of which are common enough to encounter in hotels — and most surprisingly, a loud and rousing chant from the radio of "OOXML: Go To Hell!"

The chant in question — with the help of the Norwegian media — was still echoing from a demonstration held yesterday outside of the annual plenary meeting of JTC1 - the ISO standards committee responsible for OOXML.

Led by Steve Pepper (chairman of the Norwegian mirror committee of JTC1), the protest attracted over 150 people, including some of Norway's leading technologists, such as Håkon Wium Lie (who proposed Cascading Style Sheets in 1994), Linpro CEO Trond Heier and FreeBSD hacker Dag-Erling Smørgrav.

The protest has certainly caught the attention of the Norwegian media, with a broad mix of online, print media, television and radio. Norwegian television station DNtv has even posted video of the protest online and Martin Bekkelund has a roundup of Go Open links that includes many links to media coverage of the protest. Martin also has a blog post on the protest that includes some great photos.

It is fascinating to see how awareness of digital civil liberties has become white enough that we now see real protests in addition to online action. For my part, this marks the second technology protest that I've attended in person — the first one was some years back in Strasbourg protesting against irregularities in the software patent legislation process in the EU when I was with MySQL.

Update: AP has picked up the story - they report 60 people and seem to have a milder tone than other reports.

Update: Simon Phipps, Sun's Chief Open Source Officer, blogged about the protest and was entrepreneurial enough to interview Trond Heier about his part in the protest.

Update: <no>ooxml has their own report (including Steve's speech) and a good link roundup (which I've nabbed:

• http://atvs.vg.no/player/index.php?id=15735
• http://blog.borud.no/2008/04/ooxml-debate.html
• http://flickr.com/groups/750232@N22/pool/
• http://grimstveit.no/jakob/blog/2008/04/08/ooxml-demonstration-in-oslo-wednesday-1200/
• http://www.computerworld.dk/art/45252
• http://www.dagbladet.no/kultur/2008/04/09/532046.html
• http://www.dagensit.no/bransje/article1376549.ece?jgo=c1_re_&WT.svl=article_title
• http://www.digi.no/php/art.php?id=519531
• http://www.dn.no/dntv/teknologi/article1376558.ece?WT.mc_id=dntv_rel
• http://www.raffee.co.za/
• http://www.raffee.co.za/post/31234325
• http://www.raffee.co.za/post/31234592
• http://www.tectonic.co.za/?p=2340
• http://www.tranexp.com:2000/InterTran?url=http%3A%2%2Fwww.digi.no%2Fphp%2Fart.php%3Fid%3D519531&type=text&text=&from=nor&to=eng
• http://www.tu.no/it/article151272.ece
• http://www.vg.no/teknologi/artikkel.php?artid=531467
  

• Alexander V. Røyne blogged, go open day 2008 1: Chris DiBona and Zak Greant
• ComputerWorld Norway wrote, Teknologisk verdenselite til Oslo (Technology World Elite Come to Oslo) and Friprog-konferansen er i gang (Free Software Conference In Gear)
  
• Martin Bekkelund blogged, GoOpen 08: Zak Greant, Mozilla (and has lots of other coverage on his blog)
  
• Norwegian IT daily Digi.no has several articles, including: Friprog-eliten kommer til Norge (Free Software Elite Come to Norway) and Fri programvare blir stadig mer utadvent (Free Software gets ever more accessible)  The story is based on an interview between digi.no journalist Harald Brombach and I. It includes a real zinger of a picture of me — I look like I slept under the bed instead of on top of it.
• TU.no wrote, Inviterer til åpen kildekodestrid (Invitation to an Open Source Fight)

Paper: Adoption of Open Source in The Software Industry

An excellent research paper paper produced by Reidar Conradi, Øyvind Hauge and Carl-Fredrik Sørensen from the Norwegian University of Science and Technology. The abstract describes the paper quite well, it is:

… a survey to investigate the adoption of OSS in the Norwegian software industry. The survey was based on an extensive screening of software companies, with more than 700 responses.

Analysis shows that close to 50% of the software industry integrate OSS components into vertical solutions serving all major business sectors. In addition, more than 30% of the companies using OSS components have over 40% of their income from OSS related services or software.

Link to full paper (188 KB PDF)

Paper: The Total Growth of Open Source

By Amit Deshpande and Dirk Riehle from SAP Research at SAP Labs

Software development is undergoing a major change away from a fully closed software process towards a process that incorporates open source software in products and services. Just how significant is that change? To an-
swer this question we need to look at the overall growth of open source as well as its growth rate. In this paper, we quantitatively analyze the growth of more than 5000 active and popular open source software projects. We show that the total amount of source code as well as the total number of open source projects is growing at an exponential rate. Previous research showed linear and quadratic growth in lines of source code of individual open source projects. Our work shows that open source is expanding into new domains and applications at an exponential rate.

Link to full paper (Formatted as blog post, thereby allowing comments)

Essay: Better than Free

An excellent short essay by Kevin Kelly, the former editorial of Wired. From the intro:

The internet is a copy machine. At its most foundational level, it copies every action, every character, every thought we make while we ride upon it. In order to send a message from one corner of the internet to another, the protocols of communication demand that the whole message be copied along the way several times. IT companies make a lot of money selling equipment that facilitates this ceaseless copying. Every bit of data ever produced on any computer is copied somewhere. The digital economy is thus run on a river of copies. Unlike the mass-produced reproductions of the machine age, these copies are not just cheap, they are free.

Link to full essay

I got talking about this very topic with Allison Randal when we were both at the SCALE 6x conference in Los Angeles at the beginning of this year. Many of you reading this blog know Allison either personally, or through her work on Perl, as the architect of Parrot or in her role as the co-chair of OSCON.

We talked about the general complaints that people had (too expensive, too much focus on business, no community spirit, etc.) and the remedies that the O'Reilly folks had tried (most notably OSCamp — a gratis, open-to-all unconference held within OSCON) and how they had worked out.

OSCamp was a good idea, with mixed results. Some people loved it -  for example, it inspired Cal Evans to set up an unconference inside of ZendCon, others were disappointed by it and most OSCON participants ignored it. The main problems seemed to be that the event:

• wasn't listed on the main schedule (and it is hard to compete with many parallel tracks that have presentations given by well-known speakers);
• didn't have broad participation from a significant set of the various projects with members attending OSCON
• didn't have strong support from pronoid compulsive organizers and presenters, who tend to be the grease that lets the gears of an unconference run smoothly

The last theme that we ruminated over was how many free software and open source projects had been running for 10 years or more, from hoary elders like BSD celebrating 30 years, to veterans like the GNU Project and Perl celebrating 20 years, to relative newcomers like Mozilla, MySQL, PHP and Apache who each crew out of the Web boon in the early 90s.

Each generation of FOSS projects has had its own set of challenges and its own base of strength. Many of the earlier projects had a strong academic foundation that provided both the skills needed to develop software, along with the equipment and distribution channels needed to share it. Many of the more recent projects were fueled by the growth of the Internet and how this new media made sharing information and building community incredibly cheap activities.

However, early participants in these communities needed to have some resources — usually: a Net connection, a compulsion to tinker,  programming skill, thick skin, spare time and a problem to solve — to get started. This excluded whole classes of people from getting a start in participating in online communities.

Even today, where open source and free software is fairly commonplace, people are often intimidated at the prospect of getting started in  a given FOSS community. Many projects don't have an easy point of entry and a novice asking the wrong questions may get a rude reception.

Taking all of these ruminations together, we came up with the idea to convert OSCamp into a gratis, open-to-all, highly visible, community-driven, multi-day coaching session designed to help people get a solid start participating in, starting and learning key techniques from free culture, free software and open source communities.

Put another way, we hope to get community members attending OSCON to help a few dozen people (or more) get get started creating open source, sharing free software and building the electronic frontier.

A few months later, I've had a chance to speak to a good number of people about this idea. Almost without exception, everyone I've discussed with has been very excited by the idea. Experienced open source contributors want to share the high-level skills — especially hard-to-transmit-by-email soft people skills –  that they have. Novices who wish to contribute are often intimidated by the complexity of the project that they participate in — this approach gives them a fast and non-threatening way to get started.

Allison has arranged two rooms for the event over the main days of OSCON and has asked Sam Keen (who has done good work on OSCamp) to work on the project with us. Sam in turn has asked Selena Deckelmann of the PostgreSQL project to get involved.

We've set up a wiki (which I will open up to others in a few days) and have started discussions.

My early (and rough) notes (spelling errors and all) on the event follow. If you are interested, please leave a comment and I will ping you when the wiki goes public.

Rough Ideas

I think their overarching goal for the event is to teach people the essential skills of participating in open source projects and collaborative online projects (like Wikipedia).  I also would love to see this event spark a trend towards running similar events at many other conferences that deal with FOSS, Free Culture and the electronic frontier.

On the Mozilla side of things, our goals are to help give people the skills they need to actively enact some part of Mozilla Manifesto. In particular, we want to do these things from Mozilla manifesto:

• build and enable open-source technologies and communities that support the Manifesto's principles;
• … keep the Internet an open platform;
• promote models for creating economic value for the public benefit; and
• promote the Mozilla Manifesto principles in public discourse and within the Internet industry.

What other goals you each think we should have?

Structure

• We should have one room that focuses on more or less standard presentations. For ease of preparation we should probably consider having several presenters cooperating to present an overview of each topic.
• The other room should focus on hands on coaching. For example helping people actually at a Wikipedia entry, or helping someone set up a revision control system account for a given open source project, etc. I expect that the second room also be used for informal presentations on topics that we didn't think to cover.

Potential Topics

I've made a rough list of potential topics for sessions  (in no particular order.)   Each of these sessions should be designed for a variety of attendees, both developers and non-developers:

• an overview of the  major types of participatory online projects, such as Wikipedia, the Linux kernel, PHP, and so on
• revision control systems such as SVN, Git and CVS.  We would cover not only how to use them but why you'd want to use them and how to get the best out of them.
• an overview of free software and open source licensing. Perhaps we should also cover creative Commons licensing, the GNU  Free Documentation License and so on
• An overview of the free software, open source and various other electronic frontier movements.
• a session on how to organize and manage online communities
• a session on how to use wikis and contribute to Wikipedia
• an overview of the various project tools such as Google code, source Forge, Tigris and so on
• an overview of how to file bugs, use bug trackers and send patches
• a session on documentation writing for open projects
• a session on localizing documentation for open projects
• a session on localizing open software
• a coding jumpstart session -  one that helps existing coders understand how to get into the source of the project, how to read developer mailing lists, how to suggest enhancements, and so on.
• a session on how to promote open projects
• a session on how to store user groups
• a session on why and why not to start a nonprofit organization to support an open source project
• an overview of the technology used to produce many open source projects this can include tools like  GCC,  make, yacc, C,  and so on

Promoting the event

• we can give the event visibility via the OSCON  website and program
• blog about the event and encourage others to do so
• contact tech publishers and encourage them to promote the event
• contact nonprofits and encourage them to send volunteers and staff
• contact universities and explain to them the benefits of having their students participate in open source projects
• contact local user groups
• contact local specialty bookstores
• ask participants to promote the event to their communities
• contact journalists and ask them to promote the event
• contact consulting firms who have some focus on open source or wish to have a focus on open source and encourage them to send their consultants for training
• …

Other miscellaneous ideas

• the Mozilla foundation can likely provide some funding for the event (if needed)
• for the room where we give people hands-on coaching, we should arrange projects that are willing to in effect sponsor someone in the community period for example, if someone wishes to learn about translation and revision control systems, perhaps the PHP community would be willing to set them up with a revision control account on site and get them started translating some of the documentation. Of course, this will rely on what projects and people we have signed up to help with this idea.
• we should make sure to have a cross disciplinary focus with the set of rooms. We want to support not only programmers, but writers, editors, artists, translators, usability experts, accessibility experts, and so on. In fact, if we identify the audience, and we can get much clearer idea of the contest to present.
• we should document what we do to make it easier for others to repeat the idea.
• we should try to transcribe what is discussed again as a way to help people share the ideas are developed at the event

Next Steps

• Make the wiki fit for public consumption
• Follow up with interested projects
• Refine the plans for the event

p.s. How does OSCoach or FLOSSCoach sound as a name?

See the weblogs of David Boswell, Frank Hecker and Gerv Markham for additional Mozilla Foundation reports.

This Week

• Focused on reports and conference follow-up. Will be making individual reports an most of these activities and events as time permits - first priority is following up with people and projects.
• Misc. Posted various late reports; minor work following up with potential grant applicants; light work preparing for and coordinating the eLiberatica and Open Web Vancouver conferences; light work on the Mozilla 10 year parties; worked on my presentations for the upcoming Go Open conference, the Leadership by Open Innovation in the Telecom, IT and Media Industries conference and the PGCon 2008 conference; helping some poor soul who was misled into buying a copy of Thunderbird off of eBay.

Next Week

• More follow-up + preparing for trips. Need to write a different keynote than expected for the Go Open conference!

See Also

• My Open Source Initiative Weekly Report for Week 11 of 2008
  

Stormy Peters, OpenLogic's community manager caught up with me to discuss the matter, after which I agreed to provide concrete feedback on what I thought OpenLogic should do with the licensing for the project.

I've taken a few passes at making recommendations and then, once by accident and once intentionally, discarding the recommendations. Both sets of recommendations were too long and complex.

The issue is not complicated.

If OpenLogic wants this census to be a massive success, then they must share all census data under a permissive free/open license — anything else simply decreases the value of the project to the community and diminishes OpenLogic's brand (which at the end of the day is what they will rely on to build their business.)

To keep up to date, visit http://opensource.org/blog/zak