Visiting the Open Tech Conference
On Saturday 4th of July I attended the Open Tech conference at the University of London’s Student Union. This is a regular informal, low cost, one-day conference on different approaches to technology, democracy and community. I was representing the UK Open Rights Group but found plenty of time to discuss the Symbian Foundation with developers, politicals, pundits and plenty of other random people. Pretty much everyone had already heard of the Foundation’s creation and is keen to see how they will fit in with the wider open source community. This is particularly the case with respect to Google who are already very well respected in that area, not the least for their regular Open Source Jam sessions in London.
On top of all this networking I also had time to catch a few panel sessions including a very good one by Phil Whitehouse (twitter) on “How to Build Developer Communities”. Phil’s talk (slides, blog post) was mostly centered around single person projects wanting to build up a group of contributors but a significant amount of what he said still holds true for Symbian:
» Survey after survey of open source developers has shown that by far the most common reason for wanting to get involved with open source is to “learn something new”
» The second most common reason is “to teach others”
» After that comes “feeling like I’m building something cool” and “helping other people”
» It’s crucial to help developers who have common interests find each other (perhaps via an almost Facebook-like interface)
» Phil stated that it was “an opportunity to be creative – as opposed to your day-job” but since this is their day job for Symbian founding company developers it’s a great chance for them to be creative too
» Remember – everyone has an opinion and in open source is used to being able to say it. Top-down structures like the various Foundation Councils may provide a solid framework but they need to be flexible enough to listen
» There are huge differences between building a new community from scratch and open sourcing an existing product staffed by developers who might be a bit set in their ways – just concentrate on how their roles will change over time
» Most important recommendation of all was – Stay Cool – and think about exactly how much control over your project (or Package) you are willing to cede to others
This was my first “technology and community” conference but definitely won’t be my last so I look forward to chatting to people about how Symbian is progressing for some time to come!
David Durant (Nokia)
source
On top of all this networking I also had time to catch a few panel sessions including a very good one by Phil Whitehouse (twitter) on “How to Build Developer Communities”. Phil’s talk (slides, blog post) was mostly centered around single person projects wanting to build up a group of contributors but a significant amount of what he said still holds true for Symbian:
» Survey after survey of open source developers has shown that by far the most common reason for wanting to get involved with open source is to “learn something new”
» The second most common reason is “to teach others”
» After that comes “feeling like I’m building something cool” and “helping other people”
» It’s crucial to help developers who have common interests find each other (perhaps via an almost Facebook-like interface)
» Phil stated that it was “an opportunity to be creative – as opposed to your day-job” but since this is their day job for Symbian founding company developers it’s a great chance for them to be creative too
» Remember – everyone has an opinion and in open source is used to being able to say it. Top-down structures like the various Foundation Councils may provide a solid framework but they need to be flexible enough to listen
» There are huge differences between building a new community from scratch and open sourcing an existing product staffed by developers who might be a bit set in their ways – just concentrate on how their roles will change over time
» Most important recommendation of all was – Stay Cool – and think about exactly how much control over your project (or Package) you are willing to cede to others
This was my first “technology and community” conference but definitely won’t be my last so I look forward to chatting to people about how Symbian is progressing for some time to come!
David Durant (Nokia)
source
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