'Til All Are One

I don’t get it. In a com­munity where open­ness is prized, some have seen it fit to cri­ti­cise that very tenet. In the world of FOSS, bug track­ers are laid open for all to see (and con­trib­ute to), and mail­ing lists are a hive of dis­cus­sion and innovation.

So why is it such a bad thing when we openly dis­cuss the nature of our com­munity, and the gov­ernance thereof? Kevin Rudd was widely praised for his prom­ises to pro­mote open gov­ern­ment (we’re still wait­ing, Kevin).

To put any uncer­tainty to rest: Linux Aus­tralia is in great shape. We just had yet another suc­cess­ful linux​.conf​.au and have built up a sub­stan­tial pot of sav­ings, all in the face of a global fin­an­cial melt­down. We are indeed in an envi­able pos­i­tion, and we could not have done it had we not stayed true to our beliefs. Linux Aus­tralia is defined by its com­munity sup­port and participation.

Can we do bet­ter? Of course we can. What I’ve tried to artic­u­late is that the best means of doing that is by scal­ing our com­munity. To use a code ana­logy, I effect­ively pos­ted a pub­lic bug report and invited the com­munity to help find solu­tions. You don’t see that level of trans­par­ency from many other organ­isa­tions, and I for one am very proud of that.

The FOSS com­munity in Aus­tralia will con­tinue to grow and thrive — any­body who went to linux​.conf​.au should be con­vinced of that. The bazaar feel is stronger than ever, and Linux Aus­tralia will con­tinue to hold a vital role in stim­u­lat­ing and facil­it­at­ing that devel­op­ment. But to do so in a man­ner that best suits the community’s interests requires some delib­er­a­tion, plan­ning and com­mu­nic­a­tion with the very com­munity that it seeks to assist. What’s wrong with that?

If only my local MP was as in touch with his constituents…

LotD: OpenAus­tralia, open source good­ness applied to gov­ern­ment

It looks like I’ve opened up a can of worms. Last week I bemoaned about the low voter par­ti­cip­a­tion in Linux Aus­tralia (LA) elec­tions. I spent con­sid­er­able energy at linux​.conf​.au (LCA) in Hobart pub­li­cising the issue and can­vassing opin­ion from com­munity mem­bers. This cul­min­ated in a light­ning talk titled ‘YOU PEOPLE SUCK’*, where I angrily chas­tised the com­munity for not par­ti­cip­at­ing in Linux Aus­tralia. The fury was in jest, but the call to arms was not.

It seems now that the media has grabbed a hold of the mat­ter. Frankly, I’m glad that this issue has been brought to the fore. It has been a cata­lyst for con­tem­pla­tion and debate, which in my opin­ion is the hall­mark of an open com­munity. In my chats with vari­ous people over the mat­ter, a few reas­ons crop up. These aren’t all neces­sar­ily true, but if they are believed by a sub­stan­tial sec­tion of our com­munity, they’d might as well be.

• I don’t want to pay anything

Mem­ber­ship of Linux Aus­tralia is free, as in beard! LA makes a tidy profit from LCA and sponsorships.

• I don’t know any­thing about LA
• I don’t see how LA is rel­ev­ant to me
• I don’t see LA doing anything

These three are prob­ably the most dis­turb­ing. LA must strive to mar­ket itself bet­ter and to prove its worth in the com­munity. We’ve come a long way, but I do see some areas where we could improve. For instance, I’ve found over the years that many LCA attendees don’t under­stand the rela­tion­ship between LA and LCA. LCA is an LA event, and we shouldn’t let any­one for­get it. Other areas where we could improve include sup­port for local groups, par­tic­u­larly LUGs. Vari­ous pro­jects have been in the works for a while now, but unfor­tu­nately we’ve all been con­strained by Real Life. We should be bet­ter util­ising that fam­ous open source scalab­il­ity to fix these problems.

• LA is too opaque
• I’m not good enough to participate

The sen­ti­ments above are com­plete ana­thema to a work­ing demo­cracy, and they should be dis­patched with accord­ingly. Yes it’s (gen­er­ally) true that the open source world is a mer­ito­cracy, but that should not dis­suade any cas­ual per­son from hav­ing their input.

• I don’t know any of the candidates
• I don’t have any spe­cific objec­tions or pref­er­ences regard­ing the candidates

The former is a reflec­tion of our diverse and geo­graph­ic­ally dis­trib­uted com­munity. The lat­ter might have some cros­sover with apathy, but gen­er­ally it’s an expres­sion that none of the can­did­ates are offens­ive enough to vote against (the black­list approach to vot­ing) or pref­er­en­tial enough to vote for. Enthu­si­asms can go both ways — an unpop­u­lar group of can­did­ates might be enough to mobil­ise an increased num­ber of votes against them.

• I can’t make it to the AGM, and so can­not vote
• I thought I was already a mem­ber after sub­scrib­ing to the mail­ing lists
• I thought I was already a mem­ber after regis­ter­ing for linux​.conf​.au
• The vot­ing form is dif­fi­cult to find
• The vot­ing sys­tem is confusing

These come down to the design and com­mu­nic­a­tion sur­round­ing our Web prop­er­ties. We use Mem­berDB as our online mem­ber­ships and vot­ing sys­tem, and hence there is no need to phys­ic­ally present your­self to vote (do it in your undies for all I care; just make sure the web­cam is off). Each mail­ing list has a Mail­man login, the Web site has another, and Mem­berDB has yet one more. LCA each year tends to have its own soft­ware infra­struc­ture entirely. The vot­ing form does indeed require much dig­ging to reach. There’s plenty of scope here for streamlining.

• I didn’t know the elec­tion was on
• The vot­ing period is too short
• My regis­tra­tion wasn’t approved (in time)
• I signed up dur­ing the vot­ing period

The points above are mostly to do with pro­cess and pro­ced­ure. Elec­tions need to be pub­li­cised bet­ter. One per­son said to me that they were expect­ing a big ‘VOTE’ but­ton on the front page of linux​.org​.au, link­ing dir­ectly to the bal­lot form. Maybe another Coun­cil mem­ber can cor­rect me on this, but I gather it’s unof­fi­cial policy not to accept new mem­ber­ships dur­ing the vot­ing pro­cess. Given that Mem­berDB is designed to approx­im­ate the Aus­tralian elect­oral pro­cess, this should come as no sur­prise. How­ever, this is not stated any­where in pub­lic. Also, since new mem­ber­ships must be manu­ally con­firmed (a pre­cau­tion to stop spam and mul­tiple sign-​​ups) there will be an appre­ciable lag in the approvals pro­cess. Don’t expect the Coun­cil to have any time to accept new sign-​​ups dur­ing or close to LCA.

I am yet to hear the old ‘one vote doesn’t make a dif­fer­ence’ excuse, but just in case, you can read here on why this atti­tude is not helpful.

I’d be inter­ested to hear if you have any other reas­ons (and pro­posed solu­tions) for not regis­ter­ing with Linux Aus­tralia and vot­ing in the elec­tions. I’d recom­mend that you take part in the dis­cus­sion on the linux-​​aus mail­ing list, oth­er­wise you can post a com­ment here or con­tact me dir­ectly if you’d prefer some privacy.

I won’t pre­tend to have all the answers, or pos­sess some magic map of where we should be going. I’m just another com­munity mem­ber like any­one else, who is inter­ested in see­ing us move for­wards. Please con­sider assist­ing LA to address these problems.

LotD: blue​hack​ers​.org

* yes, caps are mandatory

This is a follow-​​on from my last post, where I announced my can­did­acy for Linux Aus­tralia Coun­cil. I’ve pos­ted this to the linux-​​aus mail­ing list, but thought it wouldn’t hurt going here as it raises issues that I feel are fun­da­mental to Linux Australia’s existence.

I’m a can­did­ate for Ordin­ary Com­mit­tee Mem­ber (shouldn’t that be Ordin­ary Coun­cil Mem­ber now?). Before I repeat the spiel I made on the Elec­tions page, I’d like to talk about what I feel LA rep­res­ents in out com­munity. There’s the obvi­ous linux​.conf​.au, which proves year-​​after-​​year to be a world-​​class con­fer­ence. Linux Aus­tralia rep­res­ents the FOSS com­munity through­out Aus­tralia (and going by LCA2006, per­haps also New Zea­l­and in a way). It brings together the dis­par­ate groups through­out the country/​region and gives them one voice. The com­munity is thus able to be more influ­en­tial as whole.

This leads into my ori­ginal spiel, where I extoled the val­ues of scalab­il­ity in our com­munity. Through enhanced sup­port of grass-​​roots groups, Linux Aus­tralia will be able to grow the com­munity in a more sus­tain­able manner..

One pat­tern I dis­covered when examin­ing pre­vi­ous LA elec­tions is the low voter turnout. On most years the total num­ber (not per­cent­age) of votes was around 65–70. Why is this the case? Do we need to be doing more to engage the com­munity? Are we not well-​​known enough? Are we not trans­par­ent enough? These are issues that we should be addressing.

The Linux Aus­tralia Coun­cil elec­tions are in full swing, and I thought it only fair to abuse my blog to pimp my can­did­acy for an Ordin­ary Com­mit­tee Mem­ber pos­i­tion. You’re an LA mem­ber (it’s free!), drop in and exer­cise your demo­cratic right (i.e. vote for me :p ).

My offi­cial plat­form is as follows:

I have been par­ti­cip­at­ing in the FOSS com­munity for over ten years. I have man­aged Linux Australia’s pres­ences at CeBIT and the Edu­ca­tion Expo. I have also rep­res­en­ted LA at other events such as the Moodle Con­fer­ence in 2006, and was the lead video encoder at the A/​V Team at linux​.conf​.au 2007.

For the past two years I have been serving on the SLUG Com­mit­tee (includ­ing one term as Pres­id­ent), organ­ising most of its meet­ings in that time and run­ning events like Soft­ware Free­dom Day.

A key focus of my efforts in the com­munity over the past few years has been to foster co-​​operation between groups and con­trib­ut­ors. As an Linux Aus­tralia Coun­cil mem­ber, I feel that I would be even more effect­ive in this endeavour.

The won­der­ful thing about free soft­ware code devel­op­ment is that it can scale so well. I would like to see a sim­ilar level of scalab­il­ity with the wider com­munity out­side of the cod­ing realm. LA is uniquely posi­tioned to provide the resources and sup­port to enable com­munity mem­bers and groups to achieve great things. The bene­fits of this are many-​​fold:

• it makes it easier to engage, hence break­ing down sep­ar­a­tions between con­trib­ut­ors and users;
• it grows the com­munity of contributors;
• it allows us to do more and bet­ter things on the whole; and
• it aids to reduce depend­ence on a small group of act­ors, thereby address­ing the ever-​​present danger of burn-​​out amongst contributors.

We must remem­ber, how­ever, that the ‘com­munity’ is much lar­ger than the mem­ber­ship of LA and LUGs. I have come across many people who are inter­ested in some aspect of ‘Linux’ or ‘open source’ but know very little about LA or their local LUG. In many cases, their interests are more dir­ectly served by other groups, such as:

• industry asso­ci­ations (e.g. OSIA)
• lan­guage groups (Java, Python, etc.)
• other oper­at­ing sys­tems groups (OpenSol­aris, Mac OS, etc.)
• stand­ards bod­ies (IEEE, W3C, etc.)
• com­puter clubs
• groups devoted to a field (edu­ca­tion, embed­ded, etc.)

LA has a fant­astic com­munity, but in the grand scheme of things it is but one of many. I hope — in an offi­cial Linux Aus­tralia capa­city — to improve net­work­ing with these other organ­isa­tions to grow the over­all com­munity and extend the reach of free and open source soft­ware to more sec­tors of society.

Last month I pro­posed that the FOSS com­munity cre­ate an integ­rated soft­ware installer for Win­dows and Mac OS that only included FOSS applic­a­tions. If Google can make Google Pack, I opined, why can’t we make a FOSS Pack?

As I had expec­ted, my idea was already real­ised, at least in part. Win­Libre and Mac­Libre provide a menu of free/​libre soft­ware pack­ages for the user to choose from, and can auto­mat­ic­ally install them for you.

That’s a big step in the right dir­ec­tion, albeit not the beauty we have on GNU/​Linux through tools like Add/​Remove Applic­a­tions and apt-​​url. It haven’t tried them (I rarely use Win­dows and I don’t have a Mac), but here’s what I think they need to truly shine (based on my last post on the sub­ject):

• an updates man­age­ment ser­vice, that auto­mat­ic­ally checks for avail­able updates and installs them for you
• an abil­ity to cleanly remove the soft­ware just as eas­ily as it was installed
• a file sys­tem scan­ner that recom­mends FOSS soft­ware to install, based on the soft­ware and file types it finds on the hard drive