‘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: bluehackers.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