Nicole C. Engard

See the following -

5 Keys to Hacking Your Community. What Works?

One of the many great keynotes given at the Community Leadership Summit (CLS) this year was by Rod Martin of Mautic, creator of marketing automation software. Rod spoke to us about the five key secrets to growth hacking your community. If you're like me, you might be wondering what growth hacking is? Growth hacking is a fancy way to say throwing everything against the wall to see what sticks / works. Rod's talk stuck with me because he presented his argument by using a series of words and definitions to make it completely clear what it is we're trying to do when building our communities...

Asciidoctor Coder Writes Less Documentation

I've been working as the documentation manager for the Koha project for six and a half years, so when I saw that Sarah White would be talking about documentation at OSCON this year I knew I wanted a chance to interview her. Sarah will be giving a talk entitled Writing Documentation that Satisfies Your Users. Sarah believes in helping users succeed at solving their problems by working on and helping others write documentation for open source software, and I have to agree with her that one of the best parts of working on an open source project (not just writing the documentation) is getting to meet awesome people! Read More »

Cory Doctorow on the Real-World Dangers of Digital Rights Management

Cory Doctorow gave a fast-paced keynote at OSCON 2016 this year that served as a warning message against DRM (digital rights management): Open, closed, and demon haunted: An Internet of Things that act like inkjet printers. Cory's example of what DRM and copyright can look like in the physical world: Let's say you're building a conference center and your engineer says that he's going to make sure the ceiling won't fall down on your attendees, but he's not going to share the math he's using to do those calculates because it's proprietary. Would you want to enter that conference center? I wouldn't...

How to Care for the Community Over the Code

At All Things Open 2016, Joe Brockmeier answers the question: How can companies can work effectively with open source communities? In his talk, Joe reminded us of the #1 open source myth: Open source is comprised of mostly volunteers. The truth is, these days, pretty much any major open source project has people who are paid to work on it. There are always people who do it because they love it, but these days most of us are paid (and still love it). Over the years we have learned that if you want patches in a timely manner, you need people who are paid to do it...

How to Care for the Community Over the Code

At All Things Open 2016, Joe Brockmeier answers the question: How can companies can work effectively with open source communities? In his talk, Joe reminded us of the #1 open source myth: Open source is comprised of mostly volunteers. The truth is, these days, pretty much any major open source project has people who are paid to work on it. There are always people who do it because they love it, but these days most of us are paid (and still love it). Over the years we have learned that if you want patches in a timely manner, you need people who are paid to do it...

Open Source at Your Company? 6 Questions Your Manager Will Ask

Christian Grail gave a talk at OSCON 2016 titled: "How to convince your manager to go open source." I thought the perspective was going to be from the user side but it was from the employee side, about convincing your manager to open source the projects at your company. "Isn't the quality going to suffer?" There is a perception that when we're only depending on our internal team, we can control the quality. The fact is that with open source, you have nice lean code and the quality is usually better because it's being worked on all of the time, regardless of where and by whom. The advantage with most open source software is that you get a community, so you have more than just your team of X developers...

Open Source Companies-Key Tasks: Marketing and Press Relations

Steven Vaughan-Nichols...is here to tell us that marketing is a big part of your job if you want a successful open source company. He has heard a lot of people saying that marketing isn’t necessary anymore. The reason it’s necessary is because writing great code is not enough – if no one else knows about it it doesn’t matter. You need to talk with people about the project to make it a success...

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OpenStax Provides Cheaper Textbooks and Better Access for Higher Ed Students

OpenStax was founded by Rice University engineering professor Richard Baraniuk in 1999 under the name Connexions. It started like most open source projects: To scratch an itch and address a problem. In this case, Rice University wanted to do something on the web related to education. A grad student suggested that they take the model used to develop Linux and apply it to create textbooks, and Connexions was born. They decided on a license that allowed for reuse with attribution—in essence, this was the first use of the Creative Commons license even before the license existed.

The New Open Source: Money, Corporations, and Identity

Danese Cooper, head of open source for PayPal, spoke to during the Day 2 OSCON morning keynotes about the sustainability of open source, mixing in some of the history of open source as well as her own sage advice. She started on a high note. We have won! But this comes with some interesting challenges. We now have a whole new wave of people coming in to participate, but they are not "battle tested," as she calls it. The group of people that have gone before, who have seen open source start, falter, struggle, and finally win, have passion for open source. Many newcomers do as well but they are also more intent on the money in open source...