As always, we were not disappointed. This was our fourth year at SCALE and we are beginning to grow in perspective and focus on what we want to achieve at this conference.
This year we were focused on three topical areas to gather information, share our thoughts, and have some good conversations. They were:
- Community Building
- Open Source Software Trends
- Green and Sustainability
Community Building:
Community Building was central to two key presentations we went to see:
Karsten Wade from Redhat the Saturday Keynote. He spoke on Being a Catalyst in Communities. The key take aways for us were:
Barn Raising versus Tom Sawyer. The Tom Sawyer analogy is you getting other people (the community) to do your work. As opposed to Barn Raising where the community comes together to accomplish a goal and build on the foundation that you have laid.
Inviting Different Levels of Participation. The person who comes to the community and only sits in the back and says nothing is also a valuable member of the community.
Here are links to a video of Karten’s presentation: Part 1 and Part 2.
Here is a link to the manual and wiki that Karsten helped to create on Creating and Nurturing Communities of Contributors.
Jono Bacon from Ubuntu/Canonical who spoke Saturday morning on the Engine of Revolution (great title, no relation to the talk). We have heard Jono many times and he is always entertaining, thoughtful, and can give one many thoughts to pursue. This coupled with the fact we are currently reading his latest book The Art of Community which is excellent. It is available on line under the Creative Commons License. His take aways this time were:
The Opportunistic Contributor. A community member who only contributes things that they think are cool or something they need. They are not necessarily focused on what the community’s goals are, but you should not dismiss their contributions and ideas.
The importance of Processes. The processes should be simple and easy and should enable the community to participate. We call this getting rid of the 800 lb. gorilla. He demonstrated some of the new features in the Ubuntu desktop that link with Launchpad to make creating and contributing to projects much easier.
Open Source Software Trends
Open Source Software trends were dominated for us around the decision to move our projects to Launchpad. The sub-conference UbuCon (1 day Ubuntu Conference at SCALE) often had one on one conversations about moving to Launchpad. Our take way was that we have to move our 9 Free Open Source projects to Launchpad because this should enable community participation. But, we don’t feel like we are quite ready for the full course at the moment, so we are debating about the commercial project to begin with…and then move one Free Open Source project over to Launchpad, and then eventually all of them. We do have limited resource and experience so we don’t want to get swamped or make fools of ourselves by not providing enough foundation to get a community started.
We also spoke with the folks at the Postgres booth and got some good ideas on encryption.
Green and Sustainability
Green and sustainability was our third topic of interest kind of just wanting to see if anyone had any good ideas. As always in communities, you can often bring up a thought with someone, in this a case a member of the SoCalLUG (LInux Users Group) who knew of someone who was doing sustainable things who would be at SCALE. We tracked her down, and she referred us to a Software Developer and Engineer she worked with to pursue our thoughts. We tracked him down and found a kindred soul but one who was way beyond where we were at in our thinking. Individuals are really making strides in all kinds of sustainability projects from power to food to life styles. We even found an individual who been to the Urban Homesteaders where we had taken many of our initial ideas based on their video and having met them and spent considerable time at Green/Energy Conservation Show where they had been speakers and had a booth.
Fascinating all.

