Sat, 16 May 2009
What is open source (and Free Software) missing? / Moving to Atlanta
Tim and my mother are both neonatologists at the Golisano Children's Hospital inside the University of Rochester. Earlier today, they had this conversation:
My mother: My son Asheesh is moving to Atlanta.
Tim: Is it for a girl?
My mother: I don't really know what the kids are doing as far as girls, but no....
In fact, I'm moving to Atlanta because a venture capital firm there funded me, Nelson Pavlosky, and my friend Raphael Krut-Landau to start a company to improve interactions in the open source / free software world. We get enough money to live in Atlanta from May 18 to August 6, and after that, we have to seek more funding.
This has led to a series of ironies. The first is that I am working on a startup. The second is that I left San Francisco to do it.
But I have already moved out of San Franisco, and I have left my job at Creative Commons. (Feel free to get in touch with me (outside my website's comments) about filling my shoes there.) Thanks, Nathan and Mike, for giving me the chance to contribute to CC, an organization and project that I have always had a great passion for.
For a while, I may seem vague about the project I am about to undertake; it's because I still want to nail down some details between the three of us. When Nelson, Raphael, and I arrive in person, we're going to kick into gear.
I've been chatting with a few of you over the past few months about ideas, and I do want to especially thank Karl Fogel and Mako Hill for helping the three of us think through what could be done.
Some questions for readers:
- How could it be easier for new hackers to join the open source community?
- What programs, like Google's Highly Open Participation competition or Google Summer of Code, actually stimulate the community?
- What could be done to make it easier for developers to highlight their contributions to Free Software?
- How could it be easier for end-users or businesses to pay for improvements to software they use?
- How could it be easier, as a developer, to find other projects to join? to find important or fun things to hack on?
- How could it be easier, as a developer, to get help from other hackers?
- What groups of users or developers are hidden because of the way we conceive of the community?
- How else can you imagine making life easier for developers or users in open source?
Feel free to email me (asheesh at asheesh.org) if you'd rather not comment publicly. I have a few ideas of my own, and I hope to be tossing them up for everyone to bat at soon!
P.S. Noisebridge, I will miss you!
