Fri, 08 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!
Posted by Corey Burger at Fri May 8 13:12:17 2009
Just to make it clear, the topic of the post is how we can improve involvement in open source and free software — for end-users, hackers, or anyone else.
Personally, I think that Free Software has a core of people who are very visibly involved, such as the Debian and GNOME teams, and many people making contributions in ways that I am not currently aware of, and perhaps many more hackers who would contribute if it were easier.
Surely the language barrier is one issue; I don't know much about the Arabic-language Free Software world, for example. But then again, perhaps it is as small as it appears to me; possibly we are not doing a great job of outreach to other language communities. That would explain the clustering of e.g. Debian Developers to the United States.
Or maybe there are Free projects that are very active in those language communities that I don't know about, and they think the same sort of thing: "Oh, those hard-to-reach English speakers."
Anyway, that's just one angle. I'm curious what others people have!
Posted by Asheesh Laroia at Fri May 8 13:29:52 2009