Monday was a holiday here in Japan so I went to the O`Reilly Make
Conference and saw some of my Tokyo Hackerspace friends
there -- among thousands of other Japanese Makers. Really good time.
After spending Tuesday talking with hundreds of engineering students at ITHB Bandung (and after a great lunch with the university faculty), we found a very cool Bandung OpenSolaris User Group meeting at detikinet.com, which is Indonesia`s largest news portal (meeting references here and here). The gathering was held in a dimly lit driveway under a tent. For over two hours we sat on the floor on a carpet and just talked about building developer communities using OpenSolaris.
I didn`t present any slides, so we just had a free-flowing conversation. It was a warm night and the rains (read: utterly massive downpours) had stopped, so everything was nice and relaxed and quiet. I tried to stress that it`s important to build community locally first (this way you can follow your own rules) but then to connect globally so you learn from others around the world. The second point I made was that there is no secret to establishing credibility in a community. It`s a simple concept, really. Contributing. That`s it. In fact, there is no other way. Your title does not matter. Nor does your age or political associations or position in any given organization. And you geography should`t matter, either. What matters most is your ability to get involved, to organize and engage new people, to build basic infrastructure and tools to facilitate participation, and then to contribute directly yourself. That`s how you build community -- and the building concept pervades all levels of a community. Everyone builds. And everyone builds from within the community, not from the outside. I also told a bunch of stories about the engineers, managers, and community developers I have met along the way, the ones I respect most and from who I still learn every day. Excellent night. Then the next morning some of guys took me to a nearby volcano.
On Tuesday we went to ITHB in Bandung, which is about two hours from
Jakarta, for another university visit. We were a bit late due to some
impressive winter rain, but when we arrived the energy in the room was
palpable. Great fun. Loved every minute. Can`t wait to go back.
More presos on OpenSolaris from Harry Kaligis, Agus Setiawan, Lukman
Prihandika, Rachmat Febrianto, Alex Budiyanto. And me.
Blog tag:
indonesia-09 | Photos
on Flickr | Presentation
| Search
for Indonesia OSUGs
I was in Indonesia earlier this week for some OpenSolaris university and user group events. Really cool trip. Exhausting, too. I did a lot of talking. Much more than usual. The community there is engaged and thriving, so there was a lot of talking in between the talks, too. Everyone was super friendly and quite obviously talented. It was my first trip to Indonesia, and it moved me deeply. I will go back, no question about it. I really liked it there. And I learned a lot. I shot 500 images and saved about 200, so I`ll post them across a few entries over the next few days. Indonesia should make for an interesting future for OpenSolaris in South East Asia with these guys coming along. Trust me on that one.
On Monday we started the day at Gunadarma University in Depok, which is about an hour outside Jakarta. Presenting at the event were Harry Kaligis, Alex Budiyanto, Made Wiryana, Agus Setiawan, and Rachmat Febrianto. And me. I talked about the history of OpenSolaris, some of the open development and website projects to support contributions, and how we are building a development community around the world. The other guys talked about local programs and specific technologies in the OpenSolaris distribution. After all the talks and questions/answers, we met with the school faculty to discuss how OpenSolaris can be used to help students learn software development, and we also stressed the importance of building an engineering community on campus where students can contribute both locally and globally.
Blog tag:
indonesia-09 | Photos
on Flickr | Presentation | Search for Indonesia OSUGs
Special thanks to Alex Budiyanto for driving everything. Alex is an
amazing community organizer (and presenter too). More to come.
Bill Rushmore has been working on updating bugs.opensolaris.org. Go here for the new boo: http://bugs.opensolaris.org/. More updates to other website applications coming along soon as well.
It's excellent to see that the Sun Globalization Engineering team released a new version of the Community Translation Interface tool: Sun OpenCTI: https://translate.sun.com/opencti
Among other things, this is the tool that the OpenSolaris community used to localize Auth (which we'll update with new languages soon as well). Also, the announcement from Ales
says that he's opened some new translation projects to get ready for
the next release of the OpenSolaris distribution. So, if you want to
contribute translations to OpenSolaris, check out this new version of
the Community Translation Interface. Send questions to the Internationalization & Localization Community on i18n-discuss (subscribe to the list here and/or post to the Jive forum here). More info here at the CTI team blog.
I updated to OpenSolaris developer build 127 a few days ago. Nice. It performs much better than b126 on my Toshiba Tecra M10. That freezing mouse bit is gone.
Some images from the Tokyo Linux User Group
technical meeting and nomikai tonight.
Check out the new diagonal
crossing
at
Oxford
Circus
in
London. It looks beautiful. They based the
design on the Shibuya Crossing in Tokyo (which can be great fun if
you've never experienced it: here and here).
The
first time I navigated the Shibuya intersection I thought I was
going to get run over flat by waves of people weaving their way toward
me from multiple directions, but it's actually a remarkably efficient
way to move masses of people. I've never been to London, so I don't
know what it's like walking around the city. It'll be interesting to
see how the British like this change.
I never really got slalom skiing. Just couldn`t cut deeply enough.
Fear, I guess. I much preferred barefooting
and tricks, although I don`t have any images of trick skiing. Sad. I
really wish we had digital cameras back then. This is 1981 or so on Long Lake in Maine, about an hour north of Portland. Very pretty area.
I have never been to a Make Meeting. Just BarCamp and Hackerspace. May try Make.
Here`s a
chilling excerpt from a new movie about Daniel
Ellsberg and the Pentagon Papers, which Ellsberg leaked to Neil
Sheehan of the New York Times exposing the lies about the
Vietnam War (among other things). If you haven`t read the Pentagon
Papers I can tell you it`s an enlightening experience to say the very
least. It may shake your confidence in official leadership a bit, but
that`s
not necessarily a bad thing. Leadership should be questioned so power
remains as distributed as possible and decision making processes remain
as transparent as possible. More generally, those two concepts are
core principles to keep in mind while building communities, especially
if you want to create the circumstances where opportunities can spring
from anywhere. Anyway, back
to this film clip. There is one audio conversation between
Nixon and Kissinger cited in the film offering a glimpse into the
thinking
of Richard Nixon. Here`s the exchange:
Nixon: I still think we ought to take the dikes out now. Will that drown people?Absolutely. Insane. But instructive as well. This is what happens when leaders detach themselves from the reality of their decisions. Granted, this is an extreme case, but oftentimes even genuine leaders make bad decisions due to isolation. Lesson to would be leaders: get out of the office, get down in the grass roots, live like the people you lead.
Kissinger: That will drown 200,000 people.
Nixon: Well, no, no, no, no, no. I`d rather use a nuclear bomb. Have you got that ready?
Kissinger: That I think will just be too much, uh.
Nixon: A nuclear bomb, does that bother you? I just want you to think big, Henry, for Christsakes.
The Tokyo Linux UG will have a technical meeting & nomikai on Saturday November 14th. Stop by.
There is an interesting discussion going on in the Japan OpenSolaris Community. Ken Okubo has been floating the idea of translating the OpenSolaris Bible into Japanese. The thread is getting long and it looks like there is some progress. Translating a book that is over a thousand pages long as a community project is a big deal. If you'd like to contribute, ping Ken on ug-jposug at opensolaris dot org. He's a good guy. Sign up to the JPOSUG list here.
Imagine how helpful it would be to get such a book localized into Japanese. It would be a fantastic community-building tool.
