Tim O'Brien
Tim O'Brien has been writing documentation for Apache-related projects for a greater part of a decade. He started with the Jakarta Commons (now Apache Commons) project and wrote the Jakarta Commons Cookbook for O'Reilly. His focus over the past few years has been to support the community outreach, Maven, and Nexus documentation efforts at Sonatype. Tim used to contribute heavily to Commons back in the days of Jakarta, and he desperately wants to get back to coding and contributing to ASF projects. He's continuously trying to convince people that he's a coder, not a technical documentation expert. In addition to open source work and documentation efforts, Tim has implemented systems for Forbes, Inc., Consumer Reports, and TheStreet.com over the past decade and he has occasionally pretended to be a journalist for O'Reilly Media covering science, government, and technology.
**** The past decade saw a lot of CTOs thinking "outside the box", attempting to "leverage" the collective "synergies" of open source to improve key performance indicators (KPI) all while preserving the necessary provenance and governance structures that allow the organization to really "fire on all cylinders". As they understand open source, the collaborative paradigm-shift of distributed "knowledge-workers" allows interested parties to benefit from external sources of innovation giving management the opportunity to achieve greater dominance of vertical markets without having to expend critical resources on issues irrelevant to other C-level stakeholders. In short, Open Source in the enterprise is a win-win, and everybody likes a win-win, right?
If that paragraph made you want to cry, this presentation is for you. We're going to take a look at some of the issues that arise when your boss doesn't fully understand how open source works, and we're also going to explore some ways in which you can help guide management toward a fuller, more accurate appreciation of the culture.
A humorous analysis of the various ways in which "open-source" is misapplied and misunderstood in the corporation will be presented. Along the way we'll use these misconceptions to make some strong recommendations for how not to bring Apache to your organization.
The following topics will be explored:
* Consensus-driven Development in a Business Settings
* Self-organizing Communities in the Corporation
* How not to confuse your boss about "Open Source", answers to the following questions and statements:
* "Right so Open Source is really just like Agile?" No.
* "Why aren't these open source developers doing what we need them to do?" Errr.
* "I don't want to spend any money developing open source. That's not what I signed up for."
* Lastly, what if a corporation really was run as a pure Meritocracy? what would it look like?
