Toscalix from the Canary Islands

Building innovation nodes through Free Software Communities (II)

2012-01-29T16:37:00.004Z

Please read the previous post about this topic to have a better idea of what I'm trying to explain here.

When thinking about how to create a local node in a certain area where all the knowledge from GFSC can be used to improve local economy and social rights I came to the conclusion that we need to define a model based on the following six general ideas:

Principles: some basic principles shared by all participants must be defined.
Participants: electing who is going to participate in the initiative and which role will have each one of them is another simple but relevant idea to determine.
Localization/facilities: the initiative needs a specific place, adapted to the kind of activities needed to achieved the goals.
Services and resources: participants will need to define services and look for the resources needed to launch and sustain the project.
Organization: governance model and structure are also key point to define. They must be adapted to promote an innovation environment.
Actions: activities that will be the core of the project.

1.- Principles

The actions that need to be taken must follow some principles shared by every GFSC, adding some important ones for local agents involved. These two groups of principles can be summarized in the following:

Freedom, which includes economic and administrative freedom.
Self management.
Openness
Integration.
Free licenses.

2.-Participants

In order to be successful, I think the project must count on three major participants:

Source: local Free Software Communities.
Catalyst: organization that will promote interaction among players involved.
Receptors: local organizations and individuals.

3.-Localization/facilities

Localization must be carefully chosen. I think that the perfect place must be located in a mid-size city, well communicated with bigger cities and an international airport. The facilities chosen must allow to celebrate talks, meetings and workshop, with a networking area. Accommodation and restaurants/cafeterias must be easily reachable.

To be successful, the place must have a comfortable atmosphere, quiet but informal, with areas that promote interaction and others intimacy.

4.-Services and resources

In order to define a project to achieve our goals, some services will be needed. The basic ones are:

The project will need support in the following areas:

Administrative
Legal
Financial and accounting.
Marketing and communication.
Business development.
Facilities maintenance and management.

The resources needed to launch a project like this one, must come from:

Sponsorship.
Local public administrations and innovation agents.
Local companies.
Participants.
Activities organized by participants.

5.- Organization

Innovation and complex organization structures are incompatible. The structure to manage the project must be simple and compatible with the culture from the communities involved. I think the perfect organization and structure comes from a mix of three different kind of well known organizations:

Labs. There are many of them around the globe. In Spain we have two well known, one in Madrid and other one in Barcelona.
Self-managed cultural centers. They are multidisciplinary legal entities, self-organized, usually linked to a certain building or infrastructure where many different kind of activities are promoted and organized.
Business incubators.

The global idea is reducing administrative and legal work to the minimum, promoting meritocracy and electing the people that manage the project, creating forums where local agents directly interact with those organizers from the communities that participate in the initiative.

6.- Activities

The communities involved in the project will determine the type of activities to be organized. Obviously, in order to generate a local pole, an intense agenda a a key point. It should be full of community events, but also other kind of activities that promote interactions with local agents, like training sessions, workshops, etc.

Communities usually organize itinerant events. A project like his do not mean that local communities has to change this mechanism of "spreading the message". It is just a matter of creating several minor activities per year at this place.

In following posts I will explain a little how do I believe the above six point should be done/organized to be able to create a local pole of innovation through Free Software Communities.

Building innovation nodes through Free Software Communities

2012-01-26T15:10:00.000Z

Global Free Software Communities (GFSC from now on) are a proof that Silicon Valley model is an industrial innovation and business model from past century. GFSC are building, not just great products, but creating new engineering procedures and tools, new ways of governance models, supporting and promoting new legal improvements in some areas, creating its own identity, its own culture and becoming politically active promoting freedom in the digital world.

Communities attract many young talents and professional by allowing them to grow personally, technically and professionally while developing software anyone can use. GFSC represent a mirror to some new movements and a relevant help to others.

Traditionally key stakeholders has seen GFSC as a R&D ecosystem and a hiring environments. Lately, we are facing a significant change. Smaller companies are getting more and more involved with a new purpose, to share the development of a technology or product to base their business upon. This is specially true in vertical (product oriented) communities, like Drupal or Joomla, for example.

We are also seeing some companies succeeding in building communities around their products, creating a new type of communities driven, but not owned, by them.

All this innovation is taking place through internet, starring geographically distributed teams who usually know each other if they collaborate in the same community but do not if they are members of different ones.

I believe that we have a good opportunity in the following years of creating impact in many places with what we do if we are able to create nodes where all that we do in communities can be translate it to local agents/actors so they can adapt our procedures, use our software, create their own, build a local business sector around the software, help other sectors grow, etc. and, at the same time, attract more contributors to our communities, give us very useful feedback and give us resources to increase our activity.

Different communities have done different actions in order to accomplish these goals. We have experiences from all over the world where Libre Software has been used/deployed/develop with a concrete purpose and certain measurable results. Big companies and Public Administrations has also develop many experiences.

But overall, it seems to me that we haven't yet get the solution to spread our "innovation and culture" in a structured manner, so every community can repeat some basic processes to grow locally and get feedback from these initiatives. For several reasons, many people out there are using our software, but GFSC and the local agents are not properly connected so any of them are taking all the possible advantage. It is hard for us get benefit out of it to let our communities grow. Most of the time it is just a one way street...

GFSC want new contributors that allow us to build new code (and related activities) along with new power users to test and notify bugs and possible improvements. We use internet as the main communication channel and organize events all over the world to accomplish that goal. It takes an affordable amount of resources to execute those action and support the needed infrastructure that allow us to grow every year. But that growth is linear and have little impact in a localized area most of the time. I guess the strategy must be different if we want to create well established local nodes to generate a big impact. And spread them.

How can we move that distributed innovation done by GFSC to a certain geographic area? How an innovation node that helps local economy giving engineers, companies, etc. new chances can be created ? How can we do it in a way that GFSC get feedback? How do we replicated and spread them? Is it possible to do it by ourselves, with our own culture?

I'll write a couple of posts during the following days with some ideas I have related with this topic. These ideas are the fundamentals of a proposal sent to a City Council from Spain to try to create a local node of innovation related through Free Software Communities.

If you know an example of local groups of people that have done sustainable actions in a certain area resulting in increasing the number of contributors in a specific GFSC along with improving the local economy, promoting the creation of local companies, deploying new tools, bringing users to Free Software, etc. please add a link or write s brieft summary. I would like to know about it.

KDE 4.8 release party in Malaga

2012-01-19T15:28:00.001Z

If everything goes as expected, KDE will publish a major release on January 25th. Our KDE 4 series keep improving with the 4.8 version shipped with many new features.

After releasing two beta versions and another two candidate releases (check the announcements for further information), the moment to feel a new freedom experience with KDE 4.8 Platform, Workspaces and Applications has come and we want to celebrate it all over the world.

If you are around Malaga, Spain, on Friday Jan 27th, come to our release party and bring your family and friends with you. We will have a great time. Please add yourself to the list (if you are a KDE member) or send me an e-mail, so we can make an accurate reservation in La Garrafa restaurant.

Should we go for another Desktop Summit?

2012-01-16T09:01:00.000Z

During more than a year, back in 2008 - 2009, I invested a good amount of hours, along with many friends, local contributors and companies, KDE and GNOME members, local public administrations and universities, sponsors, etc. to make true an attractive and risky idea: co-hosting GUADEC and Akademy in Gran Canaria. Two years later, another great group of people did exactly the same to take that idea further, creating a better defined product, the Desktop Summit.

The last few months both communities are discussing about the results of that effort and the challenges we have ahead us. I would like to share my vision. I've found tons of arguments to support it. It is pretty clear to me. I've just written what I think are the most relevant ones.

I've written in the past my concerns about keep laying most of the organization tasks on volunteers and pretending at the same time to celebrate a big and high quality event. That is simply impossible. Every time we get the best we can give. The question is if that enough to achieve our goals in the following years. Do we have other options? Our communities deserve and demand a well organized event. That takes a lot of resources and people. I have no doubt that sharing the organization tasks have made us more efficient.
The Desktop Summit is far from perfect. But both, GUADEC and Akademy are not either. Promoting the idea that globally we loose more that we gain by joining efforts is not accurate.
This joint conference is, by far, the biggest example of cooperation between two free software communities in history. It is an example, one more, of the idea that has bringing us here. Together we can do much more and much better. Supporting that this principle only works within our communities do not make sense to me. This is an universal principle.
During the past two editions, there haven't been any single key issue that could not be solved in the future by representatives from both communities with effort and honest negotiation. We are walking through an unexplored field. We have done many mistakes and many more will come. This is a well known situation for both, GNOME and KDE. We know we can handle it if we have a clear common goal. We've done it in the past within our communities and we can do it during the next Desktop Summit too.
KDE and GNOME boards have came to basic agreements that ensure a fair event for both communities in most basic aspects. Instead of concentrating our efforts on going 50-50 in every single detail, we should be putting our hands on multiplying the impact of our current efforts in every way.
From the economic point of view, we have a better chance to succeed together than by our own. This might not be true in every Desktop Summit for both communities, but in the medium term I'm sure the Desktop Summit will be more profitable than the addition of both, Akademy and GUADEC.
Our communities are mature. Both, KDE and GNOME have a well defined identity. We have a clear view of who we are and what we want. But most of the people out there don't know it. In fact, most of the people out there do not know we exist. We develop two great desktops but less than 2% of the market use it. Unless something dramatically change, we won't become relevant players in the next few years. We simply will face another "this will be the Free Desktop Year", once more. Our contributors, our developers, our users, deserve a different status quo. This event is, by far, the best opportunity we have to induce that change.
In order to increase our impact, we need to reach a wider audience. Our current efforts should be complemented with media coverage. The Desktop Summit is the most attractive product we can offer them to help us.
Having a joint conference do not put in risk our own branding. Fear is what is behind that idea. Fear makes us become conservative. Innovation, means exactly the opposite. Yes, the Desktop Summit is, somehow, about innovation.
Being conservative with less than 2% of market share, having a good product like we both, GNOME and KDE have, is a huge failure in many aspects. Not trying seriously to change that situation is assuming we belong to our projects just for our own interest. The current situation is totally unfair, not just for our communities, but for every single user out there. Having a great product is not enough. We have to do our best for people to know it and, hopefully, use it. Nobody will do it for us.
KDE and GNOME relation is not just about cooperation but about competition. Introducing this second aspect in a natural way during the Desktop Summit is good, very good. I would said that is even necessary. We just have to agree on the red lines. We can do it.
GUADEC and Akademy have a different structure. The Desktop Summit cannot replicate both. The structure of an event must serve the defined goals by the organizers with the available resources. GUADEC/Akademy and the Desktop Summit do not have exactly the same goals. Once we understand this, the structure conflict becomes an affordable problem. I like to think that we want something new, something bigger and, in the medium term, much better than what we have now.
The Desktop Summit takes a whole week. There is plenty of time for accomplishing GNOME and KDE self expectations and needs.
Yes, becoming mainstream means assuming sacrifices. We have to face the challenge of keeping that cool sense of friendship and personal contact we have in GUADEC/Akademy. I think there are ways of doing it. To enforce this, I want to say that I support the idea of doing the Desktop Summit every two years, instead of every year. I understand we cannot have it all. We cannot satisfy everybody during the Desktop Summit...but neither during GUADEC/Akademy.
Instead of dividing efforts, by celebrating the same year GUADEC/Akademy and the Desktop Summit (like some have proposed) I would increase the impact of the Desktop Summit by also hosting other desktops/distribution events like XFCE, OpenSUSE, Fedora, Linux Mint, Mageia, ODF, X.org.......Unity, Trinity (yes, why not?), etc. We have already taken the most difficult decisions.
We are in the position of incubating a movement towards Freedom in the mobile world by inviting key communities and stakeholders to join us under the Desktop Summit umbrella. At least it is worth trying.

For all the above, and many more arguments, I do not agree with those who want to stop celebrating the Desktop Summit, but I do not agree either with those who want to basically keep the Desktop Summit as a KDE and GNOME joint event. I'm one of those who think that we should move further, leading others with our same principles to share our effort and rewards.

What we did in Gran Canaria and Berlin is not the Desktop Summit we deserve, the one I want. I see them as steps in the right direction. Let's take the next one.

Business around AGPL software? Oh yeah.....

2011-12-14T10:28:00.000Z

I've heard many times to executives say that AGPL is a license incompatible with business. This is a well spread idea specially in the web world.

A few years ago a friend of mine, a visionary, Gonzalo Aller, from Fotón SI, the oldest Spanish Free Software company, told me that AGPL is the GPL of the web world. He tried to convince me to put that license in a web project I was involved with. I thought he was crazy, like many times before (and later). I was one of the ignorants who used to see AGPL as business unfriendly.

Like many times before, little by little, I changed my mind and I got convinced, once again, that license define conditions but never determine business. Business is more related to having good ideas, taking smart decisions, execute them correctly and put your hart on it, and not so much about license.

This statement is backed up by many examples. The following projects:

CiviCRM
Zarafa
Gitorious
Launchpad
ProcessMaker

and many more are AGPL based Libre Software projects run by companies that build services around the product, successfully.

We have a new example, announced just today. OwnCloud Inc is born to support OwnCloud, a KDE project based on AGPL. Good luck and happy business!

Libre Software Communities and Universities: talk at La Laguna University

2011-12-12T09:23:00.001Z

On September 19th I planned to give a talk in La Laguna College, Tenerife, Canary Islands. The idea was to promote involvement in Free Software Community projects, like KDE, among students and teachers.

Due to a problem on my trip to Tenerife from La Palma (my mom's car decided to stay in La Palma instead of taking the ship to Tenerife with me) I had to cancel the talk the day before.

Since I visiting my family for Christmas in the Canary Islands, I will be able to give the talk next Monday, December 19th, at 18:00 hours (local time), at the ETSIIT of La Laguna College. Once again, the Libre Software Office of La Laguna College organices it.

You can check the slides of this talk, which I also did in Malaga's college a few weeks ago.

Libre Software Communities and Universities

View more presentations from Agustin Benito Bethencourt

Link to the official announcement done by the ULL Free Software Office.

Remember that this college have about one thousand KDE desktops deployed in their computer labs for students. Their maintenance is done by the Free Software Office (ULL's OSL).

OpePyME (OpenSME) is the most relevant Free Software applications catalog for companies published in Spanish. It is also a OSL project. Their technicians receive the requests, test the applications, categorize and publish them in the catalaog. They also have a Linkedin group (OpenPyME) with almost 800 members to answer questions.

My experience in an install party.... after so long.

2011-12-05T09:12:00.001Z

Yesterday I went to an Install Party in Málaga. It's was back in 2005 when I attended to the previous one. It took place in La Casa Invisible, a well know place because of the activities organized there related with free software, and free culture, among others. I friend of mine, Gabriel Ochoa, was the main organizer.

I went there with a friend of mine who wanted to try GNU/Linux for the first time in her PC.Since the Party goal wasn't to install Ubuntu, I didn't push my friend to install KDE. It would be unpolite. But it wasn't necessary.

I took my netbook with me (Acer Aspire One, the first model with 512 MB RAM and 8 Gb HD) with Debian + KDE (Plasma Netbook) and it was a huge success. Nobody knew about it so I ended up explaining to a couple of people how to install it.

It was my first experience with Unity and I must confess that I liked it, which it is not a surprise since I'm a big fan of clean desktops and shortcuts. My friend loved it to. Somehow the Party took me back to previous days where I used to screw up my computer trying all kind of things, since I had technicians hired who fixed my computer every time. Oh man, poor guys. I used to torture them so frecuently ....

So my conclusion is that we need a lot of promo actions (no news here right?) because our desktop is pretty and attract a lot of attention instantly. Here in the south of Spain GNOME and Ubuntu are very popular so there's a lot to do. My second conclusion is that Unity is a good competitor so I guess we have a third player in this business. Welcome Unity. Let's kick some proprietary desktops ass.

KDE eV Sprint in Berlin

2011-11-22T17:52:00.001Z

The KDE eV Sprint started yesterday for me, waking up early for preparing all my stuff. I had to unpacked my winter cloth since this autumn has been soft in Malaga and I haven't traveled much lately. My plane to Madrid arrived so late that I had to run to take the one to Berlin, so obviously, my bag didn't make it. So Berlin received me with 0ºC and I had no clothing. Not a good start.

On Friday night most of the attendees to the eV Sprint met the developers from the Mobile sprint. Albert, Aleix and Pau from KDE Spain were there. Unfortunately I couldn't make it since I decided to buy some cloth for the following day. Thanks God my bag was waiting for me when I came back to the hotel on Saturday night.

Day 1 of the KDE e.V. Sprint was very productive. We pretty much accomplished every task planned. The second day (Sunday) we worked on more complicated tasks. As usual, we ordered pizza to finish everything on time. Both nights we ended up eating Arabic food (From a Syrian and a Persian restaurant). The overall Sprint went well. On Monday, Stuart Jarvis and myself worked during a few hours in the KDE office in Berlin. We had Italian food at lunch (no German food this time although we did had some German beer).We had the chance to talk to KDE Interns and also with a FSFe employer. As you probably know, we share the office with them. I liked the place, by the way.

On Monday afternoon I had a coffee with Gil Forcada, who just moved to Berlin. At night I had dinner with Pedro Jurado Maqueda, a long time KDE contributor from Seville, Spain, that is also working in Berlin as System Administrator. Thanks Pedro for your hospitality.

As expected, it was a busy and productive long weekend. I'm already looking forward to see many of the attendees again at FOSDEM 2012, in February.

KDE Organizational Network Program structure

2011-11-15T13:31:00.001Z

The Organizational Network Program is divided into three subprograms:

KDE Organizational Network Program Guest: basic level
KDE Organizational Network Program Membership: intermediate level
Patron Forum

    Depending on the evolution of the network, more levels can be added. Each level with take into consideration the nature of the three basic targets. Each subprogram offer different kind of networking activities and implies different requirements and commitments.

   The general idea from KDE perspective is that the differences between the first two subprograms, Organizational Network Program Guest and Organizational Network Program Membership are low, while the Patron Forum is a little more that the top level subprogram, that include some extra services.

   The KDE ON can also be described as a business opportunity KDE offers to organizations related to our project, linked to our community and our software.

The KDE Organizational Network Program is based in networking

KDE Organizational Network Program is a networking based service associated to our community and our software with the idea of building a network of organizations around us that, through a structured program, build new relations among them thanks to the creation of an adequate environment. That environment will be possible to build because of:

The involvement of KDE members with experience in two areas:

Community management and development.
The field where the organizations belong (Education, business and non-profits).

The experience KDE have in key areas like

building communication channels.
community decision making procedures.
mentoring programs.
organizing events.

Existence of a Core Group of organizations already interested in building such a network. Most of them have a very strong relation with KDE actually. Some of them are Patrons.
KDE support to the Program.

   KDE Organizational Network Guest/Member Program are networking (sub)programs, while the Patron Forum is an institutional/political/commercial program, so it has a different nature. Each subprogram is described in following sections.

   KDE ON Guest/Member subprograms must be seen as a two stop journey to become part of KDE. By becoming a Guest, the organization will have the opportunity to build relations with KDE, other Program Guests and Members. Every networking activity will have a digital nature.

   If the evaluation is positive, KDE will offer to the organization the chance to become a Member of the Program. If the organization accepts, it will participate in further activities. Several of them are physical.

   KDE ON Guest/Member subprograms are designed for three different type of organizations:

Education
Business
Non-profit

Some of the activities and procedures are common to those three, but some will be different.

Please remember that this articles is just the latest of a series (7 more articles). Please read the previous ones to fully understand the ideas proposed above.

All the above are personal ideas, even though they are written in third person. Do not take this as a KDE strategy or Plan. They are not.

What is the KDE Program?

2011-11-04T20:05:00.002Z

Executivesfind valuable to become part of a common network that allow them toopen their organizations to new markets, more opportunities incurrent markets, new products, services and talent. KDE can offerthem such a worldwide network formed by many organizations.

Inorder to do it, KDE build a structured Program basedon the following global principles:

Networking as a major value to build self-sustaining cooperative system.
Meritocracy and compromise.
Mentoring.
Single contact point for every organization.
Think global, act locally.
Scalability, depending on the organization dimension and expectations.
Building the field first, creating the rules, and then, let the players play.

TheKDE Program(*) is the result of our determination to create a globalnetwork formed of organizations committed to KDE related principles,technologies, products and services. It also is:

A structured project to add value to KDE, while increasing market opportunities for every member through coordinated networking activities.
A way for KDE to connect with end users through new organizations.
A new approach for supporting KDE in a way every member gets, not just the result of our work, our software, but also the knowledge that allows us to create it, so they can learn and add it to their production process.
A channel to introduce KDE into new markets through a worldwide network of organizations that actively contribute to it.
An opportunity to recognize and reward those organizations that have historically supported KDE.
A new approach to take free software communities beyond their current influence area.

(*) Remember that I am still looking a good name for the Program

KDE Program: Mission and Goals

2011-10-31T18:39:00.001Z

The last weeks I've been putting some effort in thinking about how KDE (and any free software community) can build a network of organizations taking in consideration the weaknesses and strengths KDE (or any other FLOSS project) have.

I wrote a few posts about previous ideas I thought it should be taken in consideration before putting effort in defining a formal design for a Program that leads us to the discussion and execution of an action plan.

Now the idea is to define the Mission and Goals of such a program. In order to understand why of the following ideas, I recommend reading previous posts about this topic in my blog:

Some preious ideas about building new ecosystems around free software projects (I, II, III, IV and V)

Mission

Since we develop and publish KDE for free (as free beer), organizations usually do not understand well where our value is and how can they take advantage of it in a way our ecosystem is nourished, which is essential to keep the wheel spinning. Most organizations, especially corporations, associate value with money. This classical, product oriented, point of view must change in order for us to be recognized as we think we deserve. We can improve the way we communicate our value associating networking (as a service) to our software.

So the KDE Program Mission is:

Helping organizations to know us, what we do and how we do it, so they appreciate the value of KDE and support our action.
Giving them something valuable associated with our software, affordable for KDE, that allow them to increase the chance to grow.

Both ideas can be summarized:

The mission of such a project is to create a global, sustainable and structured network of organizations that shares KDE principles and interests.

KDE Program Goals

Major Goal

The major goal of the KDE Program (KDEP) is to establish the conditions and develop the actions needed to create a network of organizations committed to KDE principles and goals. This network will evolve in an ecosystem by increasing the relations among them and with the KDE community.

This network/ecosystem will be defined to grow, not just in number but in value, satisfying its members shared goals.

Other goals

Other goals of the KDEP are:

Present KDE as an attractive opportunity for organizations to become part of a global network that will benefit all of us.
Increase the number of organizations involved with KDE.
Improve KDE’s relationships with other organizations.
Create new business opportunities for those organizations involved in this Program.
Support local teams. Relations grow better in common environments.
Open job opportunities for KDE developers.
Increase the number of new developers so we make sure the new ecosystem can grow.
Spread KDE principles and vision to other organizations.
Feed KDE with third party experiences, knowledge, technologies, etc.

One of the things that is taking me some time is to look for a proper name for such a program. Any help is welcome.

KDE at the Libre Software World Conference 2011

2011-10-25T12:06:00.000+01:00

Libre Software World Conference (LSWC'11) is the most important commercial event related with Free Software in Spain. It is organized by ASOLIF, the National Federation of SME's Free Software Associations. As you might remember, I was its Manager Director just a few weeks ago.

Last year it was organized in Málaga, Andalusia, and this year it will take place in Zaragoza. The regional Association from the region, CESLA, along with the Municipality, play a key role in the organization of the event.

This edition includes the Joomla Day and the Python Day, which will help bringing to the LSWC'11 even more people than last year, specially technicians, which I think is really good. The event will take place on November 9th and 10th.The following two days, Zentyal celebrates it first Zentyal Summit in the same place. Zentyal contributors , partners, users and employees from all over the world will meet there to take this Free Software Business Server one step further. A lot of good news will come out of it.

Representing KDE Spain, I will give a conference called KDE as a solution in business environments. It is scheduled on November 10th at 10:30 a.m. Although there are several activities at the same time, I expect a lot of people attending since it take place in the central room. That is pressure :-)

As you can see in the program, more than 70 talks and workshop are scheduled. More than 100 companies will be there and more than 500 atendees will participate those two days.

By the way, Microsoft is sponsoring the event.

Some previous ideas about building new ecosystems around free software projects (V)

2011-10-19T11:49:00.002+01:00

Related to our topic, the most relevantinternal factors /strengths and weaknesses) I can think of are thefollowing:

Strengths

Passion.
Collaboration. Sense ofcommunity/identity.
Worldwide project.
Prominent FLOSS project. Well knownbrand.
Leading technology. Innovative.
Well defined product (software).
Broad base of skills.
Efficient development process.
Economically sustainable.
Internal communication.

Passion: KDE, like other communityprojects, is formed by people passionated about what they do andaboutfreedom.

Collaboration. Sense ofcommunity/identity: this culture make them extremely efficient anddetermined when decisions are taken, reaching goals that might seemimpossible.

Worldwide project: KDE is a worldwideproject, with active members all over the world, that speaks in manydifferent languages and come from many different cultures.

Prominent FLOSS project. Well knownbrand: KDE is one of the current leading free software projects inthe world and its brand has a high value, not just because of theproduct delivered, but because of the clear identity behind it.

Leading technology. Innovative: KDEdevelop some of the most interesting technologies in the softwareindustry for desktops.

Well defined product (software): KDEPlatform, KDE Workspaces and KDE Applications form a whole productthat give answer to millions of user needs all over the world.

Broad base of skills: KDE is formed bypeople with many different skills, experience and motivations. It isa rich community.

Efficient development process: todevelop and deliver the product throughout 15 years, KDE have a

complex, efficient and innovativedevelopment process. Coordination.

Economically sustainable: KDE is todaysan economically sustainable project. Budget control and management isefficient.

Internal communication: KDE has solidcommunication channels and procedures with high participation.

Weaknesses

Weak marketing culture. Lack ofexperience.
Lack of resources for non technicalactivities.
Complex ecosystem.
Complex decision making process.
Diffuse points of contact.
Self criticism.

Weak marketing culture. Lack ofexperience: marketing haven't been a priority in the past. We can domuch better in this area.

Lack of resources for non technicalactivities: some non technical areas need more manpower.

Complex ecosystem: KDE is a big projectwith a complex structure. It is not easy to understand it when youcome from traditional organizations.

Complex decision making process:because of its nature, some kind of decisions are hard to make inKDE. This is common to most community driven projects.

Diffuse points of contact: approachingKDE can be hard to do since we lack of globally defined roles. Someknowledge of how KDE work is needed to make the approaching processefficient, specially for non technical issues.

Self criticism: KDE has a strong senseof self-criticism, which is really good for internal processes, butharmful if it is made public continually focusing on weaknesses.

Once again, if you think some otherelements must be added, feel free to make comments to this post.

Some previous ideas about building new ecosystems around free software projects (IV)

2011-10-18T22:37:00.000+01:00

After the previous three articles aboutvery basic previous ideas to take in consideration before designingan engagement program for organizations, we need to think about whatare going to be the concepts to base our program on.

To have a better chance to succeed, wehave to build our program on our strengths and not on our weaknesses.In order to identify those strengths, I've made a simple SWOTdiagram.

This entry will describe the majoropportunities and threats I see that might affect to our plan ofbuilding new ecosystems with organizations.

Opportunities

Free Software culture expansion.
Desktop – web relation.
Free Software business models success.
KDE has millions of users.
KDE cross platform strategy.
Software everywhere.
Increasing market pressure overUniversities to include free software topics.
Free Software seen as strategical forby many countries.

Free Software culture expansion: moreand more organizations are interested in crowd sourcing techniquesand in collaboration processes like the ones we use for softwaredevelopment. Movements like Open Data, Open Gov. Free Culture,copy-left, Free hardware, etc. are strongly related to the freesoftware culture. Some of those movements are interesting for manyorganizations. A community project like KDE can expand his influenceto other areas.

Desktop – web relation: interactionbetween the desktop and the web, along with the irruption of smalldevices, can allow us to expand our influence to the web world, wheremany organizations are extremely interested.

Free Software business models success:more and more organizations, specially companies, are developing freesoftware business models where upstream collaboration is seen as agood value.

KDE has millions of users: KDE havemillions of users so we are a good target for organizations thatwants to reach them.

KDE cross platform strategy: KDE is amultiplatform and multidevice project. There is a shiny future aheadof us if we keep pushing in the current direction.

Software everywhere: software isbecoming strategical in many industries. Free Software is becomingpopular is most of them. KDE has more and more open markets everyyear.

Increasing market pressure overUniversities to include free software topics: since free software isgetting popular in IT industry, the pressure over Universities andother Education organizations is much bigger than in the past. Thismean that the cost for KDE to find potential contributors willdecrease.

Free Software seen as strategical forby many countries: more and more countries are defining national ITstrategies around free software due to political, social and economicreasons. This will open us new markets.

Threats

Classic Free Software threats likesoftware patents, closed formats, etc.
Key players without a clear and stablestrategy.
Increasing our relations scope.
Management.
Resource dimensioning.

Classic Free Software threats likesoftware patents, closed formats, etc: KDE and any action we taketoward building new ecosystems with different types of organizationsare permanently threatened by them.

Key players without a clear and stablestrategy: because of different reasons, many stakeholders thattraditionally or lately have been supporting KDE, change theirstrategy often. Although KDE has proven in the past to be good atisolating the impact produced by them, tensions might increase in thefuture.

Increasing our relations scope: KDE hasbeen very successful at attracting technical contributors and othernon-profits related with free software. It is not clear that we canextend that success to other type of organizations.

Management: KDE will face somemanagement challenges in the near future due, among other factors, tothe growth rate it is experimenting. Increasing the ecosystem toother type of organizations will stress even more the actualmanagement resources.

Resource dimensioning: overload takesany organization through many non desired consequences like qualitydecrease, internal tensions, expenses, management inefficiencies,etc. Like in any community project, properly resource dimensioningand control is specially difficult, since our community is formedmostly by volunteers.

Isolation from the freesoftware-business relation: KDE, like other free software communitieshaven't been in the past very interested in the business side of freesoftware. We are more technical focused. The increasing economicsuccess of free software will force us to put energy into this areato avoid isolation.

Yes, there are probably many more, butI hope most of them are somehow included in these ones. Otherwise,feel free to add more through comments to this blog post.

Some previous ideas about building new ecosystems around free software projects (III)

2011-10-12T11:42:00.002+01:00

In order to fully understand this post, you will need to read the previous two of this series Some previous ideas about building new ecosystems around free software projects (I and II).

As every community, KDE has members with key positions within some organizations. Some of these can be considered already part of our network of companies. A little group of them can even be considered part of KDE ecosystem. But they are just a few. There are hundreds of organizations out the re that agree with our principles, that use our technologies, that deploy it, support users, teach the tools we use or develop......Many of them would be willing to collaborate with us, or even build a strong relation.

Free Software communities have a lot to teach to organizations. We are great examples of how a complex product can be developed openly. Just a few organizations out there can compare their products and impact with ours. So why it is so hard for us to involve more organizations in our free software projects?

To answer this question, I will go back to some questions made at the end of the first post of the series:

What do we want from organizations?
What can we offer them?
What do they want from us?

1.- What do we want from organizations?

I haven't done a wide research among KDE members, but it is not hard to point the most popular answers, depending on the type of organization we are talking about (remember that we are focusing in three different types):

Education related organizations:

KDE promotion among teachers and students.
Collaboration with KDE and local companies in KDE's development.
Collaboration with KDE through P&D projects.
Including community driven development process and KDE tools in their programs.

Corporations/SME:

Funding KDE.
Adding resources to the project.
Hiring KDE members and promoting they have time to contribute to KDE
Sponsoring our events.
Support our marketing actions.
Coordination in technical and strategy decisions related with KDE.
Participate in the testing/QA/support phases of the KDE software life cycle.
Share contents related with KDE.

Non profits:

Advise/consultancy
Improve our relations with Govs., other non-profits, representatives from no IT sector, media, etc.
Funding KDE.
Adding resources to the project.
Sponsoring our events.
Support our marketing actions.

Please feel free to add a comment if you thinks there's something missing.

2.- What can we offer them?

Our software (product)
Services:

Consultancy in many different areas related with software development, tools, design, etc.
Networking with organizations and people around the world.
Exposure.
Branding.
Content creating related with our software.
Technical support.
Training.

There are some services could be also some services that, even though we can offer them, the resources needed in case of success do not scale, for example. I mean that some services can only be offered with guarantee under certain circumstances.

3.- What do they want from us?

The most common not pure technical request usually are:

Many organizations related with KDE frequently come to us looking for technical support.
We have had in the past requests to associate our branding with different kind of organizations. Partnership programs are becoming popular among free software projects lunched by a company or a commercial consortium.
Sometimes we recieve request from companies that encourage us to change our schedule, giving priority or claiming for certain new or past features.
Since KDE is what they see/use, sometimes they assign to us bugs that are in fact somebody else's responsibility. Distros share with us this problem.
Contents are a common request from organizations. Howto's, User Guides, etc.
Translation is also a common request. Even though we make a huge job in every release, it is impossible to launch our software and our contents in every single language.
Consistency is another request. Since in KDE you can run all kind of applications, not just KDE ones, it is impossible to manage every problem related to this.

Like in the definition process of every strategic plan (that is exactly what we are doing), these answers must be prioritize for every type of organization. The above are not in order.

In a simple world, matching what we can offer with what organizations want (for every type ) give you a good idea of where to point our strategy. But there is another important question that we have to answer before making any conclusion.

What do we want to offer?

Every Free Software community have its own culture based on strong principles, as explained in the second post of this serie. So there are certain services that we CAN offer but, for different reasons, we DON'T WANT to. Some other services are very hard to scale.

Many of the people/organizations that approaches us really don't understand who/what we are. Note: we have to do a lot more in this area... So for them some things seem obvious and they are not. In this discussion related with services, that statement is also true.

I assume that KDE would want to offer, in addition to our product, services that share these characteristics:

Aligned with our culture.
Adds value to our product and the receiver, but also to our community.
Scalable.
Require more manpower on areas we are stronger. This mean that what we should offer must lay on our strengths, not our weaknesses.
Not required high availability, wich means that should not lay on specific people. KDE contributors are not full time employees in most cases.

The following step is defining the ideas and concepts that will support the Program that can take us to building a Network of organizations that could evolve in the future into a healthy ecosystem.

All the above are my points fo view, even though sometimes I use we.

Some previous ideas about building new ecosystems around free software projects (II)

2011-10-05T17:51:00.000+01:00

Some definitions

The first step I've been doing lately in order to try to write some ideas about a network of organizations around KDE is to read a little about basic definitions. We need to have definitions in mind in order to use them properly.

Network (social)

Please check the definition from Wikipedia. It is important to understand that:

A network implies interdependency between nodes.
Wikipedia is explicit about knowledge and prestige as two types of interdependency between nodes.

Communiy

Please check the definition from Wikipedia . We need to keep in mind that:

A community share common values
Those values along with the interactions between community members generates a shared identity.
Community comes from latin, meaning "in common". Communis is a complex word: com + munis. Com is "cooperator" and munis means "helpful", "who fulfills his duty". These ideas are present in our mind when we think about KDE, right?

Ecosystem

Most of the readers remember this definition from school. There are a few points about it that will be important for this and the following articles:

An ecosystem involves living beings along with physical factors that affects them.
The concept do not depends on dimension.
Ecosystem implies that its members depend on each other.
A healthy ecosystem is sustainable, an unhealthy one it is not.
An ecosystem is said to be healthy when is balanced.
The balanced concept is strongly related with the reproduction of the species within the ecosystem.

These three concepts are going to be very popular in this series of post about building an ecosystem of organizations around free software projects, like KDE.

Understanding what we already have

To build a network of organizations around KDE we do not begin from scratch. Around KDE there are a few organizations that somehow "belong to KDE", I mean, most of us feel they are strongly related to our community.

What kind of relation do we have with them? What do they have uncommon? Why it is so easy and natural for them to be part of KDE and so hard for others, even for many of those that use and help us to develop our software?

An ecosystem is formed by different type of "species" that are related to each other in different ways. If we do not understand the relation we have with these "KDE organizations" and how they were built, we will have a bigger chance of failing in our goal.

Please feel free to answer to these questions via comments on this post, e-mail, etc.

I think there are three key points to mention:

Many of these organizations are founded by people that were previously KDE community members. This element is common to other communities. I know a few cases in GNOME and Debian, at least.
A significant percentage of their workforces are KDE community members, some of them are "primary nodes" and its business largely depends on technologies developed or used by KDE. Collaboration comes naturally.
They have a culture as organization influenced or aligned with KDE principles which reduces frictions in case of conflict.

My conclusion is that these "KDE companies":

Understand our culture.
Participate in our evolution as community.

There are many organizations related to KDE, obviously, but just a few have both characteristics, which define, in my opinion, the strong relation with KDE. Some only have one of them and are not visualized internally like "part of KDE", at least not in the sense of "belonging to our ecosystem".

The first factor is about knowledge, about experiences, about philosophy and ethics. It is about those fundamentals that every free software project share, but also about those that define every one of them, making them slightly different. Definitely, it is about people and relations.

The second factor is about procedures, about resources, about technology, about impact, branding, exposure......

In order to build a healthy ecosystem, formed by organizations, around KDE (any free software project), the project design needed, the derived action plan, every activity or service involved, must have as a basic goal to improve those two key factors as if they were linked, since they have proven to be necessary to generate long term relations. Otherwise, the ecosystem might not be sustainable, and the enormous effort involved in creating it will be somehow wasted.

Maybe there are other approaches, but I haven't been able to understand them or there is no clear evidence of success yet.

Some previous ideas about building new ecosystems around free software projects (I)

2011-10-04T18:18:00.001+01:00

There are a few free software projects out there that have been very successful through the years in attracting developers and building awesome development environments. KDE is one of them. Every new version of our KDE 4.x series is the result of a complex proccess made by hundreds of people working remotely as a well structured group of coordinated teams. We haven't stop growing during our 15 years of existance and the impact and scope of our work is now wider than ever. Several other free software projects are experimenting similar behaviors.

The result of our huge work has a great technical and commercial value. It is also a good testing/learning field for the people involved. Their professional careers add value by becoming part of projects like KDE. Big corporations are aware of this and it is common to see them hiring people in community events or trying to influence free software projects in many ways.

Relations between mature free software projects and big companies have been always complex. Along with the growth of free software in market, conflicts are increasing since corporations are adding more pressure into community projects. Many of them are commercializing products/services based on technologies supported or developed by these communities and we do not always have the same goals. The recent conflicts between GNOME/Canonical, KDE/Nokia, Kernel/Google, MeeGo/Nokia-Intel, LibreOffice/Oracle, MySQL/Oracle are just some examples. More are yet to come.

On the other hand, these multinational companies had put resources and money on our projects allowing us to become what we are now. By using and building their strategies around our/their work, they have helped us to reach millions of users. We do have a huge impact because of them too.

Smaller companies: new players

During the last few 3-4 years we are experimenting how some smaller companies are becoming part of our ecosystem. Some of these companies fit very well because they were founded by community members, but some others simply understand the benefits of building their products and services staying close to the decision forums, adding resources to the development proccess, so they ensure they know the technology. This small but innovative companies usually have a strong free software culture. Their size do not allow them to have their own strategy around the technology so becoming part of our ecosystem is a major goal for them, not a temporary effect of his own strategy.

The irruption of these smaller companies is also good news for corporations. It is easier for them to build a commercial and development channel laying in companies that participates in the development of the technology they use. Since software is getting more and more important, every helpful hand is welcome.

So it is easy to end up thinking about how good it would be to increase the number of smaller companies involved in our free software projects.

Grow locally

In parallel to this, KDE, and other community projects, are increasing their efforts of reaching potential contributions and users in their own language, taking in consideration the local culture. Some community projects are getting so big that some actions in the management/organization side must be taken to keep being efficient and flexible.

Like others, KDE is going through a process of organizing local communities around legal entities related with the matrix. The experience is telling us that some advantages and positive effects are taking place as a result of reducing the barriers for people to get involved in the project. There are many, but language and culture are huge ones. Another one that is not frequently mentioned is that people wants to relate to each other face to face, at least once in a while. National events, like Akademy-es, represent a definitive step for a developer to end up contributing actively to the global project.

Like in economy, the communities are built around poles that get connected to each other. If some developers are in the same geographical area, personal relations allow a pole to grow faster and stronger. We have a very good example of this process in Spain with Barcelona or in France with Toulouse. Also this helps to explain why we haven't been able yet to become in the US as successful as in other parts of the world.

It is easy to think how would it would be to speed up this process since the results look promising.

Non-profits as key partners

Every mature free software project have relation with some stakeholders that, eve though are not communities of developers, they are key players: non-profit organizations. These relations are not structured and too often have lay on personal efforts. Free software communities are very technology centric and most of those non-profit don't, so relations are not based on personal interest most of the time, but in the defense of free software (general idea).

But both, those non-profits and free software projects, are aware of how important is to stay close to each other, specially with so many viruses out there waiting to infect us.

But beside those non-profits that are very related directly on indirectly with free software,there are many more that we can contacted to build a very valuable relation. International cooperation or science centered organizations are among them.

So once again, it is easy to end up thinking how good it would be to increase the number and intensity of our relations with non-profit organizations.

Colleges: strategic partners

Most of the new contributors free software project attract are students from colleges. They have the time and energy to learn. Projects like KDE are perfect for them to develop new skills, useful in their professional careers. Only in very few companies a student can become part of such a complex environment, using such innovative tools, surrounded by high skilled people.....for free (not even paying, probably).

Teachers play a key role for us. Experience tell us that, where there is a teacher involve in our project, many new contributors arrive. Colleges are usually involve with local companies and somehow influence in the decisions they take related to technology. In order to create poles, they are the perfect host.

Every free software project have relations with colleges, but most of those relations are also based on personal relations between community members and some teachers. Maybe the same person plays both roles.

So, yes, again, it is easy to end up thinking how good it would be to increase our relation with colleges around the world.

Building a new ecosystem

In order to ensure our independence in the future, keep growing and increasing our impact, we will need to find out ways to establish structured relations with these 3 type of organizations:

smaller companies (SME from now on)
non-profits
colleges (including similar institutions).

Some of the principles and procedures we are using now successfully in our relations with developers from our own projects and other communities might not work perfectly with these organizations. They talk different languages and we will need to find ways to create a new field with different rules, so they they join our game, a game based in our classical strong principles.

If we agree that engaging developers is easier if you have a strong local structure, it make sense to think that maybe the same aproach can work with organizations.

This new ecosystem, within our community, will be the result of going through a new process that will have, at least, three different phases:

Creating a structured and coordinated program (the rules).
Building up a network with those organizations (the field).
Evolving into an ecosystem (the game).

We have to be aware of the difference between an ecosystem and a community. It seems to me it will be a basic element to consider.

All the above is quiet obvious and, like in KDE, almost every free software project has been taking steps toward this direction. The recent MeeGo/Tizen affaire has made the need to push forward these kind of actions even more obvious.

How do we design that structured and coordinated program? How do we make it compatible with our goals? It will be possible with our limited resources? What do we want from these organizations? What can we offer to them? How do we make such a program sustainable? How do we handle our differences? Is such a new ecosystem going to affect us? How? Are we prepared?

I'll write about some ideas I have in the following days related with the above questions.

A year after the agreement between KDE eV and KDE Spain

2011-09-30T16:38:00.002+01:00

Yesterday, September 29th 2011, it was published in the Dot, the article KDE España, an inspiring first year, wich summarizes KDE Spain activity after the agreement between that organization and KDE e.V. was signed. This milestone have been important due to several reasons:

Reinforce the institutional relation between both organizations, allowing KDE Spain to become stronger when relating to local public administrations, companies, other non profit organizations, etc.
It stablishes a precedent to be followed by other "KDE daughters" like the ones going on in Brazil, India, France, etc.
It shows the interest that KDE have in growing in a viral mode in every country, in the local language, taking in consideration the local culture and singularities.
Helps breaking down some myths about free software communities not being able to organice themselves properly or not having an "institutional or corporative side/point of view". It is obvious that we are getting more and more mature and these kind of agreements reflect it.
Supports every action KDE España is taking in Spain in an organized and structured way:

Almost twenty participations in events.
Akademy-es 2011 (4th edition + 1 pre-edition) sponsored by Google and Qt Software (Nokia).
Celebrating institutional meetings with local organizations and public administrations.
Organizing of KDE Sprints, for the very first time, in Spain.

Solid Sprint 2010 and 2011 (called Forge)
KDE-Edu Sprint 2010

Increasing the active members up to 30 (we pay a yearly fee/suscription) along with the spanish contributors to KDE.
Supporting not just Spanish, but other languages spoken in certain parts of Spain like galician, vasque, catalan..
The following weeks we will face the 15th anniversary of KDE and KDE España will organice some comferences to celebrate it.

KDE Spain, like other comming local KDE associations will be able to execute locally what we design globally and the opposite. It is not just a legal strategy, but a global one. KDE has made a step forward in a promising direction. One year after the agreement was signed, we have accomplished a good amount of goals, but the best is yet to come.

Generation of innovation nodes, labour insertion and technology transfer through Libre Software communities in colleges.

2011-09-14T09:48:00.003+01:00

Next monday, September 19th, the Free Software Office and the International Relations Department of La Laguna College (Tenerife, Canary Islands, Spain), has invited me to give a talk about how good is for teachers and student to become part of a mature Free Software Community.

The benefits of defining and executing a long term program that promotes the involvement of teachers and students in projects like KDE (and others) are well known....by us. Most people out there have no idea about it

My goal is to structure the arguments, present them in a simple way and support them with examples and success stories from KDE. I'm open to also show examples from other communities, so feel free to add a comment about it, with references, please.

Although the conference will be in spanish, I'll do the slides in english. I hope I'll have time to translate them into Spanish. I have plans to give this talk in other colleges so I would improve it.

We need to get teachers involved in our communities since they are the front door to get students' interest. KDE, along with other mature community prjects, offer an incredible opportunity for both groups to learn, contribute and create an innovation and knowledge trasfer node in colleges. We need to create a shared enviroment where our projects, students, teachers and local corporations get benefit of that collaboration.

I'll publish the slides in my slideshare account.

Title: Generación en la Universidad de polos de innovación, inserción laboral y transferencia tecnológica a través de comunidades de Software Libre
Conference location: Room 2.9, Computer Science School, Science Campus, La Laguna, Tenerife, Canary Islands, Spain
Time: 17:00 (local time)
Further information in Spanish

Open to open new doors

2011-09-12T19:00:00.003+01:00

Next Thursday September 15th will be my last day as ASOLIF Manager Director. It's been two and a half awesome years helping many companies, regional associations and entrepreneurs to build a Libre Software SME sector from scratch in Spain.

I've always believed that, if you want to become a good professional, working hard is not enough. You have to work side by side with high skilled and motivated people and I feel ASOLIF has given me the chance to do exactly that. I feel lucky.

I would like to thank Daniel Armendariz and Pablo Gómez (ASOLIF first two Presidents) and their boards for supporting and believing in me. These days I'm overwhelmed by the support messeges I've been recieving, wishing me luck in my new adventures. I've had a great time and I'm going to miss a lot of people.

Spain is going through the biggsest economic crisis in democracy, but Libre Software companies are growing, which means that the future is brilliant. ASOLIF have an increasing impact. If free software companies keep pushing, a lot of good news will come out from the National Federation. I wish the best to the new board and to every company involved.

It is time for me to rest a few days and look for another job. I'm sure there is something as exciting as ASOLIF has been, out there. And I want to go for it.

My personal Desktop Summit 2011

2011-08-12T23:20:00.000+01:00

I'm back in Malaga and it is time to summarize my Desktop Summit.

First of all I would like to thank every single one of the local organizers and volunteers for the effort they've done the past days/weeks/months. It has been a great conference.

I've attended to many conferences. I've read a lot comments about many of them so I'm not going through them.

Mediation Training Session

Thanks to KDE e.V., I was able to attend to the Mediation Training session on Thursday. It was designed to improve the skills of the KDE Community Working Group. It worked really well. What I did learn there will be very helpful. I'm sure it will help the CGW, so every single KDE member will benefit from it.

By the way, you guys are doing an awesome job.

GUADEC 2012 in La Coruña

On Monday July 8th, I attended, as a member of the La Coruña candidacy for hosting GUADEC 2012, to the project presentation to the GNOME Board. ASOLIF supported GPUL (and other companies and organizations) in its effort to bring this event, for the forth time, to Spain. We succeded and the announcement came a day later.

José Millán, from GPUL and KDE Spain, and I were part of the team that did the presentation. This gives a clear idea of the good relations GNOME and KDE have in Spain, that made possible bringing the Desktop Summit to Gran Canaria back in 2009 or celebrating the GUADEMY, for example.

Hosting GUADEC 2012 in Spain became a personal goal too. I am really happy about the result. The members of the candidacy did a great job. They deserve this opportunity GNOME is giving them.

Kiosk BoF

Kiosk is one the most important features KDE offers for big deployments in restricted enviroments. On Thursday 11th, some KDE developers and people related with deployments talked about the state of kiosk, new improvements and requested fixes. We came out with several tasks to do during the following weeks.

My new tasks in KDE

Little by little, I'm getting more involved in KDE, after not doing much during the second half of 2009 and almost all 2010. The weeks before the DS, I did some research about corporate networks around free software projects, specially those supported by non-profit entities.

Back in 2003, I actively participated in the birth of ESLiC, the Association of Free Software Companies from the Canary Islands. This project was followed by the foundation of ASOLIF, on which I was also involved. A couple of years later, back in 2009, I became its Manager Director (life sometimes takes funny turns). So I have been involved lately in building network of companies and relations with other type of organizations.

On Thursday, during the KDE Promo Team BoF, I presented a new approach for building relations between KDE and other organizations (companies, other non-profits, education institutions, etc.). Some team members agreed on helping me to finish the strategy plan and defining an Action Plan so it can be runnig before the end of 2011.

Since this is just a plan, I won't go into details until it is finished. I'll just say that I'm excited about it.

In parallel, I will put some effort this year in helping KDE e.V. in comercial activities. I always tried to do in KDE different activities than in my regular job. It looks like this is going to change in 2011, which I'm not sure yet if it is good or bad news...for KDE :-)

Karaoke

It looks like it will be impossible to take away a karaoke session in future Desktop Summits. The Spaniards did particulary good singing a Spanish classic song from Camilo Sesto. We demostrated we can beat really bad any Free Software group from Japan or Korea. There is no doubt about it.

Conclusions

It has been a very productive Desktop Summit for me. I always enjoy meeting the KDE crew, and people from GNOME as well. I'm looking forward to work on the new ideas we've been going through this DS, to help the eV and to see improvements in Kiosk, among many other innovations we are working on.

GNOMErs..see you in La Coruña in GUADEC 2012.

KDErs...keep rocking.

My job at ASOLIF

2011-06-09T18:56:00.000+01:00

As you might know, I work at ASOLIF, the Spanish National Federation of Libre Software SMEs, formed by 9 regional associations that group about 200 IT companies.

You can find a description about who we are and what we do in our website and an updated presentation below:

ASOLIF - Spanish National Federation of Libre Software SMEs

View more presentations from ASOLIF.

So basically my time is divided into:

Projects (design, execution, monitorization, cost control, etc. ) that involve our associations and/or our companies.
Commercial activities.
Communication activities.
Lobby :-)
Administrative and other internal activities.

So I'm in the Libre Software bussiness but in a non common organization. I hope this clarifies what I do. Many people ask me and it is not so easy to explain.

Season of KDE: we need you, KDE contributor, to get involved

2011-05-08T11:55:00.000+01:00

KDE provides a great oportunity for students interested in computer science, designers, translators, etc., to improved their skills in a worldwide, structured and organized libre software community project. The result of their work could be used by millions of users.

Season of KDE is the program our community has built to give new contrinutors the chance to get involved in KDE in a smooth way, supported by experienced contributors. Coordinated by Lydia Pintscher, we are being really successful in getting potential contributors to join the program. After all the effort done in the past, and the great opportunity we have in front of us to increase our community, it is KDE's time to give all these young students the opportunity to become part of our journey.

We need you to join the program by mentoring these new contributors.

Why should you become a Season of KDE mentor?

It is the best way to support the great job some KDE members are doing for bringing new developers into our community.
Season of KDE is a great opportunity for you to attract some new contributors to your project.
Do you remember your first few weeks as a KDE developer? Make it easier for new contributors to join our community.
It is a great starting point for you if you want to become a GsoC mentor in the near future.

To join Season of KDE as a mentor, please contact Lydia Pintscher.

Join the Game.....c'mon

2011-05-06T14:32:00.001+01:00

There are many ways for supporting KDE. Of course writing code for our project is the most popular but there are many other ways for contributing to KDE. For those who do not have time to invest collaborating with us, or simply wants to add an extra effort to support us, KDE published the Join the Game campaign last year.

Join the Game is the supporting KDE program we have built for helping to ensure our future. KDE wants to keep increasing or at least maintaining the actual number of activities we do all over the world to support our contributors, make KDE a better software and spread free software principles and benefits.

We, KDE, have a lot of fun doing what we do specially because it benefits a lot of people all around the world. So join us by joining our game. Join the Game

Killer feature for big Education deployments: kiosk returns

2011-04-10T10:19:00.000+01:00

Most of the people I've met that participate in taking the decisions in IT related to Education in public administrations related are not technicians. Many people around libre software tend to think that the decision to go for Windows or Linux based desktops (GNOME or KDE) has a lot to do with technical, usability or the look & feel features. Throughout the years, we have concentrate a lot is these aspects hoping that winning the any of those wars, we would suceed in being chosen as the default desktop in education.

During the decision process made by those people, when considering KDE and GNOME as default desktop compared to Windows, three considerations play on our side:

TCO cost
Availability of many useful applications within a classroom.
Computer's lifecycle increase.

Thanks to our effort, most of the good applications we have in Linux plattforms, are already availiable for Windows. KDE has done a huge and succesful effort in this area (KDE for Windows project).

The TCO cost is a relevant one, but it is not the most important one. The experience tell us that it is the mainteinance and support the biggest piece of the cake in the medium term.

That cost has basically 3 sources:

Communication (connectivity)
Hardware
Software

If we ask any user support department from a IT Education oriented organization, they will tell you that most of the software support queries comes from:

Users that do not know how to use the software
Teachers that report that the software do not work properly because an unexpected action from a student.

The second queries are fatal ones since they are more difficult and more expensive, to solve.

When talkign about migrating schools from Windows to Linux based desktops, one of the major features KDE had to offer in the past was our ability to port in a more scalable and cheaper way many of the features implementd in schools related to user profiles and desktop lockdown offered with Windows desktop + Active Directory. We could do that because of Kiosk.

During the KDE Edu Sprint public event that is took place yesterday in Bilbao, two people from two different Edu projects, one from Portugal and another one from Spain, pointed out the strong effort that is taking to them porting what they usually did in KDE3 with Kiosk to KDE4. In fact, they both agreed that support queries will increase due to unexpected actions done by students with the new software (KDE4).

It is easy to think that for big deployments, not having fully implemented kiosk is a major obstacle for switching from KDE3 to KDE4. Without kiosk mode working properly, we cannot compete with the Adctive Directory + Windows desktop in most of the features related with user profiles and lockdown of unusable features either.

From my point of view, related to Education, our priority should be to have a fully inplementation of kiosk mode for KDE4. If we want to beat Windows in Education, we have to think about the maintenance cost of having a huge number of desktops to take care of. Kiosk is in these situations is the best feature we can offer.

We have talked about this during the KDE Edu Sprint. Alex Fiestas is already doing some previous work in order to know what is missing and what is the effort needed to bring kiosk mode back in KDE 4.

I cannot think on a better way of having in the near future more new deployments in schools based on KDE 4, and the ones we already have switching smoothly to KDE 4, than giving them a killer feature that has a direct impact in medium term costs. Kiosk was our strongest feature in this area. It is worth it to have it back, even better if we can.

Libre Software World Conference instead of Open Source World Conference

2010-11-02T15:41:00.000Z

Every year it used to take place in Spain a big software libre conference. One year it was celebrated in Extremadura and the other one in Andalucía (Málaga). The Málaga one, called Open Source World Conference had over seven thousand atendees during the three days conference in 2008. This year was announced for October 27th and 28th a few months ago. KDE along with more than a hundred organizations were going to give talks, demos, participate in round tables, etc.

Many companies from ASOLIF, the National Federation of Free Software SME from Spain, the organization I work for, were preparing contents for that conference, and some representatives from our Andalucía Association, Andalibre, and myself has been involved in organicing our presence there since early February. Like it happens in any other big conference, it takes a lot of work to have everything ready in time and there are many things you cannot wait until the last minute to solve.

During the OSWC, ASOLIF was going to celebrate our internal meeting, called IV Encuentro ASOLIF, that take place every six months. 75 of our companies were expected to come to Malaga from all over Spain. During these meetings, we coordinate the actions and projects we are working on and we celebrate meetings with public administration, big companies and other entities interested in collaborating with us.

On October 6th, the Andalucía's Regional Goverment, the OSWC organicer, suddenly announced the cancellation of the event. This meant that all the work we were preparing had no meaning and was going to be lost. Our companies were shocked, just like I was.

Two days later, after a lot of internal disscussion, ASOLIF did agree on leading the organization of a public event during October 27th and the IV Encuentro ASOLIF on October 28th in Málaga. For doing this, we made an open call for help and many other organizations and individuals got involved on it: colleges, LUGs, media, developers, etc. The open collaboration mode worked well. The City Council of Málaga helped us by letting us use the Malaga Congress Palace for the event.

So after 19 days of hard work, we were able to kick off what it was called de Libre Software World Conference (LSWC) in the same place and time the OSWC was supposed to happen. In the four tracks we of the event, more than 60 members of different companies, universities, local and regional goverments, etc. were involved. About three hundred people attended and about 30 ASOLIF companies could show their products in demos. About 50% of the contents involved ASOLIF members and the other 50% were given by other entities. KDE Spain was one of them (Antonio Larrosa did it...yes...he's back :-) ).

The following day, ASOLIF celebrated its IV Encuentro ASOLIF and about 40 companies from all over Spain showed up. So the whole adventure ended up being a great success.

I've been quiet busy the last month trying, along with other people, to organice in a few weeks what it usually takes a few months....but we did it quiet well so all the work was worth it. It is the first time our organization leads the celebration of a partly commercial oriented event. We already have plans to repeat the experience next year. With more time and money we know now we can do a good job.

Bussines around free software is not an exception anymore so we feel there is room for a more commercial oriented event in Spain. We want to bring different profiles to it without losing the hacking way of doing things that works so well for networking purposes in community oriented events.

It was good news that KDE Spain did a KDE 4 demo during the LSWC. Many enterpreneurs attended to it. But it was even better news that most of the speakers used KDE. Some tweets reflected this fact. It was unexpected to most. I knew we had a bigger penetration in commercial enviroments than in public administrations (GNOME rules there) here in Spain, but I was also surprised of our presence being so notorious. As I've said many times before, I think companies should be our major target here in Spain. More and more people agree on it and we are trying to focus some energy in that target.

¿Why will I celebrate the Software Freedom Day?

2010-09-17T16:46:00.000+01:00

Tomorrow we celebrate the Software Freedom Day. The hispanos translate it into Día del Software Libre. I'm going to celebrate it because of the following reasons:

1.- I think it is a good tribute to those that, before me, fought hard to make Software Libre and the movement around it posible.

2.- This day should serve as an inspiration to those who keep putting effort and illussion to promote freedom through Software Libre, to those who want to bring justice to Software market and to those who, like myself, still feel motivated by innovation around ingeenering in general, and software in particular. During the everyday battle we loose part of ourselves and ocassionally we need some extra energy.

3.- All our effort is useless if our work is not known and understood by others, no matter if they agree or not with our statements. Only if they know what we do and why we do it, they will be able to understand us, which is the only way to respect us the same way we respect them.

Beacuse at the very end, this day is about celebrating that we now can choose. That is freedom. Happy Software Freedom Day. Celebrate your freedom.

II Desktop Summit: take control of your own future!

2010-08-03T12:24:00.000+01:00

...and the winner is...Berlin. It will be the "star of our system" for a week during the summer of 2011.

The II Desktop Summit has location, a good one. I'm excited about this event for several reasons. The first one is because, somehow, it gives credit to all the hard work done to celebrate the I Desktop Summit (Gran Canaria Desktop Summit). But above that, I'm excited because, after breaking the ice during that first approach, this event can be a huge oportunity to takes steps forward in joining efforts between GNOME and KDE to develop better technologies, better solutions for more devices and more exciting applications.

Beside pure technical issues, there is a lot of work we can do together in areas like marketing/promotion, usability, internationalization, education, etc. This is a great chance to begin.

So, do you want to know why Software Libre makes a difference? Come and live it by getting involved in decisions that matter.

II Desktop Summmit: take control of your own future!

Akademy is over for me

2010-07-09T18:20:00.000+01:00

I'm writing this while heading to the airport to go back home. It's been an interesting Akademy, well organiced and with a lot of good topics to disscuss. Last night we ended up in a karaoke...something unexpected but really fun. Listening people from Netherlands, India, México, Brazil and Spain singing together is not common, right?

This Akademy has also been a little different because of the World Cup. Obviously for all the spaniards that came to Tampere we have enjoyed it a lot. Let's see what happens this sunday against Netherlands. If we win.....Spain will be a huge party.

I've attended to several BoFs related with many different topics. I've also updated my laptop, tryed some new KDE features, talk about several little improvements and coordinated different actions I'll be helping on. Akademy is fun, but definetly means a lot of work of all of us.

As expected, my clothe doesn't fit into my bag. Buying clothe in the summer sales may cost me a lot....thanks God Antonio Larrosa is flying to Málaga in the same plane that I am and he has a little room in his baggage for some of my new clothe.

So, with a lot of hours of sleeping to take, a couple of extra kilos, a two weeks beard and tons of new experiences lived ....my vacations in Finland comes to an end. Thanks to all the KDE people and to the local team for organicing everything. See you all next year in the II Desktop Summit.

Let's do it

2010-07-07T14:54:00.000+01:00

Sometime we concentrate on little things that matter a lot to us but has no impact on what we are doing. I frecuently come to disscussions in my everyday live in which I put a lot of my energy but, overall are not worth it. Sometimes I have people around me telling me that there's no point on "trying to win" those arguing but moving forward and pushing hard to accomplish the real goal. But sometimes I don't have them.

This Akademy is being great so far, but as always happens when innovating, I've seen a lot of tough disscussions. Some of them matters, and some don't. Or at least to the project as a whole or not to acomplish the global goal, which is to have a great product made by a healthy community and having a lot of people using it.

This article [1] [2] just got into my e-mail client and I want it to share it with you. Even if it's not totally true, it reflects how much work is ahead of us.

So let's concentrate more in what matters and a little less in other things. It is not that we are doing bad....I just want to share this feeling that we can do even better. There are tons of opportunities out there, and now we have a great product and the best community we've ever have.

Let's do it.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OS_market_share
[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Operating_system_usage_share.svg

Akademy Day 3

2010-07-06T22:19:00.000+01:00

Today I attended to my first KDE e.V. Assembly. Everything was on time, as schedule. Some points were interesting, and some very insteresting. Well....maybe not but hey...it was my first one so I'm not going to complain.

After having lunch with some KDE e.V. members, I went to the hacking area to resolve some urgent stuff from work and go back to KDE related activities, like having beer, etc. I have my schedule for attending several BoFs during the week...so I guess I'm prepare for the more technical part of the event.

After doing some some task related with KDE at Demola and having dinner I went to sleep early since I totally exhausted. It's been a great Akademy so far...and well organiced, by the way.

Akademy Day 2

2010-07-04T23:26:00.000+01:00

After waking up late, I arrived at the Akademy place very late, but just in time for the Group Picture. The lunch was good and had some good conversations with part of KDE España. About 8-9 people from this organization are here. I'm having problems with my internet connection. I have screw up my Knetworkmanager, I think. I'm in a perfect place to fix it. There are tons of developers around.

After attending to some talks and the Akdemy awards, I went to have some beers with KDE España, after an internal meeting. Tomorrow I'll attend to my first KDE e.V. assembly.

Akademy 2010 Day 1

2010-07-04T23:20:00.001+01:00

Conferences has started in Akademy 2010. The first conference was about MeeGo, done by the Meego leader from Nokia. Surpringly the two best arguments were given during the question turn by the KDE/Nokia member Suresh and the Intel representative, talking about Meego upstreamming the code. They ensured they do not allow code that is not upstream in the community projects Meego uses. Nice to hear, now they will have to prove it.

The second conference about the 7 Principles of Community projects was quiet interesting. I attended to the conference related with developing apps and place them on the Ovi Store. They have lowered down the price and allow people (not just companies) to publish their apps in Ovi Store.

After a few conversations with MeeGo people from Nokia and Intel I went to have lunch with some KDE folks. As always, it was a pleasure to talk not just about technology but about other things that motivates us. During the afternoon I saw the prototype of Plasma for N900 and I attended to a few more talks before watching Germany vs. Argentina (with about 30 germans), comming back to the Hostel and get into World Cup mode.

At night, at the MeeGo party, we could watch the game Spain vs Paraguay and drink some beer. It was fun.

Akademy 2010 Day 0

2010-07-03T06:01:00.000+01:00

After spending a week visiting different places from the middle part of Finland with Nacho and Heidi Vilppola (thanks both for your hospitality) and their family I went to the train station to go down south to Tampere, where Akademy 2010 will begin tomorrow (saturdayjuly 3rd).

The train I was going to take was full so I have to wait an hour and a half for the following one, which makes the same trip as the previous one but takes one hour longer (4 instead of 3 hours). Not a good start.

I went with my friends to do some shopping while waiting for the train. It is summer sales period in Finland so I ended up buying some clothes at a real good price. In fact, now it doesn't fit into my bag. I have a problem....

When I got into the train....Jonathan Riddell was sleeping at my seat. What a surprise! He was comming from Oulu (a city which I also visited a few days ago). We haven't seen each other since GCDS, so we had some things to talk about.

So after all, not being able to travel in the train I was supposed to, was a good thing.

Once I arrived to Tampere and made my check-in in the hostal, I went to the welcome party/registration place. This is something we usually didn't do but since it worked well last year at GCDS, the organization has repeated this year. I had the chance to meet everybody and have some beers at night with the "spanish team". Tomorrow is when the real action begins.

What I've been doing lately and my near future plans

2010-04-30T16:58:00.002+01:00

Lets begin like many people did before ....

It's been a long time since my last post.

Now... I won't bother you with excuses.

I'm helping (as part of ASOLIF) in the organization of the GNOME Marketing Hackfest, along with the regional association of free software companies from Aragon (CESLA), the Aragon Technological Centre (ITA), Zaragoza Municipality and the Regional Gov. Some well known GNOME community members like Vincent Untz, Stormy Peters or Paul Cutler, among others, are attending. I'll be in Zaragoza from next Tuesday until Friday afternoon, just in time to go to Bilbao for Akademy-es.

On thursday May 6th, apart from the GNOME event, I'll give a workshop (in spanish) about free software bussines models within ASOLIF. In this Federation many companies make money in different ways related with free software. I'll try to summarize the most relevant ones giving some keys about how to improve those models. 30 people are already registered which is an unexpected number for me. It's been a long time (about 5 years) since my last teaching session so I'm quiet excited about it.

The organization of the local KDE conference in Bilbao is going fine and a few days ago we had almost 70 people registered, wich is a good number. Some ASOLIF companies and the Regional association from Vasque Region (ESLE) are sponsoring (not much, but hopefully this is the first of many) Akademy-es. Check other sponsors through the website

Last week I was involved in the organization of III Encuentro ASOLIF, the Federation internal event, which take place each six months. It wasn't as crowded as expected (just around 50 companies during the two days, we expected around 75) but very interesting anyway. We will repeat it in October (it takes place every 6 months).

The week before that, on April Friday 16th, I went to the ODF Plugfest in Granada. The event was organized by another ASOLIF company, Opentia, along with other organizations. It was cool to see how the ODF standard is done and how is implemented in different applications, KOffice among them. Jos Van den Oeven was there and, on saturday, I went back to Granada from Málaga this time with my friend Antonio Larrosa. The whole ODF Plufest crew visited la Alhambra with an archeologist that worked there a few years. We got there at 16 hours and we left at 23. We all agree that it was a long but still awesome tour.

After Akademy-es, it looks like I won't have another event until LinuxTag, which is good 'cause I need a rest. But let's not say it loud, just in case...

I'm still thinking about staying at Berlin after LinuxTag until flying to Akademy 2010, at Tampere, Finland. Maybe I can work a few days in Berlin and then take some days off.

Events I'll attend during 2010

2009-12-28T14:03:00.001Z

I write this post while on vacation. I live in the Canary Islands, as you probably know. Although I've been living almost all of my life in Tenerife, the bigger island, I feel La Palma is home. It is a little, still very mountain, island visited by people that loves trekking and adventure sports. It has a National Park, Caldera de Taburiente, the world's biggest active crater. It is an awesome place. Being surrounded by walls of more than a thousand meters tall is something worth seeing, specially in spring, when there is water falling all over.

It's been raining for three days in a row so I've got plenty of time to write...

I'm trying to be updated with some KDE mailing lists where I think I can contribute in the near future: usability, promo, etc. I'm also taking some time to read all mails related with KDE España and participate a little. Organizing the Akademy-es event is our next major task. Some new technicians are joining us lately and we have some people working on the event's organization so we have everything so far to organize a good one.

It is amazing how much information and discussions are around KDE. The KDE SC is becoming great and improving everyday. I feel really comfortable with it and I'm proud to show it every time I have the chance.

This 2010 my plans are attending to FOSDEM, LinuxTag and Akademy. I'm trying also to arrange a visit to GUADEC. I would like to go to Amsterdam during my vacations so I hope I can afford it.

Hopefully this year we will have more Spanish free software companies attending to FOSDEM than ever. We will arrange some meetings there with other free soft. organizations to let them know what we do to figure out how we can collaborate. As I always say, we do great stuff here, but nobody knows it. We need to go out there and show it.

It will be my first time at LinuxTag. I wanted to attend last year but it was too close to GCDS so I couldn't go. This year I will and, since I know people in Berlin, I hope they show me some nice places :-). It'll be my first time in Germany.

Akademy this year take place in Tampere, so again, it'll be my first visit to Finland. I hope I have enough time to visit a couple of places besides Tampere. It has to be a great country...during the summer. I'm not sure about it during winter.

I hope you had a nice Christmas. Ah and...Happy New Year.

Call for host for Akademy-es 2010

2009-12-05T12:01:00.001Z

KDE España opens the Akademy-es Call for Host until January 22nd for 2010 edition. Proposals are welcome. Further information is available through KDE-España website (in spanish).

I'm writing this post from Barcelona, where Maemo Long Weekend is taking place. I'm in an introductory talk about Gtk right now. There is a familiar mixture of Gtk/Qt folks around here :)

Basque Regional Government signs an agreement with software libre SME associations

2009-11-26T10:31:00.000Z

Yesterday an agreement was signed by the Basque Regional Government, ESLE (Vasque Software Libre companies association) and ASOLIF (Spanish National Federation of soft. libre companies) in order to take steps forward toward software libre migration in Basque Public Administrations. To accomplish this obtective, an Advisor Commitee and a Technical Office will be created with representatives from the three actors involved.

Among other goals, one of the most relevant is to ensure that future public contracts related with software development and hardware puchaisings will be plattform independent so software libre solutions are able to compite under the same conditions than any other software with non libre licenses.

The Technical Office will be in charge of studying and recommending software libre solutions that can be deployed in the Basque Regional Government and other Public Administration from this region.

This is the first time in Spain that a Public Administration sign an agreement with the spanish software libre SME sector, which gives an idea of the maturity that these associations/federation are getting in Spain. Other Regional Governments are also interested in such agreements.

KDE- Edu wants to know your opinion

2009-11-26T10:29:00.000Z

I have complained many times about bugs or missing features in many applications I use.. What about you?

I like this initiative from KDE-Edu because they are openly asking your opinion about relevant points related with the great applications they develope and support. So if you use any KDE Edu applications please take a few minutes for helping them to improve KHangman, KGeography, KmPlot, Kig, Kalzium, Kstars, etc.

Click here to fill the survey.

Would you like to have a spanish student doing practices in your company?

2009-11-26T10:27:00.003Z

IES El Ricón is a High School / Technical School from Gran Canaria, Canary Island, Spain, really involved in software libre. They were part of the local team in the GCDS: GUADEC + Akademy 2009. They are involved in a program (ERASMUS) for sending students to foreign countries finish their education working in IT companies during few weeks/monthes.

If you think it could be a good idea to incorporate a young enthusiast student, please contact Miguel Peña ( miguelpl /dot/ inf / at/ gmail / dot/ com ), the teacher in charge of this program, or contact me directly.

October on the road

2009-10-31T09:44:00.002Z

An idea first...I've never felt so comfortable with my desktop than I am know. Comfortable and proud.

Now...

I left home in Málaga on October 1st. I arrived 29th late in the afternoon. I'm tired but happy about all the things I've done, people I've met, places I've been... I've been visiting several cities all over Spain presenting ASOLIF, where I work, and the things we do, to a lot of people. Madrid, Zaragoza, Vitoria, Canary Islands and Sevilla has been the ones visited this trip.

I've been talking to several ICT managers from several regional and local public administrations, Central Gov., big companies, Universities, etc. I've met people from software libre SME I didn't know before. It is amazing how many cool stuff some SME are doing without much support. I've also attended to events and talk to old friend or people related with ASOLIF (or any of the Spanish regional software libre SME associations).

But my major target has been...

ASOLIF is organizing an internal event so software libre companies belonging to our regional associations can meet each other, know what they are doing, etc. We also have opened a call for projects and mature 10 ideas has been presented. Companies will collaborate on developing those ideas to turn them into projects so ASOLIF can help them to looking for funds. Like any other project ASOLIF promotes, it has to be licensed with GLP or similar licenses and developed openly, like free software communities do. It's going to be hard to put in practice, but if it works...

Although ASOLIF companies use, promote and develop with free software, not all of them make their work libre or are related with communities. For some of them, this event is an opportunity to learn from other companies that do, by working together in something they all are interested in, a project they want to achieve.

For software libre companies, interacting with communities is something that is becoming more common. It is not easy at all to build up your own community based on a product developed by a SME, so ASOLIF is trying to put together companies with experience with other ones interested in becoming more open. The goal is to raise the percentage of ASOLIF companies that has business models related with making the code libre.

To do so, since we do not have the strength multinational companies have, we have to promote collaboration in a different way. Building up ASOLIF was the first step. This event is a second one.

If we want to have a chance to succeed, we need to be close to free software communities and establish a strong relation with big companies that support soft. libre technologies. But this relation has to be based in different principles than in the past. In Spain, like in many other countries, we have been software consumers. We now have the chance to produce software and do it well.

Some of the companies attending to ASOLIF event are quiet popular among some communities: Igalia, eBox, Grupo CPD, Emergya, Warp, Grupo Ikusnet, Yerbabuena ... up to 160 aprox. We are working to have 75 companies there (50 would be a nice number anyway).

This event, that will be celebrated each 6 months, is proposed to take place in several places around Spain. We have to break with the idea that business always take place only in big cities.

The following edition (the third one in fact since in 2008 we celebrated the first one), that will take place in spring 2010, will have activities not just for our companies, for for visitors too, with special focus on soft. libre developers.

Let's see how it works...

I don't want to finish without thanking all of you who has support me to become part of KDE e.V. I'm really happy and I hope I can help.

What is that software you have on your laptop?

2009-10-10T12:36:00.005+01:00

The last couple of months I've been doing many presentations about different things related with my job. Since I have KDE on my laptop and I usually use slides even in personal conversations (I usually send them to the people I talk to so they remember the basic ideas I explained to them) they see my desktop. For most of them, it is the first time they take a look at KDE. Some of them have never seen a desktop libre before.

So sometimes I feel a little like moving back in time and showing to somebody from other age something common for us (that stupid scene when a cowboy showed a mirror to an indian). It's hard to handle the reaction once in a while. I also feel like having some responsability, so I am becomming worried about the look and feel of my desktop and that everything works (or it looks like) perfectly. Few things that didn't matter to me in the past now...can become an issue. Being able to configure the network (specially the wifi) fast, not having crashing messeges during the booting processs, X configuration when using a projector, speeding up the booting proccess, my laptop should not slow down due to RAM comsumption when opening apps, plasmoid that do not look nice without internet connection... Some of these things have nothing to do with the desktop itself but most of the people don't know it. They will blame it on that "frikie thing you have on your laptop".

I use .pdf presentations made with LaTeX beamer and showed with Okular. It is a nice combination for content oriented talks but not for good looking ones based on images. I have to improve this point. Somehow I want to give the messege that software libre is also about creativity. I'm thinking about creating a new user on my laptop just for these occasions so I can use a cool theme and adding all kind of stuff that looks really cool eventhough sometimes they aren't too useful for me. Do you have any recommendation? I have now Kubuntu 9.04 + KDE 4.3.1.

I believe that it is easier for somebody to make the step forward and try something new in his/her computer if when showing it, your desktop works perfectly and looks nice. This is obvious. The point is that we are the main sellers of what we do and we sell our job everytime we show it. So little errors, misconfigurations or procedures that are ok to us, may not be acceptable for common users without explanation (or even with it). I'm trying to have that in mind lately and I confess that stress me a little sometimes, specially when I have a presentation after updating my laptop.

Social media cuts both ways

2009-09-21T15:58:00.006+01:00

This is a post written after reading this post, from FreshNetworks, related with the impact of social media in a company's branding.

Social Media cuts both ways.

1.- Writters has to be aware of the impact of the information they publish.

Most of the regular social media users has no previous experience in marketing or regular media, obviously, so they have no real sense on how powerful published information (so these tools) can be and the harm they can make to a person or a company without even noticing it. We are seeing this in young kids at school. It is so easy to upload a unproper picture, to publish an unfair comment about somebody, destroy a company's reputation ...

Social media tools are used by everybody but not everybody know how to use them. Reacting against wrong behaviours related with their use is not just the Govs responsability. It is also ours.

2.- Companies have to take social networks as a really powerful marketing and feedback tool.

Social media are not just a new channel to make money out of. They also are a good tool for users to show your services weak points, you fealures, etc. So prepare your company (and yourself) to react to users opinions as they deserve. And also take in consideration that they have the ability now to harm you with a little cost you if you ignore them..or even if you don't.

3.- We need to adapt the law to this new reality

Social media are a new way of communicating so countries need to adapt the law to this new reality (without cutting down our rights). And since social media know very little about boundaries, Govs should make an effort to unify as much as possible its criteria related to the the protection of our rights.

Some questions come to my mind:

How do we convince a company that risks related with the use of social media do not cancel all the great opportunities related to them?
Do we have to?
What should a company ( a person or a community) do when its reputation is in danger through twitter, facebook, etc.?
How to react when somebody's opinion is unffair?
And what about when you agree on somebody's complains, you want to repair the error but the complains published in a social network has already a huge impact, so the cost of that misbehavior is insignificant compared to the harm done by the customer/blogger/user?
What if the social media user is not even your customer and have no real idea about your service?

More and more companies are getting concerned about the impact of social media for their reputation. Many of them may become afraid to use them if they are not "more controlled", so they will try to.

And we know well that fear is freedom's major enemy.

Social networks... a new challenge and a new risk for software libre projects

2009-09-02T19:25:00.006+01:00

More and more people is now using KDE 4, and specially non technical people. Since KDE4 is improving fast but do not have yet all the features and apps that KDE 3.5 did, it is easy to think that old KDE users will have many requests or questions the following monthes. Since the usability of KDE4 is new in many ways, there will be many users also asking for help.

I have a feeling that lately more and more people is complaining/making questions in identi.ca/twitter about features or non key points that they miss, don't like or, simply don't work as they expected.

The commitment of every KDE developer to answer as many questions or comments as they can is out of doubt, but this question-answer approach do not scale, since these tools do not work as chats, forums or mailing lists (the major tools we have used in the past for support purposes). They do not have a single entrance from where to route them to the right information or person. They need a new language, different procedures, different interfaces, different tools (social desktops ;) )....

I'm not sure the policies we had in the past for supporting users are going to be as efficient as they were. Probably a different strategy to handle all these requests and complains is needed for these social tools. From my point of view is becomming something to be worry about since the impact of so many people making requests or complaining about different issues are becomming significant and it can turn into relevant.

Software libre projects have a nice chance to change the way they interact with users. Social networks force people to become concise. We can use that. But they are also great tools for expressing feelings worldwide... and that is a huge risk if they get frustrated with our software.

How do we route requests and complains through social network tools? How do we track and proccess what they want, what they need? How do we make ourselves visible so they know where/who to ask? How are we going to coordinate efforts through these tools? How do we adapt other tools we use (wiki, bug tracker, mailing lists, chat) to this new scenario? How do we include social network tools into our support and maintenance strategy? Or their impact will be so big that those classic strategies won't work anymore?

Maybe we have to assume some risks and, once more, innovate....maybe this is nothing to worry about...

GCDS Conclusions II.

2009-08-30T14:02:00.020+01:00

What has been the impact of the event worldwide?

This question has different answers. I'm going to concentrate today on the GCDS website.

We presented the project to the Call for Host on a public wiki. Usually both boards recieved a .pdf archive. Since the decision to go for one particular location was made by both communities, we though it was really important that most of them has as many information as possible. We added to that wiki information about hotels, the location and many other stuff we worked on during a couple of months to present the best project we could. It was a good decision, I guess. It also reflects clearly what was our compromise then and what we accomplished so everybody can analice it. Some things we said were were going to do weren't done. I'll talk about then in future posts.

Once the project was running, a key thing happened, in my opinion. Both boards agreed on a cool name, Desktop Summit (easy but reflects what was going to happen during those days) and added Gran Canaria in front of it. GNOME and KDE supported our job by letting their brands in a secondary level. Tough decision that had a nice impact locally and openned some doors to the local team. We used it many times to take advantage locally to the support that KDE and GNOME were giving us.

By doing this, we ensured a big impact for Gran Canaria in internet. This island live out of tourism that comes from european countries. Internet is the new channel for this bussiness and this event has a worldwide impact. Most of the free software devs are young people that might want to came back again. This event was a long one and people blog about it a lot, so it is a perfect product to put money on for a touristic place like the Canary Islands.

Of course for the free soft. companies behind the organization this wasn't the objetive but it was a major one for some local public administrations. Adding Gran Canaria to the event's name was a major task because it ensured that the impact in internet the event was going to have was linked to the island. That was our thought then. The result of this strategy is clear. Just look for Gran Canaria in Google in english. The event made the first page (two entries: 4 and 8 right after the event. Now it remains one of them).

This success works both ways. In the following years this should be use by other local teams to get local public administrations involved in the event. How much money do they pay in promotion campaings? Hitting the first page in Google for any localization has a big cost... and we did it.

The election of the tool for the web generated a big disscussion internally. Most of the companies involved in the organization are ruby experts. GNOME didn't have a mature solution and KDE had a registration module made with drupal that they did use in two previous events. This solution didn't have a feature for the event program and speakers. There was a Rails program that did. Finally, with the agreement of Banot (a local company part of the organization) and the Free Software Office of La Laguna University (OSL of ULL), we end up going for the Drupal solution. Both, Banot and the OSL of the ULL did a great job with the web. They updated the previous job done from Drupal 5 to Drupal 6 (that was sometimes difficult) and added some new features to the registration module to adapt it to some new requirements for this unusual event.

The website team also integrated the new registration module with Mediawiki, so we could overpass a drupal limitation. It didn't have a wiki that feed our requirements. There are some points that need more improvements but, if other local teams use the job done maybe in a couple of yeras KDE and GNOME can have a well adapted solution. Anyway, each year a nice look to other solutions has to be done, since there are lots of nice projects out there.

<= July hits

The web design was made by GNOME community members and implemented on the website by the local team. All the job done is available for future events through a git.

Defining and publishing the program and the speakers information, done by GNOME, KDE and some local members, was hard. Tons of subevents and talks took place so we had some coordination problems, solved finally. Thanks to every people that helped, specially, Cristo, from Fotón SI, Grupo CPD, for coordinating a great team. The website team also had a key role during the event. I will talk about it in future posts.

<= June 2009

So all this job and a lot more I haven't talk about (getting sponsors on the web, making the sponsorship brochure, etc) made the following numbers possible. Of course the most important part is the community people from GNOME and KDE that visited the web and gave us tons of suggestions. Thanks all.

The web has 5.182 million hits. In July it registered 1.8 millionn hits. What has surprised me the most is the 0.324 million hits from august, due to blogging probably.

August =>

The analysis of the countries wehere the hits come from give us an idea of how spread GNOME and KDE are worldwide. June, the month before the event, is the reference one. August is a singular one and July, the month of the event, is probably determined by the visits done by the atendees and the local press coverage, which was really good. Probably many of the foreign hit comes from blogging right after the event.

July

To evaluate the impact, you have to have this in mind:

KDE had information about the event in his own Akademy web, not much but those hits should be counted. GNOME also put on his wiki the BoF's sessions information during the event.
The impact on media that the event has haven't been measured. For example, in the major local newspaper, a press note about the event on december 2008 was the third most read news that day.
Pictures related with the event were placed in free services all over internet, not in the official website. There are thousands of pictures.
Due to banthwith and space restrictions, it happened the same with videos and slices related with the events. These two contents means lots of hits, as pictures.
Mediawiki hits are not counted. That would add several thousands in June/July.
The Cabildo of Gran Canaria (the island Gov.) webpage experimented a growth on the hits registered the days before and during the event.
Many local organizers added to their webs info about the event, along with many other companies and atendees, and got many hits, specially both Canary Islands colleges.
Both GNOME and KDE (and other projects like MAEMO, Freedesktop, GNOME Hispano ) planets has registered many hits related with GCDS posts.
Sponsors webpages hits comming from the GCDS webpage haven't been measured. This would be really cool to evaluate the commercial return for them.

As you can see, eventhough there were nobody dedicated to this particular issue because it was not the purpose of the event, the impact is huge...not bad for a bunch of developers, right? ;)

There are tons of things that could be done to increase this number. This is something to disscuss for following events. These numbers give a lot of credit to the idea of co-hosting the event that both boards had, I think. Next time it'll take place a joint event the mark will probably be broken by far. It will be a good sign.

All numbers and graphs has been taken from the official Gran Canaria Desktop Sunnit: GUADEC + Akademy 2009 website. Webalizer was the tool chosen.

GCDS Conclusions I

2009-08-25T18:31:00.005+01:00

I've taken some time to write down about the event. This is the first post of a serie about the event I pretend to write. It is a personal view, although I know many of these ideas are shared by other local team members, since we have disscussed them before.

I would like to begin thanking GNOME and KDE communities for the recognition done to the local team during the GNOME assembly and the Akademy closure. It was something unexpected and appreciated by all of us. You made us feel really proud and it gave us a lot of good energy to keep pushing the rest of the event. You have gained a whole bunch of new fans in the Canary Islands.

I'm goping to focus now in some aspects not known by most attendees.

One of the key points of our Call fo Host project was the Local Program in spanish. It was divided in two parts: talks and workshops. The topics were not related with free desktops but with general aspects of free software and other tools. Although it was important it wasn't a critical activity for the event initially. I have to say though that both boards gave it a lot of relevance to it throught he organization process and we always felt really supported by them in this particular aspect. This is something we didn't expected either.

At some point a few weeks before the event we had to face an unexpected change of location. We had to redo the task list and many of them had to get lower relevance. The local program was one of them. We had to face other critical problems first.

Despite of this, nine workshops took place (3-4 hours each) and close to 80 people attended (117 in total but some went to more than one). The workshops where announced several days before the event but you couldn't register on any until the registration day (the very first day). We did this to avoid people that weren't involved in the event from attending.

The talks were also a great success. Some of them reached 50 attendees. The average was between 20 and 30. We had about 20 talks so the total number is a good one. Most of the people interested in the local program were students that are getting into free software but we had also some technicians from local private companies and from public administrations. Most of the talks were given by spanish companies or well recognized free software developers from the Canary Islands.

Rodrigo Trujillo, the Director of the Free Software Office of La Laguna University (Tenerife college) was the Local Program coordinator. He did a great job.

But the local impact goes further. The local team made turns so local people could attend to some of the activities during the event. It was really popular among us the several conversations that took place in the press room the first weekend among key participants, the crossdesktop track and, of course, the keynotes, as expected.

Some of the local team members are experienced technicians, but for half of them (or even more), it was the very first time they participated in a community event. Geting involved with GNOME and KDE volunteers was also appreciated. Many of us have learnt many things from them, they helped us a lot and we got along really well. The general atmosphere in the local team was really good during the event, despite the normal pressure.

Four presidents of Spanish regional free software companies associations attended to the event. One of them is the President of the Spanish national federation of free software companies association, ASOLIF. About 8 local free software companies were involved and several more participated in the local program or other activities. This can give you an idea of the relevance of the event for the spanish free software companies. Igalia, an ASOLIF member, was one of the main sponsors and some representatives from spanish public administrations also attended.

The asociation of Canary Islands free soft companies, ESLIC, ASOLIF and La Laguna University, signed a long term collaboration contract during the event, to make projects together. This is the first time this happens at a national level in Spain, and it took place during the event. In Spain, one of the weak points of the education system is that colleges do not collaborate much with private companies, since they get most of theis funds from other public administrations. We want to open a door to change this by using free software and involving development communities. Let's see how the experience goes.

ASOLIF gave a press conference that had a big impact in national press during the event. Another nice press conference took place with both Canary Island colleges, GNOME Hispano and KDE España Presidents. Local media also covereged it. It was the first time the Presidents from both spanish communities did such a thing together. And both Canary Islands colleges were there not just as witnesses but as real actors, one as free software promoter (La Laguna University) and the other one as main organizer (Las Palmas de Gran Canaria University).

I feel the event has been really important for GULIC, the Canary Islands LUG (one of the oldest in Spain). Many of its members lived again during those days the spirit involved in its foundation (aaaahhh... the old days). It was really cool to see "old guys" working together with local young kids. They celebrated an assembly during the event and they voted a new board with the total support of the group. Nice news for the free soft. movement in the Canary Islands.

In the Canary Islands, as in many other places in the world, there is a big rivalry between Tenerife and Gran Canaria, the two main islands. They claim to be the first on everything. Having both colleges from both islands active collaborating is something we've never imagine it would happened when we designed the event. It came to a point where technicians from both colleges were working together to set the network and the computer labs. The Software Libre Office from La Laguna University sent all the technicians they have (six) to help the technicians from the Free software Office and the system administrators from the ULPGC college.

The Cabildo of Lanzarote, another Canary Island, payed the trip and expenses (thanks Kuko Armas, from Canarytek - Grupo CPD for managing this) of five students in computer science to help us during the event. Along with the rest of the local team, we were capable to have everything ready in ULPGC college in just one week. They were definetly inspired by the event spirit. The messege was clear, if GNOME and KDE can do it, why don't we? So we did and is one of those thing we will be able to tell our grandsons.

José Miguel Santos, the IT chief of ULPGC (Gran Canaria University), has been a key person in general and in this point in particular. I hope this marks the beginning of something that break rules in the Canary Islands. It is also a strong messege to other colleges in Spain. They are meant to collaborate with each other much more than they do now.

But above all these results and some more I will tell in following posts, young local developers got new messeges they sometimes hear but never before experienced. They know now that developing software can be exciting, that they are capable to do it, GNOME and KDE are willing to accept them and real innovation is not a dream for them anymore. It is a reachable goal if you work hard, not because we tell them but because they have seen it, and lived it.

Above 60 people formed the local team during the event (plus GNOME and KDE volunteers, college workers, auditorium and music palace workers, etc). It has been an unforgetable experience for all of us.

Somebody asked me during the event:

If you could go back, would you do it again? Absolutely.

It is the general feeling of the local team.

A community event like the Gran Canaria Desktop Summit is the most powerful marketing tool the free software movement have, even more than the product coded itself. I think we still have to learn how to use it more efficiently but it is something that can make a difference if it is done in a compatible way with the traditional goals.

Nothing to attract good customers like showing the kitchen and the chef cooking.

Bringing young developers, even if they are not contributors yet, college students, small free software companies and public administrations representatives to GUADEC and Akademy can feed GNOME and KDE like no other single action. Both communities are mature enough to make steps forward in this direction without losing the esence of what these events are. We have tried to prove it is possible. Of course this was nothing more than a small experiment, but a succesful one, in my opinion, despite all the difficulties we have faced.

Do you agree?

Nothing in particular...

2009-08-19T10:43:00.002+01:00

I'm sitting in the backyard of my grandfather house, in a little village, by the mountains, in Segovia, Spain. It is called Matabuena. Here it is usually cold except in July and August. Just a few families live here in winter but the place gets alive during summertime, like many little towns all over the world.

There are cows and horses all over the place, kids with bicycles, old people taking long walks and a bar, where old men play cards during the afternoons. It is a totally different place from the Canary Islands or Malaga. I used to come here when I was a kid and it was really cool. It is only 90 minutes away from Madrid, so I guess I will visit this place more often if I finally move to Madrid next year.

I spent a month in Gran Canaria, three weeks to prepare the GCDS and the week of the event, of course. A couple of days after the closure, I went to Tenerife, spent a couple of days with my parents and then I went to La Palma, a little paradise I strongly recommend. La Palma is the place I call home. After a week there, I went back to Tenerife invited to an event. A day after I went to Málaga, spent a week there and began a long trip around Spain.

Madrid, Matabuena, Madrid again, Segovia, Valladolid, Vitoria, Bilbao, Matabuena, Madrid and finally Málaga (tomorrow). A little more than 2500 kms done by car.

Despite the hardworking, I've had some time to do cool things, meeting new and old friends, living some new experiences and spending some time with my family.

It looks like the rest of August I will have time to slow down and finishing some undone tasks, plus preparing the rest of the year's agenda. There are tons of things going on around ASOLIF this year but also we have to focus on closing some open tasks. I guess this one of the hardest thing to do when a new project involving a lot of people begins. You have to make sure some basic taks get done. There is a strong inertia of keep moving, continuosly starting new things, moving forward without closing previous work.

Meanwhile I have updated my laptop from XFCE/KDE 3.5 to KDE 4.2. As expected, some issues has arised, but in general, most of the everyday actions works quiet well. I still haven't had time to push the desktop further. Hopefully these following weeks I will. I'll write a post with my conclusions. Another thing I will do is installing GNOME and use it for specific tasks. I haven't use it for almost a year and I want to experience the improvements.

Another regional free software companies association has been created in Spain with our help. It's called CyLESoL, from Castilla y León. We are working to create one or two more before the end of this year. The plan is to reach 200 free software companies associated to the Federation ASOLIF by the end of the year, that means doubling the number we had by the end of 2008.

Spain is well known because of free software projects related with education. Almost every region in Spain is already deploying, developing or planning to put linux in schools. But lately two different areas are becomming really popular here: 3D and SIG. There is a lot of good energy and bussiness perspectives around these areas.

ASOLIF President is flying this week to Mexico and another member of our board will fly to Republica Dominicana soon. It is the second time that representatives from ASOLIF go to South America. Both of them have been invited to promote companies associations in Latin America and to do some networking.

Latin Amrica have awesome free software projects and developers. We have to figure out how to mix that potencial with our Federation by builing a simbiotic relation, treating each other as equals. We go there with a speech that is far away from usual. We are really excited about the idea of building up trasparent bridges across the Atlantic Sea between small free software companies from both sides. We have a lot to learn from each other. Of course this will take some time, but we are on it.

ASOLIF will celebrate an internal event on Novermer where companies will join to define and write down projects that we will try to acomplish during 2010. It is the first time we do such a thing but people is excited about the idea of meeting each other and seatting around a table to work on free software projects. I hope one or two of them deals with desktops and mobile technologies. I've been working on the event's methodology and it will be finished by the first week of september. It can be a nice experience to export. Let's see. It will be my major task for the following weeks.

Enough for today, right?

How do your company do it?

2009-07-30T09:55:00.002+01:00

Many of the ASOLIF companies have different ways of distributing the workday. Others simply do not have any way at all. Another group has a 8 to 5 schedule.

Reading Jorge's blog, from Warp Tech (a well known ASOLIF company from Zaragoza) planet (in spanish), I come out with a nice distribution that solves some of the problems some company face everyday. They call it Flextime. The model is far from perfect and it probably do not work for everybody, but is serves me to ask...

¿What about your company? ¿How do you manage the schedule, the workday?

Interactions between soft. libre communities and small free soft. companies

2009-06-06T11:40:00.007+01:00

Free software communities are becoming more and more efficient in tasks not directly related with code or self organization. They are evolving into totally new organisms without predecessor. Companies are aware of that and they are getting closer and closer to them. Right now the free software impact cannot be described without the interactions between companies and communities. Sometimes the influence of corporations in some communities is notorious but sometime it is happening the opposite. Mature communities do have a lot of impact in many companies.

Big companies have built strategies to take advantages of this new wave hoping to reach points they haven't been before, trying to get where they used to or simple hoping to stay on top. Every big structure has a lot of resistance for changing and its amazing how many big IT companies looks like they have changed.

An evident question arise, have they really changed?

Back in early 2003 I had a small company. I was surrounded by many free software fans but I wasn't. I had a hard time in college with linux. In fact, I was the main obstacle in my company for evolving to adopt free software principles. We had Red Hat by that time in one of computer labs but it was just due to lack of resources. I still remember some friends of mine telling me how fool I was for using Windows on my loptop.

And then LTSP came into my life ...

My personal evolution toward the basic principles of free software is far from finished. Until a few months ago, I still had a small company so it is easy to figure that its evolution has gone parallel to my personal one. I've been really lucky to be surrounded by smart believers for a long time and that has allowed me to speed up this personal change and, in consequence, my way of doing business.

In my current position, as ASOLIF manager, the federation of free software companies associations, I see the same process in many other companies. Some of them are in early stages of its own evolution, some are mature, some are beginning to question their own methods and the luckiest ones were formed with a clear idea of how to do business in an open way, using free software and interacting with the communities. This last group are the ones that has made ASOLIF possible. They in the front line right now.

Looking back, I realice how hard is changing the behavior of any company. In small companies the influence of their owners is very significant so, like it happened to me, since it takes time to cross the river and reach the other side for any person, it is obvious that it will happen the same to the company itself. It is not like Neo taking the red pill.

Then, how come we see such a strong change in many big IT companies in such a short period? Is it possible or they are just faking? Is it more like a Roman ship with galleys? Is it a marketing policy or their process is fast because it is a matter of surviving? Do they truly believe on the principles of free software or still want to generate gregarious relations with others? Is it possible for them to change the inertia and people's mind so fast?

My new job is putting me in contact with some spanish big IT companies representatives. They have the common lessons well learned, a solid free software speech and the classic unbeatable marketing manners. They know they have a winner combination. They are the face of those companies and it seems they truly believe, understand and support the principles behind free software.

But, what about the heart of those companies? Does it matter for doing business? at the very end of this process, is the actual status quo going to change? How can we change the role of small companies in the future from being just resellers to truly generate technology?

Maybe one of the answers has something to do with the title.

Some reflections about ASOLIF

2009-04-24T16:37:00.004+01:00

Facing the end of the second month on my new job, things move slow but forward, as always happens with new projects.

I've been working hard to open communication channels between companies. Interaction is more usual at a technical level than at a manegement level in every free soft. company and we are no exception. We know how to interact in a lower level. We've learned it by collaborating in free software communities, but at higher levels....that's another story.

The good point is that most of the managers and owners of ASOLIF companies come from the technical world. In fact, most of them begun as free software developers. They want to interact as managers as they did as technicians.

So how can we achieve this goal when not all of the information a company handles can be public, can be shared? How does cooperation is possible when you compete everyday?

Big companies can organice themselves in departments with different procedures, so they can interact with different profiles at different levels. Small companies cannot. For individuals is hard to be transparent for just certain activities and not for others. In ASOLIF have to deal with that duplicity.

The little time they have for ASOLIF activities is invested with big dosis of enthusiasm. Managers love what they do. I feel that good energy. Not so long ago I was like one of them so it is a well known situation for me. Bringing them a space where the can share all that good energy eventhough they live in different places is a really cool goal. It can make a difference for them, for ASOLIF and for our workers (I don't like this word), our customer.

ASOLIF board knows pretty much about how free soft. communities (FSC) work and they want to take that transparent way of doing things into this (we hope it'll become soon) community of small free soft. companies (a little more than 150 so far). This is a major objetive. We are just on the first step of the journey. I feel like the Santa María helmsman, sailing west.

Companies have different motivations and responsabilities than individuals so not everything that works for FSC will work for us. We have one thing in common though: I'm surrounded by hackers, economic system hackers. As tech hackers are doing since long time ago, they want to hack the system...but at a different level. Economic relations in our sector do not have to be gregarious. We want to turn them into mutualism.

This job is going to be fun.

Gran Canaria Desktop Summit: Akademy-es Call for Participation

2009-04-18T11:26:00.003+01:00

The Gran Canaria Desktop Summit will celebrate, along with GUADEC and Akademy, the spanish annual conferences of both communities: GAUDEC-es and Akademy-es. KDE-España, has made public the Akdemy-es Call for Participation. This event will take place on friday July 10th and saturday July 11th. GUADEC-es still do not have dates yet but they will probably next week.

276 people have already registered on the event and we have more than 1.8 million hits on the web. We expect to have a big encrease during the following month so, if you want a cheap accomodation, I recomend you to register as soon as you can.

Remember that Call for Participation for the official programe is open so send your paper and participate in this awesome opportunity.

ASOLIF: my new job

2009-03-21T17:59:00.006Z

This is my first post about my new job. It's been a little bit more than a year since I came to Malaga from the Canary Islands. During this time I been involving in two different migration projects (Municipalities from Axarquía of Málaga and Extremadura Regional Gov.), worked back again with Grupo CPD in ModularIT and, since march 1st, I've became manager of ASOLIF. I've closing down my little company back in the canaries so, in a couple of weeks, my only employer will be the federation of Spanish free software companies associations (ASOLIF). This is the first time I'll be working for somebody else. Since I was 23 I've always been self employed.

It is strange because I keep in contact with my ex teammates since we are all working on the GCDS'09 and also they are really involved in the Canary Islands free software companies association (ESLIC), the oldest one in Spain, which I helped to found and is one of ASOLIF founders. Since I'll be in Malaga a couple more months before moving (it loooks like I'll be living in Madrid), it is somehow like I haven't changed my job. It feels more closer to a project change rather than a job switch. I assume this feeling will be changing hard in a few more weeks.

ASOLIF is composed by 8 free software companies associations from different regions of Spain. I'm working on updating the exact number of companies involved but I guess we are about 200. Most of them are small (up to 5 members). ASOLIF is one year old and we are growing fast. From 5 associations we plan to end up this year being 10, which is a nice grow. There are many small free software companies all over Spain that can be under our umbrella soon, since all the regional associations are growing and new ones are forming. It looks like we can become a strong movement in Spain in a couple of years.

The economic crash is giving a lot of attention to technological companies. We are no exception. Outside of Spain people thinks that the biggest business related with software libre in this country are Public Administrations, but that is not true. What is happening is that there is a strong movement among them toward Soft. libre and, since in Spain they are the biggest customer of the software sector, this is changing big companies' mind. The message is clear: if you want to keep being leaders, you have to move toward free software. This is good news but there are some concerns.

These big companies do not believe in free software, they do not collaborate, the just use it. They are not changing their methodology and do not participate in general in any community at all. They just keep doing what they use to but now with free software.

Opposite to this, there is a growing movement of small companies mostly build up by technicians with a tremendous innovation factor that works with the tools and procedures close to what communities uses. They are efficient. They do not need (many of them do not want) to grow a lot, since it is not mandatory to grow for surviving is you innovate everyday. Their number is increasing fast so local support is becoming a truth in many parts of Spain.

But they are still fragile and lack of many basic skills that are necessary in any business. Since they are formed by smart guys, they know it. At least most of the ones I talk to realize many of these weak points. For a small, technical oriented service company, it is hard to invest money/time in non core but still important tasks. Their natural respond is to associate themselves with other software libre companies they can collaborate with. The nice point is that they already bring a collaboration culture with them that flows in every activity, every meeting we make, etc.

So the Federation has, of course, a common lobby motivation, but also a parallel one: to collaborate as companies as we usually do as technicians, as community members. This second objective is the reason why I'm here, since the lobby activity will lay more on the board members, specially ASOLIF President, Daniel Armendáriz.

We are still new so many basic stuff must be done, like administrative tasks, setting up some collaborative tools, open relations with many social agents, promote some internal procedures to increase collaboration among companies, etc. These kind of projects needs time become solid but when I finish my job (I have a one year contract) I hope there is a strong base to face the future with an optimistic vision.

Since ASOLIF is part of the local organization of the GCDS'09, I'll keep working on it. The local team is working hard and everybody have a nice feeling about the event. We truly believe this event can be different from any previous one. If the experience is good, probably more community projects will visualize as natural to celebrate together these kind of events where they can keep independence but share activities, experiences, time, projects, problems, code, etc. It also makes sense from a management and economic point of view. Many of the ASOLIF companies will be attending so it will be a nice opportunity to interact with developers and companies from other countries, besides attending to many desktop related activities.

One of the things I don't know how to do but I want to invest time on is to open relations between small companies or organizations like ASOLIF and community projects. Maybe bringing college students into free software communities can be a first approach. Now in Spain the college education model is switching to the Bolonia plan and one of the objectives is making the relation between universities and companies closer. Since now students have to spend some time making practices on companies, small companies can get more involved in software libre communities by interacting with them through these college students. This can be a win to win to win (jajajaja) relation... We need to find out a good model for that. Maybe it is a good point of discussion for the GCDS'09 event. If it works here, it can be translated to other countries. There are two experiences already we can learn from, the GSoC and the University Software Libre Championship (in Spain).

This is anoher nice challenge I hope I can learn a lot from, meeting new people, going to new places, facing new risks. Innovation...that's is what it is all about.

Registration and Call for Participants open for the Gran Canaria Desktop Summit

2009-03-17T15:00:00.006Z

One big milestone is over. Finally registration is open along with the Call for Participation.

Please visit the new web: http://www.grancanariadesktopsummit.org

The look and feel is not over yet but both boards didn't want to wait for it. It was the right decision. As it always happens, maybe some misunderstandings or little improvements can be done. Please register on the event mailing list:

http://mail.grancanariadesktopsummit.org/mailman/listinfo/gcds

and tell us about them. Some new features are planned and in a few weeks will be available. There is a travel agency that will take care or booking accomodation. I strongly recommend you to use it. They have got in charge of big events before so they will solve whatever problem you can have much better than the local community guys. Read carefully the information about the payment process:

http://grancanariadesktopsummit.org/node/30

We are aware that many people will bring their families with them. Hotels will charge them the same prices as attendees. There are several apartments and hotels available but I recommend you not to wait too long to book for your room. You will be able to stay in Las Palmas from 20 € per night up to 150 €. You can also ask the travel agency to book your fight if you wish. For groups this is a highly recommendable service. Some extra activities will be available as soon as we close them.

During the first 24 hours, about 60 people have already registered, which is pretty cool. We had 1.4 million hits on the web before opening the registration and we want to reach 5 million. The information related with sponsorhip is also available, including the sponsorship brochure:

http://grancanariadesktopsummit.org/node/36

I'm exited about the final schedule of the event. It looks like we can have a very attractive programe, not just in english, but also in spanish, since Akademy-es and GUADEC-es will also take place during those days. Check the official schedule:

http://grancanariadesktopsummit.org/node/10

There is an IRC channel: #gcds at freenode for inmediate questions and a twitter account for following announcements: http://www.twitter.com/gcds_2009

Hopefully one of the difference with previous events is that we plan to have a nice number of local people attending to it, young students that wants to get involved. We will organice some basic talks for them and also some courses so we can add local developers to both, GNOME and KDE, which would be a great success.

Well...now there is no turning back....we are heading to Gran Canaria desktop Summit.. it is not so far away, just 108 days.

Some reflections related with the KDE 4.2 release

2009-01-27T12:53:00.005Z

Please take this as a reflection. When you try to express delicate messages, feelings, the language barrier becomes bigger. I felt it was the time to say this, now that I feel the arrival is so close that I'm sure all the KDE crew feel the power of the big release, so hopefully people get the positive part of the message I want to point out.

I'm not a KDE developer but definitely a KDE user. I have KDE 3.5 on my everyday laptop and KDE 4.0 first and KDE 4.1 now on other machines I have around (my netbook, for example). I've been one of those that have been following the project in general and the tough decision made by the KDE crew a couple of years ago (and the previous discussions). I am not at first line obviously, but hey, that is also a cool stuff about free software community projects, you can watch and learn from the core people... I really respect what the KDE project does. There is no doubt about it.

I understood the decisions made then. I supported and got happy with it. I obviously am now. As a dev told me once, it's like life itself. Sometimes you reach a limit and it is a smart decision to stop, think and change instead of keep pushing on the same direction. This is an idea some other free software projects will follow after KDE success (we knew it from the very beginning ;) ).

Now that KDE 4.2 is here, many of you that have been working hard to make this happen have reasons to be proud of the job done and the risk taken. I am, and haven't done a single line of code. I've never imagined to get such an empathy with a few million lines of codes and the people that create it everyday.

The Linus case has made me decide to write about what I've seen around me the last few months. I've read many comments about it and the explanations given from many tech people in general and KDE people in particular. I want to add my personal experience.

I've seen some frustration around, related with KDE 4.0 and 4.1 lately. The regular free software user is one of those who likes to try what it comes in a magazine, in a distro. They wait for the next version like Christmas. In some sense, they (we) are like kids (love to play with toys). But most of them (that is part of our success), have no idea about how to deal with critical problems. I've been explaining to them so many times the past months that kde 4.0 and 4.1 were not an everyday OS...well, the regular arguments you already know... . But this installation...uninstallation process some people have gone through with previous versions has been unstopable (the people around me at least).

So I've failed. Why?

I don't know yet, but what I know now is that I cannot compete anymore against distros, magazines, that cool aura free software has these days, etc.. That is supposed to be one of our victories. This is not a "mouth to mouth" system anymore (I mean installations based on personal trust). My friends don't call me to try a linux distro. They don't need me for that anymore (thanks God). They just call me when they have critical problems. Since they know I'm a KDE fan, they have called me quiet frequently the past months.

KDE has built a reputation through the past years that have not finished drastically the past few months. Some of the lost credit will be soon recovered with today's release...but not all. We (I insist in including myself) will have to put an extra amount of energy for a longer time. Some people maybe won't want to try KDE 4.2. We should be prepare for that. Probably Linus won't. He has a new toy and it make sense to think he will give it a try for some time. That is a well known marketing law.

Once again, I totally assume and support the decision made to build a totally new system and I understand the decision taken about the KDE 4.0 release. I've been supporting it. But now that I have faced the consequence, my hope is that this kde 4.2 great release, all the happiness and the attention that the developers and the project itself deserve (and will have, I'm sure), will be followed by a general reflexion about how to deal in the future with decisions like this one. The KDE 4.0 release have shadows, do not have a single point of failure so it won't have a single solution. It also have shown many good points, of course. I just want to point out that despite all the coming success, experience tells me we were not totally right.

I hope that all the good energy we have around this (and future) release don't avoid the discussion to get to some conclusions future devs, deployers and user can learn from. If we do this, we probably will get even more credit in the long term than we will the following months. KDE 4.0 was necessary but has had consequences we must face and learn from.

Today is a good day. KDE 4.2 is out and I'm really happy since I've been waiting for it so bad ... Congratulations.

Gran Canaria Desktop Summit keep going

2009-01-22T17:48:00.004Z

Last Monday 15th, Tuesday 16th and Wednesday 17th of December several GNOME and KDE boards members were in Gran Canaria to prepare the Gran Canaria Desktop Summit: GUADEC + Akademy 2009. This is not great news only from the organisation of the event point of view, but also because it is a working meeting between two relevant community projects with huge impact worldwide. We will have another meeting during FOSDEM. When I think about this, I realise that events like the GCDS'09 should happen once in a while between different free software projects in order to open new and different ways of collaboration. Many community have great relations with IT companies so improving relation between them will also improve the relation between these companies, which is something positive.

We are used to collaboration between developers but this event can be seen as the first big step toward a more global relation between projects. A new step forward in the software libre path to world domination :)

Just stop and think about the companies involved in GNOME and KDE, the technologies used, the number of users, not just right now but also during the following years, that will be affected or influenced by discussions and decisions taken during that week in Gran Canaria, it is amazing, isn't it?

This event can be a good chance for distros to really raise their voice and discuss with both projects about a variety of hot stuff that affect them. Desktop developers need to hear the opinions from the people that deploy and give support to companies and users. The opposite is also a must. But also it is a chance for them to talk to each other and join efforts or simply discuss about whatever they want to. Translators, artists, usability experts, app developers, etc. will have their space too. Opening new collaboration links with the other desktop project and with distros, IT companies, etc. can also be done during the event.

It looks like some nice cross-project discussions will take place, in addition of what GUADEC and Akademy already are. But, if the people that comes to Gran Canaria wants to, the event can be a lot more. Of course that means to work in advance and to make an additional effort during those days in July, but maybe it is worth it. This is a big opportunity, that's for sure. I feel both boards perfectly understand this. The local team definitely do. But we are only a small part. You, reader, should be the front man.

We understand that, for many developers, coming to Gran Canaria in July is an unfordable effort because of economic reasons. We are looking for cheap places to stay or eat and, of course, both projects will sponsor trips and hotels like they've done in the past. For those who have family, let me tell you that we are organising a parallel track so they can come and enjoy while daddy or mum, boyfriend or girlfriend, is attending to the event. This has been a demand from many of you and we are taking care of it. Also those who are vegetarians will have special menus.

If you don't like nice weather and the beach... well, probably you will suffer a little, but hey, you still can sit and watch your friends' white bodies and laugh at them while having a beer and doing some hacking... Is up to you.

Remember to buy tickets as soon as possible. By the way, we have a twitter account: http://twitter.com/gcds_2009

GCDS'09 news

2009-01-16T11:32:00.003Z

Both boards (GNOME and KDE) along with the local team keep working on the organization of the Gran Canaria Desktop Summit:GUADEC + Akademy 2009. After the visit of representatives from both staffs to Gran Canaria, last december, we will celebrate another meeting during FOSDEM. In a few weeks an open mailing list and a community tool (a wiki or something like that) will be configurated so people can help us to make something special out of this event.

The local team has a strong recommendation: buy the tickets as soon as possible. A parallel program for families will be offered so don't be afraid of bringing them with you (little kids included).

Stay tuned for news and recommendations through the website of the event or by reading the twitter account we have for minor announces: gcds_2009.

Please, spread this recommendation.

ModularIT a new community project for system administrators

2008-12-27T20:19:00.005Z

I want to write today about what I have been doing lately.

After finishing my job related with public administrations' migration to free software in Extremadura and Malaga, Andalucia, Spain, I began to work again in November with my Canary Islands teammates (Grupo CPD) in ModularIT. This is a project we released under GPLv3 a few monthes ago that was ready to use but not to contribute to. In practice, as it happens too often, projects are published as free software but, since they don't have the proper design and a right tool, it is not possible for developers to work on it, so nobody use them.

This was exactly what it happened to us. We made a big effort then but another extra effort was needed. It is not enough to public the software and wait for the community to use it. You also need to take care of a few other things. We decided not just to offer a new 100% percent community project, but also to release a new version of ModularIT, to make the release more attractive. So additional technical wok have been done. My job has been (still is) to design and organice the community project, as long as helping in translations, requirement definition and promotion.

Yesterday, december 26th of 2008, we published ModularIT 1.1 (codename "Timanfaya") as long as the new project design, a new collaborative tool and a distributed repository (redmine + git). The first language for this new project is english, although we are still translating deployment and support guides from spanish. We hope some people and companies from other countries cooperate with us in this new adventure.

For a small company like us, mostly dedicated to give services to other companies, having a 100% community project means a lot of effort, but we are really happy for reaching this point. ModularIT is something we've been looking for so long ... We always felt that we have recieved more than we gave from the community. This pretends to change that feeling. :)

¿What is ModularIT? This is a hard question....

ModularIT is an architecture of distributed, virtualiced, integrated, monitored, and centrally managed network services based on software libre. You can get a better description here

ModularIT uses, among other technologies and projects, XEN, Puppet, Munin, Nagios, Posfix, Hylafax, Jabber, AIDE, SElinux, Dirvish, Alfresco, Samba, OpenLDAP, Asterisk or eGroupware. Our goal is to deploy, support and migrate a variety of network services with a limited amount of human resources, trying to manage them with an affordable effort, alowing us to increase the number and dimensions of our customers (number of servers and services) under our control (in different levels). ModularIT is a step forward in that direction, not the final solution, obviously.

Previous versions of ModularIT have been deployed, supported and maintained in our customers the last few years. What we present is an evolution of what we have been doing. It is not a new software that haven't been in production nor a bunch of appliance. We have been migrating our customers to this new ModularIT version for a few monthes and we feel confortable with the result. ModularIT has show us to be efficient. It is worth it for us. We hope it will also for other companies and system administrators.

You can try and judge by yourself. If you are interested in this solution, download it, deploy it and give ModularIT a try. If you think it is worth it, collaborate with us.

Merry Christmas

Gran Canaria Desktop Summit 2009. Feel the power of the desktop community

2008-11-26T10:54:00.002Z

So Gran Canaria Desktop Summit 2009 dates are already official: from friday 3 to saturday 11 of july. Check the news on GNOME and KDE webs.

This is good news because you will be able to book your flight in advance. It is a strong recommendation from the local team. It is not that there aren't plenty of flights to Gran Canaria from all over Europe. It is a matter of getting them as cheap as possible.
1000 people are expected and most of them will want to fly on 3-4 of july, so it is possible you just have the chance to get tickets quite expensive for those two days if you wait too long. Once the registration is open, you will be able to book the hotel. This point won't be a problem since there will be plenty of room available at affordable prices.

If you are a member of the KDE or GNOME community it is obvious that you should be interested in attending to the event. But if you are not, or if you have friends that likes computers, there are few reasons for comming or bringing them during those days. There are tons of events all around the world related with free software. But this is a community event, not a regular one.

You will have time to meet the developers, talk to them, disscuss with them and do some hacking with them if you wish. You will be able not just to attend to conferences but to actively participate, feeling like an actor and not just a viewer. It is also a good chance to know how a community works, understanding its innovation process and becoming a part of this unstopable wave. But above all, you will feel the power of the desktop community, larning why we feel so confortable about what we are doing, so secure about we are on the right direction but keeping a strong critical attitude.

GCDS'09 is 100% community sofware libre in motion. You can come and become a part of it or stay home and loose the momentum. The Canary Islands are waiting for you.

Come to the Gran Canaria Desktop Summit: GUADEC + Akademy 2009. Come to the big one.

Akademy-es a great success

2008-11-23T10:06:00.004Z

Akademy-es is in its final day. It's been a great success so far. 65 peolpe have registered and, since it took place in La Coruña's college (Computer Science building), even more people attended to some talks.

This year has made a big different from the organization point of view. The organizers have previos experience, so everything was well prepared. We lacked more developers truly involved in KDE but is just a matter of time. Spanish community is still getting together. After that we will be able to grow fast. Definetly, the new formed KDE-España will help a lot. Right now there are many people that uses KDE in Spain and many young developers are beggining to program with Qt-KDE tools, so it is just a matter of time that more spanish developers participate actively in core-KDE projects.

Electing for the KDE-España board most of the spanish people that actively contributes to KDE have been a great decision. Other young guys identify the association with a strong KDE feeling. People with other profile or not actively contributing decided to stay back and we made a hit. Now it is time for getting developers involved, so its time for young KDE people like Albert (aacid), Rafael (ereslibre), Eduardo (edulix), Alex (apol), etc. They are the present of KDE in Spain and its future. By promoting and supporting them, KDE will be able to have in this country a strong community sice they have the energy needed. Spain is investing tons of money in free software and we cannot be on the bench.

From my point of view, this Akademy-es will definitly make a difference. Well organized and with KDE-España born, we have a great momentum that we all shoul feed. GCDS'09 will come probably too early for demostrating anything, but at least KDE-España will be ready to take full advantage of the event as association. I feel the KDE-España board is aware of that. They are prepared to organize some activities for getting some canarians young developers involved and to get credit for their job. That will be a great goal.

Now everybody can say there is a truly spanish KDE community. It will be obvious in just a couple of years.

Thanks to GPUL and the rest of local organizers. It has been a great job.

What kind of variables do we need to study before writing down a migration project?

2008-10-05T16:29:00.015+01:00

Before writing down a migration project for any organization, bussiness or public administration, it is critical to develop a methodology that ensures you have all the information needed to be able to design the correct procedure to switch PCs, users and network services from proprietary to software libre. To be able to design that methodology, one of the previous things you need to identify is which data you need to know from the pre-migration picture, how to collect it without having impact in the production process and how do you process it to be able to properly analyze it.

From my point of view these are the major variables (related with the workstation side, not the server side) that must be known. Most of them are obvious.

Hardware

Axioms:

The organization that is going to migrate don't know the hardware they have.

Migration is about machines.

We need to know the hardware of the PCs because of, at least, these major reasons:

To determine if it is Linux compatible.

If it is, which driver or module should be included in the Linux system to install (also which kernel).

To determine if we have to install proprietary drivers. This have many legal implications.

To determine the optimal parameters related with the monitor and the graphic card.

To predict the most obvious performance limitations.

To determine the peripheral drivers needed.

System and programs installed

Axiom:

Nobody knows what is installed at 100%. You will have to find it out.

Migration is not just about machines. It's also about applications installed

We need to know, at least, this information related with the software installed:

The operative system, version and service pack. Probably we won't be able to migrate every app, so virtualization will be proposed.

Applications installed and its version.

Plug-ins, virtual machines (like Java) and other "not .exe" programs.

Links to local and remote programs, specially those placed on the desktop. Users will want those in the new Linux system.

Everyday used apps

Axiom: migration is not just about machines and application installed but also about programs really used.

The fact that a user have many programs installed, doesn't mean he/she use them all. The determination of the applications that are really important for the user in his everyday work is required. The interactions (related with apps and data) with other users from the same or different departments, with customers or other companies, will give you clues to determine the migration procedures and the tools needed.

Most of the times, users only use a few apps frequently. If these frequently used apps are shared by some users, the risk increases. You need to know who introduces data in those apps, who stress them the most, who use them for just consulting data, who will use them in the future, if there are plans to change it... It's critical to find a good solution for those. So, the more you know about them, a better picture you'll get.

Data and archives

Axiom: data is as important as applications and machines

The data that must be investigated is, at least:

Data related with their work.

Personal data.

Data related with special programs like browsers or e-mail clients, etc.

Configuration data, for example, the e-mail client configuration information.

Where is the data stored.

Users

Axiom: users are as important as data and apps in a migration process.

Users are an important part of the migration. Maybe the most difficult one to analyze and satisfy.

Leadership

In any group, there are people that leads the rest in every single area. It is needed to determine which users are leaders when you talk about computers. Relations between users within a group should remain the same after the migration process. Changing the hierarchy after the migration means adding a new problem.

To maintain those relations, you have to identify and study those leaders and their relations with the rest of the employees. They will demand more attention from the migration team. If they collaborate, you will have a lot of help when problems begin to show up. If not, they can become your biggest problem.

Knowledge and skills

It is important to find out which users have a better understanding of the Windows system, who knows about linux or, at least, if there is anybody that uses (or know something about) software libre apps under Windows. It is easier now than before to find people that knows what software libre or GNU/linux are. Some uses a Mac or a linux distro at home. For those people, switching to linux is going to be easier. Detect them.

Another interesting variable to know about is the skill users have using computers. There are people that knows a lot about Windows. Those will have a greater resistance since getting the same skills unsing Linux will take them time and a lot of effort. In one second they will go from being independent to not knowing anything about the operative system they will be using. In order to define the education proccess they will have to go through, you need to know the actual picture.

Complains and suggestions

How many people uses gmail at work because their corporative e-mail sucks?

Listen to what every worker has to say about the tools and services they use. Ask them about their wishes. Every single worker has a little clue to make the company more efficient. Be aware of their demands to reduce their resistance to switch to software libre. Tell them the truth. No not increase artificially their expectations about the new system and tools.

Interactions

Axiom: migration is not just about machines, applications, data and users. It's also about interactions among these four variables. They are not independent.

The administrative structure of an organization sometimes is not exactly ported to the data, services or applications structure. Workers usually end up finding their way to do their job, overpassing imposed restrictions or corporative rules. They get paid for finishing their job, not for changing the rules. Many times is the technical team that allow them (or even help them) to brake some technical corporative rules, since they understand workers' point of view much better than corporative procedures or general politics.

How many executives use different tools and services than the rest of the workers? Sometimes this happens because of a good reason. But it is usual to see organizations that have people in command that do not give the technical department the credit they deserve, so they do not follow their advices. They do not respect the corporative rules either.

These special cases complicates the migration process since general procedures, politics (or even apps), are not followed by all the organization. It is necessary to understand what's going on (the workers vision) in every department in order to be successful. If you write down the migration project based exclusively on what technicians and directors tells you....you will probably fail.

Companies are not isolated. They interact with other companies and customers. Those relation must be analyzed, specially if software is involved. IT providers are specially sensible to any change. You need to count on them in order to determine the migration process. This can be a tough problem if those providers work with proprietary software and do not follow open standards. There is no unique solution for these cases.

Since no lost of production is desirable, the migration process is determined by variables like schedules of the organization, bussines high or low season, employees rotation, etc. You must take care of those also. You won't migrate a toy store during Christmas, right?

The final picture

You need to know what should be final picture from everybody's point of view. This is important not just to determine where is the final point, but because an evaluation must be done after the process is finished. A lot of parameters must be analyzed in order to make a fair evaluation. Costs, resources and time are important variables to follow, but not the only ones.

Risks

One of the obvious things I've learned during the last few years is that a migration process is not just a technical process. This is easy to say but hard to understand. The first impulse is to throw yourself in a technical spiral of solutions, trying to define the requirements as fast as possible, to find out the best product, install it, configure it and teaching users how to use it. On the server side, you can make mistakes and turn back to the original situation without being killed (at least sometimes). But on the PC ...

The following risks have to be taken in consideration before writing down the migration project:

The loss of data.

The loss of functionality.

The reduction of performance of the new system.

The lost of interaction capabilities (with other users or services). I'm ignoring this one in this report since usually is related with the middle-ware or the back-end as much as with the PC.

The loss of data

You can loose data because of three major reasons:

You didn't save it before installing the software libre system or you lost it during the process.

After the installation, the data is not fully accessible or usable.

The data was transformed into new formats and part of it have changed.

The loss of functionality

This problem is due to the change of applications and services involved in a migration process to software libre. Is also common in other processes, but in this one is critical.

The reduction of performance

Is common to think that Linux desktops are lighter than Windows but there are scenarios where this is not always true. Most of the times any reduction of performance is unacceptable. There are technical, economical but also psychological implications related with performance that have to be studied in detail.

Conclusions

So computers, apps, data, users and the interactions among these four variables must be carefully analyzed before writing down the project. How to collect and analyze this information is the first step of any migration process. I (and the hold team I've been working with) have spent most of the last 7 months collecting data, thinking about these risks, developing a methodology to do it and trying to find out solutions to be able to write down the best migration projetc possible for different public administrations from the south of Spain.

I've learned a lot.

Who did make me believe?

2008-09-23T15:04:00.003+01:00

There are different ways to end up in the software libre community. I used debian at college but I really perferred windows at that time. Once I was working, I got in touch with free software again. I began to use it and promote it. It took me two more years to really understand, then truly believe, in what I was doing. A simple action convinced me that it is not just a matter of software, bussiness, community or innovation, but a matter of justice. It was reading a book.

My own red pill (remember Matrix) was Lawrence Lessig's book "Free Culture" (Cultura Libre in spanish). It is a must, It's easy to read and easy to understand but deals with really deep concepts and feelings.

Lawrence Lessig is giving a talk in Vitoria, Spain, next month. I've wanted to write this post to thank him for changing my little world.

Lawrence, you lost the battle, but we will win the war. ;)

Migrating to software libre ... not just platform related problems

2008-09-06T12:21:00.007+01:00

As some of you know, I'm working on a migration project to software libre of some municipalities close to Málaga. Meanwhile, we have been contracted as part of a group of companies that are migrating the economic department of the Extremadura Regional Goverment. So since March 2008, migration is a familiar word to me. There are some things that are common to many Public Administrations in Spain that has to be taken in consideration at the very beginning so the picture you will have to face can be understood.

Since Microsoft architecture has limitation in controlling the enviromet, and it is so expensive to do so, each technician, each user, has customiced his/her enviroment (department, server, desktop, network...) so much that migrating to any plattform (or even updating) can become a nightmare. The enviroment is heterogeneous.

Regional and local Public Administrations has grown so much in Spain the last 15 years that it has been imposible for most of them to stablish a general and strict politic related with technology and digital services.

Another key factor is that, until citizens has began to demand digital services, technical departments were underdimensioned and overcharged with low level job, due to that lack of that general politic and the way Windows is designed. Old school politics know everything about building houses (the major bussiness in Spain) but nothing about technology. That demand, plus a new generation of politics, are beginning to change this situation.

To migrate, a lot of data that is supposed to be known is not, so you have to collect it.

With this enviroment...linux has risen as an alternative of how things have been done in the past. It brings many advantages to solve some of the problems we have suffered, but not all of them. In fact, the deppest problems are not platform related. Let's talk about some of those (personal and general ones).

Migrating to linux means an enormous effort for a Public Administration. It has to be well done, by professionals. Big amounts of money and time are needed so usually politics decide to, also, add new services and new procedures. Migrating is not enough. A deep change is needed. So you end up not just migrating to linux, but improving the hold system, adding new services, new apps, new network topology, new methods, etc. The original migration project grows and grows adding pressure and stressing resources. Letting you go is a natural feeling when you believe in software libre and demand a change, but is a wrong way of approaching such a project. Migrating and improving are different concepts. Sometimes you need to take one step to one side (or even back) to be able to take many steps forward in the future.

I'm afraid many of the people I'm involved here in the south of Spain are putting into linux so much illusion that, when reality faces up, they will be a little dissapointed with the result. It is hard to reach 100% of the objetives. Without noticing it, I have ended up telling people to move slow, to be careful with the expectations, to make firm steps instead of running, to improve quality instead of quantity. Working in pioneer projects involve a lot of risk, so you usually need to be intrepid. But when people around has so many expectations, believing so much in what we are doing, in what free software can do for the people, this attitude has to turn into prudence. This is not usually well accepted. People begin to question if you really believe or you have doubts. For them, it is not a question of methodology or resources but a question of faith. So you have to stay strong to stay away of that big wave of illusion and keeping everybody on the ground. It is as risky as it can be an eviroment where no one around believes in software libre. I am used to this second one. I'm a newbie in facing the first one. So I'm learning a lot.

We have developed a new methodology and some simple tools to collect the data we need in order to define with accuracy the migration project. Since Public Administrations have hundreds of computer, not much information from other projects can be used. Scalability is a tough concept. Working in mEDUXa, the linux edu distro from the Canary Islands, have helped me a lot. Still there are many big differences. Schools are not regular Administrations, of course.

We are making a deep inventory of machines and apps installed and interviewing each and every public worker in its own desk, so they show us how they use the computer, share the information and interact with other workers, for example. I'm been doing many of those and it is beeing really interesting. Many conclusions are showing up that weren't expected. It is taken a lot of effort but it is totally worth it. It has been a money well invested.

After collecting all the the data, a good analysist has to be done (it is being done). Then, the real migration project begins. Technical solutions are well known. Most of them are well tested and have success stories behind them. We are not going to invent anything new in this area, I think by now. The risk is doing the migration smooth and softly, not stopping the services and making everybody feel confortable with the solutions. All this with limited resources and time.

For the Public Administrations involved, the analysis of the migration project will be the first time they think about the technology they use and the procedures the follow in a general approach, without names and surnames of any particular solution (take this as a wish). For many of them it will be the very first time they will be able to take key decisions related with technology. That is why it is important to give them all the information we can. They have to take their own decisions and they are not used to do this in technology. They usually just buy products (so decisions).

This is something some don't follow. I believe that trying to convince people to use this or that because you say it, because you are the "expert", is wrong. That's what have happened before (with propietary software) and the reason why many customers are so suspicious about software libre. In Public Administrations this is the root of many of the reactions against it (in politicians and, specially, in public workers). It is not that they don't trust the technical solutions we offer, they simply do not trust us. Our messege has a 100% commercial motivation form them.

After 6 monthes working here one clear conclusion has risen. Migrating Public administrations to GNU/Linux is way more difficult and more expensive than many people expected, but is possible. Much more than that...it is needed.

A wish ...

After I finish my job here it would be great to travel to other countries to get involved in Migration Projects to keep learning about different enviroment, facing new challenges, working with new and different people. Big deployments and migrations are a very interesting area to get involved. I've been working on it since 2005 and I feel I know nothing about it yet. Also, helping to spread GNU/Linux (software libre in general) makes me feel good. I like my job and I know I'm lucky.

aKademy 2008

2008-08-14T16:48:00.004+01:00

Akademy 2008 is close to end and I this is my own summary.

Organization and atmosphere

As it always happens, nothing is always perfect. But this year the job done has been amazing and the result is relevant. We will have to work really hard to make it better next year than this one. That is good news. The people related with the organization have done a good job and I only can thank them all for the effort.

Celebrating Akademy in the middle of europe (Mechelen, Belgium) has made possible that 350 people have came to the event. We expect 400 for next year, eventhough it will be in the Canary Islands (Gran Canaria). It seems that KDE is growing faster than it used to. Probably helps that KDE 4 is now a usable result in comparassion with last year, that was just a great idea in development. It is amazing that so many people have made agreements about desktop innovation and have respected the decisions taken eventhough the results are taking a long time to appear and many good job will be left behind (3.5 series). Although a lot of work is still needed, the actual state of KDE 4.1 makes more people believe it is not just possible, but it is desirable to keep pushing in this direction. KDE 4 series will be a perfect example of genuine innovation. I feel proud of being a tiny part of this.

Talks

This year I haven't been able to assist as much talks as other years since I had many things to accomplish during these days. In general I am satisfy with them. Maybe, since the project is getting bigger, we have to begin to separate pure technical confs. from other types of talks, since there are people and level enough to satisfy everybodys wishes. More non technicians are getting involved and they get absolutely lost in pure technical talks. The opposite also happens. Since there are only 2 days of talks, we have to be more accurate in the design of the schedule. But I inssist, this year have been a good one in this particular point.

The place

It is well known that sun and sea are a combination I need in order to be happy. From that point of view Mechelen is not the best place in the world for me. But, hey, it almost didn't rain and it hasn't been cold most of the time. So, comparing with other years...Mechelen was not bad at all. If next year in Gran Canaria rains, ... I'll shave my head. That cannot happen.

The job

Beside my homework, I of course attended to some BoFs related with next year event. Everybody looks happy about the job done so far. Everybody has gave us a lot of good energy and information related with present and past events. It will be extremely useful for us. I come back with tons of suggesstions and the feeling that co-hosting the event with GNOME have been a smart move made by both projects.

We need to become players of the same team to go for the 98% of the market that doesn't use any desktop libre. That is the real goal, the true challenge. Do we want to add efforts or play the game by our own? We will be able to answer this question after next year's event probably.

KDE-España

One of the multiple good news about KDE during aKademy 2008 is that KDE-España has born (or almost). We made a non official assembly here to talk about many stuff that our president, Albert Astals Cid, will explain soon. I'll just say that we have talk with Pedro Jurado (ermelenas) about collaboration between KDE-Hispano and KDE-España. Good things will happen.

Hopefully next year, in Gran Canaria Desktop Meeting, the association will have a general assembly, like GNOME-Hispano. It will be a huge chance for spanish developers to show how good we are doing.

What have I been doing lately.

2008-07-28T15:09:00.002+01:00

A little more than four monthes has gone since I left Tenerife, Canary Islands, to work in La Axarquía, Málaga, in a migration to software libre project. Working with public administrations is different than working for private companies. Usually you have more time for finishing the projects but the administrative and management issues are more complex. Get away from problems and keeping focused on the job to do is the key for not getting frustated. The impact though will be enormous so it is worth it.

After surveying and interviewing hundreds of people, trying to figure out how they use computers and apps, we have almost done an inventory system we have made for this project (based on ltsp). Since it will be GPL, I hope more people use it, specially in migration to software libre projects, like the one I'm working on.

Since in summertime most of the public workers are on vacation in Spain, we will be able to check their computers easily. I hope we can make a good report with the data extracted. Then the technicians will concentrate efforts on testing how key private apps work when virtualiced (with XEN, VMWare, Virtual Box and Wine basically). This is important to define the migration project of the 31 municipalities involved (in fact it won't be that many since some of them do not want to migrate).

Between managing this project and the Gran Canaria Desktop Meeting, I have no time for almost anything else. By the way, the Cabildo of Gran Canaria (Gran Canaria's Gov.) have put me in charge of the relation with both, KDE and GNOME projects for the GUADEC+Akademy 2009 event. This was going to be my first Akademy with no specific job to do but, obviously, it won't. It will be another busy event for me. Maybe is better this way.

---

Last week it was announced that we will participate in the migration project of the Economics and Technological Innovation Department of Junta of Extremadura (Extremadura's regional Gov.). We are going to make the initial report of the current situation. That is, interviewing pubic workers, making an inventory of equipments and apps, defining by groups the knowledge of users related with software libre, etc. That is the milestone before the development of the migration project itself.

We are the only small company that will be working on this migration project so it has been a nice surprise for us. I'm travelling tomorrow to Extremadura for the very first meeting.

Can anybody give me the clue to work 25 out of 24 hours?

Windsurfers say.... No wind...no fun.

I say....no migration to soft. libre projects...no fun

GUADEC + Akademy in Gran Canaria...thanks

2008-07-17T13:20:00.001+01:00

Thanks for choosing Gran Canaria to host GUADEC + Akademy 2009. You have made us really happy.

We have a lot of work to do now. Since it is the first time both events takes place at the same time and place, we will face many issues for the very first time. It is going to be tough sometimes but we have the determination for solving them with the help from both, GNOME and KDE, staffs. All I can say is that we will try to integrate efforts and people following the spirit that have made possible this adventure (GUADEC+KDE). It is an example that should guide us during the following year.

I want to make a call to every KDE and GNOME community member for thinking about how can we use this conference to spread free software in Africa and to support african developers. Maybe it is not a major goal for most of us, but a little effort can have a huge impact in the area close to the Canary Islands, and even in other African countries. The Canaries are a piece of Europe in Africa. We have a chance to do something special, not just for ourselves and our communities, but for those countries who have in their people, its first and only valuable resource. Free software change things everywhere, but specially in those places.

Once again, thank you.

GUADEC + Akademy in Gran Canaria...why?

2008-07-07T10:46:00.006+01:00

Why do we think GUADEC + Akademy 2009 should come to Gran Canaria, Canary Islands, Spain? Well, here you have some ideas.

We have a compromise from the Gran Canaria island Gov and the Gran Canaria's college for spending a total of 250 thousand euros in this event. We will spend all the sponsorship we can get in other stuff because many of the things we offer will be already paid. Please visit this page to see the budget. It is well determined which concepts will be paid by the local organization: http://grancanariadesktopmeeting.eslic.es/index.php/Budget

But if money is not important for you, maybe the time you spend travelling is. There are a lot of companies that flies to Gran Canaria directly. When you get to Gran Canaria's airport, there is a bus that takes you to Las Palmas every 30 minutes. The trip takes 20 - 25 minutes and it leaves you at 10 - 15 minutes walking to any of the hotels we included in the wiki. All of them are close to the beach. So getting from the airport to any of the hotels is fast, cheap and easy: http://grancanariadesktopmeeting.eslic.es/index.php/Logistics

The Auditorium is in the city, not uotside of it, so there are plenty of places to go to eat or having a beer. That is really cool for going out at night so you don't need to pick up a car. If you prefer staying at the hotel hacking at night, the local organization will pay a room for hacking in two different hotels so everybody can choose what to do. There will be internet connection in those rooms, of course.

We have planned the visit to two different places of Gran Canaria for 1000 people, 500 hundred to each place. Enough buses will be rented with a guide that speaks english. Both visits are really cool so you all will have fun. We will also have tipycal Canarian food during the trip: http://grancanariadesktopmeeting.eslic.es/index.php/Official_planning#Sightseeing_and_touristic_visit

In order to ensure that the event will be more publicited than ever, the local organization will invite journalists from general international press and media (5 people). We want to make sure that the event has impact not just in technical media but in more general ones. We also will invite 5 representatives from oocidental african countries related with technology so they can get in touch with the free software community and begin to promote it in those countries. Our islands have a great relations in the area so this event can be used as a plattform to spread technology and free software among those countries: http://grancanariadesktopmeeting.eslic.es/index.php/Impact_and_publicity

Initially we have offered to celebrate the event from July 3 to July 11, but we can delay the event a week if it is neccesary. Gran Canaria is not too hot at that time since we have a subtropical weather so it is never too hot or too cold, but most of the year is sunny. That's why we are one of the most important touristic places in the world. In addition to that, we have a mature free software community. Both Canary Islands colleges have a Free Software Office that are part of the local staff, one of the oldest LUGs in Spain and the first spanish regional free software companies association are also a key part of it.

There is a lot of job behind this offer. We have been working for monthes to define every detail yo can see on proposal. Please, get into it and take time to read before voting. Even if you do not support us, you'll find out good ideas and interesting things you can suggest to other candidates now or in the future.

This is not a just a matter of where you want to go, is a matter of where would be better for both projects to celebrate the event.

I want to thank all the people that has collaborated with us in this project and also the people that supports us. This is beeing a great experience so far.

What is not on Gran Canaria Desktop Meeting's wiki

2008-06-24T21:43:00.009+01:00

I haven't read the rest of the proposals yet. I prefer not to talk about our project in relation with the other two. I know the effort made by the other teams to make a proposal, it is enormous. All my respect for them. I want to make this clear first.

...

After attending to some big free software events, one of the major issues we (Gran Canaria Desktop Meeting team) have noticed is that most of them were organiced by people that are not professionals of these kind of thing. I've been in that situation also and the effort made is always huge. Tha software libre community have gone from local meetings some years ago to Akademy + GUADEC, with hundreds of visitors expected. This is a reflection of what softwre libre is going through.

This jump needs new methods applied to the major events. This is exactly what we wanted to offer. The guys that vote will say if we have accomplish it or somebody else have done it better.

The proposal is presented by the Cabildo of Gran Canaria, which is Gran Canaria's local Gov. It is not presented by the LUG (GULIC), the Canary Islands software libre companies association (ESLIC) nor any of the two Canary Islands Colleges (ULL and ULPGC). They are behind the Cabildo. This is a key point because it means we can count with people with a lot of experience in organicing even bigger events than ours. This is so true that the Cabildo has an organism, the Gran Canaria Convention Bureau, just for that. They have helped us a lot, not just giving us advice but also contacting people, hotels, asking for budgets, etc. They organice a major event per month.

Of course those organizations mentioned have actively participated in the proposal (and before that, the idea) and will be the heart and soul of the event, but we are only going to take care of those activities tlike the ones that needs technical skills or are directly related with the schedule. Since we are talking about two different events with some common activities, the complexity will be high. So not just many people is needed but also good coordination. This means more time spent by each of the local team members.

We are going to let the professionals take care of those kind of activities that are common to any big international event. This will allow the local team to focus energy in that extra job and also in stuff that haven't been done before and can make Gran Canaria Desktop Meeting the first of a new era of software libre inter community events.

For example, we describe in our proposal a variety of courses and other activities that need a lot of time to be made, but that can help a lot to increase the relations between GNOME and KDE people and, also, get new young local developers into both projects. They are affordable because we don't have to take care of the visit planned to the south and north of the island, for exmple. Professionals will be in charge of that. Moving 1000 people is really tough if you haven't done it before.

Following this line, we decided to celebrate the event (make the offer) in a place well prepared for big congresses: the Alfredo Kraus Auditorium and the Congress Palace next to it. Both are a first class infrastructure with, of course, a high cost, but it is worth it. The people that works there really know what has to be done to celebrate something like what we want to do. They will take care of the lights, the sound, the projectors, the security, the electricity and, with the collaboration of ESLIC, the internet connection.

Tha Cabildo can involve a travel agency, for example, to help organice the trip to Gran Canaria or nice activities for those who want to take a day off or bring your parents with you :), rent a car, etc.

Another thing that really make a difference is the place to stay the night. In a 20 min. walk from the Auditorium, there are more than 20 hotels that goes from 150 € to 20 € per night (regular prices). More than 20... that's a lot for a 350 thousand people city (Las Palmas de Gran Canaria). The Gran Canaria Convention Bureau has helped us to select some. I've been in some of them before and I'm sure nobody will complain about this issue if we are selected.

Many people think the Canary Islands are too far away. We are a little piece of Europe in Africa. But if you take a look at how many direct flights you can find to go there and the prices you can get, you will find out that we are much closer than you thought.

We recieve 10 million tourists per year by plane (that is like Brazil). There are 6 international airports in the Canary Islands. The biggest one is Gando, in Gran Canaria, so it has to be easy and cheap to come. For example, it is chaeper to fly from Frankfurt to Gran Canaria than do it from Sevilla to Zaragoza (two big spanish cities). And it is faster if, from Sevilla, you have to go first to Madrid to get to Zaragoza. This happens in every country when flying by plane. You can spent more time in a non direct short trip than in a long but direct one. For those who come from other continents, you can connect to Gran Canaria directly from London, Paris, Madrid, Rome, Berlin, Lisboa, and other european capitals. Distance is a relative concept after all.

For further information, please read the wiki and ask what you want, make suggestions or ...whatever you want:

http://grancaanriadesktopmeeting.eslic.es

Gran Canaria Desktop Meeting: GUADEC+Akademy 2009 has been presented

2008-06-16T06:35:00.003+01:00

The Hon. Cabildo de Gran Canaria, through its Secretary of Tourism, Foreign Trade and Technological innovation, under the leadership of its chairman D. Roberto Moreno Diaz, introduces The Canary Islands Generally speaking, and the island of Gran Canaria in particular as a candidate for the seat to hold GUADEC and Akademy 2009. An overview of the project, called Gran Canaria Desktop Meeting, which develops our proposal, is presented in this wiki.

The event will be held at the Alfredo Kraus Auditorium and the Palacio de Congresos de Canarias, next to the former. Hotels in various categories are available aroud the area, since it is located in the Playa de Las Canteras, at the island's capital city, Las Palmas de Gran Canaria. In this Auditorium zone there are various bars, restaurants and leisure areas.

In addition to two government programmes, and in order to promote free software between the Canary Islands society, especially among young people, proposes a program of additional activities. To develop courses, workshops and other advocacy of free software.

This candidacy has the support of all actors of the Canary archipelago within the free software world. The Cabildo de Gran Canaria expresses its outright support for innovation in software as well as its commitment to free software. In addition, the nomination has support from major associations and National bodies, which gives a clear picture of the creditworthiness of the bid.

The Secretary of Tourism, Trade and Technological Innovation has to its credit events of great importance over the past few years. To do so, it has the support of the Gran Canaria Convention Bureau, specialized in this type of activity. This will provide the necessary professionalism in organizing an event of this nature.

Gran Canaria Desktop Meeting: http://grancanariadesktopmeeting.eslic.es

Gran Canaria, Canary Islands on the cover

2008-06-12T21:45:00.004+01:00

Have you ever thought about comming to Gran Canaria, Canary Islands, for hacking?

Spanish small free software companies have a brand new voice: ASOLIF

2008-05-31T21:28:00.006+01:00

The federation of spanish free software companies' associations (ASOLIF) was born few weeks ago. 7 regional small free software companies associations has joined efforts and have founded ASOLIF, which envolves a hundred free software spanish companies aprox.. Another 3 regional associations will get into the federation soon.

I wonder if there is such a movement in other european countries so we can collaborate in a more global scale. Since the federation of associations ASOLIF is formed by small companies, we need to become a big network to push strong and defend our points of view.

We do not have web yet, but you can e-mail us: asolif@asolif.org

I'll announce when it's done.

I'm alive after all

2008-05-25T12:02:00.004+01:00

I've moved to Málaga two monthes ago for a year and I'm quiet happy about it. I came here to manage the first step of a project that will migrate 31 municipalities from a region called La Axarquía, which is close to Málaga.

After planning and scheduling the tasks, we are inventornig the computers and services these minucipalities have. I'm also surveying how public workers use the propietary apps they have installed so we can define the software libre tools we will install and the teaching project we will have to define in association with the migration process. We are also building up the team that will be working with us and explaining to politicians from these municipalities what we are trying to do. Nice job, isn't it?

We will present the first results in October probably. During june we will be working on a public wiki, so everybody can check and collaborate on what we are doing. The information will be mostly in spanish but we will translate what is relevant to english.

Some lessons learned

2008-03-30T22:04:00.002+01:00

During the last few days I've been working hard in configuring a Pundit to be able to use a big LCD TV with DVI and S-video. The technicians from Grupo CPD developed a simple app for a local company. They sent a couple of pundits to me to test the app and place them in some offices. The app showes the departure and arrival time of the ships this company has to the passengers in the ship station.

Anyway, since the company bought some TVs different from what we told them to, with no analogic signal entry, I had to configure the dvi out of the pundit (with a debian sarge) so the video signal could show up on the TV. I decided to get into it eventhough I'm not an expert.

After a couple of hours reading and trying stuffs, I supposed that I had to buy an analog to digital signal converter. So I did and I spent another couple of hours trying to configure the xfree server. In fact, I tryed everything I knew and a lot more.

Since nothing I tryed worked fine I though that converting the analogic signal (that comes out from the VGA) into digital signal (that get into the TV from the DVI) was not the best approach. I tryed then to configure the dvi out from the pundit. I failed again. Since I do not know much about xfree, I switched to xorg. I failed once more. Then I tried with different distros (live-cd), different configurations, different digital monitors.... no result. ...so I took it personal and I read a lot more about ati drivers and xorg. I spent another couple of afternoons working on it but couldn't make it.

After a couple of weeks (probably more) I gave up and sent back the computers to our technical department in Gran Canaria (from Tenerife). I was afraid they would solve it in 5 minutes and laugh at me the rest of the year.

They just called me today(I wrote this post a couple of weeks ago). They configured it in 30 minutes. After trying a couple of things, the plugged a simple vga-dvi adapter and...it worked.

What have I learned from this?

1.- Don't take computers too personal. They have no feelings.
2.- I reafirm myself now in the idea that technicians must be well paid
3.- Don't try to emulate technicians. You won't get well paid doing so.
4.- Don't laugh at technicians when they fail doing something they do not get paid for if you use a computer as an everyday tool.
5.- Do not give them your personal mobile phone number

What has happened to me is probably good from a personal point of view once in a while (realice you have limits) and for the technicians (they laugh at you telling tons of jokes).

We still have a lot to do

2008-03-18T11:11:00.002Z

Just when you think we are beginning to win the battle, the enemy shows its weapons and get a step forward.

The Canary Islands Regional Gov. has made public a contract to buy MS Office licenses. They'll spend 3.3 mill €

We have improved a lot, but still have a lot more job ahead.

I'm moving out of the Canary Islands to Málaga for a migration project

2008-03-10T10:25:00.005Z

I've been quiet lately....

I'm moving out the Canary Islands, where I've lived my entire life (except for one year I lived in the US). A friend of mine, Ramón Ramón (yes doubled Ramón), has called me to help him in a migration project to free software of La Axarquía, a group of municipalities close to Málaga, where Akademy 2005 took place, in Andalucía, Spain.

I will keep working in some of the projects I'm in right now in the Canaries, like trying to bring Akademy to these islands in 2009. I'm also going to be directly related with Grupo CPD as much as I can.

This is the first time such a migration project takes place in Spain. It is financed by Andalucía's regional Gov. and the company ITD was the one chosen to do it (they have contracted me as freelance) and Emergya, a free software company from Andalucía, is also involved.

My role will be to make the previous evaluation of each municipality and make the design of the migration project. That should take a year.

In Andalucía, GNOME rules, so it will be tough to introduce KDE, but now we have another warrior to try it. I leave a place where KDE is the most popular free desktop (Canary Islands) by a region where GNOME is, by far, the most popular.

Anyway, since Windows is the target...everything will be fine :)

This is a new milestone in my professional career so I'm excited about this new challenge. I hope we can do something that have impact in this region of Spain. We have the willing, the knowledge and the people to do it. If the politicians and the public workers of these municipalities want, we can make the difference moving from propietary to software libre.

What a nice project...isn't it? I feel lucky these days.

Kubuntu days...productive days

2008-02-25T09:55:00.008Z

These last four or five days it have been Kubuntu days for me. For different reasons, I've have installed or upgraded Kubuntu in four PCs and used the Kubuntu Live CD to configure a graphic card of a computer with debian sarge installed.

Installing Kubuntu from scratch is a great sensation. It's fast and easy most of the times. My parents had at home a debian, then switched to Kubuntu Breezy and, during this weekend, I've changed their old PC by a newer one with Kubuntu Gutsy on it. They are happy because it was easy to configure the HP Laserjet 1018 (with breezy it was a nightmare for me). Everything works fine with no extra configurations. My mother not just use it, also promote it, which is something I've never expected. My father is getting into it, not 100% convinced yet

I also took a friend's PC and changed her old unupdated Kubuntu Dapper by a brand new Kubuntu Gutsy. After installation, everything worked fine, specially her usb-wifi stick, something she could not get working with the old distro.

I upgraded my office's PC from Kubuntu Feisty to Gutsy with the distribution upgrade tool. Everything worked fine except cups. I didn't have a backup copy of the configuration archive. Does anybody knows if it does one before changing cups by the new packet?

I also installed a Kubuntu in a quite old computer after adding some RAM memory (it has xubuntu). Now it has dual boot. It works quiet well although xubuntu works faster.

So, what is the point? It is that, for non technical users, as I am, Kubuntu have reached a point where I'm able to do with linux everything I used to be able to do in windows, install it, make partitions, configure a network, install apps, share printers and directories, configure wifi devices, create users, etc. very easily. In fact, I can do more things now that I could in windows.

We can improve a lot though, but it has been a confirmation of what I already knew (we all know). With linux I'm more productive, even in tedious actions like the ones I've done these days.

aKademy in the Canary Islands?

2008-02-15T19:54:00.004Z

Sometimes it is hard or even impossible to achieve a goal no matter how hard you try. But sometimes things flow naturally and comes easier than you have ever expected. When I first told the people I work with that we should try to bring aKademy to the Canary Islands, everybody laughed at me. Few month later, some of them are even more excited with the idea of pushing hard to do it than myself.

We presented the idea to some people from the free software community here in the Canaries and they liked so we began to think about it was something we had to try. During aKademy 2007 I propose it to some of the e.V. members and they encouraged me to try it. So we are.

Now we are preparing a project to send to the e.V. to celebrate aKademy 2009 in Gran Canaria. We are working to compete with whatever candidate it shows up. Competition is good for everybody.

I hope we can finish our work soon and make a project we can be proud of. Gran Canaria, Canary Islands, sounds good for an aKademy, right?

Kubuntu...rescues another Windows. I need a special distro for this.

2008-01-26T11:35:00.000Z

No matter how old I get, I can't get away from friends of mine calling me for help when their Windows have a problem. I have finally get to a point where they call me only when the fire is clearly visible, but still it is too often....

This week I had to do it again. I've became an expert:

Save the data...that means the whole harddisk, since you never know for sure where Windows apps save the key data

Check harddisk's integrity. It would be nice to have statistics about how often a harddisk breaks with windows installed compared with linux in the same enviroment.

Pass an antivirus, maybe you just have to restore a couple of archives.

Try to restore the windows installation (this doesn't work in 99% of the cases)

Format the harddisk

Install windows

Install drivers

Install apps

Restore data

Restore configurations

Install eDonkey or similar (this is a special category even for corporative computers) :)

I used to do some of these operations with Knoppix, but lately I do them with Kubuntu. I would like to use a pendrive specially prepared for this. I have a Mandrake one (from aKademy 2007) but I prefer a Debian based one (I'm more used to it). Is there any?

Maybe next time I have to help somebody to restore the Windows, I convince myself to do it. It is such a pain.....

Plone...we meet again

2008-01-26T10:51:00.000Z

I have a nice love story with Plone. It is like a close friend that becomes a lover in different stages of somebody's life.

I first discovered Plone back in 2003. It was a great love story, I use it as intranet since then and worked in a few projects based on it. But since the end of 2005 I haven't been able to work deeply with it, so I haven't been able to test the newest version (other people from Grupo CPD were in charge of projects related with Plone). I was willing to work with the new version, specially after I met Alan Runyan during Software Libre Conferences that took place in autumn in La Laguna (Tenerife, Canary Islands, Spain. During the last 3 o 4 weeks I've the chance to use it again for a project, this time for a web portal.

Plone has grown up but still keeps in the user layer that mixture of functionality and simplicity I used to love so much, and the power and complexity that have attracted technicians these past 10 years.

I love this wiki way of generating contents that Plone has added to the new version. I'm a wiki fan and Plone can satisfy people like me.

Plone is not just the first and only really robust CMS, useful for big scale projects, it is a really good CMS, useful for medium size projects too.

KDE 4, a motivation to keep fighting

2008-01-12T14:24:00.000Z

I hear people talking about innovation everywhere. It is an easy concept to talk about but hard to put in practice. KDE community had the skills and the determination of doing something new back in 2005, when I first got in touch with the project, but that was not enough. We usually think that money is a key factor for innovation but history give us tons of examples of the opposite. This is one of them. Hardworking is a necessary one, but not sufficient.

To innovate we need freedom.

Now we are close to see the light. KDE 4 is almost out and I was wondering what does this milestone means for me.

We have put a lot of effort fighting against patents, propietary software, restrictive licenses, etc., not because we want to defeat our opponents but because we want to have freedom to innovate... and to have fun doing it. We deserve the chance of having something better, promoting that the people with the knowledge and the determination of going for something like KDE 5 (or whatever adventure they want) are able to try it, and maybe do it, just like KDE community has done in this case.

For me KDE4 means, overall, a motivation to keep fighting to make our way to the next stop easier, to gain more freedom to innovate much more than we've done so far...that has been a lot.

ReciclaRed, a software libre edu project in the Canary Islands

2008-01-03T20:51:00.000Z

ReciclaRed finished last December. During a whole year 20 students have been working hard to install and configure 14 computer labs in some public schools placed in Las Palmas de Gran Canaria. Canary Islands, Spain, as part of a project financed with EU funds through the Canary Islands Employment Department of the Regional Government.

This project was assigned to FUNDESCAN, a well known local foundation. Grupo CPD, the company I work for, was the technological partner. For ReciclaRed, a director, some teachers and one administrative were employed.

Beside cabling and building up the network of every computer lab, the students recycled hundreds of computers donated by public administrations and private companies and configured them as thin clients, using software libre to do so.

Students also learned to install and configured distros like Debian, Kubuntu or CentOS. All thin client systems had KDE as the default desktop with KOffice and KDE-Edu apps installed, among others. Software like LTSP, XEN, Mediawiki, Joomla, Firefox, OpenOffice, etc were also used.

This project wouldn't be possible with propietary software and it has been a clear success story with local media coverage (check this article in spanish). Some wiki pages written by the students and teachers has been already published. The rest will be public soon (with free license).

We have linux on schools, so now what?

2007-12-26T11:14:00.000Z

Teachers usually prepare their classes at home, so they need the same software there that it is installed at the school they work in, with the same version of any app. As they do with books, teachers need to make agreements on the software they install in computer labs. This is not just a pedagogical, but a technical and a management need. This is the first problem the have to face.

In Spain, due to political reasons, regional governments are in charge of the technical issues that deals with computers involved in education. So they select most (or all) of the apps you find in a computer lab of any public school. This is one of the reasons we have been so successful in promoting free software at schools. It is a political decision and teachers support it (although it takes time). But other countries do not have global solutions for this, since each school or teacher have independence for choosing the applications to work with at school. This is not an advantage from a managing or a supporting point of view (it doesn't have to be a disadvantage either if there is a good coordination).

Let's assume that this problem is solved.

Supporting the software and creating documentation around a single app is hard to do and takes time. To teach teachers and students to use the software chosen takes a while too, so it is impossible for edu projects to follow short release periods, as software libre distributions do. They soon get out of date, unsupported. So teachers and students end up having at home newer versions of the software they have at school. This is already a problem for those teachers that already have good skills using linux.

In addition, each distro have its own politic related with repositories and versions of packets they include and support in any release. Even if a single (or group) of schools follow it, still there is a problem with what people have at home.

One of the things that should be done by schools or regional govs. in order to reduce the impact of this problem is to create and maintain their own repository of packets to ensure they all use the same version of the same app they have at school. This is a good point for students also.

In my opinion, this repository should be distro independent, so teachers (or students) can install the distro they want (from the official distro repository, or from a installation CD), and add this edu repository, so they have the same version of any app. This can also include Windows versions of edu apps. This doesn't work at 100% but there are technical ways of getting close.

This is a better approach than preparing a complete edu distro and having to support the installation process, hardware drivers, desktop configs, etc.. Distros already take care of that and they do it well because they have the experience.

What makes the difference if you use KDE, and I think the best thing this can be done, is to be able to download and install from the edu repository the profile (configured with kiosk mode) you have in school (if you use KDE), with all the apps, so teachers have the same configs and apps in a semi-independent desktop.

By doing this, what people in charge of edu projects can do, is to put more effort on spreading their experience selecting and configuring the desktop (improving usability), on promoting a community around the software they install and on connecting that community directly with distro, desktop and apps communities, instead of putting so much effort on technical stuff related with live CD installation, hardware configurations, release periods etc. in uncontrolled environments. To deploy, update and maintain the software on computer labs and other dependencies in schools (controlled environments) is already a huge project that takes many resources.

This is not the politic big edu projects are following in general. They are promoting that people at home install the same complete distro they have at school, adding an unsustainable and non scalable effort to the technical people they have. That politic have to change if we want to give response to the increasing demand we gonna face during the following years. Specially, if computer stores begin to sell machines with linux preinstalled, so regular users won't have to install that whatever linux operative system they (or the store) choose anymore (probably different than the one they have at schools).

wiki, kile, kontact, RT...and voila!

2007-12-01T13:46:00.001Z

Wikis, kontact, RT and kile are four of the basic tools I use everyday. Some of the guys I work with have been worried for a long time about integration of tools in one interface so they can work with them in a wiki way.

When I first heard about this I didn't think it was a great idea, but now I'm 100% convinced about the need of such a tool.

When people begin to use computers need clear and easy to use interfaces, where all the information is placed in text boxes with big names with one screen for each concept, like kontact does. Is the groupware way. Kontact is a great tool because integration between tools has always been a concern for the developers. Part of it success is because of that.

Wikis are terrific tools. They make the difference, specially when you are part of a big team. Bugtrackers are also useful in those cases. Is not only a tool for developers but for all kind of people. Workers are much more efficient when they can list the activities they have to accomplish ordered by priority. To coordinate teams is much easier when you can take a look to everybody's contributions in a wiki and list their assigned work.

Kile is a basic tool for me. It makes easy to use tags in LaTeX.

So, why not to take the best of each one of them in a single tool (or a single interface)? I want a tool like kile but not for writing LaTex but for writing in a wiki.

Let's say I'm writing a text that I want to send to somebody, so I select that text and introduce a tag (|body| my text|/body|). When I press save, the tool detects the tag and, since I haven't specified basic information to send the e-mail, it ask me, lets say, in a panel at the right side of the screen. Of course I could have defined it while writing the text with the tag |to|e-mail address|/to|, for example. The same can happen with names, phone numbers, etc.

All the information tagged can be found in the wiki page where I wrote it but, since the tool recognice the tags, specific information can be listed in a specific page automatically. So if I look for the name of a travel agency, for example, it shows me all the names (information tagged with |name|) associated to the information tagged with |company_type|. I also can decide which information associated with the tag |company_name| I want to be shown.

This works very well with bug reports. We integrated long time ago Twiki with RT by defining specific tags in the wiki that opens or close new bugs (tasks) in RT, all identified with diferent colours (red for open tasks, green for closed tags, etc). We cannot live now without it.

The calendar can work perfectly this way. I can define a meeting by writing in a wiki page something like this: |meeting|Talk about KDE|/meeting||hour|8:30|/hour||place|tenerife|/place|. Since it is hard to remember the tags(there would be tons of them), we need an kile like interface to list them all. There has to be a special wiki page where you can list all the meetings or list what you have to do today, ordered by priority, date or whatever. You can also assign tags to information that relates it to other information so you can list it all together in one wiki page. Wikis do this quiet well with a whole contribution, but it should be possible to do it with a single piece of information.

The point is be able to introduce different kind of information without switching from one interface or tool to another one. You have them all in one (from the user point of view).

This is a more natural approach than the one we use now. When you are in front of your computer, you begin to write a text, for example. Part of that text has to be sent as an e-mail (so you tag that part as |body|) where you have included a contact and a task (you tag both). Right now you have to copy the text and paste in a new e-mail (you open a mail client), then open the tracker and create one task, write the contact information in a specific tool (so you keep record of it) and attach it to the e-mail and then send it. Too many interfaces for basic actions, in my opinion.

Making such a tool attractive to beginners would be hard, I know. Anyway, I want something like this so I asked for it to the Three Wise Men.

Have you get the idea of what I want? Is it an impossible dream? Do you know a good approach to this idea?

Are we trying to beat one monopoly by supporting another one?

2007-11-06T17:31:00.000Z

Lately news about the support Mozilla is receiving from Google has made me think...

Firefox is a great tool, specially is you use Windows. With Linux or Mac/OS you have more good choices.

I promote firefox everywhere I go, specially in courses where I teach. Most of the computer labs I teach in have Windows XP, so one of my objetives when I teach beginners is to break the Windows+MSN Messenger+Hotmail+Windows Live+MSNSearch association that most of them love (because it is the only thing they know).The combination Windows+Firefox+Google+Goolge talk+Gmail+Blogger is a natural option but...

Am I fighting against a monopoly by supporting another one?

I've decided I'm going to change some of the exercises and introduce more tools to avoid this situation I'm worry about.

Firstable I'll use Yahoo again, like in the early days, once in a while, so students get confortable with it as well as with Google. Almost nobody uses Yahoo in Spain. I'll also use Opera, not just Firefox, until I find another browser libre (kde browser for windows?) that I like. I'll try to use pidgin or PSI as a IM client (kopete for windows?) and, by now, I'm not going to promote any webmail but Gmail or any blog tool but Blogger. I'll think about it anyway.

By doing this, I hope my student get more open to try different tools and I calm my worries about what it looks like it can happen in the near future.

If you have any suggestion, I'm open to read and consider it. Maybe switch to linux + KDE....right?

Desktops libres help to introduce other (libres) technologies.

2007-11-03T12:38:00.000Z

In Gran Canaria's College (ULPGC) we are going to give a course about Ruby on Rails during the following days. The point is where are we going to do it. The computer lab has a nice structure based on one server with CENTOS4 + XEN + 4 virtual machines with Debian, and another server with W2k.

The first virtual machine has the LTSP system.

The second virtual machine has user's home directories.

The third one has some free desktops.

The fourth one has the monitoring system

There are some thin clients and some new and recycled PCs on the computer lab. The windows server will be used to check (through rdesktop) that everything it is done by students works on Internet Explorer. Validation goes through the old NIS the college has. This computer lab is called Aula Sostenible (something like Sustainable Lab).

If you analyze the ratio cost/power of these kind of structures compared to similar ones with propietary software (Windows, IBM or Solaris, for example) you find out why we are so strong. But most of this technology is some years old. We could configure something like this (or close) three or four years ago. What has happened for us to be able to sell these kind of solutions much easier now than before?

Mature free desktops help us to convince many people that software libre is 100% usable. That allow us to promote other technologies and solutions, like virtual machines, thin clients or monitoring software, for example. From a marketing point of view, KDE is a very strong way of breaking walls so many people open their doors by giving free software a chance. Many times you convince more people to buy software libre by showing your laptop instead of talking an hour about the benefits of this and that. This is something I live more and more frecuently.

What a day for standard formats and free software...

2007-10-30T14:47:00.001Z

Today 3 news has came along related with standars and free software that I hope it gives light to people in general and local politics here on the Canary Islands, Sapin, about what's going on:

1.- German Foreign minister, Frank-Walter Steinmeier, supports ODF.

2.- Open Document format (ODF) yesterday became an official standard for
South African government communications.

3.- Becta, the government's education technology agency, has today made a complaint to the Office of Fair Trading (OFT) for alleged anti-competitive practices by Microsoft in the schools software marketplace and in relation to Microsoft's approach to document interoperability.

...I want more days like today. By the way, thanks KDE for letting me become part of such an amazing project.

Why software libre and not free software

2007-10-25T16:35:00.000+01:00

Reading Richard Dale's post about, among others, this issue, and after having a conversation about this with some of the people invited to II Jornadas de Software Libre conference, celebrated last week in Tenerife, I want to describe some arguments that make me say that we should stop talking about free software and begin to talk about software libre.

Free is an english term that has two major and popular meanings, free as free beer and free like liberty. Libre in spanish has this second meaning only.

Software libre is a mixture of an english word (recornized already in the spanish dictionary) and a spanish word. So it is a good international mixture.

Libre is a simple word easy to identify in many languages and, above all, easy to pronunciate for non spanish people.

software libre cannot be confused with open source any more since we have taken away the relation with the concept free as free beer. In spanish there is no confusion about this as there is in english.

Libre is easy to write. Free is not, since many people make mistakes with the two final e.

kdisser + latex beamer

2007-10-25T16:34:00.000+01:00

Kdissert is an awesome app behind a simple idea. Giving talks and product presentations, you realice how hard is to make non linear presentations. When the complexity of an idea is high, sometimes you cannot express it linearly.

Kdissert help you to simplify what you want to say. After you make clear your ideas, it generates automatically a latex beamer presentation. I'm still fighting against the template, but hey...I don't have to do it everything at once. For this presentation I'm working on, I've made some progresses. Hopefully, by the end of the year I will be able to make presentations a lot faster than right now, using latex beamer from scratch.

If you are tired of making complex presentations, this is a good approach: kdissert + latex beamer.

Neutrality vs Justice

2007-10-25T16:33:00.000+01:00

A friend of mine has written a couple of good articles about Technological Neutrality, a term that is getting popular among some politics here in Spain (I assume it is also becoming popular worldwide). Check them out (they are in spanish. Click here and here). This concept makes me upset as well as Open Source. To me, they are the same song.

Beeing neutral has nothing to do with justice. There are tons of examples in history that reflect that sometimes beeing neutral is inmoral, specially when you are in front of an unequal battle, like the one we are fighting is.

What the free software community is demmanding from public administrators is justice, not neutrality. How can somebody be neutral between a software solution that do not follows standars, do not allows interoperability with other apps, and another solution that does, allowing other programs to interoperate? How can somebody be neutral when some companies not allow users to choose the tool they want to work with?

Open formats and standars are the only way to ensure technological justice. This has nothing to do with beeing neutral, the way propietary software companies want to sell this concept. This is not a battle between software libre and propietary software. It is a battle that deals with freedom. Nobody should be neutral when freedom of choice is been haunted. I'm Not. That's why I think Technological neutrality is a shame at this point. I want Technological Justice.

KOffice in schools

2007-10-25T16:32:00.000+01:00

Following disccussion taken place at Edu-day in aKademy 2007, here is a more precisely opinion than I expressed there:

Right now a big fight is taking place in market between MS Office and OpenOffice. The appearance of the free software suite and ODF has brought a new interest to a sector long time dominated by the old man. But there are, at least, two more choices:

* KOffice, from the KDE desktop

* GNOME Office suite with gnumeric and Abiword in front.

Both free software products, specially designed for linux desktop, are really mature solutions but, for whatever reason, do not have a good market position.

KOffice is a great suite. It's applications are well integrated and the guys that are working on it are good developers with great ideas. That's what it has moved me to write this, to try to help them to get the attention that other office suites have. KOffice is another example of a good product not having its way because market decisions, that is, users or customers decisions.

What do they have to do in order to attract more attention and more users?

I'm sure they know it but let me make some suggestions anyway.

Linux desktops are being really successful in some sectors but, overall, education is the one where is doing better. I think that, if KOffice team focus even more energy in the education market, they can win a small battle that will help them to get into other sectors, into other battles.

Why should they do that? Why is the education sector a good target for KOffice?
1.- OO and M$ are putting more attention on other sector, specially business.

2.- From an usability point of view, both are hard to use and have tons of features that students never use. This means that a small team of smart developers can fit their needs by doing things different. KOffice developers have those skills and the resources needed to become relevant in this new market.

3.- MSOffice and Openoffice are heavy apps. In many schools only old computers are available, so performance problems come along. This has been going worse lately. KDE + KOffice is a killer solution from a performance point of view.

4.- They (M$ and OO) try to be a "one for all" type of app. In education it is much better to use one app for one purpose. Specially with little kids. GNOME has done a good job on this and KOffice has good technical points to achieve it. Only heavy integration with other apps and between office apps justify that politic. OO has a very weak point here, integrating with desktops. M$ only integrates with M$ products the way KDE or GNOME can do it.

5.- Most of the users (specially teachers) do not use anything but the word processor from a office suite. So for most of them, a office suite is not needed. Politics and non experienced (in computers) teachers think they do. Integration with the desktop and other apps is a solution for both of them. In one side, we give teachers what they want. In other hand, we make student use it with apps they like.

6.- Kids use drawing apps. M$ do not have any good one. Integration with the word processor is needed. KOffice is doing a good job on this.

7.- KOffice can be integrated with other apps and desktop features that students love, like IM clients, audio and video players, web services, etc. KOffice can become fun to use. Users see Office suites as boring. They are.

8.- The visual design is not adapted for kids in OO and M$. KOffice can outstand both, specially with the realease of KDE4.

9.- Internationalisation is a key feature for schools that M$ do not have.

10.- First world governments are putting money in linux for schools and they believe (wrongly, in my opinion) that office suites are a key app to teach. Being competitive in this sector will bring a huge attention to this project and to KDE in general.

11.- It would be a good reason for politics to decide to switch from Windows to KDE, avoiding including OO for many profiles, specially students under 12. It would show how powerful linux(and KDE) is in adapting itself to special needs.

12.- KDE is getting popular in schools. KOffice can take advantage of that.

13.- KOffice can have different interfaces for different profiles without having to rewrite the code. An interface for little kids would be an outstanding first step.

14.- KOffice is more suitable to get people involved in its development since is part of KDE project.

15.- Focusing on education do not means to abandon the actual path. I think that, if it is done the right way, putting effort on education would attract more energy into the KOffice team, so the total manpower can be balanced. If that attraction do not happens, the effort is worth it anyway because of the increasing of KOffice users in schools.

16.- It opens a new unexplored market, that means innovation. Innovations is equal to excitement, that means more energy added into KDE.

After my experience in mEDUXa, this is really clear to me. I know people from other edu projects agree, like the guys from Skolelinux. Education is a big opportunity for KOffice. If they (we) don't go for it, somebody else will. It is just a matter of time.

Big deployments of desktops and Kiosk Mode

2007-10-25T16:31:00.000+01:00

Another item included in Edu-day discussions was related of the importance of the kiosk mode. I've written this while travellling and haven't checked grammatical errors. I'll do it the following days. But today it has been published info about the aKademy 2007 and I think it is the right day to publish this. Sorry for my english.

The kiosk mode is a key feature in KDE for big deployment because many reasons. This post go through two of them:

1.- Reduce the amount of data to transmit for updating desktops.

2.- Allows a systematic method of setting profiles for users so costs are reduced.

All the features of the desktop and the kde apps can be controlled in one directory, in a few number of .txt files under /usr directory. This means that, by changing a really few light archives, we can control desktop configurations and set different profiles with heavy customisation, that the user cannot change. This is basically what kiosk mode allows us to do. When we talk about thousands of computer with different profiles, like in mEDUXa (35,000 with 5 profiles each), this is a big issue.

When we talk about homogeneous networks or deployments, we do not refer to the network itself, specially the bandwith. This usually depends on geographical factors hard to control, so its heterogeneous. Traditionally this has been a huge problem in many places. The Canary Islands are no exception. Not just because they are seven islands in the middle of the Atlantic sea, but because they are volcanic, so there are many mountains.

Lets resolve a simple math problem. If I have to change a configuration in a desktop that is placed in user space, in a .txt file of 2 KB for example, it means that, if I have 10,000 users in 100 schools (100 users per school), I should send to school servers 2x100=200 KB through my network, and then make an update of 2x100= 200 KB in each school (if some users are able to log in with different profiles, the number grows) through its LAN. That is a total of 200x100=20,000 KB, something around 19.5 MB.

If the configuration change means 3 archives of 30 KB each, placed on the user space, and we have 1100 schools, 300,000 users and 5 profiles, you add the problem of bandwith limitations (we have ADSL of different bandwith and many satellite connections in many schools) to this equation, and then, the enormous cost of sending technicians from one island to another one... sleeping well gets harder. Kiosk mode makes a difference.

First of all, kiosk mode is set by text files, really light. By configuring features in a centraliced way, you only have to make one change (under /usr) per profile in a machine (if it is set locally), and not per user. This is a huge reduction on the amount of data that needs to be updated, so the control of that process and the possible point of failure are drastically reduced.

By setting the features configurations under /usr/local/share, we avoid user from changing them.

Lets take a look at firefox, for example. If you use a proxy to navigate, this browser doesn't let you place that feature in the system space, so you cannot block it from being manipulated by users. Since the browser is used almost every day many times in a computer lab of every school, we can say being optimistic, that at least, once each two days the teacher is going to have a problem. He is going to tell the school coordinator about it so he/she will send the report to the centralised support department, that a user cannot navigate, lets say, once each two weeks. The technician will take about 5 minutes to figure out if it is a network problem by checking it, connect to the machine by ssh, check the browser, go to the user profile and verify the proxy configuration. 5 minutes a week per school means 5x1100=5500 minutes, that is 12 working days (8 hours each). If the cost of an hour is 30 €, for example, that means about 2700 € per every two weeks, 5400 €/month. If the computer lab is used 8 months per scholar year, not following the kiosk mode in this case cost about.... 43,000 €

Of course you need to set a solution for that before the disaster takes place. So you can make all kinds of hacks to solve a structural problem of the app or go directly and substitute it, if there is any available, by another one with the same features, that can be integrated in kiosk mode (KDE app). If there is any, you pay somebody to fix it (hopefully the developer) or.....kill yourself. Or even worse get killed by teachers or students because you don't solve the problem.

Of course this is not a real problem. They can be even worse. But it shows clearly how important is for big deployments that all desktop and apps features can be configured through the kiosk mode and why it is such a relevant argument for electing KDE. This can help people understand why windows has such a huge cost of support per machineper year.

But kiosk mode is not just a feature, it is an agreement of a community to follow some development rules that allow other people to customice the desktop and apps in a systematic way, simplifying the action of setting and changing configurations and avoiding failures because of users actions. It is even more, it makes possible to extend the concept of scalability to the desktop, by allowing to offer different profiles in the same machine without multiplying the points of failure in a linear way. This means that in the future we can achieve the idea of a student using different profiles during his scholar life but having the same user space, saving all the data and customisations he has made in school and taking them home. Only with kiosk mode is possible to think in a profile for the math class, another one for chemistry, etc. for each student. Each of them with requirements established by teachers, implemented centrally by technicians and deployed in a short period of time.

So I have two important suggestions for KDE developers.

1.- Make all your features configurable using kiosk mode.

2.- Document them. So projects like mEDUXa can apply them and users can take advantage of them.

mEDUXa. 2.0... a wellcome and a goodbye

2007-10-25T16:29:00.000+01:00

Yesterday, friday 21 of september of 2007, during the II Jornadas de Software Libre Conference, that took place in La Laguna's college, Tenerife, Canary Islands (with the presence of J. Riddell, A. Seigo, R. Dale and Alan Runyan, among others), the mEDUXa 2.0 version based on Kubuntu Fiesty Fawn has been presented.

The Educational Department of the Canary Island Goverment have used most of the job done for mEDUXa 1.2 version and update the distro. They are also doing a Live CD. I have no more info so I cannot inform about it.

They have stopped the deployment of the 1.2 version (with Inves computers) and in a few weeks are going to begin the deployment of the new version in new computers (from another vendor with 2 GB of ram). So mEDUXa 1.2 and the new 2.0 version are going to live together for a while (3 or 4 years). Right now 250 schools have mEDUXa 1.2, and another 100 will have mEDUXa 2.0 by the end of the year.

So the Canary Island Gov. is going forward with mEDUXa and have plans to improve it the following years. These are good news. They are also including free software apps in the Windows Desktop.

For me and Grupo CPD this is is a goodbye. We are not going to be involved in mEDUXa anymore since the Medusa project haven't contract us for the 2.0 version. Fujitsu and some teachers are doing the job.

First of all, we want to thank all KDE community for their support, specially to the kde-edu team. We gonna keep involved in this community project. We love it. Thanks also to Kubuntu guys (specially J. Riddell), Canonical and Kubuntu community for the awesome job you guys are doing. Thanks to Debian-Edu community, CGA people from Andalucía and the teachers, developers and technicians that have collaborated with us the last 3 years. For the team I've been coordinating it has been a pleasure work in such a project and meet so many smart guys.

Personally this experience have changed my life forever. I want to get involved in more projects like this one. Software Libre makes the difference. Thanks

In following posts I'm going to write about strategies to improve mEDUXa and other educational linux distributions.

Very special thanks to mEDUXa's team. It been a great pleasure to work with you.

KDE-Edu meeting in Paris 1st and 2nd of december

2007-10-25T16:28:00.000+01:00

The KDE-Edu team is having a meeting in Paris on the 1st and 2nd of december 2007 to decide strategies for KDE 4.1. This is a sign of the maturity of this project. If you are involved in teaching and software, don't miss that meeting. Many good developers are involved in the KDE-Edu team. Applications like kig, kalzium, Kgeography, etc. are developed by these guys.

Stay tuned for the conclusions.

This blog comes back again

2007-10-25T15:15:00.000+01:00

The tool I have my blog in, b2evo is already obsolete. The version I have is old. I have now more hits than I've never expected and the ADSL line of my new office gets busy sometimes, so I decided to use Blogger again. The entries I'll write in english will be posted here. The ones in spanish are going to be at my old blog for a while. Lets see how this new configuration works.

I change the blog platform and URL

2006-06-20T20:57:00.000+01:00

I change this blog to this URL: http://agustin.ejerciciosresueltos.com
Bye

Cambio de URL y plataforma de este blog

2006-06-20T20:55:00.000+01:00

Hola a todos,

este blog se muda a la siguiente URL: http://agustin.ejerciciosresueltos.com
Un saludo