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

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":

1. Understand our culture.
2. 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)

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:

1. Creating a structured and coordinated program (the rules).
2. Building up a network with those organizations (the field).
3. 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

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.

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

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

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

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

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?

1. It is the best way to support the great job some KDE members are doing for bringing new developers into our community.
2. Season of KDE is a great opportunity for you to attract some new contributors to your project.
3. Do you remember your first few weeks as a KDE developer? Make it easier for new contributors to join our community.
4. 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

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

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:

1. Communication (connectivity)
2. Hardware
3. 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:

1. Users that do not know how to use the software
2. 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.