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Sara Ford's WebLog


My adventures embracing open source on CodePlex and at Microsoft

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Speaking at the O’Reilly Open Source Convention this Friday

If there ever were a “Sara needs a hug” moment… I’m doing a talk on Friday called Towards a Stronger Open Source Ecosystem.  It’s a story about what I’ve seen and ideas I have for the future.  I actually put together this abstract 2 years ago, so it isn’t necessarily a talk about the future of CodePlex, as my day job would led you to believe.

Here’s the abstract.  Wish me luck!

“Code speaks louder than words” is a fundamental philosophy of the open source community, because developers use code to discuss code, not words. Imagine a code review over email that did not contain a single line of code. The conversation would be lost in translation. Code is the universal language in the developer ecosystem, allowing us developers to communicate with one another.

But yet, we don’t communicate universally today. We define ourselves by our business models, our developer tools, our technologies, hence defining who we converse with. But imagine if there were no definitions or boundaries, where all developers could effectively engage together. Imagine an open source ecosystem that included all developers, regardless of platform, language, or development environment.

This talk will cover go over a roadmap for striving towards this stronger open source ecosystem through current infrastructure enhancements, fostering community growth through discoverability, project incubations and sponsorships, and paving the ways for proprietary products to evaluate various methods of going open source.

Posted: Wednesday, July 23, 2008 8:37 AM by saraford

Comments

Peter Ritchie said:

Sounds like an interesting talk.  You'll do a great job.

# July 23, 2008 12:09 PM

saraford said:

Thanks Peter.  I'm waiting for the /. article "M$ sends woman to open source convention."

# July 23, 2008 12:11 PM

Programmerman said:

Good luck!  Nothing about that sounds simple (though it does sound utterly necessary).

# July 23, 2008 1:04 PM

gakees said:

That is really funny! (Regarding your reply about /.)

Anyway, I am glad to see the demonstrable conviction with Microsoft ranks to discuss such topics...

# July 23, 2008 2:52 PM

saraford said:

Thanks!  Yeah, this talk is where i'll present my ideas about these things, so it will be interesting...

# July 23, 2008 3:01 PM

Alex Birch said:

Kudos on speaking the international language of programmers.

It's nice to see people at Microsoft are continuing to embrace the Open Source model (where it makes sense.)

# July 23, 2008 5:47 PM

jane said:

Good luck and we know you will do great.  We are proud of you and can't wait to hear the results of your talk.

# July 23, 2008 10:08 PM

Kelly said:

Isn't human language a sort of open source ecosystem? Words and concepts and patterns of use get added or dropped according to both creative and mundane use within the community. Of course, the barriers between communities exist for the same reason, a lack of shared linguistic components. But there is another more subtle reason for the barriers: boundaries.

I suspect that as long as humans (and developers) wish to make sure they belong, that there will be barriers between communities and platforms. It is by these barriers or boundaries that we derive our sense of place in the universe.

In your search for the universal programming language, be sure to take account of this very real human need to belong to a group defined by boundaries.

# July 24, 2008 10:32 AM
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