Port 25 - Communications from the open source community at Microsoft

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1. jameshowison said:

   Just watched the video (Sara tipped me off!).  It's just great and very exciting to see our, and that of other's (like the Hars and Ou and Lakhani and Wolf surveys), work really being used and the team getting excited about this whole open source adventure.

   I found the discussion early in the piece about 'Reverse platform play' as an intriguing notion, I think that it wouldn't be a sensible way to _launch_ a platform, but since your platform is already really widely spread, I think it's a different situation.

   I'd tweak the discussion about the leadership to make clear that transition is actually uncommon, but is more common amongst highly successful projects.  I read that as saying that a successful leadership transition is a really good sign (if I'm trying to assess a community that I'm looking at).  I don't know that I would interpret that as 'one ought to transition a currently successful project' if I was trying to build a community (unless, as you pointed out, the current leader is getting tired).

   The reaction to the 'for pay' reflected the idea that it is fine to employ someone full-time as a 'core dev', but the 'community feeling' and the discussion on bounties was spot-on. I liked your analysis of the summer of Code and would add that it doesn't create competition because not everyone is eligible.

   The calls for action were spot-on, I was really impressed with the way you were able to take some of the airy-fairy academic discussion and turn in into action for your project.

   I could sense a certain trepidation about the 'going open' part from the team.  One transitional possibility that might ease the transition is to set-up the infrastructure, mailing-lists etc (these are a feature of codeplex, right?), well before you go open and ensure that people are using them almost exclusively (rather than person to person email).  ie build the habit of internal openness before going totally open.  

   Then you could consider making the internal-open archives truly open when you open the forums up to others (clearly a judicious inspection of the archives for sensitive or prejudicial info or discussion would be sensible).  Also you can deal with issues with exchange email and public mailing lists (like making sure the team doesn't use RTF email (causing the infamous winmail.dat files), even HTML is sometimes difficult and so you'd need a pretty strong reason to not make the lists text only).  I realize that your target audience is all on Windows, but that doesn't mean that they will be using Outlook and similar so it's worth thinking about.

   Cheers,

   James

   ps.  The resources for the tutorial are up at:

   http://floss.syr.edu/Presentations/oscon2006/

   posted at 08:01PM 09/11/2006
2. Sara Ford's WebLog said:

   The Port 25 team filmed me giving my Developer Solutions (power toys) team a presentation on all that...

   posted at 12:40AM 09/12/2006
3. scooblog by josh ledgard said:

   Sara recently attended OSCON and wanted to give our team a recap of what she learned there. We figured...

   posted at 01:24PM 09/12/2006
4. Port 25 said:

   When we started port25 and the OSSL it was met with great skepticism. But there have been a lot of changes going on around us here at Microsoft. And one of those I wanted to bring to your attention...

   posted at 07:28PM 09/12/2006
5. Charlie Calvert's Community Blog said:

   This week you can watch the first in a series of videos featuring members of the Microsoft C# team. A video of Raj Pai, the Group Program Manager for the C# team, leads off the series.

   posted at 01:24AM 09/15/2006
6. Port 25 said:

   About a month ago, I did a presentation on What I Learned from OSCON, based primarily on James Howison's talk on OSS Communities. Since James had such great and interesting feedback on my presentation, we decided to do a follow-up podcast...

   posted at 06:52PM 10/03/2006
7. Sara Ford's WebLog said:

   On our one-year anniversary of our power toys release, I gave a Microsoft Engineering Excellence Talk

   posted at 08:38PM 07/21/2007
8. Noticias externas said:

   On our one-year anniversary of our power toys release, I gave a Microsoft Engineering Excellence Talk

   posted at 09:23PM 07/21/2007