Lessons from OSCON: The Power Toys Team Learns How To Go "Open"

Sara Ford on what Microsoft can learn from open source

Microsoft JobsBlog — Mon, 16 Nov 2009 15:02:51 GMT

Last week I attended BlogHer Business in New York City, and appeared on a panel alongside two other Microsoft bloggers, Ani Babaian and Sara Ford . Sara let me pepper her with questions for a couple minutes about the work she's doing with CodePlex , Microsoft

re: Lessons from OSCON: The Power Toys Team Learns How To Go "Open"

XRumerTest — Sun, 03 May 2009 22:11:47 GMT

Hello. And Bye.

Lessons Learned Going Open Source with the Power Toys - A Power Toy Story

Noticias externas — Sun, 22 Jul 2007 02:23:43 GMT

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

Lessons Learned Going Open Source with the Power Toys - A Power Toy Story

Sara Ford's WebLog — Sun, 22 Jul 2007 01:38:12 GMT

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

Lessons from OSCON Part 2: Sara Ford interviews James Howison

Port 25 — Tue, 03 Oct 2006 23:52:53 GMT

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...

Community Convergence III

Charlie Calvert's Community Blog — Fri, 15 Sep 2006 06:24:36 GMT

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.

OPEN/SHARED SOURCE AT Microsoft

Port 25 — Wed, 13 Sep 2006 00:28:59 GMT

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...

Latest Video from Developer Solutions on &quot;Going Open&quot;

scooblog by josh ledgard — Tue, 12 Sep 2006 18:24:02 GMT

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

Lessons Learned from OSCON 06 - Port 25 Presentation

Sara Ford's WebLog — Tue, 12 Sep 2006 05:40:19 GMT

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

re: Lessons from OSCON: The Power Toys Team Learns How To Go "Open"

jameshowison — Tue, 12 Sep 2006 01:01:33 GMT

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/

Lessons from OSCON: The Power Toys Team Learns How To Go "Open"

Sara Ford on what Microsoft can learn from open source

re: Lessons from OSCON: The Power Toys Team Learns How To Go "Open"

Lessons Learned Going Open Source with the Power Toys - A Power Toy Story

Lessons Learned Going Open Source with the Power Toys - A Power Toy Story

Lessons from OSCON Part 2: Sara Ford interviews James Howison

Community Convergence III

OPEN/SHARED SOURCE AT Microsoft

Latest Video from Developer Solutions on &amp;quot;Going Open&amp;quot;

Lessons Learned from OSCON 06 - Port 25 Presentation

re: Lessons from OSCON: The Power Toys Team Learns How To Go "Open"

Latest Video from Developer Solutions on "Going Open"