I have the good fortune, for once, of living close enough to Toronto to participate in this year's Free Software & Open Source Symposium. Two days of talks on subjects ranging from Open Content: Shared Curricula in a Web 2.0 World, to Reading and Reviewing Code, to Open Source Education in South Africa, and Community Management as Open Source's Core Competency. All that as well as the opportunity to mix and mingle with some of the folks I've only admired virtually to date, such as Louis Suarez-Potts from OpenOffice.org, and Bob Young co-founder of RedHat. With so much accumulated wisdom on hand, I'll certainly be making a point of attending Jesse Hirsh's talk entitled The Problem of Open Source: Know Your History tomorrow.

Day 1

The first talk I was able to attend (misunderstood the driving instructions to the venue - don't ask!) was Code Reading and Reviewing presented by Benjamin Smedberg who is a Platform Developer in the Mozilla Corporation. The talks were running in three parallel stream but this one was a great way for me to start this conference. I'm not a software developer by training or by inclination, so reading code is a real challenge for me. Benjamin did a good job explaining both why reading code is important and how to set about it. You might think that the why there is too obvious for words. But what if I'm primarily wanting to deploy this software as opposed to develop it? If the software is a substantial part of my institution's infrastructure, then knowing how it works ought to be important to me. And understanding how it is written is a key part of knowing how it works. But how should I start reading code in a project I am new to? Benjamin had some good advice. He noted that you need to learn by doing. Start small. Read patches. Try to see how a particular patch works. If possible, follow the code of a single contributor to a project over time. Follow his or her contributions and you will begin to see how someone who understands the code better than you is thinking about the code. Of course it is always an advantage to know your tools. And, you won't be surprised at this last one - learn your coding languages! If you are reading to learn (and this after all is precisely what FOSS always provides, i.e. access to knowledge), then Benjamin suggests that you try to get clear on what it is you are trying to learn, then get the big picture, read the unit tests, try writing a test program, follow the rules, break the rules, ask questions. In short - get involved!

The next talk I attended was Mike Beltzner's Embracing the Chaos: designing for and with community. Mike also works with the Mozilla Corporation as Director of User Experience, so it was an all-Mozilla morning for me. One thing Mike was able to convey perfectly succinctly was why community is so important for Mozilla. Mozilla has about 40 paid staff. But it has a further 100 people contributing code daily on a volunteer basis; there are more than 1000 who are periodic contributors, submitting a bug report or a patch and following it through to its implementation (or rejection); there are at least 10,000 people around the world who test Firefox builds on a daily basis; there are more than 500,000 people who count as beta testers; and finally, there are more than 40 million users of Firefox worldwide, and Mike considers them part of his development community as well. That's a lot of community effort as against the total number of employees from Mozilla. Thus community is important to Mozilla, no question. So how do you go about working well with such a far flung community? Mike had three pieces of advice that he went on to elaborate: 1) listen to your community; 2) lead your community; and 3) let your community play and experiment. Great advice.

Lunch at most conferences is usually a desperate affair for me. Terminally shy, I find it hard to simply strike up conversations with strangers. I was in luck today. I happened to sit down beside Mark Surman who is an Open Philanthropy Fellow at The Shuttleworth Foundation. By a happy coincidence I had a long telephone conversation with Mark about the eIFL-FOSS program and eIFL-FOSS ILS project only a few weeks ago. So it was easy to say hello and meet face-to-face for the first time. Mark's philanthropy extended to introducing me to others over lunch, so I got a chance to meet James Humphreys from Seneca College and David Eaves, who is a prominent blogger, public speaker and consultant on negotiation, strategy, and public policy. I was already planning on attending David's talk tomorrow on Community Management as Open Source's Core Competency so it was nice to meet him in advance and discover he's also a nice guy.

In the afternoon I skipped Mark Surman's talk on Open Sourcing Education in South Africa in order to go to a talk from Ross Turk who is Community Manager at SourceForge.net. That was a mistake. Alas Ross didn't have anything to say about community at all, although I did learn a great deal about how the back-end of SourceForge is cobbled together. Fascinating, but not terribly useful for me (it wasn't that the talk was bad; I was just the wrong audience).

Next up for me was Matt Norwood who is Legal Counsel at the Software Freedom Law Center talking about Licensing Strategies for Cross-Project Collaboration. I was wondering if this might be relevant to the kinds of cross-project collaboration we see these days in Sakai, Moodle, Kuali, etc. But it was really just a thin talk about paying attention to the legal niceties when combining code that is permissively licensed (such as BSD or MIT licensed code)  with GPL code. Matt didn't have much to say about licensing strategies. So, once again, I was probably the wrong audience for this talk.

The final talk of the day was a plenary session with Bob Young, co-founder of RedHat and founder of Lulu which provides a platform for self-publishing. Bob is always good value, full of tales of the early days of RedHat and his difficulties in convincing people that giving software away was a plausible business model. He is passionate about freedom but not, as he says, an ideologue. Mostly he is a self-described entrepreneur and so that is what his talk focused on. However, his passions rose to their heights (well, he didn't actually throw anything) when someone asked him his opinion of software patents. I'll give you the short version of his extensive reply: he doesn't like them :-)

It was a good day. I have plenty of praise for the organiser of this event. They've left me very keen for what will come tomorrow.

By the way, photos from the day and video of most of the talks is available from the conference website. So I'll be able to go back this evening and see the talks I should have gone to.