Re: [PLUG] Mentoring in Open Source Communities: What Works? What Doesn't?...

[Fred Stluka <fred@bristle.com>]

PLUGgers,

Fred Stluka wrote:
> PLUGgers,
>
> Lyz Krumbach gave an excellent talk Monday to PLUG West about
> how to encourage more involvement in your open source project.
> Here's an article that does a nice job of elaborating on many
> of the points she made:
>
> Mentoring in Open Source Communities: What Works? What Doesn't?
>
> http://www.itworld.com/open-source/78271/mentoring-open-source-communities-what-works-what-doesnt
>   
Here's a followup to that article:

    
http://www.itworld.com/open-source/78643/how-attract-more-people-your-open-source-project?

Its title is almost identical to the title of Lyz's talk.  Was
Esther Schindler at the meeting?  It even cites Ubuntu as a good
example of a friendly community.  Also makes a few more good
points beyond the first article.

One that caught my eye -- it suggests setting up a sandbox of the
software environment you want people to contribute to.  That makes
sense also for an environment like Linux that you want people to
use, even if they're not likely to ever contribute.

It has gotten much easier in recent years to give Linux a quick
try, via Live CDs and such.  Amazon AWS and other cloud computing
services that allow you to create virtual servers also help a lot.

Still, there are reasons that people might hesitate:
- Don't want to risk booting their home or work Windows computer
  from a Linux CD.
- Don't want to take the time to re-boot.
- Don't want to sign up at Amazon and pay (even 10 cents per hour).
- Don't want to install and configure their own virtual server.
- etc.

Here's an easy solution, made possible by virtualization:
- Create a Linux server at Amazon (or even a bunch of different
  ones, with different Linux flavors).
- Create a single login with root access.
- Advertise it widely, so anyone can login and do anything they
  want.
- Wipe the entire server daily, restoring it to its initial
  config.  (This can be automated as a simple shell script
  running as a cron job on another Linux box or even another
  Amazon virtual Linux box, calling the Amazon command line
  interface for launching, bundling, and terminating server
  instances.)

Then anyone can just ssh into the server and try it, with
absolutely no setup steps required.  Could even allow telnet,
since Windows has a default telnet client, but not a default ssh
client, and some users will be put off by having to download
PuTTY first.

Windows and Mac users could try Linux easily.  Linux users could
try other flavors of Linux easily.  Users could experiment with
things they are hesitant to risk on their own boxes.  etc...

Might have to find a way to prevent abuse, however, so that no
one jerk can keep intentionally trashing the configuration.  Also,
so that no largish collection of innocent users can keep
accidentally trashing it.  You'd want it to be pretty close to a
vanilla config most of the time, so that new users wouldn't get
turned off by bad results.  Maybe wipe and restore hourly,
instead of daily?

Thoughts?  Volunteers?

--Fred
---------------------------------------------------------------------
Fred Stluka -- mailto:fred@bristle.com -- http://bristle.com/~fred/
Bristle Software, Inc -- http://bristle.com -- Glad to be of service!
---------------------------------------------------------------------



Fred Stluka wrote:
> PLUGgers,
>
> Lyz Krumbach gave an excellent talk Monday to PLUG West about
> how to encourage more involvement in your open source project.
> Here's an article that does a nice job of elaborating on many
> of the points she made:
>
> Mentoring in Open Source Communities: What Works? What Doesn't?
>
> http://www.itworld.com/open-source/78271/mentoring-open-source-communities-what-works-what-doesnt
>
> BTW, personally I love mentoring people, both in person, and
> remotely via my e-mailed tips and my open source Java and
> JavaScript libraries.  I mentioned some of that at the meeting.
> Feel free to check out:
>     http://bristle.com/invite.htm
> Let me know if you want to be added to any of my lists.
>
> --Fred
> ---------------------------------------------------------------------
> Fred Stluka -- mailto:fred@bristle.com -- http://bristle.com/~fred/
> Bristle Software, Inc -- http://bristle.com -- Glad to be of service!
> ---------------------------------------------------------------------
>
>
> ___________________________________________________________________________
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>
>   
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