Czajkowski

I blogged a while back about Barry doing his Masters Thesis on The motivational drivers and barriers of volunteers in open source communities which looked at the Ubuntu Community, he handed it in yesterday and I know some folks were curious about results so I asked him to write a small piece for the blog:

Barry Smyth:
In early 2010 I sat in on a seminar on Open Source Software and the community in Ireland, organised as part of my masters course in DIT Kevin St. One of the speakers was Laura Czajkowski. It was during her
talk that I saw the commitment she had to the community and it begins a process of thought about what drives individuals to offer their time and effort to Open Source Communities.

The course that I was studying was Computing but specialising in Knowledge Management (KM). Knowledge Management is the realisation that knowledge is an organisations greatest asset. We constantly hear
the term Knowledge and Smart economy being touted by the Irish government at the moment. They like so many large organisations realise that it is what we know and don’t realise we already know can
be our greatest resource.

Within companies it is commonplace for individuals to hoard knowledge, we do this for various reasons.

• We are not confident about what we know, and are afraid others may disregard our knowledge.
• We fear giving our knowledge freely, as it may make us redundant.
• We find it difficult to articulate our knowledge.
• We do not have the tools available to record our knowledge.
• We simple do not realise that we possess some knowledge.

KM is about accessing the knowledge within people, teams, departments, organisations, then storing that knowledge in an understandable or codified fashion, and finally making that knowledge available and
easily accessible to others. Some prime examples of where KM can work effectively is in the Pharmaceutical industry, where the process of getting new drugs to market can be as long as 12 years. Most of the large pharmaceutical companies have implemented large KM projects. One in particular cut the time for filling applications to the European and American drug boards in half. The KM systems they installed held the knowledge of previous employees and former workers of the American Federal drug  Administration (FDA). Due to their expertise as to what information was required in an application, these applications could be filled out much faster. As you can imagine the saving of several years in getting a drug to market is worth a considerable amount of money to drug companies. This is can be the power of KM.

However what many organisations find when they implement KM initiatives, regardless of the money, time and expertise that they throw at it, is people seem unwilling to share their Knowledge. There are drivers that motivate and barriers that prevent people from sharing their knowledge.

Within Open Source communities, we have a group of people who come together to freely share knowledge. This makes it an ideal place to investigate positive motivations. If KM initiatives could replicate
the motivations within Open Source Communities then their initiatives could prove far more successful.

Back to my story, I began to realise that the Ubuntu community could offer me a perfect environment to investigate motivations to knowledge sharing. In May I contacted Laura and told her about my Idea. Within days we
were sitting down together in a lab in DIT and Laura was showing me around the Ubuntu community. Over the course of the next 3 months with Laura and several other members of Ubuntu’s community I had fashioned
a suitable experiment. The experiment would utilise the existing social networking pages (Launchpad) within the community and over a period of Two weeks would email an advertisement of one of those profiles to the mailing list of the Irish team. I would then survey the Irish team to ascertain the usefulness of the experiment. The idea of the experiment was to measure the levels of trust needed for knowledge sharing, and whether tools like Launchpad could assist in people getting curious about others in the community. This is the starting point of building relationships and trust. The experiment received great support from the community and I had a fantastic response to the survey. The experiment idea was even taken on board as a continuous feature by the UK and North Carolina teams. The results of the experiment did indeed indicate that, firstly trust
is important to knowledge sharing and secondly tools like launhpad if used in a proactive manner can initiate contact between members of the group.

Overall my experience dealing with Laura and the rest of the Ubuntu community was extremely pleasant. I could not of asked for any more help or enthusiasm. It was a privilege to get an insight into a remarkable community.

This is an extract of some of the projects findings:

• The project’s findings clearly suggested the varying forms of trust. That initial conversations between members in the Ubuntu community did lead to greater curiosity of others.
• This can then lead to a process where two individuals will get to know more about each other and strengthen the bonds of trust between them.
• The project also identified tools as being very important within online communities in building familiarity and trust.
• Correspondence and direct communication was identified as being the most important tool in which people will get to know one another and build trust.
• The project results suggested that the availability of social networking tools in this case Launchpad was utilised by members as a means to gain more knowledge about other users. However it also suggested that this was after initial correspondence with that individual. Curiosity of others increased after correspondence with them. This would suggest that tools are very useful in the process of building trust and friendships in virtual communities.
• Communities where there is little correspondence however may not benefit from this trust building processes and utilisation of community tools. This is where the project findings are so useful. They clearly suggest that by advertising members profiles can initiate curiosity in them. Traffic to the profiles and results of the survey indicate that this is the case. This can be an important initiative in implementing the trust building processes in communities and subsequently the sharing of knowledge. It can help drive the initial stages of a KM system and could become an important part of the familarisation and trust building process.
• The building of friendships was indicated as being one of the main motivators of membership in open source communities and thus the free sharing of knowledge. Trust is a vital element in any friendship and therefore any tools that can facilitate this are very valuable in creating a healthy dynamic knowledge-sharing environment.
• The findings imply that a proactive approach is needed within a community to initiate the trust building process, that although members desire to build relationships of trust with others they may need a push to do so.

Thanks to Barry for the update, if anyone wants to drop him a line here is his email address.

Thanks to the folks over at Tog who kindly offered us space to meet up and work on Ubuntu Global Jam.  It was I think the best one so far for us. 8 people turned up over the day and we worked on different areas and helped one another.  It was great to see two people who’d never log a bug before get excited how they could log all their information in the ubuntu-bug command so that was pretty good to see.

Mike took on the task of giving the Irish wiki page a massive overhaul, we gave him some ideas and showed him how to create the fancy sub header, so it’s now looking very nice. Rory worked on some LoCo Directory bits namely the stuff he logged as bugs Others worked on Answers on Launchpad and triaging bugs so all in all a great day was had.  Thanks to all those who came in it was great to see new faces there. It was great to get people using Ubuntu in ways they never had, learning how to create their own wiki pages and logging into the LoCo Directory and showing them how to look up events.

What started off as a one time event has surely grown.  This is my 4th OSSBarcamp I’ve run in two years. I decided to run this event as quite frankly there was diddly squat in open source events happening over here and I was spending a small fortune between time off work ,travel and and bits and pieces.  I thought if I got 70 attendees I would be very happy and this was my target…………130 people turned up. As you can imagine I was more than a bit surprised.  I was asked to run another and then well another, the rest is history.

This event is running with the help of UCD Netsoc, the college computer society who have very kindly sorted out the venue for me, which is half the battle.  It’s going to take place this time over 2 days, Saturday and Sunday 25/26th September.  We have a lovely new site done up thanks to James Forbairt , the guy is a saint! We have some new sponsors this time also, Enterpise Ireland are coming on board to help us with getting some new speakers over to talk, such as Stefano Zacchiroli and Daviey Walker, Alan Pope and Tony Whitemore of the UUPC fame who will be doing a live show! Linux Fund is also a sponsor this year. There will be lots of things going over the weekend, so do come along and sign up take part, either give a short talk, a demo or a presentation it’s entirely up to you.

OSSBarcamp is what you make it. It’s not just about Ubuntu, it’s about all forms of open source, if it’s about development, programming or other distros we want to hear about it, everyone is welcome to take part. There will also be an after party on the Saturday at the Landsdown hotel.

So firstly for those who may be unfamilar with a Global Jam  and what it’s all about.  The Ubuntu Global Jam (UGJ) is a a world-wide online and face-to-face event to get people together to fix Ubuntu bugs – we want to get as many people online fixing bugs, having a great time doing so.  This is not only a great opportunity to really help Ubuntu, but to also get together with other your team mates and work on things as a group and help one another.

This year the  Ubuntu Global Jam will take place over the weekend of  27th – 29th August and it’s a great opportunity to work  together to improve Ubuntu. Everyone is able to contribute to the Jam, and everyone is welcome and encouraged to get involved. It’s for all levels so don’t be put off thinking it’s only about development and looking at bugs for the weekend, there are loads of areas to help.

The Ubuntu Global Jam incorporates events that have been organized over the world to get Ubuntu contributors and fans together to have a great time and improve Ubuntu. Each event has one or more of our themes:

• Bugs – finding, triaging and fixing bugs.
• Testing – testing the new release and reporting your feedback.
• Upgrade – upgrading to Maverick from Lucid and reporting your upgrade experience.
• Documentation – writing documentation about how to use Ubuntu and how to join the community.
• Translations – translating Ubuntu and helping to make it available in everyone’s local language.
• Packaging – work on Ubuntu packages and improve them.
• Other – other types of contribution such as marketing and advocacy etc.

So what do you need to do to have a UGJ – a venue where you can meet up, suggestions for places to work on are a library room which many will donate free, a coffee shop will often oblige.  Having them in colleges  class rooms are ideal as many are closed for the summer.  Have one in a friends house, just remember to bring something to say thanks!  Don’t be put off if you are having a problem finding a place, you can always join people remotely on your loco irc channel or on #ubuntu-locoteams.

Remember not everyone will have experience in areas, try and help them, use this weekend as an opportunity to help you team learn how they can help with Ubuntu.  If there is someone who likes writing documentation or is good at proof reading manuals, get them to help with your loco wiki, or pick a part of the Ubuntu wiki and work on that as a team.  Encourage your team members to help and mentor others, break into groups and work on things together.  Work still gets done and confidence builds up for future events.

WE have create the Ubuntu Global Jam event on the LoCo Directory - There are at present over 142 teams located on the LoCo directory and only 8 teams have added their events! So lets see if we can get more events on there!   This is a Global event! Lets spread the word and get everyone involved! Join us in #ubuntu-locoteams during the weekend

I was recently at the Ubuntu Hour in Limerick and a discussion came up…… If a company switched to using Ubuntu or any form of open source alternative, is there support for them out there.  I assumed there would be to be honest, I know a lot of people work as sys admins and who using Debian/Ubuntu, but did they provide support.

After doing some Googling and poking folks on IRC I found out a few things.  There is the Market place on the Canonical website which shows 5 companies offering some form of support. Not a lot really when you look at other countries.  Yet the people I spoke to who run their own companies or work as contractors are not listed on there. So that made me wonder is this the first port of call and if so people may not be as fully informed as they could be.

With that in mind I’ve done up a short quick and simple wiki page to list as many as I can find who provide support for all forms of server maintenance, desktop migration or anything else open source related not just Ubuntu. If people don’t want to edit the wiki page that’s fine, you can just drop me an email with the details and I can edit it.