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.

Firstly for all those who turned their noses up at Leeds, you’re wrong it’s really pretty and very nice.   Last week I went to Leeds to take part in the National CLC – (City Learning Centre) Conference in Leeds.  I was asked to take part by Robbie who runs a CLC in Leeds to talk about Ubuntu Women and the great Ubuntu Community.

I knew diddly squat about CLCs before going over there, I had done some back ground reading on them but nothing really prepared me for what I learned over there.  They were a form of school for children/young adults that were different and taught children through different means.

Many of the CLCs in the UK are facing large budget cuts due to lack of funding available to them.  Having events like this covering a multitude of topics was rather interesting.  Even better was having an open source stream! It’s great to see conferences doing this as it gives people an opportunity to learn more about a topic they may have only a little knowledge in and a chance to learn more about an alternative solution that may be available to them.

Here is where I stepped in. My talk title was Ubuntu Women, but we’re more than just a team.  We are a part of the Global Ubuntu Community.  Having a large vocal presence on many committees, such as the Community Council, the LoCo Council and all of the membership board!  We are are also active in other teams, Accessibility, Learning, UWN and many many more.  We even offer a mentoring program and run some rather cool competitions open to everyone. This is something  that wasn’t happening 6-10 months ago. So we are growing and becoming more active.

While explaining where we are in the community and also the uniques of the community that Ubuntu has above most other groups I also showed how we operate.  From a virtual Community to a real life go give someone a hug community.  I think, trying to get people to understand the many types of people we have in our community to others is interesting, as something they assume Geeks don’t socialise and in fact we’re a rather sociable bunch of people and very approachable.  Which is easier for them to relate to if they know they can approach and talk to people find someone with a real face to ask a question to at an event or know there are people out there with varying degrees of knowledge able to help them.

It was slightly ironic seeing everyone with their iphones, ipads, macbooks and ipods all tweeting and taking notes and in some cases explaining how they give ipod shuffles to students as a reward for when kids reach a certain level of being able to read in a class. All of these things cost a lot of money, surely if your budgets are being slashed people should be looking for alternatives.   In the middle of my session I showed how easy it was to download software from the Ubuntu software centre.  I downloaded Quickly, and while I’m not a good programmer I do think it’s a great idea and can see the benefits of it for young students who may want to learn and it’s a good way to teach people.  Showing off the Software Centre I did get a few people sit up and take notice, explaining all the free software and applications that are available to them and for their students.  I’d brought over  some Live CDs and handed them out and others took some to bring back to their students so I’m hoping others are interested in looking at alternative solutions.

I did get a chance to talk to some teachers, and asked them why some were so reluctant to move towards using open source as an alternative, was it fear of not knowing about it, fear of it’s use or what? Many said it was to do with integration with other CLCs so if one CLC did it, more would seemed to be the consensus. More did ask about the software centre, which I think is a positive sign.

It was interesting to note that some CLCs do use Ubuntu in their centres, some of the teachers use it in their homes, so they do know it is out there! Some of the CLCs are pushing for it to be used more, again issues such as administration and training are the key obstacles they face in order to make a full switch over.   Every time during the talks when speakers gave a solution or software they used they seemed to only chose applications that worked on windows only or Mac only.  (I did try as much as I could to tweet an open source alternative #clcs10)

I’ve posted my slides here if anyone is interested in them.  Thanks again to the lovely folks at the CLC Leeds who were excellent hosts and again great to see a stream on Open Source making it’s way into the timetable.

Another interesting note, 18 speakers spoke over the two days.  There were two women and both of us spoke on Open Source,the other was MáirínDuffy

Sitting down to write this Ada Lovelace post I counted the number of women I deal with on a regular basis in the Ubuntu Community.  There are a lot of great people in this project. It’s great to see more and more women taking part and using Ubuntu and I can see that since this time last year there are more present, vocal, taking part and contributing. Firstly for those not familiar with it Ada Lovelace

Augusta Ada King, Countess of Lovelace was born on 10th December 1815, the only child of Lord Byron and his wife, Annabella. Born Augusta Ada Byron, but now known simply as Ada Lovelace, she wrote the world’s first computer programmes for the Analytical Engine, a general-purpose machine that Charles Babbage had invented. Her notes on the engine include what is recognized as the first algorithm intended to be processed by a machine; as such she is often regarded as the world’s first computer programmer.

This time last year I was as active member of the Ubuntu community and helped where I could.  In May I attended UDS Karmic and met some great people and was encouraged to go for my Ubuntu Membership. Since doing so I’ve encouraged other women to do so also when I’ve seen them join Ubuntu and contribute in their way to the community.  This is how I help and encourage other women to take part.

There are many women in Ubuntu who contribute daily to making it what it is. It’s more than just an operating system, more than a community. It’s become a place where you can meet more like minded people, discuss and take part in healthy debates and work on projects with people you never would have had the chance to do so. I thought I’d mention in this post some of the women I’ve met in Ubuntu and who’ve helped me. As I said, Ubuntu is more than an Community and more than a system we use, equally the women involved in Ubuntu participate in both areas.

Below are some of the women I’ve dealt with while using and being a part of the Ubuntu community. They are both community and canonical, one without the other cannot exist. Both have helped me in different ways and been helpful and interesting to talk to and work with. Some you may have heard about or know of, others perhaps not, they all have one common goal together they work within the Ubuntu community.

Ivanka Majic - works on the design team, her team is responsible for making Ubuntu sleeker and rather snazzy! New to the community, she’s jumped in and rolled up her sleeves and is making an impression, and I’m not just talking about the button moment!  Ivanka is approachable and there to help if she can.  When I’ve asked for help she’s been there to aide and offer advice and put me in contact with the right person, which is a valuable thing to be able to do.

Ara Pulido – Works on the QA team, Ara has helped me in the past when I’ve logged bugs and need help in finding out who to poke about, she’s friendly, helpful and if you need a hand wiling to help you. As a software tester myself it’s great to meet a fellow QA and Ara offered useful advice when I asked about other testing techniques which was great!

Maria Randazzo – You may not see her or know her, but she’s there making things run smoothly, she’s responsible for the ShipIt programme. It didn’t always work so smoothly but it’s improving and this is down to her following up and chasing after correspondence. If you’ve been to UDS, she’s there, if you’ve issues she’s the one that you can go ask and she’ll help you.

Penelope Stowe – I’ve yet to meet Penelope even though we were both at the penultimate Lugradio live in 2008 we never actually met, we’ve been in the same IRC channel for some time and gradually chatted more, it wasn’t till I encouraged her to joined #ubuntu-women and get more involved in Ubuntu we got to know one another more.  She has been great to bounce ideas off and help on some of the projects I’m involved in. She jumped straight in taking on tasks and giving valuable feedback and helping where she can.  It’s great to see new people working within the teams and bringing new people together.

Amber Graner -  We met over IRC while I was at UDS and she was remotely participating, now we chat most weeks over the net on Skype and work on projects together. It’s great to be able to say what I like to her and she does the same to me, and we can thrash out items.  She does an amount of work in the Ubuntu community, I’m not sure how she manages it but does a great job! She is making it more accessible for new users to come and take part in the project.

Issabell L – I’ve not met her, but her enthusiasm knows no bounds. We both work on freenode community areas and I knew she lived in the UK, loved open source and gradually poked her to join #ubuntu-uk and get involved in there, it’s been great working with her. She is great at taking on projects and trying new things out and asking for help but also her enthusiasm is catchy and you can’t help but get caught up in the projects she is working on.

These are just some of the women I’ve been lucky to meet and work with in the Ubuntu community, there are more. This post is to mark Ada Lovelace day 2010 and the remarkable women that take part in the Ubuntu and the Community and make it what it is. A great project to be a part of.