One of the things I got thinking about during my weekend away at the fantastic LugRadio Live! was the question of how to attract users to Linux / OSS. This was a question that was put out to the audience during the Live and Unleashed recording on Saturday afternoon, and I missed getting my points in I did, however, have interesting discussions with some guys during the party, and Matt & Pickle on the way back to the hotel.

Currently in the community we have a view that stems mostly from Eric S. Raymonds ‘The Cathedral and the Bazaar’ that says that all users are basically part of the development process, because all users can find bugs. And so much of our focus is ensuring that users become good community members, and that they log bugs, and ask smart questions, so that we can all get along in our big community. Therefore our main aim is really to recruit community members, who should, at a bare minimum, log bugs, but ideally will also help other members with problems, write documentation, draw artwork or even code.

I think this is wrong…..

I think there are, essentially, 3 types of person within any one project:

1. Users - these are people that use the software. They want help when it breaks, but they don’t necessarily want to interact at any other point.
2. Community members - people that are actively involved in the community around the software, but are generally reactive - they reports bugs as they find them, and might answer questions on a forum/mailing list.
3. Community contributors - the developers, documenters, etc. People who proactively produce something that benefits the project.

Now - people can move through the stages. Most people will start at 1. Some will move to 2. Even fewer will move to 3. In the past the FLOSS community has basically rejected people who refuse to move to 2. Conversely, most efforts to increase usership often try to either bring people straight into 2, or bring them in to 1, but expect them to be 2.

Some suggestions

So, if we make this realisation on the categories, what do we need to do to support such an infrastructure:

• We need to develop a support mechanism for the Level 1 people. These people will not and never will log bugs, or ask ‘Smart’ questions. And they should not be required to. If this were commercial software, then they wouldn’t. They could contact support and ask anything they like. We need to be able to do the same. We need to breed a group of ‘level 1 support’ community members, who will happily answer the same stupid question all the time. It’s a sucky job, but without it I think we will continue to struggle to introduce large numbers of people to FLOSS
• We need to recognise that a majority of level 1 people will never become level 2. They will not file bugs, they will not become part of the community, they will not write documentation. Essentially they will only do 2 things:
  1. Use your software
  2. Complain if it doesn’t do what they expect - which may either be a bug, or a user error

  We cannot ignore these people, but we do have to learn how to deal with them

• We need to discover good ways to attract new level 1 people. This will be the entry point for 99% of people
• We need to work out how to convert people from being level 1 people to being level 2 people, without making it seem mandatory, and thus alienating the people who will only ever be level 1.
• We need to create communities that are not necessarily based on contribution, but merely on membership. Analysers of social trend say that, in this day and age, people first need to feel that they belong, then they will begin to believe, and only lastly will their behaviour change. We need to create communities where people can just belong. Once they then begin to ‘believe’ in that community, then they can recieve opportunities to take action, and ‘behave’ as a community member should.

Anyway - that’s just a few thoughts to begin with. I’d appreciate peoples thoughts/comments, especially experiences with communities and support from both open source and closed source software.

mrBen

Well, LugRadio Live 2006 is over - roll on 2007 I promise that this will be the last post that only talks about LRL for at least 6 months. (Probably).

In last year’s review I said that LRL06 “will probably be bigger, better, (possibly even more scrotal*).” and it was. Not only was it a 2 day event, but the venue was much bigger. In fact, this years venue was exponentially better, I felt. So, let’s try and cover all the bases - what I did, what was good, what was bad, and an overall summary……

What I did

Friday

We arrived around 5pm on Friday, having had a very hot journey down the motorway, with a few delays and a couple of hairy moments. (We being me, pickle, seaLne and Heather in my car, and neuro and Felim in neuro’s car). We dropped off Heather and the train station, and then Kenny at his hotel (which was in the centre of town). Then it was off to the venue to drop off the stack of kit that I had brought for the LAN gaming. It was great to see the venue before all the people got in and to help with a bit of setup.
After that it was back to the hotel to drop off our bags, and then in to the Hogshead for the evenings entertainment, courtesy of a lift from Xalior and lejt. It was great to meet up with old friends from last year, new friends from IRC during the year, and a whole bunch of other people that I didn’t know at all Sadly the Hogshead wasn’t doing food for some reason, which meant that the whole thing got split up as we went for food, with only 9 of us in the excellent Chinese buffet. After that it was back to the Hogshead for a bit, but in the end I went back to the hotel fairly early - I wanted to be fresh on Saturday morning.

Saturday

Getting the LAN gaming set up was a chore, with things being a little bit stubborn. But we were up and running by 1130, which was good (although I had hoped to be done by 1030 really) and we had I think 6/7 clients running for most of the weekend. I then sat in on the excellent Jokosher BOF sesson. Lunch was the #lugradio meet ‘n’ greet which was partly spoiled by the fact that our chosen venue (the Varsity) only had 1 staff member on duty, so the food took ages to come for those that ordered, and thus is splintered the group as people went in search of sustenance.

The afternoon saw some more gaming and some more talks - not least kNo’s excellent “This talk may contain swearing”, which was utterly fantastic. The highlight of the day was, of course, “LugRadio Live and Unleashed”, and we cheered and laughed our way to the end of the day, with me passing on the mantle of Community Hero to Xalior.

The big party in the evening also brought me some pizza (which was a relief). I spent some of the evening playing on the MAME cabinet, which was one of the coolest things there, and just generally chatting to folk, and drinking beer Had a really good discussion about users vs community members with a group of guys, which I continued later on with Matt and Pickle on the way back to the hotel. Perhaps the best bit of the evening was when the DJ stopped playing, and we just sat round chatting and finishing our drinks. Bedtime: around 3am

Sunday

Tired (but not hungover), I headed in for around 10ish, giving a list to the internet’s Ted Haeger which included a good discussion, despite the lack of working brain cells at that time of the morning. Sundays highlights included Simon Willisons talk on Django, Edward Herveys talk on Pitivi, the girls of #lugradio on Women in Open Source, and Seb Payne’s talk about iFolder. Then the guys said goodbye to everyone, and we began to pack up.

This was probably the low point of the weekend - packing everything away, and realising that it was finished. The 4 large gents looked knackered, too. If that had been the end, and we’d all gone home to bed, I think I would’ve been very sad

But with a gentle bit of arm twisted, we managed to get not 1, not 2, not even 3, but all 4 of the presenters along to the Quality Hotel (aka Quality Chin) for the after-show party. We broke out the (rest of the) champagne and strawberries, and drank the night away with some top quality banter, a lot of laughs, and really just a full-on fantastic evening. In many ways, for me at least, this evening really made my weekend.

Monday

We went home

The Good, the Bad, and the rest

Good

• Meeting people again
• Quality speakers
• Great social aspect
• Good exhibition
• Loads of punters
• Just being part of LugRadio again
• LAN gaming
• MAME cabinet
• _So_ many other things……

Bad

• Heat - it was hot weather, and the hotel had a heating problem (it was ON!), and the venue’s air conditioning was gubbed.
• As a few people have already said, 2 of the BOF points were in the same room as the main talks, which was not ideal
• Getting food was an issue
• As will always happen, talks that I wanted to see clashed with each other

Overall though, this was a stunning event. It was, for the most part, well organised and slickly run. Loads of people were there (400+ they reckon) and everything felt very ‘community’ rather than corporate. And, ultimately, it reminds me why I’m part of this community - because it’s awesome!

mrBen

OK, one final blog post about the extavaganza that is LUGRadio Live 2006, happening this weekend - the 22nd and 23rd July in Wolverhampton, England.

Its going to be one heck of an event, with a bunch of speakers:

Mark Shuttleworth, Simon Phipps, Michael Meeks, Simon Willison, Stephen Lamb, Sarah Ewen, Scott James Remnant, Ted Haeger, Gervase Markham, Bastien Nocera, Barbie, Jonathan Riddell, Richard Moore, Jonathan Haslam, Steve Coast, Kat Goodwin, Jen Phillips and Phated, Edward Hervey, Matthew Garrett, John Leach, Elliot Smith, Paul Cooper, Tom Steinberg, Ewan Spence, Christian Schaller, Ian Lynch, Alex Hudson, Martin Vogel, Matthew Bloch, Bruno Bord, Mirco Müller, Belial, Des Burley, Michael Dominik, Mike Hearn, Danny O’Brien, Matthew Bloch, Gareth Bowker, Huw Lynes, Bill Thompson, Rob Taylor, Seb Payne and many more…

Oh, and lets not forget the exhibitors:

Ubuntu, Bytemark, OpenSolaris, UK Linux, KDE and Kubuntu, InkScape, Tuxgames, Clockwork Software, MythTV, Everybody Loves Eric Raymond, The Open CD, Novell, TurboCash, MOST, Enterprise Groupware Server, CentOS, Joomla!, OpenDocument Fellowship, O’Reilly, Fedora, Fluendo, Debian, Creative Commons, GNOME, Linspire, Free Software Foundation Europe, Shadowcat Systems…

Oh, and fancy some BOF sessions?

Open Source CRM with EGS, Jokosher, iFolder, Hardware Hacking Show and Tell, SuSE, Perl User Groups, Ruby on Rails In Actuality, #lugradio Meet and Greet, Ubuntu Accessibility lug.org.uk, How to Contribute to Open Source, Ubuntu Users UK and more more…

All this and much more spread over two days, for the princly sum of a fiver (or three of your english pounds, for a amusing concession). Grab your tickets here or buy on the day for a fiver. For accomodation, see here.

For those of you who are coming, some useful times (everyone is welcome to each of these events):

FRIDAY

2pm - Lunch meet up for early arrivers - The Varsity, Wolverhampton
8pm - Pre-LUGRadio Live meet up - The Hogs Head, Wolverhampton

SATURDAY

10am - Doors Open
See the schedule
6.30pm - Doors Close
8pm - LUGRadio Live Party @ LUGRadio Live Venue

SUNDAY

10.30am - Doors Open
See the schedule
5pm - Doors Close

Oh, and don’t forget that I am shaving my beard off for charity. There are some awesome donations coming in, and you ‘orrible lot who can’t come need to donate. If you are reading this right now, you should be donating. Just think of the good your donation will do for Amnesty International. Let’s earn them a bit wodge of cash.

DONATE!!

The biggest doner who attends the event will get the honour of shaving said beard off, so get donating!!

(Shamelessly stolen from Jono Bacon’s blog.)

mrBen

The LugRadio guys have provided some eye candy for continued pimpage of LugRadio Live (did I mention this already?), so I thought I’d better add them to the site……

This year, not only am I attending, but I running a BOF (a Birds Of a Feather session, where people in with similar interests or working on a project get to meet together and chat). I’m in charge of the massively informal “#lugradio Meet ‘n’ Greet’ session, which takes place over the Saturday lunchtime, and means that all the folk who chat on IRC all the time will actually get to meet face to face. Of course, I met many of them last year, but there’s always new faces, and the old faces deserve the odd pint from me too

mrBen

Aye, okay. I’m willing to accept that there’s some cool stuff on YouTube.

The Gnarls Barkley link I posted earlier.

Loads of cool live stuff by Frank Zappa.

But it is filled with a wealth of crap. Still, if it encourages peeps to make daft vids for their friends the maybe there’s some good to it.

But when you can’t find a video for Labe Siffre’s “Something Inside So Strong” then we’re all just wasting our time people.

Very possibly one of the most uplifting songs ever made.

So, being denied by YouTube I go on the trusty Google hunt for any version I can stream.

And I find this sample (sorry, it’s a real media file). It’s The Celtic Tenors.

And these people must die.

I know it might seem harsh but it’s the only course of action for butchering such a classic work.

However Pop Idol wannabe made good Darius “The man, the legend” Danesh apparently did his own version. This may or may not be the case as I can’t find any concrete info about it.

Still, I know that you’re all huge Darius fans (like me) so check out his site and have a hearty laugh enjoy the great man at his best.

BigAl

For the last 12 months, I have been given the inflated title of ‘LugRadio Community Hero’ after being given the aware at LugRadio Live 2005 - there’s a video of the live show here. As this years event comes arround (22nd and 23rd July - be there!) I’ve been thinking a little about what it means to be a community hero, and what it has meant to me to be given the title.

I guess that being a community hero is all about investing in the community, in particular about ensuring that new and old members are equally well catered for, and that the discussion within a community (usually in geek communities this happens in 1 or 2 of 4 different places - IRC, forums, usenet and mailing lists) remains vibrant and interesting. It’s about getting involved in any new things that happen within the community, and about helping out where possible.

Geek communities are funny places - for the most part they operate under a ‘meritocracy’, that is, the person who most merits leadership is given it. In a programming project, this usually means the person who contributes the best or most code. More importantly, ideas are accepted into such a project based on their merit, rather than necessarily a democratic vote. In theory, this should mean that you lose some of the elements of the ‘camel’ style committee situation. (What do you call a horse made by a committee? A camel)

I was completely gobsmacked when my name got read out at LRL05. If you watch the video, you will see me in a slight daze (although that was probably, at least in part, alcohol induced) collecting my trophy wordlessly. To be mentioned in that way, in a meritocratic community, meant a great deal to me. It meant that not only that I had been noticed, but that what I did was appreciated. To be honest, I hadn’t really considered what I did that out of the ordinary - I loved the show, and loved being part of the community, and so many of the subsequent actions came naturally.

Since then I have strived to set a high standard for the lucky geek that will take my place for the coming 12 months, and to make doubly sure that I was worthy of the honour that had been given. I hope that I had suceeded.

Community Hero or not, being part of the LugRadio community has been a thoroughly rewarding experience (and not just the £100 worth of O’Reilly books I got ) and one that I hope continues for many years to come.

mrBen

It now being only 18 days until the mighty LugRadio Live 2006, Jono has asked on the forums that we pimp LRL06 in as many places as possible.

It’s already on The Register, and Digg, but I didn’t think it would hurt if there was (yet another) mention here on the ‘Moose.

Let’s face it - LRL06 is the premier Linux show in the UK these days, if you’re a community member rather than a businessman (and possibly even if you’re not). The list of speakers is impressive, and the cost (£5!) is practically nothing for a 2 day event (although accommodation and travel are not included). There is still time to book, and still cheap accommodation available. If you’re not going already, then you probably should be!

mrBen

Well - the season finale of 24 was on last night. And it was _good_. I was, however, thoroughly disappointed at the cliffhanger-style ending. 24 has always impressed me by ending at least on a semi-happy note (at least, that’s my memory of the first 4 seasons), although there has always been the odd ‘loose end’. This series felt much less ‘happy’ and much more ‘loose endy’ to me.

But, overall, 24 rocks. And it beats Lost hands down.

mrBen

To those of you blissfully unaware, Jedimoose.org got hacked over the weekend. The damage wasn’t particularly vicious, but it was widespread. Essentially many of the PHP files across a couple of the subdomains had been altered at 2315 on Friday night so that they were sending information to a sever in Russia. This necessitated me taking down the site completely, and getting the hosts to perform a restore from backup, which has now (finally) been completed. Other than the sites not being available for the past 48 hours, there should have been no other noticable impact.

I have not yet confirmed the point of entry for the attack, but as a precaution I will be ensuring that every Wordpress-based site on the domain has been updated to the latest version of Wordpress. This may include a short bit of downtime for each domain.

Additionally, can I request that all subdomain owners reset their Wordpress passwords immediately.

mrBen