[event] Changing the world one geek at a time

How often do 4000 techno-nerds on a mission to change the world meet 25 km from where you live? As it turns out, once a year. The gathering is called Fosdem, and it brings the developers of many open source communities such as LibreOffice, Mozilla, Linux and its various distributions, etc together for a two day free and open conference with 400+ sessions. I paid a visit yesterday in what I can only describe as partly an anthropological expedition, partly a deeply technical conference, partly a sunny walk in the snow, partly a student and entrepreneurial fest, and partly a research into the leadership of leaderless communities.

So, what did I learn if nothing else?

Hacker Culture
Well, the Chinese Firewall is filtering IPv4, not IPv6, but that is as technical as my talks with a Chinese visitor went. Talking with him did illustrate that the open source community holds values as 'open' and 'free' very deer, and while it most visibly shows up in software, it is a "hacker philosophy" that goes very deep into how society ought to be.

Different and typical at the same time
The conference itself is both refreshingly different and surprisingly similar to other conferences I blogged about. The difference is mainly in the organisation: this event is for free, doesn't require any registration (just show up), and is truly the work of a community. People would sit with their winter coats (it had been snowing the day before and it was freezing) in the auditoria of the ULB university in Brussels, queue at the 'frietkot' outside for some typical Belgian dishes and pay a democratic 60 cent for a coffee. The work is done by very motivated volunteers, and as the gathering is so big in its kind it even attracts sponsors from the corporate world (who are absent in the stands or anywhere else, they just sponsor and get no visibility in return.) What is the same is the conference setup: speakers with PowerPoint with bullet points giving their talks to mainly passive audiences that ask a few questions at the end. I often discussed more interactive conference formats, but is this perhaps what most people really want? There were also job stands, a hacking room, and book shop.

"Cooking for geeks" in the bookshop: a combination of recipes, chemistry and any other science behind the ingredients and cooking processes.

"We are just like Microsoft"
In the opening keynote, Robert Dewar from Adacore underlines that commercial and open software are not in contradiction. He regards it as mainly a difference in license (what you can do with the software), and a different business model that is all about deep support and services as you go along rather than pay upfront. In his company, all developers provide support as their major focus, there is no separate unit for that. Some quotes that would do good on twitter:

• "Open software is not a communist plot", 
• "Some of the best things that can happen is your competitors wasting their time looking at your software"
• "We find customers need education on the value of support. is nt same as 'take the money and run' kind of support by 'big companies"

Beauty and the open software
I also attended a session on designing beautiful widgets. In my experience with open software a few years back, I'd say that exceptions to the rules aside, most were damn ugly in comparison to their commercial counterparts. The newer Linux desktop distrubutions have catched up. I still find LibreOffice / OpenOffice 'ugly', but that is personal taste of course. It made me wonder if the technological communities of developers and the communities of graphical designers don't match well? Design matters, and details matter. (Did somebody say Apple?) 

Open communities
But the most interesting talks I attended were on how these communities of volunteers work. They found ways to get 'direction, alignment and commitment' (aka leadership) in the absence of command-and-control mechanisms. If the world evolves more to an 'in-crowd' scenario as defined by the future learning scenarios, we can leverage a lot of what these communities have worked out over the years. One talk was on open mentoring. Mentoring is a prime way for development into these communities. Another talk was on the book 'open advice - what we wish we had known when we started' that gathers the advice to grow and become part of an open software community and is available as a free download on http://open-advice.org .

• Only 25% of mentees tend to stay in the community. So, does it mean the effort senior community members put in is wasted too often? 
• Mentoring typically takes up 1 hour a day or 5 hours a week. Often you can put more time in mentoring than doing the job yourself. Take the example of a piece of code that would take an experienced community member 1 day to make. It would take a newbie a month to get to his first success in the community and he would need approx 20 hours of mentoring.
• So what is the balance? The speaker suggests failing fast, carefully selected entry barriers, focus on relationships rather than output ("we want relationships, not just code"), turning students into mentors ("your newcommers are the people that know everything you have forgotten") and tracking mentorships to make mentoring more sustainable over time.

These open communities also suffer from 'trolling' and need to deal with it. As such, these communities become very value-based, and they create their own heroes as well as enemies. That's why I liked the suggestion for mentoring in these communities to become more relationship-based than task-based. In the end, the success of a mentor-ship is not so much 'did you slam out the code', but 'did you make friends' and 'are you still around one year from now'.  A twitter quote from this session : " you need exactly one jerk in your community so everyone else knows how not to behave..."

Lastly I want to report on the 'T-shirt' business model. Judging from the stands, a lot of these communities get their funding by selling T-shirts.
I'll miss them, those software developers in the snow... :)
And now I need to install LibreOffice, because I still have OpenOffice installed and that just can't be right...

Above: a plea for more woman to join the movement, but with few woman in the room.