Mike Milinkovich
Executive Director, Eclipse Foundation
Copies of presentation in ppt and pdf
- Great technology
- Broad adoption
- Architecture of participation
- Being hijacked by a fanatical community
Keypoints
- You need a cathedral to enable the bazaar
- Low barriers to entry
- New addons are first class citizens, not second class
The Eclipse Experience
- Open extensible architecture
- Built out of layers and plugins
- Everything is a plugin both from the cathedral and the bazaar
Open Source Community that wants to have commercial adoption
- Only project that meets it's dates religiously
- Quality matters
- Shipping 10 different projects on the same day
- 10 million lines of code
- 25 corporate interests
- 30 locations
- all shipping a suite of tools, applications and platforms
- Planning council getting together and deciding that this mass release would be worth coordinating
- New Eclipse projects are trying to get on the "release train"
- this is something to aspire to
- there is a social cred to being part of this
- 3.1 launch required that normal 50Mb connection be upgraded to 200Mb (wow!)
- expecting to outbandwidth most of the Pr0n websites
- for the first year of Eclipse the only infrastructure capable of mirroring was the Pr0n mirrors
- Brand Hijack by Alex Wipperfurth
- Culting of Brands by Douglas Atkin
Winning Communities require letting go
- IBM realized that to win is that they needed to let go
- Anti-thesis of traditional marketing
- Let the community take over
- Be spontaneous fun
Anatomy of a Community
- from the outside it looks like one big community
- if you go inside there are very distinct groups
- Committers - Build a great platform
- Plugin developers - Extend the Platform to do cool stuff
- Users - What a great hammer! Now if only I can find a nail
The value of a community is proportional to the number of functioning members.
Is it fanatical?
- Eclipse 3.1
- Number of newsgroup posts: 32,223
- Number of Eclipse specific blogs: 27
- Bugzilla reports fixed: 9,871
- Number of bugs reported entirely in verse: 2
- Most comments on a single bug: 202
- Average Bugzillas queries per day: 600,000
How to get there
- First, get rid of the marketers
- Second, admit that we're all marketers
- Creating Passionate Users by Kathy Sierra
- If you love something, set it free.
- It's about the human conversation
- And developers want to talk to developers not marketing flacks
- And the conversation is about code
- Embrace others as leaders
- Be transparent
- Say "Thank you"
Wrong
"My development manager thinks we are being out marketed, so I would like to do a press release..."
Summary
- To create a platform and community
- Great technology
- Broad adoption
- "Architecture of participation"
- Hijacked by a fanatical community
- The next generation of broadly adopted platforms won't be open source, but open source sure helps
Other Notes
RyanLowe: Creating Open Source Communities and Platforms
