Brandon Philips - http://ifup.org

As my work at IBM on the genetic library comes to a close my attention is beginning to turn to life back in Corvallis and at Oregon State. And one of the most exciting things about heading back is my new job.

With the help of Dr. Timothy Budd, Alex Polvi and I are going to create the Open Source Education Lab at OSU. Now, why isn’t that a link? Because the OSEL is so hot and new that it doesn’t even have a website yet! (That will change soon)

But, in the mean time a “What” document for the OSEL was created (here) to give some hint at what we are aiming to do at the OSEL. And one of the first headings in this flyer reads: “It’s About Community”. The term community gets thrown around alot in the FOSS world and is arguably one of the most important aspects to creating good Free software. So, in this post I wanted to share some of my recent run ins with communities in and out of the software world.

At the Supermarket

Nisha, a friend from my NASA days, recently visited France with her Dad and sister. During her visit she told me about an attempt to go to the corner market to pick up some produce with their family-friend and host Etienne Uncle. When they got down to the market door it was shut and locked despite being a Tuesday afternoon. But, Etienne Uncle wasn’t suprised, he had simply forgotten that the family who runs the store was on vacation for the month.

My mind boggled- could you imagine this situation happening in the states? Etienne Uncle didn’t even vow never to shop there again!

But, then I started to reflect: The 8-5 grind of working life keeps me on a pretty regular schedule and for that reason I tend to hit up the supermarket at a pretty regular time two or three times a week. In doing so I have discovered that I see some of the same employees everyday when I come in.

Now, some nights I come in right at 9pm (it is too hot to run before 8pm) when the meat counter is closing. A few times the regular guy there, Mike, told me he was closed, so I thanked him and moved on. But, he started to notice my pattern and I started making an effort to come in before closing time. This worked out well and on most nights we would exchange a few words about the day and I would move on. Then, tonight I showed up at 9:05pm and Mike just smiled and laughed a bit, and so did I.

However, this time he didn’t say he was closed- he set down his mop, said hello, and asked if I needed anything. And to my suprise, despite showing up 5 minutes late I got the deli meat I needed and had a quick pleasant conversation too.

Then, at the checkout, the checker Sean noticed I was buying my new favorite drink: Naked Juice (stop laughing :-)). I had recommended it to him a few days ago after he asked about it- and he stopped his checking and thanked me for the recommendation.

These three anecdotes are about community- it isn’t anything magical- it is simply people who are empathetic to one another and who are willing at times to do a little extra for each other.

Communities Go Beyond Differences

Ananda, my officemate, gave me some insight into the way religions mix in India. He told me that in the city in which he grew up the population was a mix of people following Muslim, Hindu, and Christian faiths. But, he never saw or heard of animosity towards any group because of their faith; and in fact everyone lives and works side by side.

Maybe, he suggested, if people were to live in this city for a few months, they would see that intolerance is unnecessary.

Between Colleagues Beyond Companies

This summer I had the opportunity to visit the Ottawa Linux Symposium and after a bit of coaxing from Val Henson I went to a room party for file system developers. When I arrived I saw that there were people from big tech companies and universities sharing ideas, complaints, insights and critiques on file system development and the Linux Kernel. So, in the case of this community FOSS was the enabler.

A Company that is a Tribe

Over at Robert Paterson’s Weblog a great post was made about the web design firm Silver Orange and in particular their strive to maintain a small tribe of developers instead of growing a big company. For a company of this size they are quite successful and seem fully dedicated to maintaining a healthy tribal community:

We openly challenge each other all the time. I don’t mean that we fight but that we speak out minds about what each of us are doing. Peer review happens everyday and in all settings. To fit here you have to be able to be comfortable with giving and in receiving opinion about what is going on for real and what you are doing for real.

Conclusion

Communities are important for a few reasons:

• Develop empathy and friendships
• Build tolerance and comradery
• Bring smart people with a common interest together
• Enables productive work

It is the goal of the OSEL to encourage the growth of a thriving FOSS community on the OSU campus. And I think it is quite clear why this is a Good Thing™.

P.S. Don’t ignore the communities forming all around you when you are walking down the street with your earbuds a blaring. Visit Social Recession for more information.

What is the recipe to my ideal summer internship?

• 1x Robotics
• 1x Image and Voice Processing/Recognition
• 1x Embedded Linux
• 1x Internet Technologies

Now of course it should be in a really neat location. I have always wanted to live on the east coast and visit the MIT AI lab and the NASA centers; so lets put it in Maryland. To finish it off I want to be working for some very talented people and most important of all making a difference in peoples lives.

In January Kim told me about a new NASA robotics internship program, I applied and patiently waited as the date of notification for interns was pushed back several times, settling on April 1st 2005. The 2nd and 3rd came and went with no phone call and I began considering my other options.

At 10:30am today my phone rang, it was from an area code that I didn’t recognize and I almost elected not to answer. I am glad I didn’t make that mistake.

It was Lubna Rana of the Goddard Space Flight Centers Office of University Programs and she had some good news. I got my first choice project for the Robotics Internship Program and I should be in Maryland on June 6th 2005. Wow! It was the last thing I expected today.

The project I will be working on is called “CosmoBot,” a robot used to help educators and therapists give better care to children with special needs. And it will be my job, along with 2-3 other students, to figure out how to integrate image processing, voice recognition and wireless sensors in to the product over a 10 week period.

It is going to be a great summer!

Other Cool Internships
Fellow LUG members Alex and Jeremy are taking off on some cool internships too:

• Alex Polvi - Polvi is going to San Fransico for the summer to work at Mozilla
• Jeremy Orem - Jeremy is going to work at Intel

The last few days have been alot of fun and required the help of a few friends. There have definitely been some challenges, but in the end it has been rewarding.

The GentooBugDay was a great experience, I got two bug fixes submitted 77328 and 68277. It is a start, and I plan on doing more in the future.

Alex Polvi invited Michael Marineau and I to a meeting he had set up with Professor Quinn and Dean Adams. Hearing the questions and concerns of Professor Quinn helped to focus what we can do to move our idea of having Oregon State use more Open Source Software in the classroom.

The next few baby steps are creating a document, a StateOfTheLug, something that we can place down on a table and show people what we have done, show them we have students excited about this, and that we need to bring that into the classroom. What we need to show is the benefits of having software developed by communities that reach outside the bounds of any one company, school, or even person. And how exposure to this process is valuable to students. It is an experience that Dan Frye, Randy Kalmeta, and many other universities recognize, but that we, OSU, are not taking the opportunity to engage in.

But, I think that we are approaching it the right way, the students should be able to demand the skills that the college teaches them, and I want to see open source development taught.

Today Dan and Randy came down today from the Linux Technology Center at IBM. Both of these men understand Linux the business very well, and listening to them helped me to realize how important Linux is becoming to the technology sector, and how it is making customers, engineers, and business people happy. I talked to Randy about where their employees are coming from, and they are not from Oregon. In fact one of their goals in coming down was to meet with the computer science department to see how they are going to help train students to work with open source communities; it is the community stupid! Dan said that it is not the “technology that is revolutionary but the community, and how this software is developed.” This isn’t a new idea, Eric S. Raymond, Linus, and Richard Stallman have recognized the power that a community of dedicated people have when they are able to work together without the frictions and bounds of traditional organizations.

On Alex’s blog he quotes Professor Quinn, “There are only finite resources, however there are infinite things to do.” I think the ultimate goal is to show the department that this is not another check box to add to the list of things that are being done, but a new way of teaching and learning about the things we are already doing. I don’t want to see an “Open Source Class” I want to see Open Source In Class. I think Dean Adams understands it, and loves the idea and we need to work on concentrating what it is we want to see done.

In other news I have been doing alot of work with Ruby On Rails. This framework is beautiful, Ruby is a great language, and the community is very fun and excited about the project. I plan on doing some weekend hacking on my side project of getting Maintain re-implemented in RoR. So far I have been impressed, and think with a week or two of work I could get a system rolling with alot of momentum. But I will wait and see how this weekend goes.