During early October days, we’ve been in Paris for the Open World Conference 2013 (AKA OWF 2013) as first stop of our October’s Tour, and it has been a quite interesting meeting.
First of all, OWF is not an Open Source freaks event, and business is one of the event’s target, so there were many well suited people talking about opportunities and so on. Of course, you can see people doing freak things…
Some companies missed it, but most of the big ones where there somehow: Red Hat, Openstack, Suse, Citrix… and even Debian, that is not a company, but it is a reference in the Open Source world. I’ve had the chance to talk with some old friends and to meet new ones. So, it has been a good networking event, but some kind of reception/dinner/party? would helped.
On Friday, we were invited to talk about the metrics and analysis we do in Bitergia and how it helps on Open Source projects for the Open Source in practice track. It’s been great sharing the desk with people like:
- Loïc Dachary who showed his experience from ruling an Open Source project (quite challenging and sometime frustrating) to being part of an Open Source community as contributor (quite pleasant), working in Upstream University to train developers to become better Free Software contributors
- Ludovic Dubost and Vincent Massol and their vision about businesses and Open Source projects beyond coding, and how they manage it in XWiki
- Charles-Henri Schulz talking about the Document Foundation
- Stefano Maffuli talked about how Openstack community has grown… (He also mentioned some metrics from our work for them)
- an old friend from Maemo/Meego ages, Dave Neary making another great presentation about how to deal with shy developers and how to face and Open Source community or project as a new developer/contributor
- Damian Vicino, an argentinian doing his Phd between Inria and a Canadian university, talked about FreeBSD user groups
- Mike Hendrikson from O’REILLY, who showed what they are doing to increase documentation spreading, and who made a clear statement, “O’REILLY will never use DRM on their books”
Bitergia’s presentation was focused on 5 key points:
- You, as a company or as an individual, would need to take decisions related with Open Source software that involves resources investment
- Open Source and community based projects are complex: diverse managing tools for different tasks (coding, mails, issues, etc.) and diverse people profiles
- Complexity can be measured, and Bitergia develops Open Source tools for it, like MetricsGrimoire and VizGrimoire toolsets
- The data is even more important than the visualization, so in order to ensure transparency, flexibility and interoperability, we promote going towards Open Data and we already provide the data used for metrics and analysis
- Once you have the data, thanks to metrics and analytics, you, as a company or as an indivual, can take decisions… That’s smart, so we call it, smartmetrics
The slides are available.
That was the first stop in our October’s Tour, that leave us to:
- Berlin, for Liferay Developers Conference 2013 (post is under development… stay tunned)
- Edinburgh, for the Linux Conference Europe 2013, where there will be a talk related with our tools, so, if you are there, don’t miss it
- Hong Kong, for the OpenStack Summit, where we will be showing our latest developments and on a panel
Note: photos are available in our Google+ site