Tag Archives: open source

Introducing People’s Forum – Australia

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There’s a lot of great debate on Australian political topics, with many gems of insight. But much of it is getting lost, or just available to a very limited audience. Why? Because

  • Twitter is highly transient; you can search, but it becomes harder as you go back further in time. It’s not suitable as an archive, nor as a place for engaged discussion;
  • Facebook comment threads are limited to the page or group-of-friends;
  • Online newspaper articles allow comments, but require a separate signup/login which is tedious. Also it makes for a very scattered discussion, when a topic gets discussed on various sites.

With great help from Peter Lieverdink and James Purser, I have set up People’s Forum – Australia. Using Open Source tools this took mere days. It accepts quick Twitter, Facebook and OpenID logins as well as having the ability to interact further with the big social networks. But it’s not dependent on or restricted to them, and I think that’s very important.

Ages ago I wrote that social networking is a great tool, but cannot optimally be restricted to one site or infrastructure. Hoarding the social graph is silly. The social network can be open and used everywhere, with broad benefits. Interestingly, the technology to do this is now available – and that’s what we’ve used. So the site is also a little experiment to see how this works in practice. Some examples:

  • To reply to a forum topic, you can simply click one of the buttons on the right to login with your Twitter or Facebook account; easy as! Or OpenID, for the more tech-savvy.
  • When posting (starting a new forum topic), the system allows you to also post a link to your own Twitter stream.
  • You can easily invite friends to join the forum.
  • Posts have “Share” (on FB) and “Tweet this” buttons, but that’s very common on other sites already.

We’ll see how this develops further. I reckon there’s no better way to figure out and develop ideas further than to put them live and let them meet the real world. It just requires a suitable opportunity – with the tools readily available, actually putting something out there –quickly– is actually the easy part!

Today is Software Freedom Day 2010, celebrating free/open software through many events around the world. I offer the People’s Forum site as my contribution, a practical showcase.

OSS Ability to Accept Contributions

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Clayton Christensen has some excellent insights on Modularity vs Integration in “The Innovator’s Solution”. I wrote about this for Upstarta.biz. Particularly in the realm of Open Source, modularity is regarded as a panacea – a product, service or design must be modular. But  modularity is not better (or worse) than integration. Like tools, they each have their place, depending on the state of the market/ecosystem where the process/product/service operates. Part of a system can be in a modular phase, where another part of the same system needs integration!

In this context, think of an Open Source project or company’s ability to handle contributions. If the process of interaction between a contributor and the core is not (for whatever reason) clearly defined and predictable, it won’t work. Jamming an additional [in this case external, but that’s irrelevant to the issue] interface for contributions somewhere in existing business processes can be doomed to fail.

We see the results of this in many projects that are Open Source, but find themselves unable to process contributions, or just don’t get any contributions. It’s quite likely that the underlying cause is not apathy (from the contributor’s end) or malice (from the receipient’s end), but it’s important to understand the underlying processes at work. It’s not necessarily the modularity of the software itself that’s an issue (tightly integrated code can receive contributions too!), but the surrounding business processes.

I had this realisation while camping with my good friend Steve Dalton and our kids this weekend. So a big thanks to Steve! I think it may help with understanding why Sun/MySQL (and MySQL AB before it) have had such difficulty dealing with contributions. And proper understanding could help resolve the problem. Good intent on its own does not suffice, otherwise it’d have been highly effective long ago!