Java.net Community Leaders Weekend Notes

Lightening Talks:

1. SunRFID & Sensor Community, Jim Wright – Bringing product software into java.net. Provide support for non-open source but free software that people wanted, as well as transition proprietary software to open source. There is a problem with software that isn't usable out of the box - so there's a need to make it available and document it to make it useful. Is it possible to bring together a user-community from inside sun involved in this stuff and bring them out so the public can have access to them and their expertise? Lots of information available that teaches you how to use the software – tutorials, etc. Site was just opened on Thursday, large interest so far.
2. Java User Groups, Bruno Souza – Want to get more java group leaders to get involved in this community. Doing more with user groups in Brazil to get a better feeling of how user groups can work together. Ex: Java Marathon – 12 cities in Brazil, one in Austin, TX. Competition where you get 1.5 hours to solve a problem with 4 people. Also had sun tech days in 15 different cities.
3. Robotics Community, Bruce Boyes – started 12 months ago. 8 active projects, collaborated with JDAC and other communities. Response to some university projects. Submitted standards for robotics. Lots of interest in robotics coming from the far east (Korea, China, etc). Different ideas on what robotics should be, what they should be doing, etc.
4. JNPodCasts, Chris Adamson - we have podcasts, a few from CL weekend, plus mini-talks
5. GELC, Rob Stephenson – Education community. About 3 years old, 300 projects, 4000 members. Historically, project members are developers working in an academic setting, but now has a new agenda: provide support for k-12 education in science and math. This poses technical problems – dealing with attracting a community that is different from what is used to (people not technical developers, but teachers, etc). How to make these projects available? Learning management systems. Assessment, how to create a tool or find an open-source tool that lets teachers build their own quizzes, upload them to share with others, and take assessment results to see if they are reaching the objectives they are trying to get to. How do you compare asessment results? Q: Is the plan of record still to build a site for the non-profit that serves the student-teacher-parent audience, and keep the developer component of the community on java.net? A: Yes.
6. JDOS, Ted Kosan - Take software from java.net and make it easily available through download, burning onto cd. Bootable cd that loads an environment with some of the available software from java.net like netbeans, jedit, and bluej. Good for educational tools for students who have difficulties setting up their java environments, etc. Idea for distribution might be putting it on java.net but making people become members to download it.
7. Java Tools Community, Fabiane Nardon – java development tools is what the focus wants to be. About 500 projects within the community. Have an open newsletter to communicate with project owners. Trying to open the community to tools that aren’t sun related. Netbeans coming more into java tools community. Changes from last year, newsletters more useful, svn bringing more projects in. Maybe start a new community for tools that are not java development tools but tools that are written in java.
8. internship, Sonya Barry– Micro Finance project. Join a community, integrate into the project and blog about the experience. Learning about how the project works but also the project owner perspective as well. Programmer and leader perspective. Learn how java.net works, to do bug fixes, updates, svn changeover, etc. Ideas to get other students involved in doing the same type of thing would be to make maybe unpaid internships that students can get maybe credit for that they can put onto their resume.
9. Volunteer program , Marla Parker – geared towards students. Get them involved in working with java.net for the experience. If they can assess their own aptitude, give them assignments with only a little bit of technical experience and have a mentor to help with java.net.
10. statistics, Tracie Hong - dashboard tracks project access. Uses weblogs to track downloads and uploads. www.koders.com (???)
11. JavaBin, Totto - most members are java developers. About 800 members. www.java.no - JavaZone 2006 - goal is to grow but they need bigger physical infrastructure to support a bigger convention.
12. Java Desktop Community, Roger Brinkley – 438 projects. Moved forums over to java.net which was a difficult process.
13. Tracie - What kind of tools would community leaders like to have? Option: apps that run from inside Sun that are called externally.
14. Global software development, Gary Thompson – using java.net for development. Example of SFSU software development course - students working together form SF and Germany.
15. Milton - has a need to understand dev communities, working on a database for WHO, wants to go to 50 developers.

New Projects

JDK Survey

Example data includes:

• Demographics breakdown
• Community interests
• Transparency
• Rewards and Recognition
• Versions and Platforms used by the community

Building the survey was easy using the tool javelin, and yes, we could do surveys like this for other communities on java.net.

Communication Strategies (within the communities)

• Mailing lists, forums. Group mailing lists to project owners.
• Java Tools – Weekly newsletter to project owners. Newsletter generated with tool developed specifically for Java Tools community that takes in an xml file and outputs a html and also text doc. Includes new projects that join within the week, graduated projects from the week, news about development tools (general news), weekly tips on using the tools, etc. Top three projects of Java Tools (sizewise, most famous) JavaCC^? (java compiler), Apache projects, JNFactory. Community when Fabiane started, was about 50 projects. Started communicating with project owners 1-1 talking about the projects. That helped project owners gain trust in the community leaders and that helped bring new projects in. Project owners can also add into the newsletter.
• Create relationships with project owners, but also provide way to publicize what they’ve done and give value to it.
• For forums – it helps to have “jumpstarted” the forums since people don’t want to go empty forums. One example of how this was done was from presentations and after the presentations, questions that were asked were put onto the forums and the answers were on there as well to get the forums going.
• Tools for communication are important. Why not use the tools that are being developed to reach out to those in the community? Also maybe ways to comment on the news that are on there?
• Java.net does not have a webserver that leaders can use for run things and use for links, etc. There are a fixed set of tools that we can use such as forums. Why not create a channel between community leaders and someone else either with collabnet or java.net, etc, to meet the needs the community leaders want. Community leaders want a webserver they can use to put their own scripts and tools onto that will help their communication with project owners. (There is such a pilot application server donated by locaweb for the Enterprise community to manage.)
• Can we use existing tools to do the things community leaders want? Leaders want to maximize their effort since a lot of their time is volunteer time. The way to do it now is very tedious and time-consuming and it’s hard to find people who are willing to volunteer their time to do this. Time shouldn’t be spent doing things that should be done by a tool.
• See a lot of projects that started out on java.net that are moving out of it, maybe because of the lack of tools. Some of that may be because of lack of subversion (which is now there). Other projects may be moving because they aren’t allowed to put certain things on like scripts.
• Process to get involved in a mailing list or to a forum is harder because you have to join java.net to do anything.

Internationalization

Roger talked about the brazilian-portugues JDK translation - we nee enough people to support and review (around 50?)

Primary Looking Glass forum - javalnet forums wanted 10 locales, e.g. create a looking_glass_interest_japan, but we need justification for splitting forums and providing localizations - just because it's a nice idea doesn't mean the users will come

Blogs - we disagree about localization: we need to be able to vet the blogs and confirm solid content - basically a trust issue. But surely we can trust some bi-lingual bloggers to blog in two languages?

We could make the "neighborhood" concept part of the wiki - JUGs already use their own languages.

Wikipedia is an interesting example - they have content in multiple languages, but they don't guarantee content is equivalent and don't translate.

Apple does translation via email, which doesn't create islands of developers in different languages

Open language tools (Bruno) tool gets a doc in multiple formats, when you open the file it opens the original and translated files, but it skips translating html tags, so the translated page should still render properly. Also keeps a glossary and can guarantee how much translated content is accurate. Can also redirect to things have not beenapproved.

Still missing - file format is not directly recognized by the tool.

How do we make it easy for people to translate?

How-To

If you have removed standard navigation go to project_tools.html in CVS to modify.

Navigator test, clickthrough test, and content test, are test projects that are there to help you “learn” how to change parts of the page. You can get rid of stuff (do no-nav) as long as you can get back to the standard navigation and has a button that shows you are a part of java.net. The standard links have to be available, but they don't have to be in the left nav bar (which they can't be if you've edited it). Just make a page of links. Have to turn off GUI if you are posting javadocs. Using nonav in the URL will automatically turn off the nav bar.

Three example projects:

• Navigator test – removes most of the standard stuff that’s in the left side except for search. To do this, you have to go into project_tools.html file to navigate to the left hand side. Project_tools applies to every page within the project space.
• Content test – removes descriptive parts before getting to actual parts of the project.
• Clickthrough test – for clickthrough license agreement. This is for pages that you have to “login” to get to because not everyone is authorized to get to it. What this test does is look to make sure you have access to the page (you have a role in the project) and if your login matches up. If it does, then it lets you through, otherwise it goes to clickthrough license agreement.

Education

• jninstructor
• jnstudent
• distributedcollaboration
• stipends

GELC doesn't really provide "services" for students - but it supports a place where students can keep projects.

We're not sure how teachers are using it.

Internationalization is a roadblock because students might not know enough English to negotiate the site.

Jennifer's jnstudent page gives a roadmap for getting started, and jninstructor does the same for teachers.

How do we get students in the door? We need to provide a carrot:

• smooth the way to using an IDE for the first time, with low level tutorials for NetBeans^?/Eclipse
• how to use javadoc
• how to use a debugger
• prizes, recognition of some kind
• bootstrapping projects - self contained CD

How do we get instructors in the door? Carrots again - maybe find a way to solve their problems

• identify potential candidates
• contact them and present the advantages
• have the content available to make the transition easy
• incent instructors with cash or computers?
• O'Reilly Safari subscription for students during the length of the course?

Lifecyle – “What the bleep do we do about the bleeping gaming community”

Unlikely that a community will be closed down, but appropriate to go and recruit new/other community leaders. To end of life a community may be to merge communities together. Look and see what the projects are see what community it would best fit into. If going project by project, could go to each project and see what community they might want to become a part of. Ask the project owners if anyone wants to “revive” the community, if not, what community do you think you would want to join? Good idea that communities have more than one community leader.

Gaming community had a process where in order to get a project into the community, all members of the community voted for approval. Idea was okay, but because the community wasn’t very active, didn’t work very well. Note that the gaming community has very active forums, and that should be a good place to recruit non-Sun new community leaders for the java.net Games community.

To “graduate” as a community, maybe require that they have a defined and documented governance laid out, how they will approve projects, what will happen if you leave (exit strategies), what do you want this to do, etc. in order to hopefully diminish this happening again.

What defines success? Is the community dead or alive (STATISTICS)? What makes it a community? Have to be careful that we do not become too statistics oriented because that can make something look like a community that really isn’t. How do we know what’s good, bad, what’s really happening? Having statistics will help with this. Can help show where communities need work and what is going good.

No java.net policy for pruning projects that were not showing activity. So what do to? This is based per community. The Java Desktop community, for example, prunes aggressively. Others do not prune at all.

Talk Back

blame Tracie Hong and Sonya Barry for any inaccuracies. :)