Last week I attended BlogHer Business in Ny Town, and appeared on the panel alongside two other Microsoft bloggers, Ani Babaian and Sara Ford. Sara let me pepper her with questions for the few minutes regarding the function she's doing with CodePlex, Microsoft's open supply project hosting web page. The Geek in question: Sara Ford The work title: Program Manager, CodePlex.com Naturally, open source + Microsoft = touchy topic having a lot of background. I am curious the way you method that. Do you put in your unique child gloves just before work each and every day?
We need to make a web-site that provides a great user encounter for open supply improvement around the Microsoft platform. We want persons to have the ability to collaborate in an internet world by offering them project management instruments along with a supply code repository. And, they are able to track bugs, characteristics, and also have discussion boards -- all of the issues that you need for an open, collaborative atmosphere. When I am engaging with all the open source community, I say, "Hey, I was hired at Microsoft straight out of college -- I've only seen how proprietary software is built, so I am curious about how open source projects perform. Come and show me how it works." You use words like "open" and "collaborative" -- words that haven't traditionally been in the Microsoft vernacular. How have you seen the culture at the organization change, to where "open" and "collaborative" are now a part of your work?
When I was in college, I would find bugs while coding in Visual J++, and the only way to get assistance was to pay $250 to report the bug. If Microsoft confirmed your bug, your money would be reimbursed. That was my encounter — very closed. Pay Microsoft $250 in the hopes that your bug was valid and you could get your money back?! $250 was the same as my rent,
Microsoft Office 2010 Product Key! No way I could do that. After I was hired on in Fall 2001, I started to see a shift, together with the enterprise moving towards community and transparency and blogging efforts. I got to see teams starting to use newsgroups to respond to customer concerns. Then the Microsoft forums came around, and blogging gained in popularity, so it was a natural transition. Not only were we encouraged to engage together with the local community, but we had all these new ways to do so. It's taken a while, right? We're talking like five years ago, but now we have 5500 bloggers, and forums, and we have local community. What lessons do you feel Microsoft has to learn from the open supply community?
One of the issues that I like about open supply is the agile development style. Not everyone chooses agile advancement of course, but agile allows a really quick turn-around for customers — and since the open supply neighborhood is so much about collaboration over code, and with agile you can move really quickly. What do you feel like YOU have to learn from the open source community?
I went to this incredible presentation at the O'Reilly Open Supply Convention in 2006 by James Howison from Syracuse University, who spoke about how open source communities succeed or fail. It was like being handed a textbook: "Here's your profession. Now go do it." When I came back to Redmond a week later, I had gathered seven call-to-actions of how we were going to change our advancement model for the Power Toys for Visual Studio on CodePlex. I actually just submitted a paper for the O'Reilly Open Supply convention 2008, and it got accepted. It's called "Towards a Stronger Open Source Ecosystem," and it's a summary of the lessons that I've learned, plus ideas about what the future of open supply might look like if there were no barriers in communication. Wish me luck. Oh, so you want some relevant links, hmmm? CodePlex Sara's blog CodePlex Team blog Lessons Learned Going Open Supply using the Power Toys James Howison Power Toys for Visual Studio