OSS Watch, Oxford 9 Oct 2009

Life of a Wookie

Scott Wilson (University of Bolton)

Scott.bradley.wilson@gmail.com

Twitter: scottbw

Open Source & Community

• What I’ll talk about:– What Wookie is…– Why community matters to our work– How we support community– What the barriers are, and how we

overcome them– What problems we’ve faced, and how we

tackled them.

Why community mattersto an OSS project

Open source communities…

• No community: dead code• Geek High Priesthood: open source, closed

community• Lots of Developers, No users: unfriendly geek

tool shed• Lots of Users, No developers: abandonware• User and Developers: Yay!

Apache Wookie (incubating)

• Entered incubator July ‘09 • originally developed in Framework 6 IP

– Funded projects tend to build prototypes, not communities

• http://incubator.apache.org/wookie/• W3C Widget Engine

– W3C Packaging and Configuration– W3C Widget Object– Google Wave Gadget API

Why the foundation route?

• Mechanisms to support community• Clear processes and governance, already

trusted by developers• Clear licensing and legal framework,

removing barriers to adoption

These are all things a viable OSS project needs - but are hard to set up and run alone

Community in Wookie

This is how I see our community - and one of my tasks is to make sure there is a steady supply of people moving through these stages

To be viable, Wookie needs more variety here

Developers aren’t lawyers

• But you wouldn’t know it sometimes…

overcoming the barriers

• From the OSS project:– Documenting and explaining processes– Actively reaching out to developers to help them over

the barrier

• From the external team:– Understanding tracker-based workflows– Understanding distributed development

It can be surprising how many developers (still) don’t have issue tracker and source control experience

Being nice is a survival strategy in OSS

Cases

• LAMS: integration

• HUT: bugfix

• UPD/EPFL/TG: feature spec

Problems we’ve faced

• Developers reluctant to tackle IP & licensing issues why do I need to sign this? Can I be bovvered?

• Developers inexperienced with issue trackers• Developers not understanding workflows do I

submit the patch or create an issue first?• Managers worried about what their

developers may be getting them into what’s our exposure? What are we committing ourselves to? What if I need you for xyz…

How are we doing?

• Even with active support, you don’t get everyone over the barriers (even in our own organisation)

• A long way to go yet…• A good range of developers engaged, slowly

moving up the ladder• A lot of new project proposals (FP7, JISC…)

want to use Wookie, so more developers likely coming into the picture

Why its worth it:

• External contributions help fix bugs, add features, identify user requirements

• More people tends to bring more diversity of markets where the software can be applied

• Contributing to open source projects helps developers gain important professional skills

• Working with open source projects provides opportunities for new partnership

Get involved!

• Send subscribe message to wookie-dev-subscribe@incubator.apache.org

• Submit issue reports, feature requests, patches: http://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/WOOKIE

• Come to Apache/CETIS Widgets Meetup, London, 13th Octoberhttp://wiki.cetis.ac.uk/Widgetmeetup_Oct09