Open Source and Open Innovation with whurley

Sara Dornsife On Community In A Frigid Economy

Sara Dornsife, community manager extraordinaire.

Sara Dornsife has been pivotal in several open source transformations and communities. In 2004 she helped Sun open up Solaris and then shepherded the fledgling OpenSolaris community. Her card read “marketing,” but she was a fixer tasked with keeping Sun’s open source communities whole, viable, and happy. Now independent, Sara uses her expertise in community development to drive successful marketing strategies. Sara is one of the founders of CloudCamp and an active BarCampAustin volunteer. I wondered about what all of these companies were asking her about. Do they really see the value of community in troubled economic times? To no surprise Sara was happy to share both her time and her experience with the rest of us.

(whurley) The economy couldn’t get much worse. Do companies see value in community development in these troubled times?

That’s a prudent question, as I’m currently looking for new opportunities myself. Everything I know about social media I learned from open source.

The concept of “community” has morphed, as with any buzz word. Five years ago when I started working in open source, the only “community manager” role I was aware of was in some way connected to an open source project, probably because of the crowds I was traveling in. Mostly they were the founders of the projects themselves and the person who monitored the forums, resolved issues, and most importantly, made final decisions. All communications were done openly and publicly to help the project grow and get adopted. It was not a very common job title, and one a person earned, not got. The title is going through its own transition right now. Five years ago I was given the job to market an open source community which morphed into a community management role. Today, the same title means anything from content provider to data analysis.

This type of communication with the customer is why I got into open source in the first place. There was no mistaking the fact that the open source advocates and contributors that I met and worked with felt that marketing was (mostly) a waste of time and money. You’d think as a marketer that I would have backed away from that, but I saw the brilliance in what they were doing. They were miles ahead of the word-of-mouth marketing phenomena we have today. Open source developers were implementing social media before the term existed, disseminating information through public blogs, searchable e-mail forums, and online discussion groups. My role in marketing became figuring out how to scale what they were doing, encourage it, amplify it when necessary, get myself and the company out of their way when needed, and to advocate on their behalf.

Community managers now are hired or even contracted with and are associated with brands more than they are with code. The community manager is employed by a company to be in charge of content and to be a liaison with the company, bringing external issues inside the company, providing a kind of proactive customer service. This role today is more commonly associated with social media than with community management, but in a lot of cases the terms are used interchangeably.

Companies recognize and respect the communities that have formed around their products and brands. They have learned, in some cases the hard way, that neglected communities can turn. They are taking special care to make sure that their valuable communities are well taken care of, and because of that community managers are in high demand.

(Sara) Congratulations on your new cloud computing column with InfoWorld. I have to say I was a little surprised given your position on the matter. So, what’s the connection between your open source past and the industry’s cloud computing future?

Thanks! I’m having a lot of fun with the InfoWorld crew. People were little surprised when I took the gig, but I’ve lived through several iterations of the cloud computing concept, including the application service provider, software as a service, grid, utility, and on-demand variations that have splashed around in our industry pond for the last 15 years. In my first InfoWorld column, I highlighted the dubious evolutionary path that produced the cloud computing “revolution,” and one commenter added, “2009: cloud computing; 1970: time-sharing.”

That’s an exaggeration, but not much of one. There haven’t been any magical tech innovations that make cloud computing any different from the previous variations on this theme. That’s why I think open source has a critical role in cloud computing’s future. It’s all about the LAMP stack, baby. A data center is at the heart of every cloud, and Linux and Apache are at the heart of every data center. I keep my systems theorist hat clean and ready for just such occasions.

The majority of my career has been spent mapping, modeling, and managing large-scale systems. Open source, open innovation, and community are the basis of everything I build, but that doesn’t preclude me from participating in cloud-related projects. To me, they’re simply data centers that end users rarely see. Mix two parts open source, one part data centers, and one part their relation to the the cloud, and I’d say this seemingly random topic is the most normal thing I’ve added to my resume in the last five years. It fits nicely between winning an Apple design award and becoming an IBM master inventor, don’t you think?

Seriously, writing and speaking about cloud computing is a blast. To me there’s a clear and obvious line between open source, which is very much my present and future, and the future of cloud computing.