OSCON CFP Submissions for 2017

Sadly, 2017 was not a great year for Shane, since all the below submissions were rejected by OSCON.

Shane did not attend OSCON 2017

Who owns that open source brand?

Technical, business, and project leaders or community managers who are deciding which open source projects to invest in or base their business around. When buying commercial software, you need to understand the supplier organization’s quality, responsiveness, costs, and longevity. All these factors apply when using an open source solution - although the ownership of the project - or rather, it’s brand - is not always obvious. Make sure you know who your suppliers are and how they’ll lead the projects you depend on over time.

Do you really know who owns the brand behind the top open source projects you rely on? Code is infinitely forkable; brands and communities are not. Engage in an interactive session reviewing top open source project, and be surprised when you learn which projects are truly independent, and which are really vendor-owned.

Various edits on this theme

Do you know who runs the projects behind the code you run – or contribute to? It’s not always obvious, and while you can always try forking the code, successfully attracting contributors to your fork is hard.

You don’t have to get involved in branding: but you do need to know who truly controls the direction of the open source technologies that you rely on every day. Far too many individual developers and companies rely on a wide variety of open source tools that come from different projects. How do you accurately evaluate the security, stability, and potential for future support around an open source project? How can you find if your chief competitor truly has a lock on a project’s governance and future direction?

The power behind a project’s brand is not always obvious. Come discover who governs some key open source project brands, and what might happen to governance when someone goes IPO or gets bought out. Learn how to keep governance of the project truly independent and welcoming – or how to properly own and run your own open source brand.

Surprises guaranteed!

Defend your open source project from corporate control

Working on a great project but concerned about its future? Worried about out how to keep control of your project in the hands of your community, not in some $BigCorp? Learn how to welcome new contributors and stay relevant while keeping solid governance of your project’s direction and brand.

The huge variety of competing open source projects – and forks of projects – means it’s more important than ever to understand the maturity and stability of any open source project before you start investing your personal technical expertise or company infrastructure. If you join a new project, will they welcome your contributions and allow you a say in decisions? If you’re using an existing project, will there be a coherent community of developers and diverse vendors around it with an ecosystem of support and contributors for the future?

Drawing on experience from dozens of long-lived Apache Software Foundation projects, you will learn what policies your project needs to adopt to control your future, without bureaucratic overhead.

  • Effective project governance without red tape
  • Telling the project’s story to the world
  • Defending your brand from corporate raiders
  • Attracting diverse new contributors
  • The legal bits of trademarks you really do need

Just telling a compelling story about your project is not enough to help it succeed over the long term: your community needs to take ownership of their own governance and especially your project brand to truly shine. Whether looking for top geek contributors or high-profile corporate sponsors, you need to keep control of your project’s message to be able to attract the best.

Partnering, Not Competing With Open Source Projects

How can your company use open source - not just for DevOps, but for competitive advantage - while keeping the respect of the high-performing talent that you want to hire? Profiting from open source code is fine - as long as you respect the projects and communities that build it. Learn how to walk the line of respect while getting the edge in the marketplace.

vairous edits your company interacts with independent open source projects is critical to both talent acquisition and customer acquisition.

Top talent driving new open source technologies is part of the github generation: their resume is a github URL and personal website. Technology leaders today expect to work on multiple projects and multiple employers over their career: developers expect to work for a company that respects open source projects.

Customers alike expect a vendor to be familiar with and be able to work with a variety of open source technologies and projects. Your company’s reputation in the open source arena is a key factor in how a customer rates your ability to deliver a variety of services over time.

Drawing on experience from the open source developer and corporate marketing team sides alike, Shane will help you discover:

  • Gaining respect in open source communities
  • Policies to help your employees participate in open source
  • Reducing risk when using open source products
  • How to work in other ways (events, marketing, swag) with open source projects
  • What not to do with independent open source communities
ShaneCurcuru

Shane is founder of Punderthings℠ LLC consultancy, helping organizations find better ways to engage with the critical open source projects that power modern technology and business. He blogs and tweets about open source governance and trademark issues, and speaks at open source conferences like ApacheCon, OSCON, All Things Open, Community Leadership Summit, and Ignite. More about the author →