I spent Monday at OSCON in two half-day tutorials:

Business Partnering with Open Source Communities: Opportunities, Perils, and Pitfalls by James Howison. James shared some fascinating research on open source communities, including data mining results of SourceForge projects. One of the most interesting pieces of information from the talk was a graph on the number of team members in open source projects. I couldn’t find this graph on the Internet, so I will summarize here – of the 100,000 or so open source projects hosted on SourceForge, more than 60,000 of them have a single team member, and another 20,000 have only two members. Projects with three or more team members account for only 20,000 projects. One could surmise that of those 100,000 projects, only 20,000 or so could be considered a development community (and many of the 100,000 are inactive). If you’re interested in more SourceForge data mining information, check out FLOSSmole.

Face 2 Face: Processes for OS Communities by Kaliya Hamlin. Kaliya shared techniques for organizing in-person meetings with an un-conference flavor. While this can be applied for distributed open source project teams holding in-person meetings, the material can be used for other events. The term she used was “open space”. Although a lot of the material was familiar to me due to me participation in various BarCamps, I enjoyed her approach and many of the attendees were introduced to these concepts for the first time. We spent most of the time in a circle, which helped to encourage greater participation. It also cut down on the number of laptops open (I’m often guilty of this)!

The day concluded with an engaging dinner discussion on various open source topics attended by Larry Augustin (see my blog entries on Larry), Stephen Walli, Dave Gynn, and me. Stephe and Dave are with Optaros.