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The presentation was unique. [http://fsoss.senecac.on.ca/2008/?q=user/14 David Eaves] played the role of an interviewer, tossing questions about the development of the Thunderbird community and how it compared to Firefox. [http://fsoss.senecac.on.ca/2008/?q=user/69 Dan Mosedale] answered those questions as a true Thunderbird community builder.
The Delphi effect was mentioned as a concern among the Thunderbird community builders.It revolves around the idea that out of a pool of hobbyist developers working on Thunderbird, only a few are selected to become money-earning employees.Would the others become jealous or grow resentful? Would there be complaints that the choices were unfair? To this day, there have been no major uprisings against the employed.The highlighted opinion of the still-unemployed follows this logic: "There are developers who have been with the project since the beginning, and have major contributions to the code base. It's about time they are recognized for their work, through employment."
===Views on Open Source:===
Open Source is open discussion. It is the ability to have an atmosphere where you feel free to share your ideas.
This freedom of expression requires that someone listens to your ideas and responds thoughtfully. Users won't feel free to generate and share their ideas if no one is around to listen and react. Initially, the Thunderbird community failed to grow because the end users were voicing their opinions on the forums while the developers avoided the forums like the plague. The end users wanted to help make a better product. The developers just wanted to get work done, and felt that there were too many voices to deal with in the forums. The motives from both sides were pure. The result was a dying conversation.
This freedom of expression also requires that your ideas aren't rejected indiscriminately (via trolling).
Oddly enough, open communication does not mean that all conversations are held in public. There are times when individuals need to talk privately through e-mail or irc queries. One-to-one talks will often allow both parties to feel more comfortable with exploring ideas and concepts, when public discussion would bring fear of ridicule and resentment. In that case, public discussion actually suppresses communication, and defeats the concept of open discussion.
Open discussion is complete when sharing these developed ideas with the public, once both parties feel the ideas are ready for general consumption. This is one point that surprised me, not because it was a foreign concept, but because it was described so elegantly.
===Opinion on the Presentation===
I liked it.
It brought the process of community building down to earth, so I could relate to it more. Before the symposium, I thought of open source community building as an arcane process, wrought through arcane magic by wizards who possessed an inexplicable mystic ability to solve disputes instantly. It seemed to be a process that happened gradually over eons, and through an impossible sequence of miracles.
The way David and Dan presented a person-to-person skit was a brilliant method of delivery. It removed the illusion that Mozilla developers were inapproachable legends and connected them with the audience. They immediately seemed like real people we could relate to and interact with.
===Views on Open Source:===
OS is (possibly) a tool whose most notable use of utmost importance is to balance out the costs of Open Access. I have the feeling that Chan equates "Open Source" with "code that is free to access for all". He seems to extend this concept beyond code, to include journals as well. Thus, the "Open Source" focus of his speech relates to journals accessible freely on the web. Chan doesn't appear to have any views on the Open Source community, or on how Open Source projects are developed. Source code wasn't mentioned once during the presentation, nor was open collaboration among peers to get tasks done. ===Opinion of the Presentation=== I was disappointed. I was expecting a new viewpoint on what Open Source meant for the world. Instead, I got a brief introduction on what Open Access was, and how it affected the economy of post-secondary institutions. I understand that efforts are being made to move the monopolistic dominance away from the publishers and towards online libraries that spread the journals to a larger audience. I don't know how successful it has been, or if it affects Seneca, or if it involves any open source projects or communities.
== Comparison on Open Source Opinions ==
David and Dan treat Open Source as a community, and promote its growth as such. Chan treats Open Source as a type of publication license.It defines how material can and should be distributed among the public. These sets of opinions don't seem comparable.
