Santa Cruz, CA
For the last decade Karsten has been teaching and living the open source way. As a member of Red Hat's premier community leadership team, he helps with various community activities in the Fedora Project and other projects Red Hat is involved in. As a 15 year IT industry veteran, Karsten has worked most sides of common business equations as an IS manager, professional services consultant, technical writer, and developer advocate.
Karsten lives in his hometown of Santa Cruz, CA with his wife and two daughters on their small urban farm, Fairy-Tale Farm, where they focus on growing their own food and nurturing sustainable community living.
Authored Comments
I think it's very brave to open source hardware - it seems there is a greater investment in the work, unlike software that can be created and destroyed virtually without a real world investment beyond server and power. It's great to see such work being done in such a fun way.
A question about your open source hardware efforts. You link to the CC BY NC SA license, which is (strictly speaking) not a free and open source license due to the non-commercial restriction. Is that the license you are currently using for your open hardware? If so, do you plan to switch to a license that aligns better with the OSHW definition?
Very glad to see you are thinking as you are working about how these decisions are going to affect a potential open sourcing in the future. If I could make a wish for you, it would be to find a way to simply rip back the covers immediately and do all the refactoring work in the open. <a href="https://www.theopensourceway.org/wiki/How_to_loosely_organize_a_community#Practice_radical_transparency_from_day_zero">Being open from the beginning</a> is a defining principle of the open source way because you can never capture the thinking and reasoning that went on behind closed doors to show transparently one month or one year down the road. All that goes before the Great Opening will be apocryphal knowledge lost to the sands of time, reasoning and explanations that always start with, "Well, when we had an internal meeting to decide two years ago, I guess we were thinking ..."
Very interesting question. I'm involved with an internal group at Red Hat that is focused on understanding how our own internal communities work. We just did a survey of hundreds of internal mailing list admins to understand more of how mailing lists relate to community, sense of involvement, and getting things done.
One interesting result is that many list admins identified their lists as being a community of people, but not all of those same admins identified some of the limited criteria we set. We were trying to understand, for example, how many were social communities compared to do-it communities. Ultimately, it was unclear if our stricter definition helped or not - people felt a sense of community regardless if they volunteered or were assigned to the mailing list. The sense of purpose seemed to be the key - having an interest or passion in the topic may create the community sense.
BTW, many have been looking at how we can better engage all the people who don't like mailing lists. There is a self-selective nature at work - mailing lists work for a percentage of the people, but maybe not even a majority. Look at the growth of various social media tools as a way people grow community outside of traditional mailing list structures. This is why things such as <a href="http://iquaid.org/2012/05/14/mailing-list-web-interface-magic/">Mailman 3</a> and the collaborative features of Drupal 7 may signal a doubling or tripling of community sizes where mailing list merges with web-interface in a way that works for everyone involved.