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 has spoken at major technology conferences like ApacheCon, OSCON, All Things Open, Community Leadership Summit, and Ignite.
Shane Curcuru serves as VP Brand Management for the ASF, wrote the trademark and branding policies that cover all 200+ Apache® projects, and assists projects with defining and policing their trademarks, as well as negotiating agreements with various software vendors using Apache software brands. Shane is serving a seventh term as an elected Director of the ASF, providing governance oversight, community mentoring, and fiscal review for all Apache projects.
Otherwise, Shane is: a father and husband, a BMW driver and punny guy. Oh, and we have cats! Follow @ShaneCurcuru and read about open source communities and see my FOSS Foundation directory.
Authored Comments
Kudos - sounds like an amazingly powerful translation tool. The story of "five different words for File" is a commonly heard one.
How do you clearly weigh possible alternatives, especially in a context where - either from the locale / regional dialect side there might be a real reason to choose a different word, and from the conceptual side, you might not mean a File (to save) but rather a File of some sort of business process? That is, the actual underlying concepts, while related, are different, but in English traditionally map to the same word; however in some dialects they may really map to different words.
Nice overview, although a key bit to add is locality: so many of these activities are intensely local. It still feels difficult to *easily* find both a strong data source and an interesting project/visualization/community that's based on MyHomeTown, or OurVacationSpot.
Ahead of the curve: it feels like there's a lot of code governance and branding thought that, if started early enough for many of these projects, would really improve re-use and expansion of the underlying technologies.
I.e. if you're starting one of these cool code visualizations, think about licensing and governance of the project as a whole. Find a good brand for the project; define how that brand (and the overall project direction) should be managed; and then actively recruit new governance members.
It's the classic question in open source governance: we want to define a strong project that will live on in the image we want for it, but we also need to be willing to give up control to the rest of the actively participating community.
Is there a meta-meta directory of cities that have projects? I.e. not just data portals, but some sort of non-techy citizen engagement visualizations built atop them?