the stinkin' blog

I had the pleasure of attending the Florida Linux Show in Jacksonville, FL on Monday, 9 March 2009 (happy birthday, Mom) where I presented on Ubuntu and Cloud Computing. The first speaker at this conference was none other than Joe “Zonker” Brockmeier who is currently representing Novell as openSUSE’s Community Manager. His presentation was titled “Bootstrapping Community – Starting and Open Source Project”.

I found the title to be interesting however his presentation was fascinating. After fiddling with the projector for a bit he started the presentation about 15 minutes late. No problem there, typical to a relatively small conference. Joe has not presented much, it appears, as he used the “um”, “uh”, “so” fillers a lot. On his second slide his machine hung hard and he was forced to reboot openSUSE. Nice.

Joe managed to get through the technical glitch and rebooted his machine, however, the projector was not able to determine the sync rate and his deck was completely unreadable for the rest of the presentation. Ok…we have all been through technical glitches, no problem. I have had my quota for sure.

The fascinating part? As he was the first session, I expectd that he would hang around with the rest of the community members and at least hear what they had to say. Not a chance. He disappeared after his presentation was over at 9:15a and was never to be seen again.

It is no wonder that openSUSE’s community is lackluster at best. Not only does Novell not understand community, it has hired a community manager who has ZERO knowledge of how to build, manage, or work within a community. Sad state of affairs, but not necessarily unexpected.

Community requires just that, community. One must be visible to the community, be active in the community, enjoy the community and all of the interesting aspects of a community. Joe chose not to particpate in the open source community present at this show which is indicative of how well openSUSE’s community efforts are working to date.