It's actually rather exciting to see the dynamics of corporate-sponsored community work being actively discussed and studied. I've just learned (thanks to Matt Asay) of research, in prepublication state, on The Role of Participation Architecture in Growing Sponsored Open Source Communities. Unfortunately, this study only goes so far as to collect the reasons given by various companies and communities for why they chose to organize they way they did, principally in matters of "transparency" (read access to the code),  "accessibility" (write access to the code) and "governance" (the right to make decisions). As the study itself concludes, a useful next step would be to investigate whether these choices actually had the desired effect.

There are hints here that they do not. For example, it's common belief that the right to contribute code (what this study calls "accessibility") helps to grow the community. But the study points out that MySQL involves very little accessibility (more because a production-grade relational database server is HARD than any explicit policy), yet the MySQL community is extremely active (judged from mail list activity), both in user and developer areas. Explore at MarkMail (http://mysql.markmail.org/)

It's amazing to still find people who misunderstand terms like "Open Source Software" or "Free Software" to mean "available without charge," despite frequent clarifications, and even the ten-year old formation of the Open Source Initiative (and the renaming to "Open Source" precisely to combat this misunderstanding).

One of our main goals and success factors at CollabNet is to listen carefully to our customers and prospects to understand your specific requirements. These requirements drive the development of new features within our products significantly. 

This blog post is a call for participation with two opportunities - An opportunity for us to listen to your needs, wishes and best practices and an opportunity for you to actively participate in our requirements engineering process.

For a research study focusing on improving the tracker workflow management features of SourceForge Enterprise Edition (SFEE), we developed a survey and a workflow extractor tool  to gather your current tracker workflow configuration and learn more about your needs.

The workflow configuration of a tracker defines its statuses, its permitted transitions between the statuses with their constraints (e. g. required fields and roles for a transition to happen) and its auto-assignment configuration. You can find the current workflow configuration of your trackers within the project admin tab in subsection “Tracker Settings.”

Please take part in our Survey

If you would like to take part in our survey, you can rate five proposed new features that extend the functionality of SFEE's Tracker Workflow Engine. Every feature comes with three examples of how it can be applied to boost the tracker workflow and ticket handling process within your organization.

Of course, you know better what your organization needs than we do, so don't miss the chance to vote for and comment on these new features.

Please share your Tracker Workflow Configuration with us (Free Open Source Tool)

Getting a rating for potential features is one part to improve SFEE - seeing how the current features are actually used is another one. Therefore, we developed an Open Source SFEE workflow extractor tool.

CollabNet's Workflow Extractor Tool will automatically extract the tracker workflow configuration of your system and store it within an XML file. If you send the information within this XML file to CollabNet (please zip it before), it will be used to find out how and how often the various features currently available within the tracker workflow engine are actually used and how they can be improved.

If you like that CollabNet can come up with further ideas of improvements by considering your unique situation, just download  our tracker workflow configuration extractor tool, follow the instructions in the README file and send the resulting (zipped) XML file to CollabNet.

Play around with Free Code Samples

Last but not least, the full source code of the workflow extractor tool and a pre-configured Eclipse project are also part of the download. If you are interested in some free code samples how to retrieve the tracker workflow configuration, the project names, its associated users, releases and tracker names for your whole SFEE site or even multiple sites, feel free to play around with the code. Of course, you are allowed to use some snippets within your own projects.

Thank you for actively shaping the future of SourceForge Enterprise Edition, I promise to keep you updated!

One of the trickiest questions in inner-sourcing is, "what's the relationship between the organization and the community?"  Stormy Peters, recently elected as Executive Director of the GNOME Foundation, points out that there are sometimes three parties to this question: the organization, the community, and the governing body. She's pleased because she can now contribute to an important open-source community and effort.  I'm more pleased because the formation of the GNOME Foundation means that this important open-source community has increasing ability to determine their own direction, independent from any particular corporate agenda.

That independence is crucial to inner-source  communities as well.

Wait, wait, wait: what did he say?