By Bill Portelli, CollabNet CEO & President

I am proud to be sitting here in Frankfurt making my way to Davos, Switzerland, where I will accept a Technology Pioneer Award. While there, I will also participate in a number of working sessions and breakout groups along with hundreds of technical, business, and social leaders from around the globe.  Although I will have the pleasure of accepting this award and participating in these sessions, I accept this on behalf of the hard work, passion, and vision of the current and past employees of CollabNet who have made globally distributed software development a reality. The community of World Economic Forum (WEF) Technical Pioneers was established by the WEF in 2000 in recognition of the importance of small companies that create impact through technical innovation of entire industries.  Since 2000, a rigorous annual selection process by the WEF in cooperation with a host of strategic partners identifies hundreds of companies worldwide, and eventually selects about two dozen companies each year. 

When thinking about why CollabNet won this award, a couple of things struck me.  First, it takes a certain kind of company to win.  Klaus Schwab, founder and still the driving force behind the WEF, founded it in 1971, based on the stakeholder theory, which states that the management of an enterprise has to serve all stakeholders.  In a 2008 London Times opinion piece, he wrote:  “ . . . the management has to lead the enterprise as the trustee of all stakeholders . . . in order to secure the long term prosperity of the company”.  By “stakeholder”, Schwab means all constituencies – both internal and external.  I’d like to believe that CollabNet management has operated in an open manner with this long-term view of serving our stakeholders since we founded the company in 1999 - both internally among our employees, as well as externally with our clients and business partners.   And of course, we need to look no further than CollabNet’s founding of Subversion and continued corporate sponsorship and leadership of it over the last 10 years to see that this multi-stakeholder long term view of the world is a core value of our company.  Perhaps it’s the open source gene coming through….

The second aspect that struck me even more was that the companies honored as Pioneers are recognized for creating “impact through technical innovation of entire industries.”  CollabNet, and our nearly 1,000 customers, have blazed the path for industry to define and adopt industry-changing software development paradigms -- from fractured and decentralized to collaborative and distributed.  We have done this across every industry, and often with award-winning results, such as the recent recognition by the US government for DISA’s CollabNet-based implementation of forge.mil.  Certainly, great technology is critical to winning such an award. Even more important is the ability to have the long-term vision and perseverance to identify an industry opportunity, and to work within that industry to bring to bear that technology for transformative gains for all that participate in that industry.  That’s exactly what CollabNet, DISA, and other companies have done in the past year - but more about that in a blog to come.

About the Author

Bill Portelli is CollabNet's CEO. Read his full bio here.

(Posted by Dana Nourie)

This weekend I attended the Community Leadership Summit in San Jose. Before it even started, I had an interesting discussion with Jack Repenning and a man who was investigating various community models for a homeschooling organization he's working for. As we talked about the needs of the parents of homeschoolers, I realized how much they had in common with open source community members:

• They are joiners and have need of connecting with other parents like themselves
• They do not want an overt governing body controlling the way the community interacts
• They have need of shared resources and discussions
• They want to stay away from institutionalized or corporate rules and pressures, and instead want the community members to have roles emerge organically

There are likely some similarities I'm missing here, but I realized in this discussion that these types of communities can benefit from the open source community model. In an open source community, it's important that creativity is encouraged and unbound, that community members are treated equally, and that any roles assigned are appropriate and emerge out of needs rather that what an official overhead dictates. This type of community is self-regulating for the most part, if not entirely.

The parents of homeschoolers, and many groups like them, are rejecting conventional methods of education, but that does not mean they don't have a driving need for support, communal togetherness, or collaboration.They do join groups, parenting, educational, as well as many others, but they want to avoid the school "feel."

Additionally, I can see how a project model and platform would work for homeschoolers and their parents. Homeschooling often involves collaboration similar to software development. Needless to say the Subversion and TeamForge platform would be ideal so that children could work together on various projects, keeping all versions of a project and adding to it, while parents could make use of collaborating on resources, documentation, and discussion forums.

Both the open source community model and the CollabNet platform and tools would work well for the homeschooling crowd, and no doubt many other non-developer types.

I'm noticing more communities wiggling out from "the man" and opting for an open environment in which community drives and guides itself. Everyone seems to be tiring of corporate or institutional pressure and dictates. I think we'll be seeing the open source community model becoming more the norm than not over the next few years. And it will be interesting and fun to see what kind of creativity emerges from these communities of free thinkers.

 

I spent a great half-day at CloudCamp @ CommunityOne, this week. This was an Unconference, "a facilitated, participant-driven conference centered around a theme or purpose," meaning that the agenda and content were provided by the participants. The format can be very effective, especially in cutting-edge, rapidly evolving areas like this.

Indicative of the state of cloud computing, our first order of business was to hammer out a definition: what is "Cloud Computing"? We quickly agreed that abstraction from hardware management was a key thought, but I don't think anyone really believes that's the whole story. Certainly not this group! As we talked, it became clear that most participants thought Cloud Computing also requires refactoring your application for horizontal scale, statelessness and location transparency, and a few other fairly new programming disciplines. These might be part of the definition, or perhaps just "best practices," but they were high on everyone's interest list. (There is, by the way, some good work on-going at NIST in defining the terms of cloudy discourse.)

What strikes me in all this is that, if you're deploying into a cloud, you're going to need several of 'em. Just as you can't let developers and testers and untried code onto a production system, so also a production cloud needs to stay clean. You may be able to share lower levels, but you'll need security separation, debugging tools, experimental versions, and so on. NIST talks about three "cloud delivery models":

• Cloud Software (Applications) as a Service
• Cloud Platform as a Service
• Cloud Infrastructure as a Service 

If you're building the applications, you might be able to share the platform with a production application instance, but not the application itself.  Similarly, if you're building the platform, then shared infrastructure can work, but you'll need a sandbox platform.

This all fits very nicely into CollabNet's Lab Manager component: the Lab Manager can allocate infrastructure instances from several providers, and track the profiles that distinguish production from test, test from development, application from platform, and so on. If you're developing at the Infrastructure level, you can use the Lab Manager to allocate physical boxes in your own office, so you can poke and prod. If you're working at Platform level, you can allocation physical boxes anywhere, and exercise your location transparency in and out of lab, test, and even production. And if you're clouding up your application, you can float blissfully above all that, while still complying automatically with your local policies.

Last week I attended the Virtual Edge Summit, which  focused exclusively on providing education, training, and solutions for planning and producing virtual events. I attended the first day in person, and the second day virtually.

It's not surprising in this economy that virtual conferences are becoming more popular. What I did find interesting was the number of virtual conference vendors out there, and the quality of their software and services. In addition, it was fascinating to listen to some of the top dogs, such as IBM and Oracle, speak about their experience with virtual conferences, the mistakes they made, how they corrected, and what expectations should be.

Conferences are at heart about community. You aren't bringing together hundreds or thousands of people just for the heck of it. Every conference must have a purpose, a goal that is wrapped up in intention to better serve that particular community with services, products, and communication. After all, this is not a one way street. Companies need to find out what their communities need from them and how they can better serve them. Conferences are a great opportunity to do just that.

So, when considering a platform for your virtual conference, it's vital to make sure it's going to satisfy the social aspects of a conference. All the speakers at the Virtual Edge Summit made it clear that virtual conferences do not replace face-to-face contact and in-person conferences, but rather they extend and enhance the typical conference. Businesses need to make sure the virtual experience is every bit as satisfying as the in-person experience.

Most of my experience with virtual conferences and meetings has been in Second Life (SL). I like SL a lot, and use it way too frequently for my personal fun, but I have found professionally that SL has a steep learning curve for many, has big computer requirements, and therefore some attendees are less likely to join that platform. What is great about SL, though, is the 3D environment lends to a feeling of "being there" and having avatar-to-avatar contact gives more of a face-to-face feeling than does 2D.

The Virtual Edge Summit did a great job of uniting the in-person experience with the virtual. While in sessions, we could see the virtual session while they had us on a screen, so we could see each other. Virtually folks entered their questions and comments through text, and chatted with each other, commenting on what the speakers were saying, while listening to our in-person questions and comments.

The Virtual Edge Summit used VirtualU, a virtual universe created by Digitaltell Inc. This platform provides a 3D and 2D experience, which I really liked. First you download the software, which has a small footprint, then select an avatar. Navigation buttons are at the bottom of the screen at all times. The virtual environment is on the left, while a small panel of 2D features is on the right, giving you access to any file downloads, such as PDFs, text chat, etc. It was nice to use the software in a real conference to see how it worked. Other vendor software there worked similarly, some using only 2D and menuing systems, which offered a lot of nice features.

For CollabNet, since we are a smaller company, some of these platforms are going to be out of our budget. I'm researching less expensive alternatives, while being careful that the platform gives as "real" a conference experience as possible. Community is important to us, and one big attraction to having a virtual conference is that more people can attend since travel is not an issue.

I would love to hear from you on your experiences with virtual conferences, how likely you would be to attend a CollabNet virtual conference, and what some of your expectations would be.

Another interesting use of this platform is that some companies are extending their websites with this software so that folks can visit virtual chats and 3D forums year-round. Sites have had text discussion forums for a long time, but it seems our online communities are getting 3D face lifts, such as extending into places like Second Life or platforms like VirtualU. I welcome your thoughts on this topic as well.

Dana dnourie at collab.net

I must admit, I really enjoy my job, and the industry that I'm in. This week I went to the Virtual Edge Summit conference in Santa Clara. Today, I am attending that same conference, but I'm participating while lying on the couch, laptop on my lap (go figure) in my jammies, and getting other work done at the same time.

Virtual meetings and conferences are wonderful. I'm not saying this replaces face-to-face interaction, but there are many advantages to attending meetings and conferences virtually:

1. Convenience -- no traveling; easy to join in; can squeeze in between other tasks because you don't have to go anywhere
2. Increases productivity -- you can do other work when parts of the meeting don't apply to you, or during conference sessions of no interest to you
3. Document share -- you can share documents or other computer assets instantly
4. Increased communication -- while one person is talking, you can IM others pertinent information
5. Expense -- virtual conferences and trade shows cost a lot less to run than physical ones, or extend the physical
6. Increased Participation -- Folks from all over the planet can join since no physical travel is involved
7. Near face-to-face - Video and avatars, plus live chat or voice, provide a near face-to-face experience that is immediate

I'm looking into various software applications for CollabNet to use for virtual conferences and trade shows. Yesterday while at the Virtual Edge Summit in person, I had a chance to talk to a few vendors. My experience has been mainly with Second Life, so this was a nice opportunity to see what other folks are using, and what features are provided.

Some of the software was mostly 2D, some of it 3D similar to Second Life, and one ran in the browser, using graphics and a menu system. I was impressed with all. Some are quite pricey but have a lot of features. I'm also looking online for less expensive alternatives, and to see what is available.

I welcome suggestions from you folks who have experience with particular software that you really like. I'd also welcome hearing your experiences with virtual conferences and tradeshows.

Email: dnourie at collab.net