Connecting Eyeballs

In his keynote at the Linux Foundation Collaboration Summit at Google, Ubuntu chief Mark Shuttleworth focused on the importance of collaboration. For Mark, collaboration inspires innovation and tools and processes that help collaboration are key to maintaining the edge of innovation in FOSS. I couldn’t agree with Mark more. Mark observed that barriers to collaboration include too many interfaces to communicate with, rigid community structure management, attitudes of “us vs. them”, poor project management, and insufficient standardization. He said that while there are many collaboration techniques and tools WITHIN global open source projects, there are not many ACROSS these projects. Many of his efforts try to connect islands of eyeballs through the tools the Ubuntu community is building - Launchpad, Bazaar, Rosetta, UbuntuForums. Otherwise, a lack of tools and standards across projects are hampering bug tracking, submission of translations & patches and testing. He cited the GNOME project as a great example of communication across projects especially in helping downstream developers.