11:10 am Bruxelles room == Title "Why should you care about an open infrastructure for your project?" == Abstract (200 word max) In this presentation Karsten will explain how and why it's crucial that your FLOSS project maintain a 100% free/libre and open infrastructure. Hint: because of the scientific method. With the rise of no-cost services such as GitHub and Trello that are useful to FLOSS projects, many projects are choosing to gain the advantage of the tools and the social systems that go along with them. However, there are dangers to the project in using these services. This presentation will briefly cover those dangers, why you should care about them, and how to move your project towards being 100% FLOSS. == Narrative My background in Fedora Project and now CentOS projects, as well as my 13 years at Red Hat, means I'm always seeing the pressure to move to hosted, non-open solutions. In all of that I wrote and maintain The Open Source Way, a community that produces a handbook about how to practice the free/open community methodologies in and beyond software. Today I will also spend some time with how to move and run a project to having the most free and open infrastructure you can. But in order to understand why this matters, there is an important connection I need to make between what we do in FLOSS and the wild success of the scientific method. By wild success I mean that since we began to accept the scientific method as a culture, as a society, we have had amazing changes in every aspect of life and our existence in this Universe. Rather than limit this way of questioning and reasoning, it is crucial that we expand it. The great Arabic golden age is something to remember -- they made amazing advances until they rolled back their usage of the scientific method. The scientific method works because no black boxes are allowed, or it's not legitimate science. I can put this lump of lead in to a black box, twist some dials, and out pops gold! If I don't show every detail of how that black box works, then what I've done is alchemy or fraud, or both. FLOSS is simply a practical application of deliberating makings the scientific method apply to everything. Information must be open, people must be allowed to interact, everyone involved or interested must be able to reproduce results with their own copy of all the tools used. Otherwise, it's just alchemy. To make sure we are talking about the same things, what is the definition of an open an open community and an infrastructure of participation? "Making everyone win" is another way of looking at a FLOSS project's goals. Whatever specific thing you want to build, you want your users to be successful and you want your contributors to be successful. Having an open infra is important to the project because ... Having an open infra is important to the contributor because ... Another reason this matters is your work must be able to go beyond your own encounter with a raptor. Let's spend a few minutes focused on how to do this in the face of everything-as-a-service. We have to be practical and see about moving the direction of change day-by-day. This is done by following the methods and practices of free/open source software, the open source way. This is leaning on the brand of open source to get a point across, not to ignore the essential freedoms of FLOSS. Part of making the open source way infused throughout a project is defaulting to open. Radical transparency is an important tool. ... and remember that we have the time and luxury of doing this the right way - no lives are immediately at stake. You can open your infrastructure and break it up in to segments to allow people access in one area without compromising others. Then you can let them work and build a relationship In planning a new project or trying to make changes to an existing one, start by looking at what is core and essential, what is core but non-essential, and what is non-core. Segmentize what you do so that you can hand out control to aspects of the infrastructure without giving out control to all of it. There are many ways to do this, such as using configuration management and simple checks-and-balances of work done by different people. Remember that you don't have to solve all the problems to start, just work from /default to open/ and scale. Running your own infra may take money, to start or eventually, and this is something that is great for sponsors -- people who ask how they can throw some money at making things better now have something to do. Some examples ... == Notes Caveat: My work has been primarily with Linux distributions, with lots of out connections to upstream projects that we package in the Linux distro. Key to a Linux distro is the ability to rebuild entirely from source. [Explain rebuild from source.] What is fascinating to me is that this relates directly to the scientific method and the risk of the black box. [Explain black box, and why that doesn't work for science. Alchemy example.] [Why this matters for TOSW - explain TOSw, relate to projects, and relate back to the history of science and other open endeavors.] == Guidelines from Cedric Now for those who are still struggling how to fill your 10-15' here are some guidelines – with special thanks toMagnus for giving me the opportunity to put this in written The main question is "how do you draw the line between service that have to be sourced by your community and those that can be out-sourced?" exemple: using your own forge/version control vs using github? In other words can a community run on 3rd party online services? Other questions worth covering: Structure: - what does your community's infrastructure look like? - how/why did you choose specific resources? who did? - how many people to run your infrastructure (volunteers? paid sysadmins?) - are you using 3rd party online services? Evolution - are your needs growing in a particular way? - what do you consider good/bad about your current infra? - new services you are considering or that are being discussed? - are you considering 3rd party online services? which ones? Look at this page http://www.ow2.org/view/IT_Infrastructure/Overview, this is what we have. Maybe that can help you fire some remarks. No need for fancy slides, it is more a workshop, no a show. Even NO slides at all is acceptable but I found that simple slides like notes thrown on the screen can help both presenters and attendees.