Slides of my opening keynote at the openSUSE Conference (http://conference.opensuse.org/) on 2009-09-17

1. Working in a Virtual Community
Lenz Grimmer <lenz@grimmer.com>
<
http://lenzg.net/
2009-09-17 | openSUSE Conference 09 | Nuremberg, DE

2. $ whoami
1998 2002
2008 2010?

3. MySQL AB, Jan 2008

4. Advantages
● Contribute from anywhere
● Setting your own work schedule
● Time zone coverage
● Less distractions

5. Personal Requirements
● Skills
● Communication
● Language (English)
● System administration
● Self-motivation
● Working in isolation
● Fast/reliable Internet connection

6. Disadvantages
● Work/life balance
● Isolation
● Time zone differences
● Communication overhead
● Decision making processes

7. Language / Culture Barriers

8. Passion and Disagreement

9. Social Aspects
● Trust
● Leadership
● Mission and Culture
● Open & direct communication

10. Collaboration

11. Collaboration Tools
● Mailing lists / Forums / Archives
● Wikis / Documentation
● Public / Shared Calendar
● IRC / Chat (AIM, ICQ, Jabber, etc.)
● Skype / VoIP (Asterisk)
● Social Networks / (Micro-) Blogs
● News aggregators

12. Collaboration Tools (2)
● Public Issue/Feature Trackers
● Automated builds / Continous Integration
● Downloadable snapshot builds
● DVCS (Bazaar, git, Mercurial)
● Source Code Browsers / Cross References

13. Meetings & Conferences

14. Travel

15. $ cat /etc/motd

16. Questions / Discussion
Thank you!
Lenz Grimmer
<lenz@grimmer.com>
http://lenzg.net/