[Freeipa-devel] Self-intro: Karsten Wade

[Karsten Wade]

Hi:

This is my self-intro to the FreeIPA community.  It's a bit long, but
I'm sure it's worth it. ;-)  I've been lurking on this list and around
the fringes for some time[1], and I now have an idea of what sort of
contribution I can make.  But first some background so my ideas make
sense ...

I'm Karsten Wade (quaid), some of you may know me from my work in the
Fedora Project (past Docs Team lead and Board member, currently
Fedoran-all-over-the-place).  I work on Red Hat's Community
Architecture team[2], which includes former Fedora Project leaders Max
Spevack and Greg Dekoengisberg.  Our team's job is to:

* Distill Red Hat's broad and deep knowledge on how to create,
  participate in, and grow open communities.

* Share that knowledge and tactics with nascent and evolving
  communities /where needed/ in a series of community consulting
  engagements.

* Help define Red Hat's global community strategy, which stretches
  beyond software to cover customer, partner, sales, and so forth.

FreeIPA is obviously rocking very hard.  The work on v2 is intense;
I've been reading this list unfiltered to my inbox for months, so I
have an idea of how many patches have been flying through. ;-D The
work load and enthusiasm are impressive.

Last October I met with some of the team leaders underpinning parts of
FreeIPA (Rich Megginson, Matthew Harmson, and Dmitri Pal).  This was
part of Community Architecture's goal to talk with various upstream
projects that are in earlier stages of life.  As a result, I asked to
work with FreeIPA.  Red Hat is involved with a large amount of
upstream work[3], and most of these are long standing, providing the
source material for our knowledge distillation.  If I can help get
that clear and useful information from one upstream to this one,
that's a pretty good use of my time.

FreeIPA is at a stage in evolution that is not uncommon in projects
where there is a large presence from one major corporate sponsor.
There is a lot of work going on in the open, but it is mainly
@redhat.com talking with @redhat.com[4].  Although many of you are
experienced open source contributors, you are naturally limited in
your ability to just grab FreeIPA by the collar and say, "You are now
a completely community run project, go!"  That has to grow in to
being, and helping make that happen is what I have to contribute:

1. Growing the participant and contributor base beyond Red Hat, at an
   appropriate rate to an appropriate size.

2. Creating or finishing the parts of the project that allow it to
   scale.

3. Measuring and demonstrating the existence and value of that growth.

Specific ideas around all that are best left for a separate email and
some wiki pages.  Speaking of which ... now that I am self-intro'd,
and if you are still reading this far :), can someone give me write
access to the wiki?[5]  Thanks!

Cheers - Karsten

[1] Way back when, I was Red Hat's senior tech writer leading the work
on directory and certificate system documentation; one of my few
accomplishments was deciding, defining, and kicking-off the conversion
of ~5000 pages of DS/CS documentation from FrameMaker to DocBook XML.
Yee-ha!

[2] http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Community_Architecture

[3] http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Red_Hat_contributions

[4] We like to say, "This is incurring the costs of proprietary,
    closed source software development without any of the supposed
    benefits."

[5] [[User:Quaid]] please.

-- 
Karsten 'quaid' Wade, Community Gardener
http://quaid.fedorapeople.org
AD0E0C41
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