Stormy Peters
Topic:
Companies & Communities, partners in open source?
Company:
GNOME Foundation Stormy Peters is Executive Director of the GNOME Foundation. She joins the GNOME Foundation from OpenLogic where she set up their OpenLogic Expert Community. Previously, Stormy worked at Hewlett-Packard (HP) where she founded and managed the Open Source Program Office that is responsible for HP's open source strategy, policy and business practices. Stormy joined HP as a software engineer in the Unix Development Lab after graduating from Rice University with a B.A. in Computer Science. Stormy is a frequent keynote speaker on business aspects of Open Source Software at major conferences such as the Open Source Business Conference and the O'Reilly conferences, as well as government organizations such as the United Nations and the European Union. Stormy is involved in GNOME and free and open source software because it is changing the world and the community is full of smart, passionate people!
Abstract:
Open source communities are set up for individuals to work together. When they invite companies, they expect individuals to show up, but companies are sending company representatives. The company representatives, while empowered to work on their own, must also represent their company and as companies are not individuals, their motivations are different. The problem is even more complicated when companies set up open source communities of their own.
However, many companies have successfully met the challenge and they participate successfully in many open source communities, including ones they've set up and sponsored themselves. Come learn and discuss how:
- Companies can best participate in existing communities using employees and money as well as tactics like transparency.
- How communities can best invite and work with companies.
- How companies can build communities that grow to be bigger than one company.
