Foggy Software

Or ... some thoughts about organizing OpenStack Meetups On February 1st I've had to joy (and hassle) to coordinate another Boston OpenStack meetu p. This time, using Harvard facilities, which are quite different than our previous venue - suffice to say that Harvard is very different than the Lexington Historical Society (you don't need to know where the vacuum is). But I digress. If you were in the room, you know all about the value of a community, so skip ahead to the "closing notes" for links to preso's, future events, acknowledgements and such. What I find exciting about open source projects is the sense of shared mission and destiny. An open source project fails or succeeds to a large extent based on how well it builds a community.  To be successful a project needs to create a dedicated community of users, developers, vendors and service providers. Users have real problems to solve. Real use cases, real businesses, real money. Devel...

or,dissipating   the fog in the cloud Update (Feb 3,2012):  read the meetup retrospective here OpenStack  is creating lots of buzz in the IT industry. Its promise is to revolutionize the cloud market in the same way that Linux revolutionized the operating system market. Part of the reason that Linux was successful is the community of devotees that saw the potential and ushered the code base to where it is today. But communities don't always just happen, they're made with sweat and pizza. My group has taken on the goal of making OpenStack users in the Boston area a vibrant community. The promise of OpenStack and quick pace of activity has spurred a worldwide  wave of excitement, with local groups spanning the globe - from Argentina  to Japan, Australia to British Columbia. I half stumbled into organizing the  Boston meetup group . Being an engineer, it gave me a new appreciation to what it takes to make an event happen. From gett...