Google Tech Talks February, 25 2008 ABSTRACT We all love to hate large software systems. They are hard to build, hard to evolve, and don’t work very well. Why is this? A lot of reasons, some social, some technical, and some socio-technical. We believe that OSS provides an excellent source of data to test hypotheses about the factors that affect important phenomena/outcomes in software projects. Our group at UC Davis, comprising bio-informaticians, organizational behaviourists, physicists, and software engineers, is using a range of different approaches to the analyze the veritable torrents of data pouring out of open source projects to understand how things work in OSS, and what tools and techniques can help. One important issue is IMMIGRATION: how do new people join projects, and how can we help the difficult intellectual and social challenges they face. We present two results: 1.a) Can we build “recommender” tools that help programmers deal with “information overload” by helping them focus their attention? 1.b) Such tools have always been evaluated with user studies. Can we do something more quantitative? 2) What are the factors influencing immigration of new developers in Open source projects? Joint work with: V. Filkov, A. Swaminathan, G. Hsu, and students C. Bird, Z. Saul, and A. Gourley We gratefully acknowledge support from NSF (Science of Design and Human and Social Dynamics Programs), the IBM Faculty Fellowship Program, and the GrammaTech and SciTools …
Tag Archives: talks
What's In It for Me? Benefits from Open Sourcing Code
Open Source Developers @ Google Speaker Series: Ben Collins-Sussman and Brian Fitzpatrick What’s In It for Me? How Your Company Can Benefit from Open Sourcing Code As the open source community continues to clamor for more companies to open source their code, more and more executives are asking themselves just what open source can do for their company. There are a number of ways for a company to open source an internal project: from tossing code over the wall on the one hand to running a fully open development project on the other to any combination of the two. This talk will discuss the costs and benefits associated with each method as well as how to successfully launch your new open source project.
Open Office Training
Google Tech Talks June 6, 2008 ABSTRACT Open Office Training Speaker: Michelle Murrian
Open-source architecture to house the world
www.ted.com Accepting his 2006 TED Prize, Cameron Sinclair demonstrates how passionate designers and architects can respond to world housing crises. He unveils his TED Prize wish for a network to improve global living standards through collaborative design.TEDTalks is a daily video podcast of the best talks and performances from the TED Conference, where the world’s leading thinkers and doers are invited to give the talk of their lives in 18 minutes — including speakers such as Jill Bolte Taylor, Sir Ken Robinson, Hans Rosling, Al Gore and Arthur Benjamin. TED stands for Technology, Entertainment, and Design, and TEDTalks cover these topics as well as science, business, politics and the arts. Watch the Top 10 TEDTalks on TED.com, at http
Massively Multiplayer Open Source Game Development
Google Tech Talks October 16, 2008 ABSTRACT An MMORPG project is challenging for any development team, let alone a distributed team of “amateur” volunteers. This talk will explore the internal design of the FOSS MMO project called PlaneShift, and how that design was influenced by the strengths and weaknesses of the team structure and the community. Topics will include server design, network topology, NPC AI and management and player security, among others. Speaker: Keith Fulton Keith Fulton is the CTO at ChoicePay, Inc. in Tulsa, Oklahoma which is an electronic payments company. In his spare time, he has been the principal architect on the PlaneShift project since 2001, along with dozens of other contributors. PlaneShift has over 500000 registered accounts and maintains a small, tight-knit community of players, fans and developers. The game is entirely written in C++ under the GPL.
Greg Kroah Hartman on the Linux Kernel
Google Tech Talks June, 5 2008 ABSTRACT The Linux Kernel, who is developing it, how they are doing it, and why you should care. This talk describes the rate of development for the Linux kernel, and how the development model is set up to handle such a large and diverse developer population and huge rate of change. It will detail who is doing the work, and what companies, if any, are sponsering it. Finally, it will go into why companies like Google, and any other that uses or depends on Linux, should care about this development. Lots of numbers and pretty graphs will be shown to keep the audience awake. Speaker: Greg Kroah Hartman Greg Kroah-Hartman is a Linux kernel maintainer for the USB, driver core, sysfs, and debugfs portions of the kernel as well as being one half of the -stable kernel release team. He currently works for Novell as a Fellow doing various kernel related things and has written a few books from O’Reilly about Linux development in the past.
How Open Source Projects Survive Poisonous People (And…
Ever have trouble getting your point across about open source? If so, this video is for you.
Google Tech Talks January 25, 2007 ABSTRACT Every open source project runs into people who are selfish, uncooperative, and disrespectful. These people can silently poison the atmosphere of a happy developer community. Come learn how to identify these people and peacefully de-fuse them before they derail your project. Told through a series of (often amusing) real-life anecdotes and experiences. Credits: Speaker:Ben Collins-Sussman, Speaker:Brian Fitzpatrick