Writing Open Source software that people will actually use

I gave this presentation at the 2010 Central PA Open Source Conference (CPOSC). Someone suggested I write about Open Source software being used for dispersed team collaboration based on my interviews for Wide Teams, and my knee-jerk reaction was “nobody is using FLOSS for remote collaboration!”. That became the inspiration for the talk.

It starts by covering some of the tools that are available to distributed teams, and why teams are choosing to use proprietary tools instead of their FLOSS equivalents. From there, it attempts to draw out some lessons about writing Open Source social software.

I apologize for the all the “ums”; delivering a talk to a microphone is a rather different experience than delivering to a room full of people, and I don’t quite have the knack of it yet.

1 comment

  1. A few weeks ago I heard the piece Pulling Back the Curtain on the NPR show On The Media. It was really enlightening to realize that our favorite interviewers and radio voices that sound so calm and unflappable are actually uming and humming throughout their interviews. Of course, it might not be worth it to edit out the ums on a small piece like this, but I wouldn't worry about how you sound in a continuous recording.

    http://www.onthemedia.org/transcripts/2010/11/05/06

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