OS Communities

Tampere MeeGo Network started with strong interest both from network members and companies. First 4-5 meetups gathered 40 to 50 participants. However, TMN has lost some of it’s attraction lately. Partly that is due to MeeGo Summit FI which took a lot of energy from other activities, since most members were involved as volunteer organizers. Furthermore, Summit might have ‘consumed’ some of the need to have social gatherings at least for a moment. That does not explain all though. TMN meetups have been mostly about talking and discussions. There has not been much doing.

Perhaps we should change our focus to gain more attention and regenerate enthusiasm which we had in the beginning. Some of TMN members have expressed need for more hands-on related activity. This is visible in TMN meetup web discussions:

Something more coding oriented. I personally would be interested in something like “come with your tablet and we’ll help you get started”, other guys could be interested in coding camps focused on the other areas.

[M]aybe we could do a two week cadence, i.e. keep the current timeline for the presentations and news oriented meetups, and have a “enter only if you’re willing to code” type event also once a month but with a 2 week offset.

Perhaps the answer is in focusing on projects, which are run by the community. Projects are hands-on, at least application development projects should be, and software development raises new topics, issues, skills to learn and discuss. There are multiple projects going on inside our community. Current projects can best be described as ‘one man shows’. People are scattered in own projects. There’s nothing wrong with that, but it leads to situation that skills, talent, time and resources are wasted. Perhaps it’s time to find a few ideas for joint development project and participate in that even if it is not exactly what one initially wants to do. Some ideas for joint project has already been tossed in the air. One of those is to implement sort of ‘meetup app’, which would be used for making notes about meetups.

Projects are great, but what’s the big picture?

Again I had to make another drawing about the ‘big picture’ behind the projects discussed above. And again, I failed to make a simple model (skill that I lack, but I’m working on it). After a few moments thinking I found out that we have all the pieces to build/start a joint development ecosystem. Oh yes, the current buzz word ecosystem :) Anyway, what we have in Tampere:

• individual small projects (’itch’ is there, but one hand can’t make it go away)
• lots of skills and tacit knowledge
• people have interest to hands-on doing
• two universities (one is tech) and several other high education institutions.
• lots of companies, which have business interests in open source application development
• ideas, both business origin and from community.
• facilities to use as base (New Factory) and platform for projects.
• Virtual tools to enable communication: MNFI portal, mailing lists, IRC channel (#meego-fi)
• large local app development community (TMN: over 110 members)
• connections to other open source communities (hackerspaces, LUG, vapaakoodi, Ubuntu LoCo) and organizations (such as COSS)

All that needs to be done, is to make all pieces work together. In other words, someone to function as glue-gun and shoot! Below is rather complex looking illustration how things could go.

Benefits for companies

For companies supporting the above model based development are evident (and nothing new). They can test their ideas in volunteer based projects. They can use the community to implement solutions to practical needs or at least feed the community with ideas. During the projects, people generate more skills and knowledge (tacit knowledge might turn into visible form) which can be used in own product development. Needless to say that new talented employees can be found through projects and networks. New people come in from joint networks such as local hackerspaces, Linux Users Groups and other communities.

General benefits for business

Projects create applications and skills, which can benefit open source community.  New applications can create new startups for new companies and enhance entrepreneurship in Tampere region. Some of the apps would most likely be ready for end-users and could be uploaded directly to existing (and future) app stores.

What is needed

Plan to set up ‘developer lounge’, which would have devices for development and education use has been on ice for some time now. This lounge would be located to Demola, New factory. Need for devices is evident. I stumble upon the need almost daily;  many application developers (pure volunteers and people from startups) face sudden need for different devices. Developer lounge would not be limited to include just MeeGo devices. The support would include also devices suitable for iOS, Android and others. What is needed, is some support from local companies. Someone has to maintain the facilities and lounge. Of course hardware is needed too. Devices can be bought or companies could donate those for development and educational purposes.

To sum up, we have all the pieces to boost local application development and create ecosystem that benefits all participants. We just need to sit around the round table and discuss details. I’m willing to take the challenge, what about you? :)

An ocean of ideas

In the early stages when we were thinking about the MeeGo Summit FI content, an idea of hackathon kind of competition came up. Obviously some of us checked out what kind of settings, ideas, rules etc others have generated. Multiple ideas emerged and were tossed around in the community. The whole content and structure of the Meegathon started pretty much similar as competitions around the world. It looked nice and clear with two separate categories: hardware and software. A lot of members wanted to see onsite coding as one of the main features of the competition. That would have probably worked and might have had some success. Nevertheless, it was a bit lame and sounded a bit old and worn. Despite of that, initial competition model was drafted and forgotten for a moment.

It would have been safe to arrange a similar competition compared to dozens of hackathon type competitions around the world. We wanted (some of us) to do something different. We took a risk. Time will tell if the risk was worth it.

Flying gadgets

The idea to include something relatively new as part of the competition came to my mind as I was visiting Helsinki MeeGo Network meetup in December 2010. I was there to give a presentation about the MeeGo Summit FI 2011 and to get ameegos in Helsinki as part of the organizing teams. I presented the ideas and after that there was some mingling and talks between people. Lucky for me, I ended up discussing with Kate Alhola, who introduced me and others to flying gadgets (better know as Quadricopters). I got back to my tasks and forgot the flying gadgets for a month or so. For some reason I just remembered it and started to think it as part of the competition. The more I read about Kate’s work with the Quadricopters and watched videos from youtube, the more I was convinced that this might work.

At this point the composition of the team which was drafting the competition changed. Until that moment, there had been just a few people involved. I expanded the team by involving Kate into the process. This seemed natural. She had the most information about AR.drones and she had already done pioneer work on it. Simultaneously with Kate, two members who had already participated in other competitions were included to the team.  Based on their experiences we dropped the requirement of pure onsite coding (it is still included as valued aspect but not as requirement). Instead we started to approach the competition model from community perspective. Kate kind of pushed us to go there.

The reasoning for the selected structure and rules

AR.drones are somewhat new and cool gadgets. The device was introduced at the Las Vegas International Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in 2010. Because of that, Open Source development in libraries used for creating AR apps is still quite small. Also the development regarding the tools for lib and app development is mostly absent. Instead of forcing competition participants to create something hasty in 24 hours time, we wanted to start a long run development cycle or process. One of the ideas or purposes of Meegathon is to get more people involved in AR.drone lib development. This might create a new community around AR.drone related libs. This is why we have chosen to reveal (30th Jan 2011) the reference scenario months before the Summit.  People need time to produce good quality code and get familiar with the scenario and tools.

We didn’t however want to rule out that people can participate with something else than the given scenario. We intentionally left the back door open. You can participate into the competition with something totally different. You are allowed to choose your own agenda for your project. Furthermore, hardware inventions and unusual use-cases are welcome.

Releasing the scenario early is intended to get more stable code and more ‘wow’ effects. What about after this competition? Most hackathon competitions start and end at the same event. We would like to see other MeeGo events (organized by Nokia, Intel and others) to include similar setting in their future competitions. This could possibly speed up the development and teams could set goals for the development. Furthermore, drones combined with MeeGo devices could be one of the coolest technology demos to ’sell’ MeeGo and Qt around the world.

Part of other activities

Obviously it is fun to play with toys, even when you’re adult. Therefore we have decided to get some quadricopters for the Summit participants to play with. The activities does not have to be complex, just some initial settings for the people to get started. A few drones, lots of space and freedom to explore and try. Having quadricopters without the connection to Meegathon would have been sort of…out of context.

Introduced in TMN meetup

In April 2011 we had Local MeeGo Network meetup in Tampere, where one of the top developers (MAR.drone), Kate Alhola, presented what has been done already. The session was recorded (by several participants) and will be used in Meegathon marketing. Tampere has been lucky regarding the drones, since Protomo (part of New Factory which is the base for Tampere MeeGo Network) was convinced to order one Quadricopter for development purposes. Convincing Protomo lead was not hard at all. All that was needed was to look thrilled like a little kid and ask. People in Protomo like hackers and people outside our community were also interested about it. Some other MNFI members have also ordered their own quadricopter after the TMN meetup and buzz it has generated. Below two video recordings from TMN meetup.

http://www.vimeo.com/19124393

In brief we found out that we can combine the Meegathon, help to boost AR lib development and have fun with the Quadricopter! Did we have this idea in the beginning? No, it just happened :) All it took was to include different kind of people into the process.

Meegathon

Meegathon competition will be opened for teams 31th January 2011. Team size can be 1-3 persons. More information such as detailed competition scenario, rules and team registration will be at http://summit.meegonetwork.fi by the end of this month.

More information about drone:

1. Review
2. Parrot Discussion Forum
3. Drone & MeeGo (Kate Alhola)
4. Technical details
5. Maemo Garage( MAR-drone)

Inspiration:

1. Constructing with drones
2. ‘Surveillance’