Buidling Great Communities

Tomorrow Paolo Juvara and I will bet at the Open Source Business Conference (OSBC) in San Francisco, CA.

OSBC is the premier strategy event for the open source industry. It was founded in 2003 by Matt Asay, who is an Openbravo advisor. Paolo and I plan to meet several of our peers to exchange ideas and best practices.

Additionally, I will participate in a panel to discuss the nuances of community building. The panel will be moderated by Stormy Peters, Executive Director and the Gnome Foundation.

Key ideas I will voice include:

• The importance for all the company to become "community" and embrace community processes and communication channels
• The importance to lead and set example if you want others to follow
• The importance of recognition and meritocracy
• The importance to invest in tools to lower collaboration barriers

I bet you recognize some of the initiatives we are taking in Openbravo to make the above statements a reality.

I will share my learnings after the conference in a follow-on post.

The future of Open Source in Europe

Next Wednesday 24th September, I will be in Paris to attend the Paris Capital du Libre event.

I will participate in a panel to discuss the future of Open Source in Europe.

You can find the agenda for the event here.

See you at the first international Openbravo community event

There is no doubt that Openbravo's community is growing very fast. The strength of the product -which has been in production since 2001-, and a truly open company vision, which places the community at the core of everything we do (from development and testing to documentation) is no doubt helping.

Born on April 19th, 2006 (the date when Openbravo's code was first was published in SourceForge) the following indicators clearly show Openbravo's community has enjoyed a remarkable activity:

• More than 350,000 accumulated downloads (today we have more than 1,000 average downloads a day)
• 1,400 bugs reported
• 41 registered localization projects
• 7,500 messages in 11 forums, with
• 172 individuals participating every month (17 are Openbravo employees)
• 67 registered developers in SourceForge.net (31 are Openbravo employees)
• 933 registered in the wiki (30 are Openbravo employees)

Right now I am getting the final confirmed attendants in our first international community gathering in Barcelona: the so called Openbravo Get Together and they look great! We have confirmed the attendance of almost 200 participants coming from 31 different countries representing all continents.

We will cover several topics, including business and technical aspects. We also will show case one of the first tangible results of the Open Solutions Alliance: the Common Customer View project's single sign-on.

For all of you attending ... THANK YOU and a WARM WELCOME TO BARCELONA! I don't have any doubts that you will enjoy the event and will help bring Openbravo's community one step forward.

For those that you can not attend, don't be sad: we will post the different presentations and summaries of the different sessions.

This is only the beginning!

SAP's carpet

Today I am in Hannover, where Openbravo is participating in the largest European tradeshow, CeBIT.

The show is breathtaking for its gigantic size. There are 25 halls dedicated to IT categories such as telecommunications equipment, consumer electronics, solutions for financial services or the public administration. More than 6,000 companies are exhibiting there. The largest area is dedicated to Enterprise Software and spans across 8 halls.

SAP has deployed a flabbergasting booth (jumbo booth I should call it), which occupies almost half a pavilion. The infrastructure is a tribute to the sheer power of the company, and must have required a millionaire budget to set up. Even the carpet of the whole area has been specially manufactured to sport the SAP logo on it!

Ultimately, these marketing dollars all come from the bills paid by SAP's customers. This brings me to the point I wanted to make in this post: Can a different business model enable a more efficient use of those resources? Proprietary licensed software benefits from large economies of scale that require tremendous marketing effort. Open Source, on the contrary, focuses on development and leaves marketing mainly to the positive word of mouth derived from a good product.

No matter how successful Openbravo becomes, I don't think it will ever have a customized rug. On the other hand, I don't believe Openbravo will need one to convince its customers about the quality of its product...

LinuxWorld Open Solutions Summit

In a couple of weeks I will participate in a roundtable on the next edition of the LinuxWorld which will be held in New York, NY. This time the event is dubbed Open Solutions Linux.

The rountable will be the official presentation of the Open Solutions Alliance and will be moderated by Collabnet's Founder and CTO, Brian Behlendorf. I will be sharing the panel with executives from participating alliance member companies, including:
- Kim Polese, CEO, SpikeSource
- Tom Manos, CTO, Centric CRM
- Javier Soltero, CEO, Hyperic
- Barry Klawans, CTO, JasperSoft
- William Soward, CEO, Adaptive Planning
- Andy Astor, President & CEO, EnterpriseDB Corp.

I would love to see you there. This is Thursday, February the 15th at 10:15 am. You can find the details for the session, at "Open Solutions AllianceForms to Promote Interoperability Between Open Source Solutions"

To Share or Not To Share

Last Friday I had the pleasure to participate in a roundtable to discuss about “Ideas, Enterprises and Open Knowledge”. The roundtable was part of the Powerful Ideas Summit (see my previous post).

A number of powerful ideas (honoring the name of the event) were put forward, but I would like to single out here one of the thesis of John Perry Barlow (a real character and co-founder of the Electronic Frontier Foundation) about the benefits of sharing.

He talked about the dynamics of intellectual property as opposed to physical property, and highlighted an interesting difference. Whereas with physical goods, its value increases with the scarcity, with intellectual property exactly the opposite happens. The value of an idea increases with its diffusion. Obviously there are many businesses based on owning ideas (call it licenses, patents or copyrights). And very profitable businesses indeed: software and pharmaceutical companies among them. However, these businesses are still successful because their ideas have reached a wide dissemination: Windows and Office for Microsoft or Aspirin for Bayer to name a couple of examples

In my keynote, titled “Building Global Open Source Enterprises” I also presented a similar argument: “Sharing your assets, strengthens your business”. This is a counterintuitive argument to many, but I can tell you that every day I see more tangible evidence that the statement is true. What other, more powerful, mechanisms exist to spread an idea than freely sharing it (with the help of the Internet, I might add)?

For me, being an entrepreneur who is trying to build a successful business following this concept, the beauty of it is that sharing is not an attitude easily replicated by your competitors. Many businessmen are not prepared (or even afraid) to embrace this concept, or they don’t know how to do it (Should I share all or just a part of my knowledge? What tools should I use to ensure that sharing is an activity that works both ways in and out of the company?)

Powerful Ideas Summit

Next Friday 26th I have been invited to participate on the Powerful Ideas Summit. The event has been beautifuly organized under the direction of Adolfo Plasencia by the University and Science Department of the Generalitat Valenciana and the Valencian Institute of Small and Medium-Sized Enterprises (IMPIVA).

The objectives of the summit are the following:

This Meeting has as a main objective to be a meeting point for sharing different visions, expertise, best practices, ways to see and do things differently in the world, joined by a common interest that cannot be given for granted: that of imaginative creative intelligence that boosts business creation, and which will be the shearest measure of its liveliness and high standard on a long and short term basis, as well as one of the most significant data for its future configuration.

In a keynote speech I will talk about Openbravo's experience delivering an open source application to small and midsize enterprises worldwide. Later I will also join a very promising round table to discuss about open source business models with:
- John Perry Barlow, co-founder of the Electronic Frontier Foundation
- Juan Tomas García, blogger and MonoLabs founder and CEO
- Alfredo Romeo, Blobject.es founder and CEO
- Julio Yuste Tosina, Vivernet managing director and creator of LinexEmpresas
- Juan Reig, President of the Malaga's Open Source World Conference
There are also a number of high profile participants, who will account for a very interesting gathering of ideas. I really look forward to positive energy that this type of events generate. I will keep you posted with my conclusions.