You may have noticed some recent changes here at SourceForge (and if not, that’s ok too.) As a new member of the SF.net team, I’d like to introduce myself. My name is Elizabeth Naramore, and I work as the OSS Outreach Coordinator here. Basically, I get to help ensure that we are doing what we can to help our projects succeed. My outreach also includes interacting with the SF.net and FOSS communities through outlets like this blog and Twitter, so you’ll see my face here quite often.
Who am I?
I’m a PHP enthusiast that has been working with PHP since 2002. Besides being a coder, I am an author, editor, speaker, and an active member of several open source communities, such as PHPC, PHPWomen, and OINK-PUG. I’ve also helped organize conferences such as php|tek, CodeWorks, and the Cincinnati Day of Agile. Also, I am proud to say that I earned my Pitfall Harry badge by sending in a picture of my TV screen showing my high score. A crowning achievement, indeed.
Opening Up
One reason why I’m thrilled to be here is SourceForge’s long standing commitment to open source, and the fact that we continue to be more open ourselves. Our Service Operations Group (affectionately known as SOG) has recently opened more of our internal tools, including peppet 2.0 (a push-based configuration management platform) and a permission based filesystem, based on FUSE and an Apache module. This new filesystem powers our new secure web hosting platform, for which we’re sending out early beta invites.
In addition, you will see us continuing to focus on the FOSS community at large. After all, open source is something that is very near and dear to our hearts, and it always has been. If there is something we can do to keep this industry alive and vibrant, then we’ll do what we can to make that happen. And besides, without open source, we wouldn’t have much to do around here except listen to our servers hum themselves to sleep at night and maybe get in some Starcraft time.
So what does that mean, “focusing on the FOSS community?” One part of that means that there will be a shift on our blog toward the bigger picture. We love the open source projects here, and we will still blog about them. And we will also keep honoring some of our more successful and long-standing projects with the “Project of the Month” spotlight. But we also want to give you resources to help you make your project better, such as how to recruit more people to the team, how to refine your deployment process, how to overcome obstacles with global team collaboration, how to get more users for your software, why documentation matters, and what your options are for licensing. We want you to know about community-run open source events and cool things user groups are doing. We want you to know about tools that might help you code or help your team collaborate with each other. We want to share lessons learned from other projects. In short, we want to talk about things that matter to you.
With that, we’ll open it up. Tell us what you want to hear about. Tell us what we can do to help your open source project succeed. Because, honestly, when open source wins, everybody wins.
Post your comment below, or hit us up on Twitter (@sourceforge). We have a bright, open future ahead of us, and we’d love for you to be a part of it.