ApacheCon EU 2014

Ever notice that the projects most likely to tell you to RTFM tend to have the worst FM? That's because the virtues of a docs team - Dilligence, Patience, and Humility - happen to be the virtues of kinder politer people, too.

Come learn some tips of writing better documentation, providing better end-user support, and just possibly growing your project community.

Rich has been doing Open Source documentation for 20 years, and some folks say he's kind of good at it.

As part of the Apache CloudStack project, I had a chance to see first-hand some of the good and bad choices made during Apache CloudStack's incubation. We'll take a look at a successful graduate more than a year after its exit from the Incubator, and where things went well and where they didn't go so well. Also will have plenty of advice for companies/projects looking to join the ASF.

It's already two years since OpenOffice graduated as a Top Level Project at Apache. We have more than 100 million downloads and a stable, working community at Apache. In an overall "state of the project" talk, we will see what we accomplished so far, what worked, what can be improved, what Apache gave to OpenOffice and what OpenOffice gave to Apache. Then we will see what can be accomplished in the medium-term future and how the community resources can be used to those aims.

Open Development is often mentioned in open source circles nowadays, as a way to make projects really open, sustainable and meritocratic rather than based on people's titles or hierarchical ranking.
Does this model have its place in the enterprise? Can we apply the open source governance models to enterprise projects, where you'd usually expect a strictly hierarchical decision making process?
The open collaboration methods used by the some development groups at Adobe demonstrate that this is not only possible, but brings measurable benefits in terms of agility, employee satisfaction and quality of the final product.
This talk describes the key elements that make this possible, and provides pointers to developers or project leaders to start using such a model in their own projects.