On February 6, the White House Open Government Initiative launched a government wide public participation opportunity.  As part of the Open Government Directive issued in early December, every major agency published an open government website.

In response the Open Source for America (OSFA) initiative has submitted their:  “Proposed Guidelines for Open Government Plans” to the Obama Administration for consideration. These plans are meant to encourage the government to embrace the open source ideals of participation, collaboration and transparency.

The proposal notes that there is, ” ….a tremendous opportunity to capture the innovation and ingenuity of government employees, who have the means to create their own tools to make themselves more effective, rather than waiting for a cumbersome and unresponsive procurement process. Open source software is, in fact, the most concrete form of participation available to the government’s constituents and its employees”

To get involved the Administration has invited public comments on each agency’s open government page through March 19, 2010. Open source advocates are encouraged to visit these agencies listed on the White House website and share their opinion.

Technorati Tags: government, Open Source, United States

The October edition of the Harvard Business Journal has a contributed article by Intuit co-founder Scott Cooke on how to build your business using communities. I thought it interesting that he used many of the standard “crowd-sourcing” examples like Skype and Wikipedia but no open source software examples. Given Intuit’s proprietary nature I guess I shouldn’t be surprised.

Some tips from Scott that I like:

• Protect experiments from your company’s natural control instincts.
• Let enthusiasts and young employees provide ideas and leadership
• Let users “vote,” early and often.

He makes some other suggestions that I am not sure I agree with in every case but they apparently worked for Intuit. Definately a worthwhile read if you are a community builder.

Technorati Tags: crowd sourcing, Harvard Business Review, Intuit, Scott Cook

As I mentioned before I really like Trent Reznor not only his music but his philosophy on making music. He’s cut out the record labels makes his music available for free. He does make money by selling tickets to shows and albums he produces himself.

I got this note from him this week (actually everyone who registered at NIN.com probably did) asking what you want from NIN – nice touch an artist doing market research. Actually the survey was way too long but he gets points for asking things like, your favorite song, your entertainment preferences, etc. so he can do his job better.

Anyhow as someone who manages a collaborative open source project it’s cool to see that kind of interaction from something infinitely cooler than software, rock and roll. And while I am gettng older and don’t go to concerts as much as I used to I am looking for the best way to support him. So if you are a fan here’s his message (he even throws in a little leet speak — he said pwn3d) and a link to his survey:

Hello everyone.

I’d like to thank everyone for a very successful year so far in the world of Nine Inch Nails. I’m enjoying my couple of weeks off between legs of our Lights In The Sky tour and got to thinking… “wouldn’t it be fun to send out a survey to everyone that’s shown interest in NIN?” Well, that’s not exactly how it went, but regardless – here it is. As we’ve moved from the familiar world of record labels and BS into the unknown world of doing everything yourself, we’ve realized it would benefit us and our ability to interact with you if we knew more about what you want, what you like, what you look like naked, etc. I know it’s a pain in the ass but we’d truly appreciate it if you’d take a minute and help us out. As an incentive, everyone who completes the survey will be able to download a video of live performance from this most recent tour (and I know what’s going through your little minds right now: “I’ll just grab this off a torrent site and not have to fill out the survey!!!” and guess what? You will be able to do just that and BEAT THE SYSTEM!!!! NIN=pwn3d!!!)
BUT
What if we were to select some of those that DO complete the survey and provide them with something really cool? I’m not saying we’ll ever get around to it, but if we did maybe something like signed stuff, flying someone to a show somewhere in the world, a magic amulet that makes you invisible, a date with Jeordie White (condoms supplied of course), you know – something cool. See, you’d miss that opportunity AND be a cheater.
Do the right thing – help us out. You’ll feel better.

Thank you and I’ve had too much caffeine this morning,
Trent

Visit here to take the survey:
https://www.questionpro.com/akira/TakeSurvey?id=1049187

Technorati Tags: NIN, Open Source, Trent Reznor

It’s funny how varied music artists are some artists seem to get and embrace the Internet and others seem to be at war with it. According to this article on Ars Technica, Metallica doesn’t care what anyone says about their music or at least not music fans who write blogs. Apparently they released some rough tracks of their upcoming album to a journalist who reviewed the tracks. Then once he reviewed the tracks they demanded he take down the article.

The Quietus decided to pull the review and replace it with a cheeky note and an old interview with the band. Wired’s Listening Post blog, which has followed the story, notes that this isn’t just about being jerks; management claims that the tracks in question were a rough mix that weren’t ready for prime time, which perfectly explains why they invited journalists to come hear them.

Metallica has acquired a reputation for hating the Internet, which isn’t really true—the band does have a website and it did finally come to iTunes—but the band invited derision from fans with its stance against Napster back in the day. (As a metal band, Metallica of course has long stood up for the principles of fair play, buying your music at retail prices, and not being a rebel.)

Now contrast that position with of Trent Reznor of Nine Inch Nails who gives away his rough tracks and  recently released “The Slip” for free from his website even though he the album is available for sale in retail outlets. In a recent New York Times article Reznor says:

“This one’s on me,” Mr. Reznor announces on that Web page. The album was downloaded more than a million times before the end of May, according to him. A retail CD version of “The Slip” is due shortly before Nine Inch Nails starts its tour on July 25 in Vancouver.

“Aside from any kind of monetization of it, I’m glad to know that a million people have it on their iPods,” Mr. Reznor said. “If you paid for it, great, but I want everyone to hear it, you know? I want to blow people’s minds.

The Slip is released under creative commons attribution non-commercial share alike license with the following message:

we encourage you to
remix it
share it with your friends,
post it on your blog,
play it on your podcast,
give it to strangers,
etc.

I remember when rock and roll was about being a rebel, I am glad that Trent does too. I can’t tell you whether Metallica’s next album is good or not but I can tell you that NIN’s slip is excellent.

Technorati Tags: Metallica, Punks, Trent Reznor

I really wanted to attend the Citizen Journalism Academy presented by the Society of Professional Journalists in Greensboro, NC today but after a hectic spring travel schedule I thought better of it and stayed home to visit with my family. Luckily local social media maven, Wayne Sutton’s (@WayneSutton on Twitter) been sending tweets with the commentary from the program.

One thing that caught my eye was a link to Section 230 of Title 47 of the United States Code (47 USC § 230) part of the Communications Decency Act of 1996.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation has some commentary on it. First the relevant part of the law:

No provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information provided by another information content provider.” This federal law preempts any state laws to the contrary: “[n]o cause of action may be brought and no liability may be imposed under any State or local law that is inconsistent with this section.” The courts have repeatedly rejected attempts to limit the reach of Section 230 to “traditional” Internet service providers, instead treating many diverse entities as “interactive computer service providers.

What that means to bloggers:

Bloggers can be both a provider and a user of interactive computer services. Bloggers are users when they create and edit blogs through a service provider, and they are providers to the extent that they allow third parties to add comments or other material to their blogs.

Your readers’ comments, entries written by guest bloggers, tips sent by email, and information provided to you through an RSS feed would all likely be considered information provided by another content provider. This would mean that you would not be held liable for defamatory statements contained in it. However, if you selected the third-party information yourself, no court has ruled whether this information would be considered “provided” to you. One court has limited Section 230 immunity to situations in which the originator “furnished it to the provider or user under circumstances in which a reasonable person…would conclude that the information was provided for publication on the Internet….”

So if you are actively going out and gathering data on your own, then republishing it on your blog, we cannot guarantee that Section 230 would shield you from liability. But we believe that Section 230 should cover information a blogger has selected from other blogs or elsewhere on the Internet, since the originator provided the information for publication to the world. However, no court has ruled on this.

There’s more commentary on the site but unlike some laws that deal with electronic communications their have been numerous court decisions that have established precedent.

I think it’s a good practice for the “new media” to understand the legalities of all media. I also think it’s a good idea to understand the ethics that good journalist practice and that our spelled out by the Society of Professional Journalists Code of Ethics that boils down to four main themes.

1. Seek Truth and Report It
2. Minimize Harm
3. Act Independently
4. Be Accountable

I believe that Citizen Journalism has gained increased popularity as a result of the accountability factor, remember the Killian documents from Rathergate.

Anyhow, I am sorry I missed the conference especially since I am sitting here blogging and my wife went for a pedicure, quality time bah…

Technorati Tags: Blogging, blogs, Publishing, Section 230, Title 47

Over the last few years there has been a lot of fanfare around open source companies and their liquidation events. Most of the news has been around Sun’s billion dollar acquisition of MySQL or the Citrix acquisition of Xen and even Yahoo’s acquisition of Zimbra. In contrast there was little attention paid to the SourceFire. Actually if you ask most open source users about SourceFire they would probably answer “SourceWho?” If you ask open source users if they have heard of ClamAV or Snort they probably would be able to tell you that they are the leading open source software for virus protection and intrusion detection respectively. Recently, SourceFire has been in the news a bit lately as Barracuda Networks has made a bid for their open source competitor.

Founded in 2001 SourceFire (NASDAQ: FIRE) went public in May 2007. The IPO gave Sourcefire a market capitalization of $347 million. In October 2005 the Justice Department blocked the sale of SourceFire to Israeli owned Checkpoint Software for $225 million. Now Barracuda Networks is making an offer for SourceFire for $188 million. Sourcefire’s revenue for the first quarter of 2008 was 13.6 million and they lost 29 cents per share. Despite this negative trend I still think SourceFire can turn around their backslide by leveraging some under-utilized assets.

Here’s what stuck me as I started poking around, theoretically a Google search will return the most relevant results for a search. For example when I search for intrusion detection the first two results are Wikipedia entries (both which mention Snort) and number three is the Snort.org home page. SourceFire doesn’t show up in the first 50 search results for intrusion detection.

What this tells me is that the Snort brand is considerably stronger than the SourceFire brand. In fact as the page says Snort is the de facto standard for intrusion detection/prevention.

I am a strong believer that if you make open source software you lead with your software and follow with your services. What I mean is that you invest in your open source software community, build loyal users, make the software successful then you capitalize in a way that benefits both your users and your company. I don’t see evidence that Sourcefire has done that to greatest degree.

Most open source companies benefit by sharing the goodwill they created with their software by sharing their names (i.e. MySQL, Red Hat in the pre-Fedora days, Zimbra, SugarCRM). I also have seen some companies fail to capitalize on their brand (Remember when Novell renamed SUSE to Novell Linux Desktop, a big flop). I am surprised that SourceFire does so little to capitalize on their strong security brand. For example, why not name the company Snort Networks.

I also like to check out user forums in open source projects as a sign of health of a project. I was surprised that I wasn’t even allowed to read the forums without registering in detail. Even after I registered I was unable to login and received a must have cookies enabled message (My browser was set to accept cookies but that’s not the point.) The barrier to participation was rather high especially for an open source project. On top of that having your content indexed by Google is a huge help in search results. I was shocked that an open source project was so closed to participation.

Another asset is new to the SourceForge Sourcefire family ClamAV. In my opinion the acquisition of ClamAV should have helped them build their brand. ClamAV has been downloaded over 13 million times according to SourceForge.net and distributed various other ways for many years. The ClamAV mailing lists show a fairly good volume of email and show the signs of a vital open source community. The thing that was puzzling to me is that ClamAV website is almost devoid of mentions of the SourceFire sponsorship. I don’t think they need to wallpaper the site with the SourceFire logo but surely they should get even some minimum benefit from being a sponsor.

Now why do I focus on the marketing aspect of open source? After taking a look at the SourceFire 2007 Annual report I see some interesting things. According to their financials for last year they had revenue of 42.7 million dollars and sales and marketing costs of 25.8 million. That is 60% of revenue spent adding new customers. In contrast their cost of R&D is 34% of revenue. So controlling costs or at least helping leverage what they are spending should have the biggest impact on their profitability.

As I look at the Barracuda Networks offer, it seems like their play is to take a competitor off the market and convert SourceFire customers to their products. And given what others had been willing to pay for SourceFire in the past they probably would be doing so at a bargain price. I believe that SourceFire needs to take a gutcheck and realize that they have been successful because they simply executed a good software strategy typical of a proprietary software company. They made a good product, they offered a good value, and they had good results. However, there is a lot of competition in enterprise software and I think they have never fully leveraged their open source brand. When times get tough you need to tighten your belt and squeeze out every bit of efficiency. Open source offers a lot of efficiency in distribution, marketing, product management powered by a huge community. Figuring out how to better leverage that community is their best opportunity to reverse their fortunes.

[Disclosure: Michele Perry SourceFire's Chief Marketing Officer is an advisor to my company, Zenoss, though she may not appreciate my commentary on their marketing plan ]

[Barracuda Photo Courtesy of Festeban CC non-commercial license http://www.flickr.com/photos/festeban/9777900/]

Technorati Tags: ClamAV, Commerical, Community Leverage, MySQL, Open Source, Snort, SoureFire, Sun, Zimbra

Tonight at 7:00 p.m. there’s a Triangle Tweetup at the Capstrat in Raleigh (near the RBC Center) to discuss Twitter and to network with other Twitter users.

Here’s the venue:

Capstrat, Inc.
1201 Edwards Mill Road, First Floor 102
Raleigh, NC 27607

http://www.capstrat.com

More information can be found on the wiki.

If you want to get together at the event hit me on Twitter @mrhinkle.

Technorati Tags: Meetup, Raleigh, Triangle, Twitter

Today a story hit the front page of Slashdot about Matthew Newhall who posted a draft of his novel on the web in late 2005. Eventually it was downloaded over 6000 time and edited by his readers. The book, “Thicker than Blood” is still downloadable under Creative Commons but for sale at Lulu.com (a company by founded by Red Hat’s Bob Young).

The sci-fi thriller is described as:

The flip of a switch gives Joe, an ordinary mechanic, superhuman abilities. He discovers his new powers after his aunt saves his life with restricted nanites. When the corporation sanctioned by the military to control all nanotechnology discovers his secret, everyone he knows is thrust into a world of deception and treason. Can Joe give the people of the world life-saving superhuman powers, or will the attempt claim his life?

I think it’s an interesting approach to developing any piece of work whether it’s a book or open source software. The question posed to Slashdot readers was, “Is this the first community-edited book published under the Creative Commons”. The theme I noticed bubbling up in the comments was, “Who gets paid, and how?”. I suspect given my experience with open source software that this is just the new promotional technique. I’ll show you what I got and then if you like it, throw me a couple of bones. It’s not unlike Radiohead’s pay what you want release of In Rainbows. I would bet just by virtue of the Slashdot effect the hardcover book which was ranked at 46,680 for sales at Lulu might end up selling a few extra copies today. Maybe it will gain the attention of some acquisitions editor at a small publishing house or a book deal. Either way I suspect putting his work out in the commons will get it much broader exposure than simply self-publishing a less-permissive copyrighted work.

Technorati Tags: creative commons, Lulu, Publishing

Do you know what Moore’s, Metcalfe’s,and Reed’s Law are and how they are related? Have your read Wealth of Networks, Democratizing Innovation, Free Culture, The Long Tail, and Small is the New Big? Find out why in this excellent video of Paul Jones talk to TriLug last month. Do you know that iBiblio that hosts some of the world’s coolest archives and communities (Groklaw, free Roger McGuinn music, Project Gutenberg)

I am very bummed I didn’t make it home from Annapolis in time to see the talk.

Technorati Tags: Ibiblio, Paul Jones, Sunsite

Today I am attending Blog Carolinas a social media conference being held in North Carolina’s Research Triangle Park (that’s halfway between Raleigh and Durham). I am particularly interesting on hearing Andy Beal’s session on Online Reputation Management. Andy recently launched Trackur, an online reputation monitoring service (which I am interested in using for Zenoss).

Here’s what I expect to get out of today’s conference (paraphrased from their website)

• How Social Media is impacting Marketing and Communications Strategies
• How Community can serve as a model to improving organizational productivity
• Network with experts in the fields of On Line Reputation, Search Engine Optimization, Web 2.0 Technology and On Line Community Building

Not sure what the program will be like but just the fact I get this kind of content five minutes from my house seems very cool to me.

Technorati Tags: Andy Beal, BlogCarolinas, online communities, RTP, Social Media, trackur