Shout or Leave? - Open-source community governance

I’ve often thought that open-source contributions are towards “social good”, but I also realize it is a fairly naïve way to look at the open-source world. I was listening to a friend’s frustration of getting people to work together. She is a social worker and now in a political party is trying to make people work together to do “social good”. Participating closely in 3 fairly large open-source communities and following a few others closely, she asked me how I saw it works in the world of open-source. That’s where I thought it might be good to post my thoughts.

Open-source in its literal definition is just putting your code out. Doesn’t mean anything more. Though we have associated a few implicit connotations with the concept. Particularly, that there is an open, bazaar-like mode of working, which can be thought of as similar to the concept of democracy. But as we can see from the political conditions in different parts of the world, democracy isn’t one single thing. It is indeed a group of people working together towards a common goal, ideally each person having an equal weight of vote. But as the world is not idealistic, the more pragmatic meritocracy is acceptable. The open-source world looks at meritocracy through a number of aspects like code contributions, advocacy, documentations etc. with the general focus being towards getting work done. Yet, most research and discussion around open-source misses out on the aspect of power, tradition and culture of the communities that political scientists and sociologists have talked about for a long time. Open-source communities like other human networks have a vision of meritocracy and sometimes evangelize this vision, but often find it hard to practice.

Some open-source communities do have a BDFL, while others generally play by the resources rule. Resources include money, people, ideas and the group that possess these are generally considered more powerful. Some companies because of their “cool” products automatically make “cool” suggestions to the community and their work is “cooler” than the average contributor’s work. Because a developer works for a “cool” company, does not necessarily mean that every developer from that company has better skills than your average contributor. Some open-source communities value context-of-use, while others value “de-contextualization”. Many researchers have highlighted that domain-specific open-source software communities are better suited by being contextual. While, this challenge of being contextual and translating the contextual knowledge to a de-contextual developer, is also well studied, it is really not well enacted in domain-specific open-source community governance. Governance relates to decisions that define expectations, grant power, or verify performance. It consists of either a separate process or part of decision-making or leadership processes. Thus, when the next time you read about OSS 2.0, realize that governance plays a vital role in the challenge of domain-specific open-source communities.

Open-source communities are typically expected to work around an open-source license, some code of conduct pages and roles of developers. These alone, as we see from functioning democracies is fairly inadequate – judiciary, legislature, and executive. Media is often considered the 4th pillar of democracy. A vehicle that allows voices to reflect on how the other 3-pillars are doing. Good governance often comes from the fact that reflective voices are heard, understood and acted upon.

Yet, power plays an important role in sustainability or growth of a community. As an independent contributor (just as a citizen in democracy), one can either look at the power play, raise voice so that others see it or get fed up and leave.

You Aint Virtualized Till You’ve Used Archipel

I’ve setup a few virtualized environments starting from the good old Xen in 2004. Good web-based, remote management of the VMs has been a sore point for me, since you needed to have some Gtk or Qt app to do all the VM management stuff. Not that the desktop virtual machine management isn’t robust, but its just that when you are travelling and you just want to restart the VM quickly, a web interface does the work quickly.

Another thing about VM management is being able to look at resources in real-time use. There are people out there who love the command-line stuff, but I like a GUI for real-time resource management. Are there too many simultaneous users, high-latency requests, reporting occupying too much CPU? So SSH into a server through the command-line just doesn’t cut it for me.

I recently discovered the Archipel project, when trying to setup a virtualized environment for an NGO without system admin, who don’t need to know qemu, libvirt etc. The goal is that in a few clicks you’d have a virtual machine ready to be used. Another click to restart a VM. Another click to clone an existing VM. Increase or decrease VM memory or CPU cores etc. by moving some sliders. Isn’t that what linode or Amazon EC2 offers you ask?… But I have my own server in a local datacenter, which turns out to be much more ROI-effective and performance effective than those providers in the long-term.

Archipel does all of the above and much more. It is an excellent XMPP-based VM orchestration tool:

Archipel is a solution to manage and supervise virtual machines. No matter if you have a few locally on your computer or thousands through data centers, Archipel is a central solution to manage them all. You can perform all basic virtualization commands and many other things like live migration, VMCasts, packages, etc.

All you have to do is setup eJabberd-based XMPP server, make some configuration like the qemu host and it will find all the VMs from your list. You can even manage multiple hosts with multiple VMs from one eJabberd server. That’s not all. Most of the commands are like chatting to a bot and then it runs commands on libvirt. How cool is that?!? Being able to chat with your Hypervisor!!

On the client-side, you have to install a set of webpages on Apache and this can be on the same host as eJabberd or separate. The pages on this client-side app uses websockets or BOSH and has a nice looking UI. This allows real-time view of the virtual machines and the hosts. I also some the built-in VNC client that uses only JavaScript. So you do not have to install any client on the local machine. It all runs from the web browser. There is some lag, but if you’ve got a good machine and a browser with good internet connection, it works quite well.

There are some bugs in the client app that keep showing up, but all in all this is an excellent system. Virtual machine management cannot be easier than this… This is indeed the future of virtual machine orchestration.

Alter Table for column with Foreign key in MySQL 5.6 Fails

Oracle released the much awaited MySQL 5.6 GA on 5th Feb, 2013. Much to everyone’s surprise and changing direction in some sense, lots of improvements were made available in the Community release of MySQL, which were expected to be only part of the Enterprise Edition only.

Eager to try out the new NoSQL and performance improvements in 5.6, I downloaded the new installer. It is a packaged installer than unpacks and installs connectors, workbench and few other things along with the MySQL 5.6 Server. A surprising place where I got stuck was trying to install OpenMRS. The liquibase changeset uses <modifyType> tag and attempts to change the varchar column size. This works well under MySQL 5.5, but fails in 5.6.

While I’ve tried searching for this change in the release notes, what’s new and few other places, I haven’t found this mentioned clearly for the MySQL 5.6 release. The problem is that earlier you could disable the foreign key constraints check, modify the columns that have the constraints and re-enable the foreign key checks. If you changed the columns on both ends fine, things would just work well. But in 5.6 it seems there has been a change to this and the only mention I’ve found is new error messages that the server can throw. There is probably some tighten of things around the constraints management, but I couldn’t find much.

Here are the server error messages from MySQL 5.6 and MySQL 5.5:

http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.6/en/error-messages-server.html#error_er_fk_column_cannot_change
which wasn't there in:
http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.5/en/error-messages-server.html

Opera to use Webkit engine

Update: Brendan Eich made an interesting post about the fighting the monoculture and the web needs diversity. But I feel Gecko needs to innovate faster to remain useful to the web. Servo is coming too late and platform acceleration is moving slowly. NPAPI/PPAPI is too slow etc. etc.

The news that Opera will be abandoning its Presto engine and moving to Webkit isn’t so much about shock, but is more disappointment for me. I have been a user of Opera for at least a decade now. Although I use Chrome and Firefox for a many things, Opera has remained installed and upgraded because every new release has something innovative in it.

Presto is a nice, lightweight rendering engine, where even with 50+ tabs open, the browser continues to work smooth. Pages scroll fine and they all the tabs open up quickly when you restart the browser. I have a habit of keeping tabs open for pages that I need to go to. Bookmarks don’t just cut it for me. An open tab to me is a reminder of what needs to be done. With Chrome, Firefox or Safari, staying with many tabs is a pain. Crashes are common with those browsers and the system memory usage is somewhat exponential. I don’t know how much of that can be attributed the the layout engine, but Opera does handle it with ease. All Opera users know this and they probably feel a disappointed that future versions of Opera might not be the same.

In some sense everyone agrees to the dominant Webkit position. More so as the world moves to mobile devices, Webkit is the standard layout engine from iPhone, Android to Blackberry. What differentiates the 300 million Opera users to continue using it will be interesting to watch. I’m probably not upgrading Opera to the next release, but if I really wanted to use something I’ve grown up with, they say IE10 also grew up!!

CFP: Theory-driven Interventions in Health care using Health Information Systems

Calls for Papers (special): International Journal of User-Driven Healthcare (IJUDH)
Special Issue On: Theory-driven Interventions in Health care using Health Information Systems

Submission Due Date
2/1/2013 (Extended to 1st March, 2013)

Guest Editors
Saptarshi Purkayastha, Norwegian University of Science and Technology, Norway
Knut Staring, University of Oslo, Norway

Introduction
Theory-driven evaluation came to prominence only a few decades ago with the appearance of Chen’s 1990 book Theory-Driven Evaluations. Since that time, the approach has attracted many supporters as well as detractors. At its core, theory-driven evaluation has two vital components, one conceptual, one empirical. Conceptually, theory-driven evaluations should explicate a program theory or model. Empirically, theory-driven evaluations seek to investigate how programs cause intended or observed outcomes.
Yet, limiting theory to evaluations is somewhat futile, because usually some theory as basis for a “hypothesis” (unless the research is using a grounded approach) is what drives interventions in the first place. For instance, some health information system (HIS) interventions aim to provide information about health system practices towards meeting the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs). A great number of theoretical lenses drive Information Systems (IS) interventions, and there have been attempts at collecting overviews of such theories, e.g., http://istheory.byu.edu. However, even though that list is quite comprehensive, it is not exhaustive – for example, it leaves out important perspectives from design science and information infrastructure theory.
In this special issue we seek to showcase papers that are driven by theory – in planning, in action, in diagnosis and in evaluations. Theory-driven interventions is used here to distinguish from report-style papers, position papers or papers that draw concepts purely from observations without theoretical basis prior to intervention.

Objective
The special issue would like to highlight studies in HIS that focus on doing IS interventions with a theory in mind or with knowledge building/testing in mind. The studies in the special issue would like to explain the phenomenon of IS intervention through IS theory, yet allow medical researchers/practitioners to connect with them. These studies will help medical informaticians or public health practitioners to realize the importance of existing abstracted knowledge (theory) and consider appropriate theoretical lenses for HIS interventions.

Recommended Topics
Suggested topics for discussion include (but are not limited to) the following:
- Participatory action-research as a bottom up strategy to problem solving and achieving change in healthcare
- Distinguishing end-users from super-users and theorizing their views in HIS
- Institutionalization of IS within healthcare practices
- Design science perspectives on HIS
- Interventions that deal with structures in health systems and their evolution
- Efforts at scaling interventions and information infrastructure
- Quantity of knowledge absorption, quantity of knowledge transfer, innovation in HIS
- User satisfaction, performance, perception, behaviour, usage as in Cognitive dissonance theory
- Dynamics of social construction and performance of illness through user-driven healthcare practices
- Capabilities, absorptive capacity, environmental turbulence, agility as in Dynamic Capabilities Theory
- Resource Importance, Alternatives, Discretion as in Resource Dependency Theory
- Speech acts, Communicative action as in Language Action Perspectives when HIS systems capture patient narratives or clinician notes or communication in health systems
- Fit-Viability Model of IS interventions on Health systems
- Bridging the gap between what we know and what is knowable in clinical practice

Submission Procedure
Researchers and practitioners are invited to submit papers (over email to the guest editors) for this special theme issue on or before March 1, 2013. All submissions must be original and should not be under review by another publication. Interested authors should consult the journal’s guidelines for the manuscript submissions at: http://www.igi-global.com/Files/AuthorEditor/guidelinessubmission.pdf. Submitted papers should not be more than 8000 words inclusive of abstract, tables and references. All submitted papers will be reviewed by 2 reviewers on a double-blind basis. Papers must follow APA style for reference citations.

We also request interested authors to send an abstract as soon as possible for discussion.
All submissions and inquiries should be directed to the attention of:

Saptarshi Purkayastha	Knut Staring
Norwegian University of Science & Technology	University of Oslo, Norway
E-mail: saptarsp (at) idi<dot>ntnu.no	E-mail: knutst (at) ifi<dot>uio.no

Try Netbeans 7.3 RC1

The Netbeans 7.3 RC1 is out for everyone to try. After a lot of hardwork from the Netbeans developers and testing and feedback from the NetCAT community, the latest release of Netbeans is out… for the larger community to accept.

Download from here: http://bits.netbeans.org/netbeans/7.3/rc1/

As has been the tradition, the community will decide if the release is good enough through the Community Acceptance Survey. You’ll need the netbeans.org account to complete the survey. But your feedback is invaluable.

Why VoLTE (Voice over LTE) might take really long

There was an interesting article today at the Reg explaining VoLTE (Voice over LTE – Long Term Evolution or 4G LTE) in their WTF series of articles. I’ve been following this interesting phenomenon that over the last few months many telecom operators are rolling-out 4G networks, but not fully utilising the features that 4G networks bring for Voice-Over-IP (VOIP).

So to give a bit of background on LTE and its advantages that I’m talking about. LTE being a purely IP network has the advantages of managing just one kind of data packet. This means that we can build tools around only managing IP and data packets. So all your gateways and routers could be optimized to lessons that have been learnt from using internet firewalls, messaging routers and what have you… Voice is also sent as data packets instead of having a different frequency for voice. GSMA puts some advantages to VoLTE:

1. Single implementation promotes scale
2. Single implementation reduces complexity
3. Single implementation enables Roaming

But as you’ll see, its not as simple to move an existing infrastructure to another one. We’ve seen this in the case of IPv6 as well. Information Infrastructure  theory discusses in length the challenges of evolving/moving infrastructures. They don’t happen overnight, nor is there an obvious/expected path to how it’ll evolve! A couple of months back we heard Verizon’s deployment of 4G LTE, “there’s no rush for VoLTE”. If not using VoLTE, one can re-route the voice calls to the old-style Circuit-Switched (CS) network. But this handover between the network creates a lag of 3-4 secs, and my guess is that on heavy traffic could take longer. Investing in this handover might be another headache for the telecom operator, but that seems to be the path most of the operators are taking. The Reg article asks an important question “Are phone users - most of the population these days, though rather fewer of them will be 4G early adopters - going to put up with the pre-call lag? Will they accept a lesser experience than they're used to?”. An important question and the answer could be that operators will use 4G for data services and 3G connection for voice. So they’ll not move to 4G completely and still have their 3G equipment.

There is path dependency that the operators will take and this will result in much slower adoption of VoLTE. So while the operators think it might be fine to make the users wait a few seconds to get on the call, I don’t think users will appreciate that… I hate listening to some stupid beeps or never connecting the call on CDMA networks in India when making an urgent call!! We want 4G for the data speeds, but we decrease usability through the route which operators are taking. Why not get into VoIP apps through which calls can be made? Monetize that instead? Forget the fear that you’ll lose money from voice calls. Increasing volumes on data services will help. As an operator, you can always bundle cheap calls when using that VoIP app that you install as part of the SIM card.

Insourcing for Development – A Networks of Action Approach to GSD

When presenting “The Research Agenda for IT impact sourcing”, Heeks places Ethical outsourcing and Social outsourcing within the scope of what can be broadly referred as the use of outsourcing for development. In the BoP (Business Operation Process) outsourcing continuum he differentiates these from Exploitative Outsourcing and Commercial Outsourcing. You can read about these terms in depth on his blogs. The focus of Social Outsourcing is on contracting out goods and services into social enterprises. In their paper, Heeks & Arun (2010) highlight that social outsourcing has the potential to deliver development benefits to marginalized groups.

In the IT impact sourcing model the idea is to create sustainable jobs in communities where opportunities are low and can act as income improvements. While this is a useful and more common way to look at developmental impacts of outsourcing, there is another way to use IT for Development. And that is through the view of offshore insourcing.

Global Software Development (GSD) is a fairly common practice in large software projects. As an arbitrage in globalized markets, it is more common practice to contracting with a wholly owned subsidiary located in another country. This is offshore insourcing. While insourcing in itself might be offshore or in-country and there has been a recent push at GM towards insourcing, offshore insourcing has many advantages that are seldom described in research. This is what I’d like to add to the research agenda for IT impact sourcing.

Titlestad, Staring and Braa (2009) highlight how the design of health information in the global south has been co-ordinated in a GSD fashion. The project’s core development on what is referred to as global release happens at the Univ of Oslo, Norway, but the requirements for this comes from different local teams based in the “global south”, as can be summarized from their paper below:

Since this is an open-source project (DHIS2), the idea of wholly-owned subsidiary might be unconventional to think about, but being part of the same global research network (HISP), each of the local nodes actually act similar to what would happen in a large global software corporation. Thus, the local software requirements, design and use happens in different countries in the “global south”, but most of the global/generic software development happens in Norway. This type of offshore insourcing is done to keep “generativity” (Gizaw, 2013) of the software intact, such that it can be “ready-for-customization” and be “flexible”, which does not have the features that are specific to a country implementation. This allows new implementers or new country to use DHIS2 without any costs to software development, although only customizations to the context need to be done. Even then, the generic features are available at a much lower cost (following the principles of libre software) for the new implementations than it would, if they were to develop the features from scratch.

How the GSD model has contributed to developmental impacts in many countries in “global south” has been discussed through many research articles. Staring & Titlestad (2008) describe the global software development and commons-based peer production of DHIS2. Through practical examples of the project they discuss the software development practices that are aimed at improving public health sector in the south. Many other researchers in the HISP network over the years have shown the developmental impacts resulting from the project and its use in developing countries. This action-research approach of the HISP network has been referred to as “Networks of Action”, where the method of action research has been shown to have sustainable developmental impact in the “global south”. Combining these concepts of Insourcing for the purpose of development using the Networks of Action approach is what should become part of the IT impact sourcing research agenda.

This blog post is just to introduce the idea that instead of focusing on outsourcing alone, “IT impact sourcing” can also cover insourcing and development through insourcing. Much more detailed analysis and discussion on this will be part of an upcoming research paper.

NetCAT 7.2 goodies and 7.3 just got started

The Netbeans Community Acceptance Testing (NetCAT) for v7.2 concluded at the end of July 2012. It was a very productive testing process for the Netbeans community. Details about the NetCAT 7.2 are here. Beyond improving the quality of our favourite IDE, depending on how much you have contributed, Oracle also gives out goodies to the participants.

The goodies I received this time around includes a very large towel, a nice t-shirt, 2GB memory stick, notebook and pen, an acknowledgement letter detailing my contributions and points to the program and this new Oracle-branded mint!! Strong mint!! At least from the envelope, Sun is still alive… Hurray!!

If you’d like to get similar goodies or just improve the quality of Netbeans, participate in the NetCAT 7.3 which started 10 days back. Its not too late to participate. Signup to the mailing list and add yourself to this wiki page. You’ll get points for participating in discussions over email/forums, reporting bugs, participating in surveys and following a manual testing script by being part of Tribes that test specific functionality. So its not very hard… you just have to simply use the daily or beta builds and give feedback to the developers. Go for it!!

Limits to growth?–waiting for the 40yr update

While dabbling around arguments on how development hasn’t reached everyone, especially looking at the cases in India and Gujarat, I’ve also been reading the book Limits to growth – the 30yr update (thanks dada!!). This post is mainly to say that I desire to read the next update of this masterpiece of work that has been updated over the years since it was first released in 1972. Hunter Lovins says “If you only read one book…make this it!”. I’d say the next one “40-yr update” will be more interesting, given the global financial crisis!!

Just last night I watched, Michael Moore’s exaggerated critique on Wall Street – “Capitalism – A Love Story” and that made me think how different would the world be today, if as the movie puts it, we had a love story with Democracy instead of Capitalism. Instead of Socialism, he suggests it should be called Democracy… I wonder though if economics can be simply governed through a set of political principles. I know Adam Smith talked about political economy some centuries ago, but was his perspective too simplistic to look at the globalized world that we live in today? Would we be able to label China as a non-democratic Capitalism or FDI in India as global capitalism and not Socialism? Its hard to argue for any of these labels; to look through Marx or Smith’s worldview. Because in my opinion, the complexities around globalized economies makes it much harder to box political economies any more. The US Wall street has much more effect on the farmer suicides in Maharashtra or Andhra Pradesh than what Smith or pure Capitalists or free-enterprisers would have us believe. As Meadows said in 1972, we have “overshot”. We haven’t prepared ourselves better before globalizing. The three causes as they say for overshoot are the same, whether personal or planetary -

• There is growth, acceleration and rapid change
• Some limit, some barriers beyond which the system may not safely go
• Delay or mistake in perceptions and responses that strive to keep the system in limits

Growth is believed to be necessary for employment, upward mobility and technical advancement. For places with poverty, growth is believed to provide resources out of poverty. Growth can solve some problems, but it creates others. That is primarily because of limits and the book highlights the limits very nicely. The book was written 10yrs back before sub-prime crisis, debt problems etc. that have affected nearly all of the world’s interconnected populations. Greed, overshoot, delay in perception or response, whatever you may call it… it has highlighted that there are limits to growth and how we can’t sustain this single-minded approach to achieve growth

I’m a bit sceptical on how World3 (their model) bases itself on the central assumption that population and capital are structurally capable of exponential growth. They cite examples of different countervailing pressures that they’ve added as feedback to the model, but I’m less convinced that they’ve had enough considerations on emigration, where people are moving back to growing economies as soon as things have started to slowdown in rich countries.

What is brilliantly highlighted in the book - that growth in the way in which it has happened since 1930s has created enormous disparity. A fourteenfold increase in world industrial output since 1930s has created more disparity and hasn’t ended poverty. Another fourteenfold increase (if possible with earthly limits) would not change it either if we continued in the same way… Running the system harder or faster will not change the pattern as long as the structure is not revised. And over the last 10yrs, since they wrote the book, if anything, we see increasing disparity and faster running on this non-sustainable system.

While the book and World3 model supposes many ways to collapse, it also in Chapter 7, shows a model that can lead the world to not collapse. They call this “Sustainable System”. In Chapter 8, they suggest “Tools for the Transition to Sustainability”. They mention that “Everywhere we find folks who care about the earth, about other people, about the welfare of children and grandchildren”. Not just their own, but of others. The problem is are these folks doing enough to change the model? Are we so many and doing so much as to move towards sustainability? They say the next revolution has to be Sustainability, just as the previous 2 revolutions were Agricultural and Industrial. I wonder though will all those who have not been touched by the previous 2 revolutions be able to “leap-frog” to the third revolution? What tools do we have to reach a sustainable system – Visioning, Networking, Truth-telling, Learning, Loving. Sounds like the Buddha??

Though there is no way of knowing for sure, other than to try it.