This year, we got fourteen Google Summer of Code projects accepted. Colin Charles has informed the students, and things can now get started!

The first step is what’s called the Community Bonding Period. That’s happening right now, and also being facilitated by Colin. Colin has written a summary of the Community Bonding period on the Forge Wiki, and there’s also a general description by Google.

We expect great things from the students. We want them to produce code that our userbase can use as features in MySQL.

Given our high expectations for what the students produce, we don’t expect all fourteen projects to succeed. And we do want our students to be an integral part of the MySQL community even after they’re done with the Summer of Code 2008.

I’d also like to add that we’re grateful for the mentoring participation from the MySQL community, where PBXT and phpMyAdmin are worthy of mentioning.

Looking forward to the code produced, and to Colin’s upcoming blogs on SoC progress reports!

References:

• http://code.google.com/soc/2008/mysql/about.html
• http://googlesummerofcode.blogspot.com/2007/04/so-what-is-this-community-bonding-all.html
• http://forge.mysql.com/wiki/SummerOfCode
• http://forge.mysql.com/wiki/Community_Bonding

There’s a reason for Sheeri winning the Community Advocate of the Year award. Her activity level is hard to beat.

If you want a chance to beat Sheeri for 2009, you need to master multitasking. Not only is Sheeri listening to Mårten presenting his keynote. She’s preparing for some vlogging, i.e. recording Mårten’s presentation. And she’s blogging at the same time. And (although she doesn’t know it until three seconds after the picture was taken) she’s getting ready for getting up on stage to receive her 2008 award.

Ah, myself I’m only listening, and taking the odd picture. (Some of them very odd).

Every year, there’s a task that is both difficult and pleasant at the same time: Picking three outstanding contributors from the MySQL Community. Mårten Mickos, MySQL’s former-CEO and Sun’s now-SVP of the Database Group, has just presented the results by handing out the 2008 MySQL Community Awards.

Rich Green, Diego Medina, Baron “xaprb” Schwartz, Sheeri Kritzer Cabral, Mårten Mickos at the award ceremony

This time, our choice fell upon these three community members, whose contributions we very much appreciate:

Code Contributor of the Year: Baron “Xaprb” Schwartz, for the Maatkit toolkit
From the creation of the most popular MySQL toolkit, Maatkit, to his outstanding and comprehensive blogging, we would like to recognize Baron Schwartz for his extraordinary contributions to the greater MySQL community.

Quality Contributor of the Year: Diego Medina
The next award winner has distinguished himself this past year in being the most prolific forum poster, answering questions in multiple categories with great zeal, and for logging countless reproduceable bug reports. For his efforts, we recognize Diego Medina for his outstanding contributions to the MySQL community.

Community Advocate, Communicator and Facilitator of the Year: Sheeri Kritzer Cabral
As the only community member to receive an award two years in a row, this next award winner has once again distinguished herself from her peers in working to promote MySQL, to organize meetups and local events, for blogging about MySQL issues and concerns, and for being an advocate in the truest sense of the word. We recognize Sheeri Kritzer Cabral for her tireless community efforts.

Thank you, Baron, Diego and Sheeri!

Reference web sites:

• Baron Schwartz: http://www.xaprb.com/
• Diego Medina: http://www.fmpwizard.com/
• Sheeri Kritzer Cabral: http://www.sheeri.com/

The very first UC related parties are over, and the Users Conference hasn’t even started!

The first one was Mårten’s traditional and well-liked MySQL staff party in his garden. The coolest and most community significant one was the MySQL Community Pre-Conference Dinner party, though, as advertised on MySQL Forge Wiki. So we dropped out of Mårten’s party at six, to meet with the community.

There were 48 registered people, and I think even more turned up. And some of the guys who turned up unregistered were from Sun.

Sun CEO Jonathan Schwartz crashes the party and is surrounded by community members and MySQLers alike

Rich Green, Executive VP of Software at Sun, also surrounded by Community Dinner attendees

Given that we’ve got record number of attendees at the UC, I think I will have to speed up my discussions, as I got to talk properly only with Florian Haas and Philipp Reisner of Linbit / DRBD, with Kai ‘Oswald’ Seidler of XAMPP, with Marc Delisle of phpMyAdmin, with Volker Oboda of Primebase, other than the MySQLers, ex-MySQLers and Sun employees. Note to self: Blame the jet lag, as this is my second Sunday 13 April 2008 (having got up in Tokyo at 7, and left Tokyo at 16, and arrived in San Francisco at 9 i.e. 7 hours before leaving).

And it seems I also blew my opportunity of flying Decadence Airlines again anytime soon. I was going to handle the payment using Rich Green’s credit card (Rich had to leave a bit earlier), but the restaurant gave him back the credit card and left me with merely signing a receipt. This isn’t going to buy me any aircraft fuel on Netjets.

Footnote 1: Yes, I was teased all evening for the four days we flew “Sun’s Corporate Jet“, i.e. a rental airplane by Netjets from Dublin via Stockholm, Moscow, Izhevsk, Moscow again, and Kiev to Hamburg in March. But it was good, so I suppose I deserve some teasing.

Footnote 2: I googled for “Decadence Airlines”, and funnily enough, one of the links goes directly to http://www.netjetseurope.com/eng/welcome-to-netjets/. I think I will have to plead guilty to that one.

Friday afternoon, I met with Tetsuro Ikeda-san and Teruyoshi Hazama-san of MySQL’s long-time key partner in Japan, Sumisho. Ikeda-san and Hazama-san taught me about their work on full text search in Japanese.

Senna is an engine for fast full text search in Japanese. The Senna project derives its name from Formula I driver Ayrton Senna. “But he’s dead”, I protested. “Sure, but he is a legend and will always be associated with speed.” I cannot protest there — and the numbers I saw for Senna’s full-text search defend the choice of name.

Tritonn is the combination of Senna into MySQL. The Tritonn name refers to two things: Triton Square in Tokyo, where Sumisho has its offices, and to the fact that MySQL through our dolphin logotype is associated with the sea. Tritonn is spelt with two n’s in order to simplify web search, so as not to be confused with the Greek god Triton (the messenger of the deep, son of Poseidon, god of the sea) and the many other things named after him.

I recommended Hazama-san to meet at the MySQL Users Conference with key guys in MySQL Engineering: Sergei Golubchik who wrote MySQL’s Full-Text Search feature, Peter Gulutzan who knows all there is to be known about standards and character sets, and Alexander Barkov who implements all there is to be implemented about character sets.

Good luck to Senna and Tritonn!

References:

• Tritonn home page: http://qwik.jp/tritonn/about_en.html

My Japan trip was full of meetings, as trips to Japan usually are. One of the most interesting ones was at Sun Microsystems K.K.’s site, with a number of people engaged in building Japanese communities for Sun.

Takashi Shitamichi, Yoko Suga, Natsuki Wakabayashi, Jim Grisanzio,
Hiroshi Yamaguchi, Satoshi Kawai, myself, Toshiro Umetsu, Takanobu Masuzuki

From Jim Grisanzio and others, I learned that Japan is Sun’s most active blogging country outside the US, on blogs.sun.com. And I got reminded of the messages heard many times at numerous Sun meetings: That Sun has Community experts both in Marketing and Engineering. On the contrary, MySQL’s Community Team is a separate entity, outside of both Marketing and Engineering, but serving them both.

And that’s an area where MySQL and Sun has a lot to discuss about, in order to understand if there is something to learn from the other party, and how the learnings can be applied and implemented in practise.

There is at least one area where MySQL can learn and contemplate how to implement Sun’s practices: Developer Marketing. We have never used those two words in combination at MySQL, which at times also means that a certain group of MySQL users fall between the cracks — those who contribute to the MySQL community but work for commercial customers. The Community Team socialises with them at Dev Mtgs (such as in Heidelberg last year) and at the Users Conference, and so do the Sales Engineers, Support Engineers and everyone else working for MySQL. Yet, spending time isn’t the same as concerted efforts.

Conversely, the concept of “user” seems to be different at MySQL and Sun. At MySQL, “user” is often used to mean “non-paying customer”. And these users form the core of the charter of the Community Team. We want to smoothen the way for our users, we want them to use MySQL, to expand their usage of and benefit from MySQL, and to share their positive experiences with the rest of the world. And while working on this, the MySQL Community Team strictly does not have an agenda of convincing the users to pay for something, ASAP. Sure, we want our pay check, and sure, we want MySQL (now Sun) to prosper financially. But our main goal is to fill the invisible pipeline of users who may take months or years at the user stage, before even considering to become paying customers.

Some of this forces top management to have quite a strong belief in the good that a community can have for a company. I’m thinking about metrics. It’s not as if there would be ideal metrics for community building. Or rather, there are ideal metrics, such as the number of project wins, i.e. cases where MySQL is being adopted in new projects. That would be highly relevant to know, segmented by various types of organisations. But we don’t have access to those numbers. Forcing people to register won’t work, and voluntary registration gives only a fraction of the new projects as well as a fraction of the relevant data.

My personal conclusion is that I’d rather have a high adoption rate, than know exactly which low adoption rate I have.

And another personal conclusion is that I’d generally rather spend time increasing adoption further, than increasing my level of knowledge of that adoption. That conclusion is less easy to defend, though, as some level of knowledge about adoption rates is essential.

What’s again easier to defend is that exact knowledge about an irrelevant aspect of the adoption rate may fool one to believe that said aspect is relevant. How significant is download rates? Web page hits? Email list traffic? Number of blog postings? Forum entries? And how much of that is directly driven by the efforts of the Community Team, rather than events outside the control of that team (such as new releases, security holes, acquisitions by Sun)?

Looking forward to various discussions on this topic with Ian Murdock and many other colleagues!

Reference:

• Jim Grisanzio’s blog at http://blogs.sun.com/jimgris/entry/mysql_meeting_at_sun_japan

Point your browsers to forge.mysql.com.

• MySQL Forge is the directory for projects related to MySQL.
• New MySQL functionality under work is described on the Forge Worklog.
• New Forge 2.0 features includes site-wide search, commenting and voting.
• Forge 2.0 hence sports ranking of projects.
• Forge 2.0 has a new people section with profiles and listings of contributed tools.
• The tools section is a code and tool repository for smallish code snippets.
• The Preview Section lists sneak peeks at products before their official distribution.
• The Forge Wiki is a community-maintained documentation repository.

Thanks Jay Pipes for the stamina to get out Forge 2.0, in the middle of all the work as the Program Chair for the MySQL Users Conference, coming up in less than a month!

References:

• http://datacharmer.blogspot.com/2008/03/forge-20.html
• http://www.jpipes.com/index.php?/archives/215-A-New-MySQL-Forge-is-Born.html

Today, 24 March 2008, the student application period opens. And it remains open for a week, until 31 March 2008, presumably at one minute before midnight UTC.

If you haven’t already discussed the MySQL related ideas published on forge.mysql.com/wiki/SummerOfCode2008Ideas, do so now.

A good place to first silently lurk in and then actively participate in is lists.mysql.com/soc.

As opposed to last year, you can now also apply for MySQL Worklog Items Open for Community Development listed on forge.mysql.com/wiki/ComContribution_Worklog. Worklog items are internal “todo items” or coding tasks identified (but not yet necessarily being actively worked upon) by MySQL AB, ehh, now Sun Microsystems.

Next Thursday 6 March 2008 at 17:00-18:00 CET, there will be a panel on “The Commercialisation of Open Source” at the Future Talk Booth in Hall 9 (Stand A30) of the CeBIT fair in Hannover, Germany. One of the purposes of the panel is to publish the Open Source Yearbook 2008, the fifth in a series of yearbooks produced by a team around Professor Lutterbeck of the Technical University of Berlin.

I’ll be one of the panelists, representing MySQL AB. Other panelists are from OpenOffice.org, Citrix, the Zope user group, and the Free Software Foundation.

For the book, I wrote a chapter called “Architecture of Participation: Taking part in Open Source at MySQL“. It describes our attempts at MySQL at increasing the level of participation by our community in the development of MySQL, which has traditionally been very centralistic in its development model.

If you read German and want to have some fun at the cost of other business models than that of MySQL AB, I recommend you to read the comment “Windows Closed Source Yearbook appears at CeBIT” on heise closed.

Links (all in German):

• The Open Source Yearbook home page: http://www.opensourcejahrbuch.de/
• Blog note on the CeBIT panel: http://www.opensourcejahrbuch.de/blog/207
• Newsticker item at heise online: http://www.heise.de/newsticker/meldung/103860/from/rss09
• Fun comment on Closed Source Yearbook: http://www.heise.de/ix/news/foren/S-Windows-Closed-Source-Jahrbuch-2008-erscheint-zur-CeBIT/forum-132986/msg-14504436/read/
• My article “Architecture of Participation: Teilnehmende Open Source bei MySQL“: http://www.heise.de/open/The-Architecture-of-Participation-Teilnehmende-Open-Source-bei-MySQL–/artikel/104253

The World Tour starts on IRC next week!

The schedule is as follows:

• Wed 5 March 2008: Ian Murdock, 7am PT/16 CET. Ian is the ian of Debian and Chief OS Platform Strategist at Sun Microsystems. Wikipedia puts it like this:
  

  Since joining Sun, he has led Project Indiana, which he describes as “taking the lesson that Linux has brought to the operating system and providing that for Solaris,” making a full OpenSolaris distribution with GNOME and userland tools from GNU plus a network-based package management system.

• Thu 6 March 2008: Simon Phipps 6am PT/15CET. Simon is Chief Open Source Officer at Sun Microsystems. Sun’s Executive Bio says:
  

  [Simon is] co-ordinating Sun’s extensive participation in free and open source software communities, promoting consistency and best practice and actively participating in the global conversation they express. Prior to this appointment he co-founded Sun’s pioneering staff weblog facility at blogs.sun.com. Simon joined Sun in mid-2000.

• UPDATED: Wed 12 March 2008: Bob Brewin 9am PT / 18 CET. Bob is a Distinguished Engineer and Chief Technology Officer for Software at Sun Microsystems. Sun’s Executive Bio says:
  

  His responsibilities include technical leadership for developer products and application platforms, including the Java platform, mobility, enterprise software and business integration products. Within this role, some of his key areas of responsibility include Sun’s expanding role in the development of Web 2.0 technologies, improving the developer experience, and alignment and integration of our platforms, technologies and tools.

I’ll also be there, and so will several other MySQLers.

The purpose is for us to come to where the MySQL users are, online, for an informal chat. We’ll try our best to answer your questions!

Instructions:

1. Start your favourite IRC client. In my case, that’s X-Chat on my Mac.
2. Connect to the irc.freenode.net server.
3. /join #mysql. That’s the channel we’ll be in. At least I will also be on #mysql-dev (for those who hack on MySQL Server itself, as opposed to use MySQL in their own apps) and #mysql.de (in German).

Chat to you on Wednesday and Thursday!