This particular post deals with the benefits and challenges of product management.  Where it’s been and where it’s going as it relates to open source.  First, I know what you’re thinking … product management in open source? That can’t be, and in some cases its true (See the summary of Pidgin’s resizable textbox).  In other cases there is too much “traditional” product management and not enough community driven product management.  So what is the happy medium and how should open source projects approach product management?   In this post I’m going to look at how community driven PM differs from traditional PM within a commercial open source project.

Let’s start by looking at a definition of product management.  Product management is discovering, documenting, and prioritizing user stories with the objective of maximizing some combination of users, sales (more…)

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Anyone else want to run TweetDeck on openSUSE (or any Linux for that matter) but can’t because they don’t use GNOME or KDE?  When I first tried TweetDeck using XFCE everything looked okay but the interface would not respond to any button clicks.  After a quick trip to Google it appears that TweetDeck wants someplace to store your username/password information and it only knows how to use Gnome or KDEs keyring.  I got around this by launching Gnome services on startup.  This can be done by opening the menu Settings -> Sessions and Startup and choosing the Advanced Tab.  Under this tab I selected ‘Launch Gnome services on startup’.

I then wrote the little script below to extract the gnome-keyring process id and pass it to TweetDeck on startup using the (more…)

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Ever wonder why some open source projects are insanely popular and others struggle to get mind-share?  I do, all the time, especially since the “insanely popular” part is what I’m striving for as a Community Manager at Novell.  I recently read a great book entitled “Designing for the Social Web” by Joshua Porter.  In his book Joshua describes the life-cycle of a user interacting with a website and points out the various hurdles that must be overcome in order to create an active user.  This got me to thinking (dangerous) about the similarities shared between the life-cycle Joshua outlined and what open source projects go through.  I thought I’d write down my thoughts on this topic before I forgot them (more…)

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I’ve been an avid fan of Tomboy Notes for quite some time.  Tomboy is one of a handful of applications I consider vital to my productivity on par with email or IM.  The one deficiency I’ve found with Tomboy is that it is not as easy to sync or share notes as it could be.  I had been thinking of marrying my passion for iFolder with Tomboy, however a new solution has appeared on the horizon that I’ll be throwing my support behind, Snowy.  Snowy is a new open source project that supports syncing and sharing Tomboy notes via a web application.  The plan, as I understand it, is that there will soon be a service that provides this functionality.  Let’s all hope so and get involved to make this badly needed service a reality!

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I fully appreciate the need that the “Save” button fulfilled thirty years ago when disk and cpu resources where hard to come by, but today ….. please.  My documents should be saved as I type them and not require me to manually press Ctrl -S or “Save”.  I don’t understand why an application can crash and I lose my work or why when I shutdown and forget to save something its gone.  Why does the “Save” button still exist?

Tomboy Notes does a fantastic job with “Save”.  Why can’t other applications?  In fact, I’ll say it… I Love Tomboy Notes:-)  Of course it has its warts, the outline tool is not very sophisticated and sharing notes is not as easy as it should be but overall I’d say it is one of my favorite (more…)

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