When I began with Free Software I already was CEO of a little company back in the Canary Islands. To me it was a complete shock getting in contact with LTSP first and KDE later. In both cases I had business projects related with their technologies so, at the very beginning, that relation with them was a matter of pure business.
I remember thinking…. If they behave like crazy nuns, fine, I won’t. I felt like the The Walking Dead lead actor. Not many months later, I realized I was one of the zombies. Still, both project made easy for me to get involved. No regrets, no blames, no pointing fingers…. just friendly hackers.
This common experience can be softened. Times have changed but business culture not so much. KDE ON Program must reduce this culture gap. One the main issues to do so is clearly defining how to deal with confidentiality, a key point for organizations.
When designing a Program like KDE ON, that deals with organizations, specially with companies, one of the possible conflicts we need to take in consideration is the different views/models/culture we have around confidentiality, about what is public and what should be kept private.
FLOSS communities, like KDE, that evolve in the Open, tend to reduce as much as possible the amount of private information, forums, decisions. Companies usually promote the opposite.
We have a tough challenge ahead of: to bring organizations into the open in a compatible way with their current business culture.
Someone might think that it is just a matter of building trust. But we know that is not enough. We have seen in the past how strong relations between companies and communities fell apart in seconds. We need to establish some procedures ensuring that common spaces can be built where private and open meets comfortably.
KDE-ON Program, our effort to create an ecosystem of organizations around KDE, must define those meeting points without changing our ground rules, which it won’t be easy if we want to become attractive to organizations, so they join us. We should not underestimate their fears to the Open, specially when dealing with managers, born in the classic MBA business culture.
We have around KDE (other community projects too, obviously) many companies that, at different levels, understands and/or have experience dealing internally (and with us) with many of those fears, misconceptions, reactions, etc. Along with other experienced KDE members, I feel we can do a great job teaching organizations how powerful and profitable embracing the opening could be.
Don’t you remember the first person that showed you how cool Free Software was? We always tend to have a special relation with our first mentor, that special teacher that opened our eyes, that first love that allowed us to discover a new world, right? That is the kind of hit we are able to create in many CxO that, hopefully, will get involved with us through KDE ON Program.
So KDE ON Program should be for participants a learning process that end up allowing them to build long term relations with Free Software community projects in open forums, in a FLOSS life style, accepting some Free Culture principles. At the same time, it should help us to understand them better, so along the road we can become a more business friendly.
Let’s see if we do it right in KDE ON, or at least, we create learning spaces understanding we are in a, somehow, R&D environment. So we all judge our mistakes with scientific, or at least not pure business, eyes.
toscalix 