The JP Allen Blog

Update on the open source ‘miracle’ paper:  It has been accepted at the HICSS 2010 conference track on Open Movements:  FLOSS, Open Content, Open Access and Open Communities.  The paper now features the more sedate title “Open Source Deployment at the City and County of San Francisco:  From Cost Reduction to Rapid Innovation”.  The reviewers were enthusiastic, but still a bit skeptical that open source really could deliver such rapid innovation, and customer delight, under very challenging circumstances.  Hopefully other researchers will take up the challenge to help prove me right (or wrong).

A version of the open source innovation paper is available here, but the copyright now belongs to the IEEE.  Let’s hope they use it wisely.

After spending July in Krakow, Poland visiting companies, startups, and universities, I am truly impressed with the Krakow tech scene.

Together with a colleague at Cisco Systems Poland, Ramon Tancinco, I have put together a small deck of slides introducing Krakow as a hub for taking advantage of the immense pool of technical talent in Central and Eastern Europe.  Krakow has it all:  low cost, a nice place to live or visit, an emerging culture of entrepreneurship and risk-taking, plus the political and legal stability of an EU country.  Learn why Google, IBM, CapGemini and many others have chosen Krakow as a high-tech location.

We created these slides in the context of the new San Francisco/Krakow sister city relationship.  The slides are licensed as open content, so help yourself.

[Slides in ppt format]  New version as of 27 January 2010.

Thanks to a recent discussion on slashdot, I learned that the entire editorial boards from at least three journals have resigned to start new journals that are open, or lower cost:

• Journal of Algorithms
• Topology
• K-Theory

Perhaps others would like to follow their lead?

For most of June, I was a visiting researcher in the Informatics division of the Swedish Business School, Örebro University.  Thanks to the group’s rigorous, precise daily schedule of lunch times and coffee breaks (fika), I had the structure I needed to be productive!

I gave a talk on my open source deployment research in San Francisco (talk title:  “Open Source Deployment at the City and County of San Francisco:  From Cost Reduction to Rapid Innovation”).  Open Source (or öppen kod, as they say) attracted good interest, particularly with the eGovernment angle.  I also served as an external examiner on Ella Kolkowska’s licentiate thesis, which focused on a values-based approach to IS security.  As Örebro, along with many other European universities, makes the transition to a more American-style system of rewards based on publications, strategies for cracking the right journals were another hot topic.

I’ll miss having the intellectual stimulation of Karin, Ella, Fredrik, Johan P, Johan A, Kai, Nena, Hannu, and the entire group on the rest of our sabbatical world tour.  Thanks Örebro!

Robin Teigland at the Stockholm School of Economics and Anders Lundkvist were kind enough to organize a meeting of local social media experts at the offices of Springtime, a Swedish PR and communications firm.  I gave a short presentation on what I saw as the ‘conventional wisdom’ on Web 2.0 and social media back home in Calfornia, and asked if it was any different in Scandinavia.  It was difficult for me to get a word in–my favorite kind of group!

The reluctance of large corporations to embrace social media tools, because of security and control concerns, was a consistent theme.  One takeaway for me was the idea that, in some respects, not-for-profits, government, and small start-ups could take the lead because they can embrace the latest, most efficient tools (e.g., Skype, Google Wave) without being blocked by corporate IT.  What interesting times we live in, when openness is not an additional burden, but actually the most efficient and effective way to do things.

In partnership with the Department of Technology at the City and County of San Francisco, I’ve been studying the deployment of new applications using open source.  We looked at three projects (including the recoverysf.org site), and found the people involved reporting results that seemed almost too good to be true:  working systems developed and deployed in record time, at very little cost, that increase the skills and importance of locally-employed IT talent.  It seems like an ‘IS miracle’, especially in these tough times.

While cost-cutting is often seen as the big selling point for open source, faster ‘time-to-market’ for new applications is the focus of our results.  To quote one of our respondents:

“Now, you can stand up that site in 8 hours, four hours, have it done by the
end of the day.  It flips the customer out.  Really?  I thought it would take 2
months.  Being responsive is huge.  Technology changes fast, but business
requirements change faster.”

For example, there’s no way the recoverysf.org site would have been built in less than three weeks without using an open source platform (WordPress), and without a new technology mindset.  It’s a mindset where the IT department sees itself as offering great new products for its diverse customers, rather than trying to control and constrain them all the time.

The paper with our preliminary research results is currently under review.  Please contact me if you’d like a draft.  Special thanks to the City’s CTO Blair Adams, USF MBA Dave Geller, and all of the study participants.

The open source platforms I admire the most, and are most useful for business, are the ones with the largest communities behind them.  For open business platforms, it’s not just the contributions to the core software that matter.  It’s the number of extensions (or modules) and the number of themes (or styles) that’s critical.  Having many extensions and themes to choose from give business users the best of both worlds:  a standard software package, and lots of easy customization possibilities.

I presented some preliminary research on open source communities for business platforms at OSCOMM 2009, the first international workshop on open source communities, held after OSS 2009 in Skövde, Sweden.  Our data shows that the best supported platform with the highest number of community-contributed extensions is WordPress, followed by Joomla, phpBB, MediaWiki, and Drupal.  Moodle, SugarCRM, Elgg, Magento, and Gallery are the next five, with not much in the way of community contributions after that.  Only award-winning open source software packages that a business user would directly interact with were included.

The paper and slides are available at the OSCOMM program website.  The paper is called “Community Building for Open Source Business Applications:  The Core-Extensions-Theme Pattern”.

The second installment of our new Freshman Seminar class, “Social Networking and Online Community”, wrapped up this week.  Check out these great projects from our first-year business majors:

San FREEcisco

A user-generated collection of free things to do in the city, targeting primarily San Francisco’s 72,000 students at 23 colleges and universities.  Users will be able to express interest in events, invite others, and comment on events, while friends can subscribe to events and pictures flagged by their social network.  Advertising and merchandise are the main revenue sources for this low-cost business idea.

Resume 2.0

A facebook application for uploading resumes and finding internships for college students.  Despite facebook being the hub for college student interaction, there is no serious competition for this application yet.  Resume 2.0 will offer templates and automatic upload of existing resumes, along with a possibility for instant video interviews.  Revenue will come from premium services and advertising.

San Francisco Volunteer Network

An online community focused on volunteer opportunities for San Francisco high school students required to perform community service.  No other destination is focused on making high school community service opportunities easy to find, and helping students and organizations track volunteer hours.  Users will be able to see which volunteer opportunities their friends are participating in.

YouMix

Like at popular Asian sites such as SongTaste and K8, users will be able to make their own karaoke mixes, upload vocals from their computers, and comment on other users’ mixes.  Revenue will come from ads, and a paid iPhone application.

Congrats to Peggy Takahashi and the entire Freshman Launch Program team for creating an outstanding first year business major experience from scratch.  Given the quality of work we’ve seen from the students, we now know we can do a lot more with them during their entire four years at the McLaren College of Business.

The Syllabus and Readings for the Social Networking and Online Communities seminar are available under open content licenses, so take a look and grab anything that might be useful.  Again, the idea was to provide an introduction to business that examined both ‘traditional’ and ‘digital’ business.  Last semester’s experience was written up in this previous post.

The sabbatical year plans are coming along nicely.  You can follow the latest updates on our Allen World Tour 2009-10 Itinerary page.

So far, I have four official university visits lined up:

• Swedish Business School, Örebro University, Sweden (6/09)
• Center for Organisational and Social Informatics, Monash University, Melbourne, Australia (11/09)
• Department of Industrial Engineering, University of Chile, Santiago (3/10)
• Department of Economics and Business, University of Azores, Ponta Delgada, Portugal (4-6/10)

I’m hoping to visit other Universities for seminars, long lunches, walks on the beach, etc.  If you’re interested in having me visit, or give a talk, check out my slightly cheesy looking brochure with a list of research interests and potential seminar topics.

It’s official. I’ve been named a Fulbright scholar during my 2009-10 sabbatical year.  The host country will be Portugal, specifically the Azores islands in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean.

At the University of the Azores, I will be a visiting lecturer in Innovation and Technology Management.  I’ll be teaching an MBA class during their third term (April-June 2010), meeting with students, and consulting on curriculum.

The Fulbright scholars program is the “flagship international educational exchange program sponsored by the U.S. government”, sending about 800 U.S. faculty and professionals abroad each year.  To fulfill my mission of “increasing mutual understanding between the people of the United States and the people of other countries”, I am prepared to eat do whatever it takes to promote international harmony.