It is time to tell the world that I have the distinct pleasure to become part of the Community Architecture team within Red Hat. This is indeed both an exciting as well as a deeply challenging opportunity. Exciting because it means I get to continue to engage with some of the brightest minds within Red Hat who are chartered to think about how the FOSS community has to be kept alive and well. A thriving FOSS community will help continue the amazingly rapid innovation that happens which Red Hat can then bring to enterprises. Red Hat bringing the innovations from the community to enterprises ensures that everyone wins by added engineering and QA/QE that is added so that deploying FOSS in mission critical systems become a no-brainer. Equally important, the investments by Red Hat on the additional QA/QE flows back out to the FOSS community. All of this is the core of what has come to be termed, The Open Source Way.
Being part of Community Architecture
I have a lot of ideas as does the team. We need to build a thriving community of FOSS contributors in Asia Pacific (APAC in short). For too long, APAC has been a net consumer of FOSS and contributors are few and far between. I am hoping that with the added focus I now can bring to this space on a full-time basis, that the number of people contributing code, documentation, testing, new ideas etc from APAC countries will see an increase. It has always been my belief that smart people are evenly distributed around the world. Why we see pockets of contributors is largely a function of connectivity and opportunity. With the connectivity equation becoming moot, we need to foster opportunity. For that, I am gung ho and ready to make the plunge.
Congratulations Harish! You’re a great addition to a great team.
Welcome to the team, Harish! It’s great to have you. I suppose I’ll be seeing you a lot on IRC in the middle of the night NA time now. ):
Thanks Mel and Chris.
I just returned from Kuala Lumpur after speaking at a Malaysia government ICT event (http://mscmalaysia.my/mms2010/nict/) and while I talked about cloud and open source etc, it was clear that there is a very strong need to build a community of open source developers and contributors. As alluded to in my post, that is the single biggest issue I think FOSS has in Asia Pacific – insufficient contributors.
I look forward to your help in trying to bridge that gap.