Bearing Point Consulting just published a study on the use of open source software in the automotive industry. It shows how open source is on the rise, no surprise. Martin Helmreich, a student of mine, did most of the work, and I guided study conception and evaluation. Here are links to the German version and the English version. I’m particularly proud about this news coverage. It is our first Chinese news coverage!
I finally put my teaching materials for my agile methods course on this website. The slides are available in “source” form, i.e. Open/LibreOffice format, as well as PDFs. I also added supplementary materials like the videos I use for illustration purposes. The slides are made available using the Creative Commons BY-SA license and are based on a course I’ve been giving several times now. It is far from being perfect but obviously good enough for a real course. Feel free to use or copy from the slides for your own courses!
My goal is to keep improving the slides. I expect there to be a new version every year or maybe every semester. For me, this is an experiment. I honestly don’t know how to collaborate around a format like ODP and ODT. It sure doesn’t feel like source code. So, my best suggestion is that if you find this useful and would like to see it improve in a direction that suits you, please let me know of your suggestions. I might then incorporate the suggested changes into the slide set. In general, my philosophy is that the content will grow, but ideally in a consistent fashion.
I’m at beautiful Schloss Dagstuhl once again this week, for a seminar on “Open Models as a Foundation of Future Enterprise Systems”. I was asked to spin some thoughts on what the Open Models Initiative could learn from open source. The result is a short but sweet presentation on “the business of open models”. My maybe obvious statement is that for open models to be sustainable, they’ll need a business model. My suggestion is to create developer foundations like Apache or Eclipse for this. The slides are available as a PDF and through Slideshare, see below:
Conference Site: Grand Wailea Maui
Dates: 7-10 January 2013
HICSS conferences are devoted to the most relevant advances in the information, computer and system sciences and encompass developments in both theory and practice. Accepted papers may be theoretical, conceptual, tutorial or descriptive in nature. Those selected for presentation will be included in the Conference Proceedings published by the IEEE Computer Society.
Additional detail about the conference may be found on the HICSS primary web site: http://www.hicss.hawaii.edu
This mini-track covers all aspects of the Open Movement phenomena, such as:
Here is useful information from the chair if you are considering attending ECOOP 2012 in Beijing!
See you at ECOOP 2012 in Beijing!
Update 2012-03-28: I made the course slides available to the public.
I just finished teaching a one-week course on agile methods at Tsinghua University, the top (mainland) Chinese engineering school and one of the two leading Chinese universities. My host told me that I was the first non-Chinese-speaking lecturer to have held such a short course, not only in Computer Science but at Tsinghua as a whole. (I’m sure there have been plenty of prior foreign lecturers, but apparently I was the first one not to teach for a whole semester, but only for this condensed one-week half-day type of course). Yay! Adventure and breaking new grounds is still possible on this planet.
Moreover, with my research partner Prof. Bai, I’ll be leading a joint distributed agile software development project, involving student teams from both Tsinghua University (THU) and Friedrich-Alexander University (FAU). The goal of the project is to learn about what makes or breaks distributed agile development. We’ll start with simple hypotheses but hope to grow this into something larger. We already have student teams, but are looking for more. If you are a software engineering student at either THU or FAU, please come and talk to us!
“Startupinformatik” is a German term for “informatics (computer science) for startups” that I just made up. It is intended to be close to “Wirtschaftsinformatik”, which is German for “informatics for businesses”. So it is about the business of startups and the role software (IT) plays in it. You can read my prior thoughts
Enjoy!
2012-02-18: Updated the post with translations from the original letter.
I’m an Addison-Wesley author and just received a letter from Pearson, the owner of Addison-Wesley, informing me about their thoughts and steps towards e-books and the digital age. The letter is written as an open letter with no apparent secrets, so I’m making it available here for anyone interested to read and to comment on it.
In general, I have sympathies with companies trying to sustain their revenue streams. I do expect them, however, to understand that change is inevitable and to flexibly react to and to lead that change for their customers’ sake and not just their shareholders’ sake. As an author, I’m naturally in a similar or at least related situation.
The PDF is marked up with numbers. The following list relates to what the (German) letter says on the respective issues:
A technology is disruptive, if it allows new companies to shake up an established market and win against established large companies.
I got asked three times this week what “disruptive” means so here is my definition 
8th International Symposium on Wikis and Open Collaboration
August 27-29, 2012 | Linz, Austria
The International Symposium on Wikis and Open Collaboration (WikiSym) is the premier conference on open collaboration and related technologies. In 2012, WikiSym celebrates its 8th year of scholarly, technical and community innovation in Linz, Austria. We are excited this year to be collocated with Ars Electronica, the premier digital art and science meeting that attracts over 35,000 attendees per year.
Submissions are invited for the following categories: