Category Archives: Presentation

Learning from Wikipedia: Open Collaboration within Corporations

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Wikipedia is the free online encyclopedia that has taken the Internet by storm. It is written and administered solely by volunteers. How exactly did this come about and how does it work? Can it keep working? And maybe more importantly, can you transfer its practices to the workplace to achieve similar levels of dedication and quality of work? In this presentation I describe the structure, processes and governance of Wikipedia and discuss how some of its practices can be transferred to the corporate context.

This presentation represents the next step in the evolution of two Wikimania tutorials/workshops, see Presentations/Tutorials. If the slideshow doesn’t play, please use the PDF file download below.

Reference: Dirk Riehle. “Learning from Wikipedia: Open Collaboration within Corporations.” Invited talk at Talk the Future 2008. Krems, Austria: 2008.

The slides are available as a PDF file.

Open Collaboration: Self-Organizing Innovation in Large Corporations

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Author: Dirk Riehle, SAP Research, SAP Labs LLC

Reference: Steven Fraser (editor). “Escaped from the Lab: Innovation Practices in Large Organizations.” In Companion of the 2008 Conference on Object Oriented Programming, Systems, Languages, and Applications (OOPSLA ’08). ACM Press, 2008: Pages 787-790.

Available as a PDF file; my part follows as HTML below.

Position statement for the OOPSLA 2008 Panel on Innovation Practices in Large Corporations

In most companies, the innovation process is organized as follows: A research unit suggests to build a prototype of some innovative product or feature, a line-of-business sponsor signs off on the project, the research unit develops the prototype, a product unit receives it and turns it into a real product.

The critical point is the transfer from research to product unit. Here, many things can go wrong, for example:

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End-User Programming with Application Wikis

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Title: End-User Programming with Application Wikis: A Panel with Ludovic Dubost, Stewart Nickolas, and Peter Thoeny

Author: Dirk Riehle

Abstract: Wikis empower users to collaborate with each other using prose. Users imprint data structures and processes onto wiki pages using social and technical conventions. Application wikis enhance wiki engines with lightweight programming features that aid in making data structures and processes explicit. Using these features, end-users can program a wiki to better support them in their collaborative processes and integrate their work into the overall IT infrastructure. Application wikis make database access and business process integration easy from within the wiki while maintaining the wiki-style of collaborative work. The panelists of this panel, together with the audience and the moderator, will review existing work and explore future research directions in application wikis.

Reference: In Proceedings of the 2008 International Symposium on Wikis (WikiSym ’08). ACM Press, 2008: Article No. 4.

Available as a PDF file.

Open Source Businesses and Developer Careers: Who Benefits from Open Source? How and Why?

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Title: Open Source Businesses and Developer Careers: Who Benefits from Open Source? How and Why?

Presenter: Dirk Riehle

Abstract: Open source is changing how software is built and how money is made. This talk discusses the economics of open source software from the start-up firm, the system integrator, and the software developer perspective. The talk provides a strategy framework and discusses its implementation using the dual-license strategy. It explains how system integrators use open source in the share-of-wallet wars. Finally, open source defines a new developer career. This talk explains this new career and argues that it creates economic value for some while it makes life harder for others.

Reference: Main stage presentation (invited talk) at the Agile 2008 conference. Toronto, Canada: 2008.

Successful Open Source, with Little or No Agile

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I’ll be participating in the panel “Successful Open Source, with little or no Agile” at Agile 2008 in Toronto, Canada, on August 7th, 2008.

Successful Open Source, with Little or No Agile

Agile adoption in the Open Source community ranges from some to none for most successful teams.

  • Can these communities learn anything from each other?
  • Are these two communities one in the same?
  • Do Open Source projects and Agile projects succeed or fail for the same reasons?

The panelists, Dennis Byrne, Dirk Riehle, Christian Robottom Reis and Naresh Jain, will use their collective experience to answer these and many other questions. We’ll also have one empty chair for anyone from the audience to be a part of the panel temporarily.

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Bringing Wikipedia to Work: Open Collaboration within Corporations

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This upcoming Wikimania 2008 tutorial discusses the three principles of “open collaboration” which I believe are underlying wikis, open source, and other forms of peer production. It is a follow-up to last year’s tutorial about open collaboration at Wikimania 2007.

If the slideshow doesn’t play, please use the PDF file download below.

Reference: Dirk Riehle. “Bringing Wikipedia to Work: Open Collaboration in Corporations.” In Proceedings of Wikimania 2008, forthcoming.

Also available as a PDF file.

Global Open Source Trends and Public Initiatives

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I’ll be moderating the experts panel on “Global Open Source Trends and Public Initiatives” at the half-day Global Open Source Conference on March 24th, 2008, in San Francisco. Panel participants are Mark Radcliffe of DLA Piper, Sander Ruiter from the Dutch Ministry of Economic Affairs, Tony Wasserman of CMU West, and Arnaud Le Hors of IBM. The event precedes the Open Source Business Conference which will start the next day.

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Is Open Source Bad for Your Career?

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ComputerWorld Canada recently published an article about the closing keynote on open source that I had given at the Free Software & Open Source Symposium in Toronto last year. The basic tenet of the article is that I had claimed that software developers will fall on hard times due to open source. This is obviously not true, at least not in a naive sense.

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How to Benefit from Open Source

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Title: How to benefit from open source

Presenter: Dirk Riehle

Institution: SAP Research, SAP Labs LLC

Abstract: Open source is changing the game of how software is built and how money is made. This talk analyzes the economics of open source software from three main perspectives: The system integrator perspective, the start-up firm perspective, and the individual software developer perspective. A focus is on the distinction between community open source and commercial open source, and how the different stakeholders use different approaches to win in the market, e.g. to gain market share or to keep a job. The dual-license strategy is explained as well as why committers to important open source software projects can expect a higher salary. The talk shows how every stakeholder can benefit and thereby explains why open source is here to stay.

Event/location: Software Engineering Today 2008 (SET 2008) in Zurich, May 6-7th 2008