Community, Incorporated

Joe Brockmeier

Joe 'Zonker' Brockmeier is the community manager for openSUSE, a community Linux distro sponsored by Novell. Prior to joining Novell, Brockmeier worked as a technology journalist primarily covering the Linux and FOSS beat, and wrote for a number of publications, such as Linux Magazine, Linux.com, Sys Admin, UnixReview.com, IBM developerWorks, Linux Weekly News, Enterprise Linux Magazine, and ZDNet.

Foiled by Facebook? Mangled by mailing lists? Employers do take note

If this hasn't sunken in, yet please take note -- what you do online will haunt you. But it's not just social networks that open sourcers have to worry about.

September 14, 2008 by Joe Brockmeier in Social Enterprise

Picking the Fleas from Community

Just how many people can we be "close" to online? Clive Thompson's piece on the New York Times site, "Brave New World of Digital Intimacy," raises some interesting points about digital relationships for those of us engaged in remote work with thousands of community members.

September 10, 2008 by Joe Brockmeier in Banking

The Importance of Dissent

Word is going around that Monty Widenius, founder of MySQL, is parting ways with Sun. Matt Asay blogs about it and says it's a good thing Widenius is taking his dissent on the road:At this point, however, Monty has done the right thing with his dissent.

September 5, 2008 by Joe Brockmeier in Data Management

Community managers and corporate structure

Stormy Peters reflects on where community managers ought to reside in the corporate structure. According to Bernard Golden, community managers ought to be in the support structure of a business.

September 1, 2008 by Joe Brockmeier in Open Source

If open source is going to succeed, that is long-haul succeed as a business and development model, companies and open source projects need to be a lot better at finding ways to work with one another. Without commercial partners, open source projects have a hard time progressing beyond the "nice, but not quite ready for prime time," stage.