Transcript

Sandro Groganz: Hello Terrence. Welcome to this interview. Thanks for joining me. You work at Sun Microsystems. You are the community advocate for the Java Mobile platform. Please tell me a bit more about your role.

Terrence Barr: It started out with technical evangelism. I got involved with the creation of the open source community around Java Mobile and Embedded, and so I became Sun’s first open source evangelist for that platform, about two years ago. The goal and the charter was clearly community growth, technology adoption, developer outreach and lately I’ve actually changed my title, as you said, to ‘Community Advocate’, because I wanted to defocus some of the evangelism aspects. Java is so well known in the industry that I wanted to focus on getting in touch with developers, understanding their needs and trying to feed those needs and feedback back into the organisation, making sure we produce technologies that the developer actually can use.

Sandro Groganz: Would you say that what you do is marketing?

Terrence Barr: In the widest sense, yes. It’s a lot of communication with people, with your speciality being focussed on developer aspects and on technology. We use a lot of the traditional marketing tools. I’m not a marketing person by trade, I’m an engineer, but we use a lot of marketing tools, a lot of electronic communication of course, blogs, interviews, white papers, articles in trade magazines, we do conferences, we do podcasts, so we use the whole arsenal, always very focussed on technology and technological aspects.

Sandro Groganz: What is a recent activity that you governed or executed that was largely successful from your point of view?

Terrence Barr: A big part of our charter is community growth, so we want to bring and touch as many developers and people who are involved with our technology, and bring them into the open source community to establish communication, to establish an exchange of ideas, and of course to drive technology adoption of our own technologies.

We’ve been working very hard on growing that community through all the means that I said before and lots of conferences that I attended and made presentations and interviews. Recently we did a recap and we looked at the statistics of the traction we were getting in the community growth. That was actually very pleasing, because we basically started a community from nothing - when Sun launched its open source efforts for the Java Mobile & Embedded space about two years ago, we had zero in terms of open source community and now we have more than 180 projects in the community, most of which are not Sun, and we have 20,000 activities a month in the community.

An activity means forum accesses, blogs, new hits to the blogs, blogging, articles, accesses to the source code, downloads, downloads of our podcasts. If you count all the individual activities that people can engage upon in the community, we have a pretty nice run rate at this point.

One of the big benefits of having a close relationship to a community and there is trust on both sides, is that they give you a lot of unsolicited feedback. That’s very valuable, I think, from a marketing and from a strategy perspective, because you cut through all the middlemen and you talk directly to the people who actually use your stuff, and I think that’s actually one of the most valuable things you can get from a community.

They, for example, told us, “Well, the technology is all going great, we’re using it, but what we’re really missing is a dedicated conference that focuses on Java in the Mobile and Embedded space.” We looked around and we found out, “Yes indeed that’s true!” In the past, that sort of developer conference was always tacked on to other conferences and so it always lacked depth and breadth, and so what we did was basically create our own community/developer conference focussed on that space and we did it sort of in a volunteer effort with a community backing and it was a sell-out success, and we got lots of good feedback and so we are going to do it again in January of next year.

One of the big benefits of opening up your technology and giving people access to it, like you do in an open source community, is to establish this two-way communication and it requires a lot of up-front effort and an on-going effort on your part. So companies who start getting involved in this sort of community marketing effort might think, “Oh, I just dump a bunch of stuff into the public space somewhere, and it will just happen, and people will come”, and that’s not at all the case. We’ve seen open-source efforts ... if you just take code and dump it somewhere and don’t monitor it, don’t actively invest in it, don’t keep maintaining it and increasing its value, people will lose interest very quickly.

It’s really important to make an effort to make sure that the things you offer to the public are actually usable, that they are valuable to them, that they know it’s not a one-shot deal, that they can actually invest their time and know it’s worth the effort because in six months or a year or two years, this thing is still around, that they know that establishing relationships with people on the other side is worth their time, and that these people will stick around, and that the project keeps evolving, and that establishes this level of trust where people on the other side then say, “Oh, it’s really worthwhile for me, there’re people who are listening, and I can actually make a difference and they’ll help me.” What’s in it for me at the end of the day as a developer?  I want my job to be easier and I want my product to get out the door faster. If a company like Sun listens, if my input is heard, that down the line helps me, and that is why I want to be involved.

There are a few people who get involved just,  because they have a hacker mentality, and they just like playing with stuff, and money comes from somewhere else and they are not under pressure to produce a product, but for the most case the people who do get involved have a commercial background, they need to get stuff out of the door and they need to see value in why they want to get involved.

Sandro Groganz: So you, as the community advocate for the mobile platform at Sun, are you a spokesman of the company or of the community?

Terrence Barr: Our audience is very focussed on developers and because we are talking about code and technology. I was an engineer, I’m still an engineer, I still try to write code whenever I have time, but for many years I was deep into the code and so I need to keep up with the technology and be able to talk, to have a conversation eye to eye with developers about technology, and they have a very good bullshit detector. If they find out you are talking marketing and you’re talking high level strategy and you’re trying to circumvent the issues, they find that out very quickly, you lose credibility and your whole community effort sort of starts fading.

I have to walk this thin line. I‘m being a spokesperson for Sun and I need to broadcast the bigger strategy and create some excitement for Sun’s technology, but I always try to err on the side of the developer’s point of view.

Sandro Groganz: Which piece of advice do you have for aspiring community advocates?

Terrence Barr: It’s a lot of work and it’s a long road. It’s not something you can do overnight. Trust is something you need to establish slowly and you need backing by your own organization. You need the engineers and the technology to continuously be involved. You don’t necessarily need engineers to constantly be part of the community, day in and day out, but you need to have people in the back who actively work on this project and who are there to answer people’s technical questions.

You need to do a lot of evangelism actually internally. In many, especially the bigger, corporations, there’s either still a bit of misinformation and lack of education when it comes to open source methodologies and open source paradigms. That might be one problem. The other problem is that often corporate developers are just too busy, they just don’t have time, like “I’m already spending 50 hours a week on this project, I don’t have another 5 hours to answer questions from the community.”

Not everybody will jump into that boat, but you need to find the people who see the benefit of starting to interact with the community and get involved and make it clear to them that in the end, they benefit and the product benefits, because they get this valuable feedback and in an ideal case, you even get external contributions from people who actually help you produce more or better code. As an evangelist or marketing person, you have to straddle these both worlds, you have to be outward facing and inward facing, because you are the place where it all comes together and you have to make it work, and both sides have to participate. That can be a pretty hard struggle at times to get that to work.

Sandro Groganz: ‘Community Advocate’ is nothing you can learn at university, so how did you teach yourself along the way?

Terrence Barr: When I was offered the job, it wasn’t at all clear that I wanted to do it because, as a developer, you tend to be sort of inward focussed and not very outgoing. I spoke to a number of people who had worked on other open source projects and communities, and I spoke to other evangelists - Sun has a whole group of evangelists who do this day in and day out and they are very successful with it. And I basically said, “Okay, this doesn’t sound too bad, and I will take a gamble and push my limits a little bit.”

It turns out, it’s actually a very enjoyable job. Once you start seeing some successes  and you get the ball rolling, and you are a person who likes to interact with people, you’ll get better at it over time, but if you fundamentally like interacting with people, it’s actually a very enjoyable job because it broadens your horizon enormously. There are many things, I can basically pick and choose what I want to do, whatever I think gets me the most benefit, the most leverage, towards that goal of growing the community, driving technology adoption, I can pick and do that. There is a very broad range of things that I am able to pick from.

Sandro Groganz: Are there any Weblogs that you regularly read that help you with your job?

Terrence Barr: There are a number and I’m not really following them well enough. Over time we’ve established relationships with a number of bloggers in the industry that we've added to our own blog aggregator in our community. I read those on a fairly regular basis. But, it’s more of constantly scanning the industry and absorbing things.

I have my own blog, it was very hard for me initially, you know, I labored over every single entry for ever, and now I am at the point where I can write a blog entry every day, and sometimes twice a day, because there’s just so much stuff that I want to communicate, and I seem to be doing a reasonably good job because I get about 10,000 hits a month. It’s something you learn and you grow into. I think you’ll find pretty quickly, after six months or so, whether it’s for you or not.

Sandro Groganz: What is the budget available for community work in terms of percentage, compared to say the overall marketing budget or the department’s overall budget?

Terrence Barr: We do have a dedicated community organization that actually is in charge of several open source communities at Sun, and so we have a couple of full-time people involved in that. In terms of resources and budgets - at Sun, we have sort of, over the last couple of years, gone into this mode where it’s sort of a more horizontal alignment depending on individual projects. There’s not one big pool for us, but there’s one big pool for all of the outgoing activities, and we try to share that and optimise that and so, sometimes we get into a quarter and it’s been used up by the marketing department because there were two or three big shows or something like that, and then in other quarters there’s money left over and we use that for our community building efforts. Same for people, we pull in marketing people and PR people as needed, so it’s more of a cross-organizational thing.

Sandro Groganz: How do you monitor success in community advocacy?

Terrence Barr: Actually, success is a bit easier, because as I said, in a traditional sense, you can monitor things like activities that are going on, number of projects that have members of your community. The more interesting question is, “How does that tie in to revenue? What is the relationship between your community efforts and the developer outreach you’re doing, and the bottom line for the company?”

That’s of course a very tricky topic, and it ties into the bigger subject of open source business models, how do you use open source to create revenue, to the bottom line? I think the industry as a whole is still grappling with that question. There are some methods and some business models that are sort of starting to appear like the services model, for Linux for example. That’s a very obvious one, but there are many others.

We’ve captured a thousand developers this month and they’ve hit our Web page and they’ve requested information, but how many of those are going to sign a contract or pay us money in some way? That’s a difficult discussion because, at the end of the day, you have to justify the budget you are using towards management.

For traditional marketing people, that’s much easier because those methodologies, the return on investment has been established over decades, it’s been much researched. For open source communities and these loosely-coupled, loosely-formed communities of "not yet customers", the situation is much more fluid and hard to grasp. That’s an ongoing problem - we hardly ever can make the case “give us $10,000, we’ll be able to generate X revenue.” That’s just a very difficult equation to make.