By: Rüdiger Glott, UNU-MERIT, The Netherlands 1st International Workshop on "D4PL - Designing for participatory learning" Building from open source success to develop free ways to share and learn

1. D4PL Workshop
Open Source Skills and Business Requirements –
Match and Mismatch
Ruediger Glott, UNU-Merit

2. Why doing FLOSS?
I want to learn and develop new skills
I want to share knowledge and skills
I want to improve software products of others
I think that software shouldn't be proprietary
I want to participate in new forms of cooperation
I want to participate in the FLOSS scene
I want to improve my job opportunities
I want to solve a problem that cannot be solved by proprietary software
I want to limit the power of large software companies
I want to make money
I want to get a reputation in the FLOSS community
I want to get help in realising an idea for a software product
0 10 20 30 40 50 60 70 80
%
Reason to join Reason to stay

3. FLOSS learning environment
● FLOSS = model for the creation of self-learning
and self-organizing communities
● Staring 2005: FLOSS "represents a rich and
largely untapped resource for institutionalized
education”
● => FLOSS skills should be valuable for
businesses, too

4. Questions
● Who is learning FLOSS?
● What skills are learnt in FLOSS?
● Can FLOSS provide skills better than formal
computer science courses?
● Can skills learnt in FLOSS compete with formal
degrees on the labour market?
● How do employers value FLOSS skills?
● Does FLOSS make people future-ready?

5. Who learns FLOSS?
Period / Year joining the FLOSS community
Age when joining the
1950 - 1985 1986 - 1990 1991 - 1995 1996 1997 1998 1999 2000 2001 2002 Total
FLOSS community
10 - 15 years 16,1 12,2 10,2 5,7 4,6 5,6 5,2 6,6 0,8 6,6
16 - 18 years 27,4 17,6 15,7 24,2 22,0 20,1 13,6 16,5 10,1 8,1 17,1
19 - 21 years 19,4 25,2 24,9 22,2 32,6 26,2 27,3 19,1 28,0 16,2 25,1
22 - 25 years 11,3 24,4 25,7 26,3 22,5 26,9 25,8 30,5 28,8 32,4 26,3
Total: 10-25 years 74,2 79,4 76,5 78,4 81,7 78,7 71,8 72,6 67,7 56,8 75,1
26 - 30 years 21,0 12,2 12,4 13,4 14,2 12,3 17,6 18,2 17,9 27,0 15,2
Older than 30 years 4,8 8,4 11,0 8,2 4,1 9,0 10,6 9,1 14,4 16,2 9,7
Total: 26 years and older 25,8 20,6 23,5 21,6 18,3 21,3 28,2 27,4 32,3 43,2 24,9
Total 100 100 100 100 100 100 100 100 100 100 100
n = 2402 p < 0.01; Contingency coefficient: .225 Source: FLOSS Survey (Ghosh et al. 2002)

6. Who learns FLOSS?
Software engineer 36,3
Student (IT) 15,8
Programmer 11,2
Consultant (IT) 9,8
Other (IT) 5,2
Student (other areas) 5,1
University staff (IT) 5,0
University staff (other areas) 4,3
Executive (IT) 3,2
Other engineer 3,2
Other (other sectors) 2,7
Consultant (other sectors) 0,6
Executive (other sectors) 0,3
Marketing (IT) 0,2
Product sales (IT) 0,1
Product sales (other sectors) 0,0
Marketing (other sectors) 0,0

7. What is learnt?

8. What is learnt???
Skills learned in FLOSS I learned a lot
To understand the differences between copyrights, patents, and licences 51,7
Coding and legal skills are
To re-use code written by others 48,0
●
Basic / introductory programming skills 47,7
considered to be learnt best
To run and maintain complex software systems 47,1
To understand licences 47,0
To write code in a way that it can be re-used 46,0
To understand copyright law issues
To become familiar with different programming languages
44,7
44,3
● Learning managerial skills
To get an overview of developments in software technology
To understand patent law issues
44,3
40,0 appear to be difficult to learn
To look for and fix bugs
To better understand English, especially technical discussion
38,7
37,0
in comparison to the other
To design modular code
To get an overview of the skills you need in the software professions
35,5
33,2
skills
To clearly articulate an argument 27,3
To express personal opinions
To accept and to respond to criticism from others
27,2
27,0
● However: managerial skills
To improve your understanding of liability issues
To coordinate own work with the work of others
23,5
23,4
play quite an important role
To understand and work with people from different cultures
To document code
22,9
22,4
when skills learnt in the
To interact with other people
To evaluate the work of others
18,6
18,5
FLOSS community are
To lead a project or a group of people
To keep a community going
17,4
15,8
compared to formal courses
To clearly define and achieve targets 14,3
To motivate people 13,0
To create new algorithms 12,4
To settle conflicts within a group 12,4
To plan work and stick to a work schedule 7,1
n = 1453

9. Value of FLOSS Skills
● Community members and employers regard informal skills attained in
FLOSS as very competitive on the labour market
● 85% of the employers say that FLOSS experience adds value to
formal computer science degrees
● 38% of the employers consider informal qualifications and formal
qualifications to be equal, 29% think that formal qualifications are
better, and 17% consider informal qualifications to be better (16%:
don't know)
● 60% of the FLOSS community members consider the skills they learn
within the FLOSS community as core skills for their professional
career
● 80% are convinced that proven FLOSS experience can compensate
for a lack of formal degrees

10. Future-readiness?
● Structural change of education
– High quality learning materials are being made available
for free and can be modified
– Web 2.0 allows for ever more special interest online
learning communities
– Growing social technology and entrepreneurial mindsets
– "Digital natives grow up in a world where dealing with
enormous amounts of information is second nature"
(Senges/Brown/Rheingold)
● => FLOSS seems to be an appropriate learning
environment

11. Future-readiness?
● Business requirements
– innovations across company boundaries
become more and more important
– distributed networks of researchers within
diverse academic disciplines
– parallel, rather than sequential, problem-solving
– rapid iterations with peer reviews
● => FLOSS seems to be an appropriate learning
environment

12. Future-readiness?
● Business requirements (Service Science,
Management, and Engineering)
– T-shaped professionals are in high demand
because they have both depth and breadth
– They combine expert thinking (depth in one or
more areas) and complex communications
(breadth across many areas)

13. Future-readiness?
● SSME-typical skills ● Business project
management
● Cross-disciplinary
communication
● Business case development
and analysis
● Service system design,
management, and modeling
● Organizational change
management
● Value co-creation analysis
● Marketing and sales
● Service lifecycle analysis (for
quality assurance)
● Creative and critical thinking
● Service supply and demand
● Communication skills
management ● Leadership and collaboration
skills

14. Conclusions
● FLOSS provides a future-ready learning environment,
● FLOSS skills are competitive as compared to
traditional learning at universities
● B-U-T:
● It focusses rather on a traditional software engineering
education
● What is needed is however: engineering approaches
that focus on service logic and technical realization at
the same time

15. Conclusions
● Requirements:
– community organisation and coordination (get
things done in time)
– community must become aware of business
processes and service logic
– companies must play an active role in the
community

16. Conclusions
● Problems
– business processes are usually nothing to share with the
public
– communities are usually focussed on software, not on
services
– there might be only few community members interested in
working on little tasks that help to improve service quality
but have no effect on the software itself and that are not
rewarded in the meritocracy of the FLOSS community
– steering (and rewarding) a community usually requires a lot
of personal and monetary effort from the company that
wants to benefit from the community in this sense

17. Thank you!