Yesterday I gave a new talk at Reto Hartinger’s Internet Briefing Software Development Conference in the Zurich World Trade Center. It was fun talking as social scientist to a technical audience. The intense discussion about open source, motivations of contributors and much more after the presentation showed that the audience was not too much bored by my academic elaboration. Using the (unfortunately proprietary) service Slideshare with its Slidecast feature one can listen to the talk (MP3) while following the slides (PDF):

Code Reuse, Motivation, Koordination, Kollaboration: Was Entwicklerteams von Open Source Communities lernen können

Software-Unternehmen entwickeln und verkaufen erfolgreich umfangreiche Informatik-Lösungen und koordinieren dafür grosse Entwickler-Teams. Dennoch kommen die meisten kommerziellen IT-Projekte nicht an die Zahl von beteiligten Personen in Communities von Open Source Projekten heran. Matthias Stürmer fasst Forschungsergebnissen sowie praktischen Erfahrungen mit Open Source Projekten zusammen, um aufzuzeigen, wie diese scheinbar unorganisierten Programmierer-Gruppen funktionieren.und was Firmen von ihnen lernen können.

Diese Best Practices aus Open Source Projekten:

- Software-Wiederverwendung
- modulare Entwicklung
- Community Building,
- Motivierung und Einbindung von externen Programmierern
- Anreizsysteme für unbezahlte Beitragende

Today I presented our paper on extending the concept of open innovation with a so-called ‘push model’. The paper should come out during the next months in the International Journal of Technology Management. Thanks to Marc Holitscher from Microsoft and Marcus Dapp of ETHZ for joining the discussion! Marcus even wrote some nice thoughts about companies and true sustainability!

Today I represent /ch/open and OpenExpo at the Linux Days 2008 in Geneva. It’s a neat open source conference and exhibition for the French-speaking part of Switzerland. And it’s great to make some French connections, e.g. Thierry Stoehr of Association Francophone des Utilisateurs de Linux et des Logiciels Libres. And of course it’s fun to meet the hospitable Swisslinux.org community (photo below)!

Last week Rivella, THE famous Swiss beverage company, celebrated one year anniversary of its Fairtrade certified juices. The press release explains why the decision to brand the high quality juice bottles with the newly designed Max Havelaar Fairtrade label (although they don’t call it branding but labelling ;) was a great success. My sincerest congratulation to this brave social entrepreneurial move with strategic impact!

Today was the first conference day of EURAM 2008 in Ljubljuana, the beautiful capital of Slovenia. Peter, Zeynep and I travelled yesterday to the city by airplane - which obviously still seems to bother our postdocs who took the train and have to emphasize they’re not jealous at us doctoral students ;)

So after missing the early bus at 6.30h to Bled and thus investing 65 euros in my PhD education for a taxi I spent an interesting day at the doctoral colloquium together with other 40 PhD students from all over Europe. Especially orally playing the “reviewing game” with senior researcher Henk V. Volberda was great fun - thanks a lot! As the sun is shining and food and drinks are great, it’s really a nice stay at the current European Union presidency country!

Let’s see how my tomorrow’s presentation of our Nokia paper will go. (no worry Seb, I don’t show all 23 slides in the 10min talk ;)

Normal things become very abnormal when filmed very slowly or very quickly. My favorite ones:

http://www.istockphoto.com/file_closeup?id=5542783

http://www.istockphoto.com/file_closeup?id=5593958