“Hello, World!”

This is my first blog post as the Director of Community Management for Hyperic, so I suppose I should begin with an introduction. I’m Jeremy Hogan, and I’m a hacker. If something works, I want to pull it apart and see how. If it’s broken, I have a compulsive need to try and fix it. Open source is my crack.

My first real tech job was as a web slinger in the mid-90s. Back when open source was called “right click > view source”. I got wind of this Linux thing and went to work for Red Hat. There I got to use my LAMP, network and sysadmin skills in anger for some bleeding edge customers in enterprise support. And believe you me, there was plenty of the bleeding.

Then they asked me to be their community relations manager. I had no idea what that meant other than I wouldn’t get support calls at 4AM so I said “hells yeah!”. I fumbled about trying to define that role from the final boxed product days of the 7.x series and on through the launch of Fedora. In those years I learned the most important lesson about managing an open source community: you can’t. At least not in the traditional sense of the word.

As Linux Deity Alan Cox once put it, open source is an explosion and if you try and contain it in your hands, they’ll get blown off. But you *can* put a barrel on it, and point it in an approximate direction. My hope is that I’ve lost enough digits over the years that I’ve learned a thing or two and can lend a helping stump.

So my role–as I see it so far on my first day–will be to help make sure Hyperic keeps its end of barrel on the explosion. Perhaps we’ll rifle the other end, climb a water tower and blow the brains out of some crufty, closed source software. You know, metaphorically speaking. I don’t recommend being a sniper. Unless you’re playing Call of Duty 4, in which case it can be a gas. In that role, you can expect me to be an open and tolerant listener. Equal parts whipping post and bully pulpit, I’m here to make sure you are heard within the company and that the company’s decisions are relayed and explained in kind.

In that spirit, it’s now open mic night. What do you want to see happen with the Hyperic community? With the company itself? What’s working? What sucks? Got something to say about my mother? Let it rip, but fair warning, she *does* wear combat boots. Srsly.

The comments are open, the com is yours. If you’d prefer, you can drop me a note at jeremy dot hogan at hyperic dot com. Say anything, even if it’s just to say “unsubscribe” or even “hello.”

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