Companies and Communities

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Proposal
Short form
osb2009-0053

Excerpt

Companies are sponsoring more open source projects or paying the salaries of people participating in the community. What happens when you throw companies into the mix in an open source community?

Description

Companies are sponsoring more open source projects or paying the salaries of people participating in the community. What happens when you throw companies into the mix in an open source community? In this panel, we’ll talk about the good and the bad that can come out of corporate participation in open source communities.

Tags

company, community, Online Community, corporate

Speaking experience

Speaker

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    Dawn Foster

    Fast Wonder

    Biography

    Community Manager, Event Organizer, Blogger, RSS Junkie and Technology Enthusiast.

    Dawn Foster works in Intel’s Open Source Technology Center and is Intel’s Community Manager for the open source MeeGo project. Dawn has more than 14 years of experience in business and technology with expertise in strategic planning, management, community building, community management, open source software, market research, social media, and RSS. She is passionate about bringing people together through a combination of online communities and real-world events. She has experience building new communities, and managing existing communities with a particular emphasis on developer and open source communities. In addition to working at Intel, Dawn was an online community consultant, and she has worked at Jive Software, Compiere, and a Midwestern manufacturing company in positions ranging from Unix system administrator to market researcher to community manager to open source strategist.

    While at Jive Software, she was responsible for building a new developer community for Jive’s new Clearspace product line and managing the existing Ignite Realtime open source community. She is a co-founder and board member of Legion of Tech, a non-profit chartered with organizing free events for the Portland, Oregon technology community. As part of her work with Legion of Tech, Dawn is an organizer for Portland BarCamp, Ignite Portland and other events. Dawn holds an MBA from Ashland University and a bachelor’s degree in computer science from Kent State University. Dawn regularly blogs about online communities as the author of the Fast Wonder Blog, and she blogs for GigaOM’s WebWorkerDaily. She is the author of the book, Companies and Communities: Participating without being sleazy.