Marketing

The good news following our recent presence at the SCaLE conference and the great exposure that it resulted in continues to pour in. Haiku has now been invited to have a booth at the LugRadio Live USA 2008, the first LugRadio live event to be held in the US. Needless to say, we could not refuse the irresistible offer. The event will take place in San Francisco on the weekend of April 12 and 13, at the The Metreon entertainment center located at the heart of the city (map).

LugRadio is an event that covers a range of topics about free software, Open Source, digital rights, technology and more. Combined with a compelling list of speakers, exhibitors and birds of a feather sessions, this event is said to offer what feels like a combination of a rock concert and a computer conference. To bring this unique atmosphere to San Francisco, LugRadio Live USA 2008 USA will have around 30 speakers including Miguel de Icaza and Ian Murdock, over 20 exhibitors, an eclectic range of BOF and other sessions, and the live recording of LugRadio in front of an audience.

SCaLE 5x, Haiku Tech Talks at Google, Picn*x XVI, CNSL 3 in Venezuela, FISL 8.0 in Brazil, NUMERICA in France, T-DOSE in the Netherlands, Kansai Open Source Forum in Japan. The list of 2007 events where Haiku had a presence is very long. In fact, never in the past has Haiku had so much public exposure as it did during 2007. And as the project keeps making progress towards its first release, this trend of increased exposure before the eyes of the open source and computing world in general is expected — and desired — to continue. In the first two months of 2008 alone, Haiku will be at BeGeistert 018, SCaLE 6x and FOSDEM 2008, not to mention the Haiku hacking event that is taking place this very same week. With very few exceptions, these events are all the result of initiatives by one or more community members.

In an attempt to assist the effort of these community members who drive such initiatives and to lure more of them to follow suit, we have added to the Haiku website the ability to easily publish information about conferences and events, as a means to increase their exposure and as a tool to further engage the participation of the community in this events.

2007 has been a year of change for Haiku. None of it has been quite like this, however. Haiku, as an organization, is reinventing itself. First of all, on Aug. 31, Michael Phipps announced to the Haiku admin team that he intended to move on. Here are some of his words on the subject:

"... I think that it is time that I move on. Haiku has become something that I do because I have to. ... I am *NOT* in any way angry or bitter. I WANT Haiku to succeed. I still love it. ... This has been a great run and I am phenomenally proud of what we have accomplished here. I am very sad to be leaving, but I think that it is the right decision both for Haiku and for me personally."

Michael has written an article, in which he reflects on his departure. There is no doubt that Michael will be dearly missed by all of us as a visionary, leader, and friend. Michael, should you ever feel like it, you are most welcome to rejoin our efforts!

Following Michael's announcement to the team, everyone felt that this would be the right time to put into place some fundamental restructuring of our organization which had been discussed at length for some weeks. This reorganization's purpose is to better fit Haiku's needs, such as current developers needing to be able to focus on development and matching non-development needs with members of the community who wish to meet them.

One persisting problem with the current admin team is that most of its members don't have enough time to do non-development work for the project or simply aren't interested, and those who do could need more help. In order to address this problem, we have decided to take the following steps to transition to a new and hopefully more effective structure.

First, we will unify all contributors with commit access to the Haiku source tree into a single Developer Team, which will be exclusively focused on development and all technical and development-related decisions, including the creation of one or more eventual Haiku distributions. Membership to this team is automatic through gaining commit access. The rules for gaining or losing commit access will be simple and announced separately.

In parallel, we are setting up a "Transition Steering Committee" consisting of developers, admins and a few trusted community members who will be tasked with the mission of creating a body designed to effectively manage the assets and resources of the project, and support its growth through activities such as funding, marketing, business relations and others. The ultimate goal of this committee is to setup a Haiku Inc. on steroids with a new president, a functional BOD, a charter, more transparency and some form of representation from the community. The transition process to this beefed up Haiku Inc. is expected to take several months, during which the community will be consulted from time to time for input on various matters. After the transition period, the people involved can be ratified in their positions or replaced by some form of representative vote.

We are hoping that by having two bodies with clearly defined and distinct roles, everyone will be able to focus on what they do best, making the individuals more productive and the organization as a whole more effective. Needless to say, both groups will work synergistically, and will consult each other when either side deems it necessary.

We think that this restructuring will be positive for Haiku in the long run. But as they say, "the devil is in the details". :) So we will keep the community posted as we figure out the details along the way. In the meantime, if you have any comments or input, feel free to post a message to the Haiku mailing list. We want to know what you think.

As another avenue to spread awareness of the Haiku project, the Haiku project has opened a store for official Haiku merchandise at CafePress. Find T-shirts, mousepads, coffee mugs, and more! Most items are sold at Haiku's cost and any proceeds go directly to Haiku. Read more for how you can contribute designs for the store. What's more is that this is a community-driven effort. Got a great idea for Haiku stuff? Here are the guidelines:

Yesterday was our big day at Google, and we can say with a good degree of confidence that the Haiku Tech Talk was quite successful. We had a very special guest for this event: former Be Inc. CEO Jean Louis Gassée, not only joined us at Google for our presentation, but also gave a few words of support and encouragement for our project. It was great to have JLG's presence, as well as that of the several ex-Be engineers who showed up for the talk. We were also glad to see JAVA for BeOS developer Andrew Bachman join us for this special event. Take a look at the pictures taken during the presentation. A video of the full presentation will be posted on the web later this week; we will post the link here when it becomes available.

We finally have the specific details regarding the activities planned by the Haiku Project at the SCaLE 5x Conference. It's going to be two days filled with action, including an exhibit booth with a projector demonstrating Haiku, and two Birds of a Feather (BOF) presentations.

SCaLE 5x floor plan; Haiku is at booth #42.

Haiku Exhibit

We will be at booth #42. We are planning on having a projector running Haiku on a backwall screen, and a couple of hands-on PCs so that visitors can actually play with Haiku. Project leader Michael Phipps along with Haiku developers Axel Dörfler and Bruno G. Albuquerque will be available on-site. Feel free to stop by to find out about the project or to discuss technical details of the Haiku operating system. We look forward to seeing everyone!

BoF Presentations

February 10 (Sat), 8:00PM

• Title: Introducing the Haiku Operating System
• Description: This is an introduction to Haiku, an open source operating system designed from the ground up for the desktop, inspired by the concepts and technologies of BeOS. The presentation will cover the concepts and features that make Haiku unique, as well as a hands-on demo.
• Presenter: Michael Phipps
• Place: Midway conference room

February 11 (Sun), 7:00PM

• Title: Haiku Technology Insight
• Description: This presentation covers some of the technologies that make Haiku a unique operating system, including the OpenBFS database-like file system, the original HVIF icon file format, and Haiku's unique implementation of devfs.
• Presenters: Axel Dörfler and Bruno G. Albuquerque
• Place: Kennedy conference room

Conference Overview

• The Fifth Annual Southern California Linux Expo — SCaLE 5x 2007
• Date: February 10 & 11, 2007
• Location: The Westin Los Angeles Airport (map)
• Registration: on-site

We finally have the long promised new website. It has taken much longer than expected, but hopefully the wait was worth it. I would like to briefly introduce some of the (not so obvious) changes, and try to explain how to make the best of the Haiku website as a tool for the community to contribute to our project.

About Section

• Haiku Gallery
  For starters, there is now a new Haiku Gallery. The gallery currently has a Haiku Screenshot Tour that gives a good visual overview of what Haiku looks like. We plan to gradually expand the number of screenshots to show various applications running in Haiku, and also use use the gallery to post photos of conferences, presentations and other Haiku related events.
• Haiku Movies
  There is also a new Haiku Movies page with links to videos on the web showing Haiku. At present, this page lists only a couple of videos, but we would like to expand this list with your help. So, if you know of any Haiku videos on the web that could be added to this list, please drop us a line with the URL, description and author information so that we can add it to the list.
• FAQs
  The frequently asked questions section has been divided into a General FAQ and a Development FAQ.

Development Section

This section has been slightly changed to make it more compact and focused. We should also note that our Project management and bug/issue tracking system (Trac) is back and that it has a new home at dev.haiku-os.org.

Documents Section

The Documents section has been reorganized into Developer Documents and End User Documents. Each category also has its own subcategories to make it easier to find the kind of document that you are looking for. We will most likely add new document categories as we see fit in the future.

Community Section

• Haiku Blog-O-Sphere
  We have setup a Haiku Blog-O-Sphere, where the Haiku admins will blog progress reports and other Haiku related posts. This will hopefully give the community a little bit of insight into what the core project members are doing a bit beyond of the commit logs.
• Community Forums
  The Community Forums have been migrated to the Drupal system. This was a difficult decision (and a bit controversial), but we decided to keep it all under one system, both for consistency of looks and easy of maintenance.
• Wiki
  Also, as you may have noticed, the wiki has been taken offline. There was too much duplication of content (which we want to avoid), and we would like to repurpose it so that it fulfills a distinct and useful role within the context of our web presence. I hope the community will understand and support this decision.

Other Goodies

At the end of every news post in the front page you will see a few additional icons. As some of you may guess, these allow you to:

• Bookmark the post on del.icio.us
• Bookmark the post on Google
• Digg the post on digg.com
• Search for the post on Technorati.

This is an easy way to spread the word about Haiku, and help raise its visibility on the web.

If you want an easy way to follow what's going on with Haiku, there are several RSS feeds that you can subscribe to:

• Latest News
• Haiku Blog-O-Sphere feed
• Development Aggregator

As a matter of fact, there are many more pages on the website that have their own syndication feed, which you can easily identify by the icon.

User Accounts

All user accounts were migrated from the old website. If you find that you are unable to login to the new website, please try:

• Clearing the cookies in your browser
• Requesting a new password

Acknowledgements

The new website was possible thanks to the help of many people. Hopefully, I have not forgotten anyone.

• Austin Bales, for his valuable ideas.
• Petter Holt Juliussen, for providing server space at the early stages of development.
• Gavin James, for his technical help with Drupal.
• Waldemar Kornewald, for his valuable technical support.
• Urias McCullough and Curtis Wanner, for helping out with the migration of content.
• Zumi, for creating nice icons for the site.
• Stephan Assmus, for creating great looking artwork.
• All the admins, for providing great insight, and for putting up with my marketing rants for the last several months. :-)
• The Haiku community at large, for their patience.

To finish, I can't emphasize enough the fact that we are a community based project, and that as such, we rely on the contributions of volunteers that want to see Haiku progress. The website is no exception. This new website is just a little step — hopefully in the right direction. Use it as a tool to inform yourself, to interact with other members of the community, and also to promote Haiku. This is just a start: let's make it even better.