Open Source Skills and Business Requirements – Match and Mismatch
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The document discusses the motivations for engaging in Free/Libre Open Source Software (FLOSS), highlighting the skills learned and the profile of participants. It evaluates the value of FLOSS skills in the job market compared to formal degrees, finding that employers generally regard these skills as competitive, and suggests that FLOSS environments may provide essential future-ready skills. However, it notes that to meet evolving business requirements, there needs to be a shift in focus towards service-oriented engineering and greater collaboration between communities and companies.
Open Source Skills and Business Requirements – Match and Mismatch
- 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
- 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!