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Hi Mark!

What's the context? Like, who's the audience, and how much do they know?

I've given a few presentations like that over the years, and I always think that it's important to know your audience. (I'm not always the best at that, but at least I know to worry about it.)

It is going to be for a Java Users Group. They aren't new developers (many of them have 10+ years of dev experience), but I've found many within the Java community do not contribute to open source. They tend to have side projects to learn new things, but don't do it as a community. I want to help change that, at least with the people I know.

I would focus on demystification of the process of open source, and finding out what could motivate them to contribute.

For demystification, can you find out what they *don't* know (or make some good guesses)?

They're probably mostly used to bug trackers from work. They might not be used to the more interesting uses of bug trackers, like http://www.internetnews.com/skerner/2008/08/mozilla-files-landslide-bug.html . They're probably also used to version control?

I think the social part of the story and the life cycle of a project and a patch would be interesting. For that, I would check out Karl Fogel's book called _Producing Open Source Software_.

Another really good entry point is a story of *your* involvement and your motivations. By making it personal and concrete, you can keep people interested.

I like the twin stories of Skype in the 2007 to 2009 period, to showcase the power structures at work in proprietary sfotware: a) Skype is designed to be resistant to debuggers <<a href="http://www.blackhat.com/presentations/bh-europe-06/bh-eu-06-biondi/bh-eu-06-biondi-up.pdf" target="_blank" rel="nofollow">http://www.blackhat.com/presentations/bh-europe-06/bh-eu-06-biondi/bh-eu-06-biondi-up.pdf> <<a href="http://docbug.com/blog/archives/000748.html" target="_blank" rel="nofollow">http://docbug.com/blog/archives/000748.html> (there are surely other references worth looking at), and Skype in China appears to be government-backdoored spyware <<a href="http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/node/4710" target="_blank" rel="nofollow">http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/node/4710>.

I also think that the history of free software and open source, and the meaning of the terms, are actually important to cover in a presentation like that. I have found that people are often very receptive to the ideals of the movement, even if they're not ready to move all the way to a fully free-software system today.

That's my thoughts! Not a bunch of slides, but hopefully some useful thoughts.

Thank you for the info! I hope to start putting something together over the next few weeks. This will be very helpful,

Mark, I code in Java for my job and found the same thing. Like paulproteus said, it'd be nice to know why they're not contributing to open source. Maybe you could do a quick ping of people on the list to find out why or (if you think you know) you could do a hand survey at the presentation. That will help get them engaged, and then you'll have the "answers" in your slides.

For example, I didn't contribute for the longest time because I couldn't find a Java project I really connect with like the Python projects.