A Tokyo trip report

One attempt to improve this situation can be found in the Linux Foundation Japan Symposium, held a few times each year in Tokyo. This event was started by OSDL, and is being continued by the Linux Foundation. The idea is to bring a few community developers over for a couple of days and have them talk with Japanese developers about what the community is up to and how they can be a part of it. Your editor was lucky enough to be invited to the July meeting where, between encounters with sushi, sake, and Japanese beer, he was able to get some interesting work done.

First, though, was an encounter with the Yokohama Linux Users Group, which had invited your editor to come talk seeing as he was in the neighborhood anyway. YLUG meetings, as it turns out, look much like LUG meetings just about anywhere: a couple dozen or so technical guys show up to hear somebody talk about free software. The beer and dinner (and more beer) gathering afterward was special, though; if more user groups included that sort of event, attendance at meetings would doubtless go up.

The symposium itself began with presentations from your editor and Paul Menage, author of the process containers patch. One of the important features of this event is that it includes simultaneous translators; said translators were somewhat dismayed by your editor's habit of changing his talks (and slides) right up to the point where the laptop gets plugged in at the podium. Their presence is important, though: it allows attendees to follow the talks without having to struggle with a foreign language; they can also ask questions in Japanese and still have the presenters understand them.

As it happens, language issues, while not on the formal agenda, were a big issue at this event. It is easy fall into the trap of believing that anybody who is sufficiently well educated to be part of our development community will, naturally, have learned the English language along the way. The truth of the matter is that there are many languages one could invest time in learning, English is a hard language (especially for those whose native language is far removed from English), and that many people who might have studied English for years have never really had a chance to use it enough to become truly proficient. English really is an obstacle for many potential contributors to our community. It slows down many developers, makes others afraid to participate in public forums, and blocks some entirely.

One step which is being taken to improve this situation is the translation of a number of core kernel development documents into Japanese. The documents of interest are primarily process-oriented - those which tell prospective developers how the community works and how to get patches accepted. Translation of serious technical documentation would require quite a bit more work and would be hard to keep up to date, so that is less likely to happen. Japanese versions of the documentation seem unlikely to go into the kernel repository itself, so they will have to be hosted elsewhere; they should, in any case, provide a useful resource for Japanese developers hoping to begin with the kernel.

The translators got to work in the opposite direction for a while as Akinobu Mita discussed his work on the fault injection framework. At any event designed to increase community involvement it is important to highlight the efforts of local people who have been successful; Mita-san's work, which makes it possible to find problems in difficult-to-test error recovery paths, is an important contribution to the kernel development toolkit. He has, recently, been posting fixes to a long series of bugs found through the use of fault injection, making the kernel more stable for everybody.

The afternoon included a panel session which, among other things, covered the kernel development process. One of the key points in your editor's talk on that process is that code must be posted early; if a company insists that code pass through all of its internal quality assurance processes before being submitted, it is likely to post code which is in need of major changes. It turns out that this can be a problem with Japanese companies; one developer talked about "stone-headed managers" who are deathly afraid that somebody will post something which embarrasses or shames the company. Strange as it seems, the stone-headed manager problem is not confined to Japan; there is little to be done except to continue to try to educate those managers - or wait until they get promoted to a level where they are no longer a problem.

The second day consisted of smaller sessions where developers from Linux Foundation member companies could talk about their work and get questions answered. Fault injection was on the agenda again, as were various virtualization topics and the translation issue. Closing statements were made, and the event shut down until next time - scheduled for November.

The key to building a community and keeping it together is good communication. By bringing in community developers, the Japan Symposium certainly succeeds in raising the level of communication with the Japanese community. There is no better way to learn about how a community works than to talk with those who are in the middle of it. This series of events might just be part of why contributions from Japan appear to be on the rise. A less obvious but equally important point is this: communication goes both ways. Any speaker who attends this event can only go away smarter, having learned something about how the wider world sees free software. That, too, can only be a good thing.