Wesley Leggette and I are very proud to announce that we have been named Open Source Community Managers for the Cleversafe dispersed storage project. Our history with this project goes back to its very roots, and we've had a steady hand in driving forward the initial open source strategy and decisions. In our close work together over the years as core developers, Wesley and I have established a strong and successful rapport, and we really look forward to the opportunity of applying ourselves to the continued improvement of our open source interactions and policies.

Cleversafe's decision to name us as Managers is a testament to the company's fundamental belief in the value of cooperative experimentation and development in an open environment. This is a value deeply rooted in our daily lives, both with the technical and business staff at our company. This decision also signifies our project's maturation. Up until this point, it has been all hands on deck to implement, test and deploy our first version of the dispersed storage network, and as such we haven't had the opportunity to fully dedicate ourselves to fostering innovation in our open source community. As Open Source Managers our prime directive will be just this - to tend to the care and feeding of this project, and those who wish to join us.

In the past, Wesley and I have been involved at various levels in open source development projects and users groups, both at the international and local community level, and our combined experience with these has given us a precise understanding of how best to foster this community. With no further ado, we're going to begin execution of that vision. We're deprecating usage of the current forums, which we've found to be difficult to use in carrying out technical conversation. In it's place we've deployed a bulletin board at http://dev.cleversafe.org/forums/, complete with OpenID support. We've also created a development-oriented mailling list, and we likewise encourage you to subscribe to it at http://lists.cleversafe.org/listinfo/dsnet-development.

The first phase of our effort is focused on deploying the right online tools and resources to support you, as a dispersed storage user or developer. We're intensely interested in your thoughts and opinions as to what we should use, so please use the aforementioned means to tell us of your every wish and desire. We'll do our very best to please. Our second phase of work will target the augmentation of documentation and improvement of software usability. We'll be blogging more about this in the very near-term, as we pull everything together, so please stay tuned.

In the meantime, we need your help to grow. We believe this technology can be used for great good in and around the open source software community. Tell us where you think can we can help!

All my best,
John Quigley