community

Red Hat Nation

I was emailing back and forth with my friend Todd Barr the other day. Catching up with him reminded me of an idea we used to talk about quite a bit that I still think is the best idea that we haven’t made good on: Red Hat Nation.

The basic idea is that a company like Red Hat, based on open source, has an opportunity to completely redefine what a business looks like in the 21st century. The traditional 20th century business is often very black and white: either you work for the company or you don’t. You are inside it’s walls, or you are not. There are clear distinctions between employees, partners, and customers. The most common way of depicting a company in this 20th century model is by showing its building.

In the traditional model, if I was to say I work for Red Hat, you would assume it means I am a Red Hat employee, and that they give me a paycheck, benefits, a desk, all the normal stuff.

But imagine for a second that the image used to illustrate the 21st century company is not a building, but instead a flag.

A flag is often a rallying point for nations, a symbol that represents a common set of beliefs. You see flags at the front lines of troops in battle. You see flags hanging outside the door of homes. You see flags on clothing, at sporting events, in many places where people who share common traits gather.

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Truth Happens

One day in 2003, Matthew Szulik came to us and said he wanted to create a video to show before his keynote at Linuxworld. Now no one in our group had ever done a video before, but we figured we’d take a shot. My good friend David Burney had just hired a guy right out of college into his design firm (his name was Tim Kiernan, one of the most talented guys I have ever worked with) who specialized in video/film, so we got to work. If I remember correctly, we produced the entire thing from beginning to end in about a month. Originally, we only planned to show the video once, at the keynote.

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Introduction

Only about 4% of the total energy density in the universe can be seen directly.
About 96% is thought to be composed of dark matter or dark energy.
(Wikipedia)

July 2009: See my update on the topics covered in this post here.

I’ve been intrigued by the idea of dark matter for a while. But it was actually hearing about this thing called the Large Hadron Collider that helped me make the connection between what I do for a living and this concept of dark matter.

The Large Hadron Collider is the world’s largest particle accelerator. It was built on the border of France and Switzerland and is about 17 miles long. One of the things that particle physicists hope to prove with this enormous project is that dark matter actually exists. As I understand it, the accelerator shoots protons at super high speeds around the collider, and, if these scientists are lucky, it eventually might produce a few wacky particles that will exist for only a few milliseconds and then disappear again. And these particles might prove that dark matter isn’t just a theory. Continue reading →