Last week I attended BlogHer Business in New York City, and appeared on a panel alongside two other Microsoft bloggers, Ani Babaian and Sara Ford. Sara let me pepper her with questions for a couple minutes about the work she's doing with CodePlex, Microsoft's open source project hosting site. Sara Ford in NYC

The Geek in question: Sara Ford

The job title: Program Manager, CodePlex.com

Obviously, open source + Microsoft = touchy subject with a lot of history. I'm curious how you approach that. Do you put on your special kid gloves before work every day?
We want to create a site that provides a great user experience for open source development on the Microsoft platform. We want people to be able to collaborate in an online world by giving them project management tools and a source code repository. And, they can track bugs, features, and have discussion boards -- all the things that you need for an open, collaborative environment.

When I'm engaging with the open source community, I say, "Hey, I was hired at Microsoft straight out of college -- I've only seen how proprietary software is built, so I'm curious about how open source projects work. Come and show me how it works."

You use words like "open" and "collaborative" -- words that haven't traditionally been in the Microsoft vernacular. How have you seen the culture at the company change, to where "open" and "collaborative" are now a part of your job?
When I was in college, I would find bugs while coding in Visual J++, and the only way to get assistance was to pay $250 to report the bug. If Microsoft confirmed your bug, your money would be reimbursed.

That was my experience — very closed. Pay Microsoft $250 in the hopes that your bug was valid and you could get your money back?! $250 was the same as my rent! No way I could do that.

After I was hired on in Fall 2001, I started to see a shift, with the company moving towards community and transparency and blogging efforts. I got to see teams starting to use newsgroups to respond to customer questions.

Then the Microsoft forums came around, and blogging gained in popularity, so it was a natural transition. Not only were we encouraged to engage with the community, but we had all these new ways to do so. It's taken a while, right? We're talking like five years ago, but now we have 5500 bloggers, and forums, and we have community.

What lessons do you feel Microsoft has to learn from the open source community?
One of the things that I like about open source is the agile development style. Not everyone chooses agile development of course, but agile allows a really quick turn-around for customers — and since the open source community is so much about collaboration over code, and with agile you can move really quickly.

What do you feel like YOU have to learn from the open source community?
I went to this incredible presentation at the O'Reilly Open Source Convention in 2006 by James Howison from Syracuse University, who spoke about how open source communities succeed or fail. It was like being handed a textbook: "Here's your job. Now go do it." When I came back to Redmond a week later, I had gathered seven call-to-actions of how we were going to change our development model for the Power Toys for Visual Studio on CodePlex.

I actually just submitted a paper for the O'Reilly Open Source convention 2008, and it got accepted. It's called "Towards a Stronger Open Source Ecosystem," and it's a summary of the lessons that I've learned, plus ideas about what the future of open source might look like if there were no barriers in communication. Wish me luck.

Oh, so you want some relevant links, hmmm?