MindTouch Announces the Most Powerful Voices in Open Source

By Dee-Ann LeBlanc | Published Mar 17, 2010

One of the announcements at the Open Source Business Conference happening now in San Francisco, California, is that of the "Most Powerful Voices in Open Source."Let's take a stroll through the who's who of open source MVPs.

What Is the Most Powerful Voices List?

According to MindTouch (news, site), the company behind the list, the Most Powerful Voices are the top 50 "most vocal, followed and repeated/re-posted open source commentators, representing several spheres of influence, including media, vendors, OSS projects, standards bodies, community management and more."

The ranking apparently draws from "the wide array of metrics available through Web and Enterprise 2.0 channels, including Twitter, Google News alerts, unique online visitor counts and analysis of the related 'buzz' of vendor/project affiliations."

The data itself was compiled using the MindTouch platform, according to the company "federating these data sources, applying varied weighting, and processing it for delivery of the ranking."

Who's on the List?

The top five MPVs are:

Tim O'Reilly, founder and CEO of O'Reilly Media
Linus Torvalds, founder of Linux, open source advocate
Chris Messina, open web advocate, Google (news, site)
Miguel de Icaza, founder, Mono and GNOME projects
Jonathan Schwartz, former CEO of Sun Microsystems (news, site)

Open Source CMS Notables

Familiar names from the open source CMS world include Dries Buytaert of Drupal (news, site) and Cheryl McKinnon with Nuxeo (news, site). Also making the list is MindTouch's own Aaron Roe Fulkerson (should they get to put someone on their own list?) and a number of well-known consultants who serve the open source CMS community.

Of course, the question has to be asked whether frequencies on social media really represent one's level of influence, but for those who like quantifiable processes, the list is interesting. How would your own list be different?

For more on the Most Powerful Voices in Open Source list, see the official announcement here and the blog post here.