Here’s the video, including Q&A:

Wish I’d been able to make it!

Now You See it

Cathy Davidson‘s Now You See It argues that the educational system in the US is failing to prepare graduates for the work they will be doing in the 21st century. While I found myself vigorously nodding at the general argument of the book, there were also some places I wished Davidson had developed in greater detail.

The best part of the book for me is the description of the roots of our standard educational approach going back to the early 20th century: Taylorism, the IQ, and standardized testing on a large scale. These approaches made sense when education’s focus was the creation of disciplined, managerial, bureaucratic middle-managers for hierarchical, command-and-control corporations.

Unfortunately, while the workforce is adapting to new realities of globalization, the digital revolution, and commons-based peer production, the educational system has not kept pace.

She’s definitely on to something, and I agree with much of her rant in both its aims and its general tenor. She’s also generally compelling when she talks about the variety of approaches they’ve taken at Duke (distributing iPods, how to crowdsource grading) and that she’s experienced as director of the HASTAC program (and as an all-around digital humanities evangelist).

The book’s a bit weaker, for me, when she tries to describe alternative educational approaches which embody the values and approach she wants to promote: collaboration through difference, game mechanics, and creative expression over standardized testing. They end up resonating as anecdotes but don’t provide a true alternative program which could be managed at any broad scale.

I also found the sections on what the modern workforce is like rang a bit hollow. It’s easy to critique Prof. Davidson as an academic – the old “Ivory Tower” versus “real world of work” contrast – but I think it’s fair to say that Davidson doesn’t reflect deep lived experience here in describing the “average” office worker, whatever that might mean.

If you have a job just about anywhere but Google, you are most likely working in a space designed for a mode of work that is disappearing. . . . We’ve just begun to think about the best ways to restructure the industrial labor values we inherited in order to maximize our productivity in the information age.

Maybe it’s just because I’ve spent the last 12+ years working in interactive agencies, on web projects, and with open source communities, but the descriptions Davidson offers of all the signposts of the new felt immediately familiar to me, as I suspect they would to anyone working in web strategy, design, and development. Global conference calls supplemented by a digital backchannel (irc / IM, over public networks or internal intranets) and web-based collaboration environments (maybe we don’t all use Second Life, but the specific technology isn’t really the point), working toward consensus and community-driven decision making over command and control – this is how everyone I know works!

Again, I don’t think this takes away from Davidson’s primary point about the organization of the educational system in relation to the way work actually happens – I just think the new mode of work is even more widespread than she suggests. It isn’t just the denizens of the Googleplex or Big Blue who are working in a collaborative, technology-embedded, continuous partial attention world. (It’s also not just agencies, based on what I’ve observed at clients).

The second place where I wanted more from Davidson was in what industry likes to call “the solutions space.” Other than reducing class sizes, and decreasing reliance on standardized tests (which drives the behavior of teaching to the test rather than the kind of critical thinking, research, and collaboration skills Davidson emphasizes), what path should educators (or parents) take?

Davidson gestures in the direction of solutions with a few specific cases of schools and a broad discussion of game mechanics (cue Jane McGonical). Would substituting boss challenges for end of grade (standardized) testing be both radically productive in improving education and sustainable at large scale? If every university starting giving students iPods (or perhaps now iPads) and eliminated letter grades, would that magically shift the conversation back to creativity and collaboration?

I was also concerned at Davidson’s fast and loose use of “crowdsourcing” and “open source” as though they were interchangeable or nearly interchangeable references to work done by large groups. (The simple fact that she’s talking about cooperative production and there isn’t a single mention of Yochai Benkler’s The Wealth of Networks or The Penguin and the Leviathan or, for that matter, the Public Library of Science, or Open Courseware). There’s one quick nod to Creative Commons but it’s dismissive: “it’s not always a simple matter in a collaborative endeavor to agree to ‘share alike’” (232).

Instead we get broad references to “open source” via Linux and Mozilla, and crowdsourcing via Wikipedia, but with no clear definition or explanation of how free software and open source communities came to be or organize themselves. There doesn’t really seem to be any recognition of the core freedoms open source is really about. She cites the Cathedral and the Bazaar, but never really explores why or how this mode of production compares to traditional software (which is very much still present and arguably even dominant in education). There doesn’t seem, for example, to be any concern about the involvement of companies like Apple and in driving educational initiatives. What does it mean to train students on a proprietary platform when free platforms are also available? What impact might the free software and free culture movements have on institutional education (elementary on through tertiary) if we took seriously their challenges to proprietary software and big corporate media?

(Starter Recommendations: Chris Kelty’s Two Bits: On the Cultural Significance of Free Software, Gabriella Coleman‘s research on the ethics of hackers and hacking.).

Promising Whiteboard Sketch for Mozilla Education - photo by Mark Surman, cc-by-nc-sa license)

The last major gap I was surprised to see Davidson not explore further is alternative educational approaches. There’s no mention of homeschooling or diy education: increasingly used by significant segments of the population to opt-out of the institutional part of the educational system. Would she support this approach, as it is inline with adaptive learning and flexibility and anti-standardized testing, or would she bemoan the approach as it doesn’t provide enough collaboration? (Of course, home-schooled students could collaborate online with others, which might pretty closely mirror the life of the new IBM consultant – some have said IBM stands for “I’m By Myself”).

In the end, Now You See It is a compelling read if you’re interested in the failings of standardized testing, and exploring more creative, internet-era-appropriate methods of education. The challenge it raises to educators is a signal one: how are we checking our own institutional biases in favor of really exploring what students will need in the workforce, and how can we make school more like the new workplace?

As someone who’s argued that Lolcats belong on your corporate intranet, I’m sympathetic to Davidson’s desire to recuperate the reputations of internet “distractions” and recognize that it is ok that kids like video games and that students might spend part of their school day on thinking that is not immediately measured on a multiple-choice test. I just wish there was a more specific program of actions we could take to get there, as I want to play along.

LOLCats on teh Internet (Click here to expand)
Source: Online Education

Optaros Beer, which was free as in freedom but not as in beer

Of course, as r0ml pointed out in a masterful OSCON presentation in 2008, we do have a corresponding word in English to libre – Liberal, or Liberty. Maybe if we’d been calling it “Liberty Software” or “Freedom Software” all these years there’d be less FUD.

Two recent posts crossed my blog reader on the challenge of value versus cost. Now that so many content creators are taking approaches similar to free software via unconferences and creative commons licenses, we need to remember that “free” in these case does not mean without value and does not have to mean without cost.

Chris Brogan at Gnomedex (Photo by turoczy, cc-by license)

First, my friend Chris Brogan writes about why the Inbound Marketing Summit isn’t free (in the sense of no charge to attend):

When you run conferences, everyone wants in for free. It’s understandable. Times are tough and people don’t have as much money. . . . The ticket price is $695 to attend (unless you know @dmscott, @justinlevy, or a few other people, who have codes for VIP discounts).

Otherwise, you’ve gotta shell out to get in.

There are lots of reasons why it isn’t free, of course, not the least of which is that running the conference means incurring costs:

The venue, Gillette Stadium, is home to the New England Patriots. They charge me money to be there. The food costs me money. The power, the booth construction, all that stuff. This is simple, right? It’s a transaction. I ask people for something, and they tell me how much it will cost. Sometimes, I get a discount if I buy in bulk.

Chris goes on, though, to talk about the difference between a cost focus and a value focus, encouraging us to think in terms of value:

Don’t ever feel embarrassed to charge for value. Never apologize that something costs money if you’ve determined the value of it.

The irony is the the Inbound Marketing Summit now has to compete – for mindshare if not for actual audience, since I don’t know what the actual attendee profiles of the two events look like – with PodCamp, an unconference he co-founded a few years ago.

PodCamp’s model is to charge nothing or a minimal fee (this year’s PodCamp Boston did charge $50 ), attract sponsors, and encourage all attendees to speak on topics about which they have knowledge. (PodCamp itself was modeled after BarCamp, which was originally created in juxtaposition to FooCamp, which was an exclusive, invite-only event for “Friends of O’Reilly.”).

Just as the increased volume and quality of so-called “amateur” content has put incredible price pressure on “paid content” online, the increased frequency and quality of unconferences (*camps, tweet-ups, social media breakfasts, and the like) has put tremendous downward price pressure on more traditional conferences. They aren’t the same thing – any more than fan videos are the same as Hollywood movies – but they are enough alike that people naturally compare them. There’s a personal ROI calculation that goes into conference attendance (which includes not only the entrance fee but travel cost and the opportunity cost of time spent), and the presence of “free” or “nearly-free” alternatives has an impact.

Amanda Palmer (Photo by McWonthelottery, cc-by-sa license)

In another field heavily hit by price pressure related to digital distribution, Amanda Palmer writes about why she’s not afraid to ask for money:

artists need to make money to eat and to continue to make art.

artists used to rely on middlemen to collect their money on their behalf, thereby rendering themselves innocent of cash-handling in the public eye.

artists will now be coming straight to you (yes YOU, you who want their music, their films, their books) for their paychecks.
please welcome them. please help them. please do not make them feel badly about asking you directly for money.
dead serious: this is the way [it] is going to work from now on and it will work best if we all embrace it and don’t fight it.

Amanda and Chris are both in a difficult position, trying to demonstrate consistently the value of something intangible and make their living from it. Both demonstrate that stepping into new territory – experimenting with new revenue models, new ways of sharing value with communities, and new ways of interacting with audience(s) around intangibles like art and knowledge – isn’t some magic path that enables you to avoid all the thorny questions about value. If anything, Chris and Amanda are leaping headfirst into the storm, trying out new ways of sharing value and determining cost, and in the process hitting these issues head on.

Who gets to set the value of an experience? The performer? The audience?

What happens when the audience values the experience differently than the performer or organizer? What if you determined the value of a conference after attending it, rather than before?

I know I’ve been to many a “professional conference” where if I could I’d have demanded a refund, or felt like my time would be best served by walking out rather than staying put for the complete conference. I’ve also been to (and helped organize) “free” conferences that were packed with value.

Similarly, I’ve paid for CDs or concerts which ended up being disappointing, and seen free concerts or downloaded free music (legally!) from artists who blew me away. The link between cost and value is tenuous at best, which is something I think most consumers know intuitively.

Which brings us full circle to free and open source software. (The ambiguity of “free” is one of the reasons some prefer the term “open source” – though for others this is the problem with “open source” – that it lacks the key ideological valence of “free”).

Libre (Photo by TheAlieness GiselaGiardino²³, cc-by-sa license)

Understanding the true value of free and open source software means recognizing two key aspects:

1. It isn’t just that you have access to the software without cost, it’s that you also have access to the source code, enabling you to examine, understand, and modify its behavior to suit your needs
2. It isn’t just that you can obtain software under an open source license, but that there is a community attached to that code, in which you are invited to participate. (Though, to be fair, not all open source communities are equally open – some commercial open source companies do limit participation in various ways)

If the dominant reason for your interest in FOSS is that it will be free of charge, you will likely end up disappointed. (This is equally true of folks for whom the primary reason to attend a BarCamp or PodCamp is the free or cheap price rather than the conversation and open space approach to coordinating content).

If, on the other hand, you’re interested in being more able to experiment, being more agile in your ability to stand up new experiences and launch new sites quickly, and being less tied to traditional “lock-in” licensing agreements, you will find much to love in open source platforms and solutions built on them.

Just don’t forget that value is being exchanged, even if costs are not.

You may not be paying for access to the source code, but that doesn’t mean you should not expect to invest in all the other aspects of the solution. (The expression “free as puppies” is sometimes used to draw this distinction – you will need to manage, support, and maintain any solution you build or acquire, which you can do yourself or pay someone else to do for you).

Street Performer Gets A Tip, Photo by ceajaegirl, cc-by license)

The John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, among many other philanthropic initiatives in culture, community, and journalism generally, has been running the Knight News Challenge since 2007. Its basically a grant competition, in which various digital journalism initiatives compete for a pool of grants amounting to $25 million total over five years.

One aspect which makes the Knight News Challenge unique – other than the size of the grant pool – is that the winning grantees are required to:

1. Use digital, open-source technology.
2. Distribute news in the public interest.
3. Test your project in a local community.

It looks like a fantastic strategy: encourage innovation, provide funding without forcing the grantees into short-term, must-build-immediate-ROI type thinking, and share the results with the broader community through open source.

Knight - Photo by Ruth L., cc-by-nd license

Two recent successful projects from Knight Foundation grantees – EveryBlock and Village Soup (which I’ve written about before in this blog), however, suggest there might be some gaps in the Foundation’s overall plan.

The core of the issue is this question: once the Knight Foundation funding is expended, what happens to the open source project the grant process mandates?

Do the creators truly create, engage with, and sustain an open source community around the code they release, contributing to and supporting the open source version, or do they “take it private”, leaving the open source seed to either take root and grow (or wither) on its own?

First, Village Soup. When I wrote about them back in May, it was unclear what exactly would be released and in fact whether or not they were compliant with the terms of the grant:

As one of the commentators on [founder Richard M.] Anderson’s recent blog entry on making hyperlocal pay pointed out, however, that doesn’t seem likely to be what the Knight Foundation expected when it funded creation of an open source project. Perhaps we’ll hear more as the end of the grant period (June 2009) approaches?

Anderson himself later commented on that same post, clarifying:

In accordance with the terms of our Knight Foundation News Challenge Grant, we are using the funds to create an open source version of VillageSoup’s software, which combines blogs, citizen journalism, online advertising and reverse publishing from online to print. The Knight Foundation will sublicense the open source publishing system software to third parties under the GPL and Creative Commons License.

In fact, that code is now available from this google code project: vsce (Village Soup Community Edition). It’s GPL (v2) licensed, with content (the user manual?) available under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 license.

There’s a 1.0.0 release, dated July 15, 2009, as well as a 63-page user manual which covers installation, configuration, and operation of sites based on the platform. The platform components are pretty standard in the open source world: Java (specifically Java Server Faces), JBoss Application Server, JBoss Seam, Hibernate, MySQL, Maven, and JQuery.

Fighing Knights - Photo by threlkelded, cc-by-nd license

What’s missing, though, is any real sense of an open source community around the platform. Issues? none. Wiki pages? none. There’s only one check-in to the subversion code repository, with no changes since then. The only “person” attached to the project at Google Code, and also the project owner, is identified as “helpd…@villagesoup.com” (no great imagination necessary to suggest that this parses to helpdesk@villagesoup.com).

In other words, an open source project has been released, to comply with the terms of the Knight Foundation grant, but is it an open source project likely to succeed?

There’s nothing in GPL v2 nor in the Knight grant itself, so far as I can tell, that would prevent (or even, for that matter, strongly discourage) VillageSoup® from continuing to iterate on, improve, develop, and maintain the Enterprise (hosted) version, Village Soup Common, without contributing those fixes to the open source community edition, and simply let the VSCE project wither on the vine.

EveryBlock, another Knight Foundation News Challenge grant recipient, has received considerably more press coverage (the acquisition of EveryBlock by MSNBC this week was covered by the AP and the NYT) but is potentially in a similar situation: there is an open source project release, in accordance with the terms of the grant, but will it be sustained long term?

A few pointers to other blog posts laying out some of the issues:

• EveryBlock.com Sale Shows Impact of Knight-Funded Media Innovation
• The Trouble with Taking Charity
• Is this legal? Is it ethical?
• The Nuances of the Everyblock Sale to MSNBC
• In Detail: The Nuances of the Everyblock Sale to MSNBC
• Interview: MSNBC.com Likely Will Add EveryBlock Feeds To Its Local Section in ‘Next Few Months’

The emerging consensus seems to be that EveryBlock has fulfilled its obligation to the Knight Foundation, releasing the project under the GPL (v3 in their case) at the end of the grant period. It also seems clear that neither the GPL itself nor the Knight Foundation grant will require that MSNBC continue to make its changes to the project available as open source.

So MSNBC could continue to improve the code, starting from the GPL code base, without releasing those improvements to the open source project. Since whatever platform they offer will almost certainly be a web service, they will not be distributing the modifications and can keep them private.

Whoa! You Totally Conquered Him, Dude! Photo by Sister72, cc-by license

But here’s the rub: so can anyone else. I could also take the GPL’d EveryBlock platform, improve upon it by adding additional features, and run a hyperlocal site for Salem MA, without being obligated to redistribute my version. That’s how the GPL works.

What, precisely, did MSBC buy, then? Presumably, the people involved in the project, the name and domain, and perhaps the existing data (it isn’t clear to me what license the data itself is under).

Will MSNBC take EveryBlock private, or will they learn to value the benefit of working with an open source project, and sustain a real community around the codebase?

I was initially more optimistic about EveryBlock, since the ebcode site has some activity: code updates, individuals named as owners, a mailing list). ebcode is also built on top of Django and Python, which will connect them more clearly to other communities of open source developers working on journalism. But in the paidContent interview EveryBlock founder Adrian Holovaty reportedly said:

others will only have access to the code as it existed on June 30—when it was initially released—meaning MSNBC.com will likely have an edge over any competitors. “What happens after that we’re not obligated to make that open source,” Holovaty says, adding that so far only a handful of sites have actually adopted the code.

He goes on to say, in the same interview:

The Knight Foundation funded EveryBlock via its Knight News Challenge program but the foundation did not have equity in the startup. “Basically the grant was paying for development of the open source code and we fulfilled the obligation,” Holovaty says. Asked whether he was now considering returning some money to the group, Holovaty says he is “planning on pointing everyone I know to the News Challenge. That’s what they’ve asked me to do.”

This doesn’t bode well for the long term future of an open source project derived from that code.

Ritterrüstung - Photo by marfis75, cc-by-sa license

What does this trend (if two can be called a trend) begin to suggest a flaw in the News Challenge approach?

If the grantees are required to release an open source version of the code written during the grant period (and maybe only the subset of the code specifically funded by the grant money), but have no real investment in the community model, and no real open source community of contributors around that core, is there any real benefit?

One could argue that if these platforms prove valuable enough, the GPL’d core that comes out of the grant period could be taken by a community and “forked” to create a real vibrant open source project around them – but generally code dumps (significant sets of code that were created by others and then thrown over the wall into an open source community) lead to less successful open source projects than those which actually develop organically from the beginning. It’s difficult to find a group of developers interested in making a community around existing source code – you’re more likely to find a community of developers willing to contribute to creating a code base.

Put differently, communities are great at creating (and maintaining, supporting, extending) code: code is not great at creating communities.

Should the Knight Foundation, and the News Challenge in particular, be doing something else to encourage or require real communities to form around the open source projects? It’s difficult, even with the purest intentions, to ensure that a real community will evolve around any open source project – though getting the community involved throughout might go a long way in that direction. How would open source developers contributing to the effort but not partaking in the grant funding feel?

On the other hand, is this a case where everything is actually working as it should be? If communities evolve around the open source projects that’s great, and if they don’t then perhaps there was no need to release the open source version, but there was no harm in doing so either.

Bruce Perens (co-founder of the Open Source Initiative) and Shane Coughlan (from FSF Europe):

Perens essentially calls the exclusion or downplaying of Richard Stallman a critical mistake made at the point of split between the “Open Source” and “Free Software” camps. They go on to discuss what the current challenges are in terms of helping people understand the core concepts of freedom underlying both approaches.

At risk of inciting a comments flame war, are “open source” and “free software” just two different names for the same thing, as Perens argues (even if you believe one name to be better than the other)?

What’s Last.fm?

Basically you install some client software which tracks (the verb they use is ‘scrobbles’) get played in your audio player of choice and uploads that data to a Last.fm server.

Why would you do that?

For one, it’s interesting to see what you actually listen to, not just what you think you listen to:

My Last.fm profile with Recently Listened Tracks

(You can see I’ve been catching up on my NPR Live Concert Podcasts this weekend while writing some blog posts).

In addition to your own constantly updated, live list of what you’re listening to, you can also track friends and what Last.fm calls “neighbours” (UK spelling showing you where last.fm hails from) – people who you may or may not know but who have musical tastes similar to yours.

Two of my last.fm neighbours, and our shared artists

You can also listen to streaming music from last.fm – a radio station created based on your own library (tracks you’ve scrobbled) or your neighborhood. There’s even a streaming iPhone application.

Why do we need Libre.fm?

In exchange for all this functionality, however, I’m essentially giving last.fm (and parent company CBS, and all the third parties specified in their terms of service) access to a substantial bit of data about my habits.

Who owns that data, both legally and in practical terms? What happens if I want to take all that data – my complete listening history of the last two years – and migrate to another service? What if the terms of service at last.fm change, and they decide to impose a fee on all users just to maintain profiles? Would my choice essentially be to take it or leave it? What if last.fm imploded – see ma.gnolia – and lost all that data?

(Technically I propogate the last.fm ‘recently played tracks’ stream as part of an aggregated lifestream at johneckman.com, so I keep my own copy of the data as well – but most last.fm users do not).

Users looking to run their own “track what I play, let me display it to friends and see theirs” service now have an alternative: Libre.fm, current in alpha release:

Libre.fm

You could say Libre.fm is to Last.fm as Identi.ca is to Twitter.

Like the code behind Identi.ca, the code running Libre.fm is licensed using the AGPL, and the content is explicitly licensed (Creative Commons Attribution Share-Alike) for sharing. In addition to getting the code which runs the service, users can also retrieve data dumps of their own tracks and those of their friends.

Also like Identi.ca, the folks at Libre.fm are leveraging existing clients and APIs. identi.ca replicated Twitter’s API, enabling clients which had been built for Twitter to be easily adapted to point to Identi.ca instead, and even created a “bridge” function enabling users to autofeed microblog status updates to Twitter from Identi.ca. The Libre.fm wiki points to several clients which can “multiscrobble” (point to more than one scrobbling server) as well as clients which can be made to scrobble to turtle.libre.fm by use of a hosts file redirecting the last.fm scrobbler server address.

The intial site is in alpha – you can request an invitation to become a user or you can explore popular artists in the current users’ playlists. (I’m jeckman there as on last.fm)

See also: Libre.fm – Building an Open Last.fm

Now BarCamp Boston 4 is coming up this April 25th and 26th at the Stata Center at MIT. Although ultimately the topics discussed are determined by who shows up, odds are that free and open source software, social media, voting, government transparency, robotics, hardware and software hacking, startups, and all kinds of topics related to openness, the web, and business will be common.

BarCamp Boston 4

I definitely plan to be there and I’d encourage you to register and attend, whether you’re a veteran or a n00b to the unconference world. It’s a fantastic opportunity to have a real conversation, in the absence of hugely expensive registration fees or overbearing sponsors.

So, Ubuntu has a pretty famous Bug #1:
https://launchpad.net/ubuntu/+bug/1
The title is “Microsoft has a majority market share”. I think it’s a great part of the Ubuntu culture, because it focuses people on what they want to do with Ubuntu.

Our bug #1, by the way, is “/doc/contact”.
http://laconi.ca/trac/ticket/1
Since this was long-ago fixed, I’d like to wipe this ticket* and replace it with an overall project purpose, like Ubuntu’s. But what would the bug be?

It got me thinking – and not just about Identi.ca and open microblogging as a federated, distributed alternative to centralized approaches like Twitter.

Moose and Squirrel - photo by Paul Lannuier.

Remember Boris and Natasha, and their plans for world domination? They ultimately failed because they always decided "but first, get moose and squirrel" – they chose the wrong bug #1. (See 21 Things I Wish My Broker Had Told Me).

At its core, having a bug #1 is really a geek-centric way of having a mission statement. What’s wrong with the world as it exists without your effort, and what would it look like to solve that problem?

This could even be adapted to personal goals – you could have a shortlist of “bugs” with the world you hope to focus on, and while you may not ever close each of those bugs, you should be able to tell whether your work is headed in the right direction – whether you feel like you are contributing to progress in that direction or not.

One concern might be that phrasing each goal as a bug limits innovation – the old FUD that open source imitates, but doesn’t innovate, for example – but describing a broad problem you hope to solve doesn’t, in reality, limit the innovation you might create.

Side note: it’s really interesting to read the threads associated with Ubuntu’s bug #1 and Evan’s question (view by thread in laconica-dev archives) – both are core cases of a “reflexive public” in the process of defining itself (see Chris Kelty’s Two Bits: The Cultural Significance of Free Software for more on that concept).

Alex King‘s Twitter Tools is a great little WordPress plugin for integrating your Twitter presence with your blog. It can show your latest tweets in a sidebar widget, create a “digest” post daily / weekly with a list of your tweets, and announce your blog posts to your twitter account.

In this post I’ll show you what changes are necessary to make it work with identi.ca instead of Twitter.

Why would you want to do that?

Identi.ca is often described as “an open source twitter” which it is, but it’s also the first instance of the Open Microblogging standard, which I believe will become increasingly important. Where Twitter users all share the same service, and are entirely dependent on Twitter for their ability to reach other, Identi.ca enables subscriptions across services, removing the need for a single point of failure.

Twitter Fail Whale, screenshot by John Rees

In other words, Twitter is a bit like the early days of email, when Compuserve users couldn’t email AOL users, and neither set of users could email the Internet. (I quality that with “a bit” since the Twitter API certainly makes possible clients which can do more than just post to Twitter). Identi.ca (or laconi.ca, as the software project behind identi.ca is called) is more like modern, decentralized, global-address-space email.

When identi.ca first launched, many folks were left stuck between the two alternatives: use identi.ca, which was more open and federated, or stay on Twitter, where a strong, rapidly developing community already existed (and, frankly, where many of the folks you were already talking to and listening to were unlikely to be persuaded to move en masse).

Evan Prodromou of Laconi.ca (photo by Zach Copley)

This ability means that for me, a version of Twitter Tools which would post to identi.ca (and let identi.ca cross-post to Twitter) was preferrable. Luckily, identi.ca has also implemented an API which responds to the same commands in the same way as the Twitter API.

This means that the changes needed are very simple.

In version 1.5.1a of Twitter Tools, lines 67-72 define the API endpoints to be used:


define('AKTT_API_POST_STATUS', 'http://twitter.com/statuses/update.json');
define('AKTT_API_USER_TIMELINE', 'http://twitter.com/statuses/user_timeline.json');
define('AKTT_API_STATUS_SHOW', 'http://twitter.com/statuses/show/###ID###.json');
define('AKTT_PROFILE_URL', 'http://twitter.com/###USERNAME###');
define('AKTT_STATUS_URL', 'http://twitter.com/###USERNAME###/statuses/###STATUS###');
define('AKTT_HASHTAG_URL', 'http://search.twitter.com/search?q=###HASHTAG###');


The key is to change these to map to the corresponding identi.ca API endpoints:


define('AKTT_API_POST_STATUS', 'http://identi.ca/api/statuses/update.json');
define('AKTT_API_USER_TIMELINE', 'http://identi.ca/api/statuses/user_timeline.json');
define('AKTT_API_STATUS_SHOW', 'http://identi.ca/api/statuses/show/###ID###.json');
define('AKTT_PROFILE_URL', 'http://identi.ca/###USERNAME###');
define('AKTT_STATUS_URL', 'http://identi.ca/notice/###STATUS###');
define('AKTT_HASHTAG_URL', 'http://identi.ca/###HASHTAG###');


For the most part, this just means replacing ‘twitter.com’ with ‘identi.ca/api’ except that the individual post urls and hashtag url have to be handled differently.

If you’re planning to use the sidebar widget, which includes a link to hashtags when you use them in a notice. , you’ll also need to find this line:

$hashtag = urlencode('#' . $hashtag);

And change it to:

$hashtag = urlencode($hashtag);

Finally, I also chose to update the “give credit” line, which occurs in two places in the code (not to remove credit for Twitter Tools but to point out the changes):

First, at roughly line 403 (this one is used in the blog post digest of tweets):

$content .= '<p class="aktt_credit">Powered by <a href="http://alexking.org/projects/wordpress">Twitter Tools</a>.</p>';

I changed that to:

$content .= '<p class="aktt_credit">Powered by <a href="http://www.openparenthesis.org/2009/01/25/identica-tools">Identi.ca Tools</a>, a modified version of <a href="http://alexking.org/projects/wordpress">Twitter Tools</a>.</p>';

And again later at line 768 (this is the one used in the sidebar widget):

$output .= '<p class="aktt_credit">Powered by <a href="http://alexking.org/projects/wordpress">Twitter Tools</a>.</p>';

Which I changed to:

$output .= '<p class="aktt_credit">Powered by <a href="http://www.openparenthesis.org/2009/01/25/identica-tools">Identi.ca Tools</a>, a modified version of <a href="http://alexking.org/projects/wordpress">Twitter Tools</a>.</p>';

This same approach could also be leveraged for other laconi.ca based sites with little effort.

Remember that these changes will get overwritten if you upgrade to newer versions of the Twitter Tools plugin.

(Here’s my modified copy of twitter-tools.php – just change the extension back to .php)

The topic was MediaWiki in production, with presentations by Greg Rundlett of Harvard’s Initiative in Innovative Computing (IIC) and Daniel Barrett, who wrote the (O’Reilly) book on MediaWiki, and uses it in production at VistaPrint.

Greg Rundlett presents at BostonPHP

Dan Barrett gets ready to present at BostonPHP

Greg’s presentation, appropriately enough, is in the format of a MediaWiki page. He provided an overview of wikis in general as well as some of the other activites of the MediaWiki Foundation, then got right into details of MedaWiki syntax, built in features, and plugins.

Daniel Barrett’s presentation (which he was kind enough to send to me and allow me to post – thanks Dan) focused more on how to deploy a successful wiki, including six lessons:

1. It’s not about the technology
2. Know the strengths and weaknesses of the platform
3. Know the culture of the enterprise
4. Pre-structure the wiki and write stubs
5. Integrate with legacy systems
6. Measure your results

There was also good time for Q & A at the end, including a number of questions that were as much about corporate culture as technology: how to handle “potentially dangerous” procedures, how to deal with employees who horde information in search of job security, and the like.

Looking forward to next month’s BostonPHP which will be Jesse Burns facilitating a “PHP IDE Bakeoff” – February 11th, 6:30 pm, at Optaros Boston (More detail on Meetup.com – please RSVP if you plan to attend).

Russell uses the occasion of some nasty comments in Digg on a Caryl Shaw article for PC gamer (and a series of presentations at OSCON a few weeks back) to reflect on the issue of sexism in free and open source software communities. Ultimately, the issue is really about what kinds of communities we want to be building. As he notes:

the frustrating conclusion [is] that this is the outcome the community allows. Surely this kind of objectionable behavior wouldn’t show up so frequently if we were closer to gender balance in the OSS world. But the larger tech world seems to be addressing the topic badly if at all and OSS is no exception.

Many have argued, of course, that free expression is the ultimately value above all others, and that keeping the purity of free expression inviolate somehow requires allowing people to behave badly. But it is important to think not only about the positive value of free expression but also the negative impacts of the kinds of comments commonly seen in IRC channels and public forums:

degenerate behavior in support channels or on discussions about popular links serves no principle, rises to no higher cause than prurient interest, and builds no “community” other than those who tolerate the objectification and denigration of half (or more) of the world’s population. Frankly, that’s not a community I want any part of.

How does this particularly apply to free and open source software? Given the self-forming nature of community, the reliance of our projects on participation, and the attention paid in such communities to issues of governance, one might expect free and open source software projects to be ahead of the curve in this respect:

the Open Source world finds itself debating the moral and practical consequences of obtuse licensing aspects on a daily basis. What makes norms of community behavior around race, gender, and other forms of bias so different and loaded that Open Source community leaders then can’t or won’t speak to them? If we’re developing this software with society at large, for society at large, why is absence of half of society from the process not the largest topic of discussion in the OSS world? It’s certainly much more disturbing to me personally than any of the dickering over licenses that consumes so much time and attention.

Of course there were a number of presentations at OSCON which touched on this issue or addressed it directly. Unfortunately I missed Emma Jane Hogbin’s talk, about how she managed to get 50% female participation and speakers at her conference.

I did get a chance to see Pia Waugh’s talk on Heroes: Women in FOSS, which focused on creating visibility for women already in free software and going directly to primary schools to show young girls that technology is an option for women. Danese Cooper’s keynote Why Whinging Doesn’t Work — which was originally focused on women in open source, but was broadened for the “general audience” — also focused on creating and making visible positive success stories, including the directive “teach your daughters to code” as a core mechanism for breaking this cycle. (Whether they go on to become programmers, I’d say, is nearly irrelevant – think of the whole digital literacy and set of assumptions that gets broken in the process of learning to program – changing the kind of “magic” of making the machine work into a tactical, knowable process).

Russell links to a draft code of conduct for all Dojo Foundation projects. I’m sure this will generate lots of discussion – some of it serious and well meaning, some of it snide, sarcastic, and misogynist. (The blogosphere in general loves to attack codes of conduct perceived as too idealistic).

But ultimately the more important thing, I think, is the social norms we all as free and open source software community participants enforce and encourage on a daily basis. It’s all well and good to have a code of conduct or other document which encodes those norms and makes them clear to new participants, but it ultimately comes down to what behaviors we all tolerate or engage in.

It brings me back to the same thoughts I had at and after ROFLcon, in which many aspects of “internet culture” were being celebrated that I hoped would be more critically examined.

If free and open source software is produced by and for communities, what kind of communities do we hope those will be, and what are we doing to ensure that they are communities in which we’d like to live?

I came to software (mostly web) development (and FOSS) from the academic world, in a graduate English department, having done a doctoral dissertation which (in part) was on the reconfigurations of race, gender, and class in US history at the turn into the 20th century, and how “the city” provided both the geographic context and dominant trope for the exploration of anxiety generated by these changes.

In essence what that experience taught me is that the stories which community members tell each other — about what they are trying to accomplish, about what values they share, and about other participants as well as non-participants — are critical to community definition. More critical, ultimately, than even the explicit foundational governance documents.

That doesn’t mean I think codes of conduct are a bad idea – it helps to be able to point to values in an encoded form when bad behavior occurs – but that the informal, social norms based enforcement of a living community is always a stronger and more lasting mechanism.

To start with the positive: This is a really solid business book, which sets out a clear methodology (including the Social Technographics Profile and the POST method with which Forrester clients / subscribers are already familiar), walks through a broad range of well explained case studies, and situates the business benefits of the different approaches.

Bernoff and Li have clearly done their research here, talking to a wide variety of companies in different industries about their experiences with “social technologies,” and they do a very astute job of avoiding oversimplification (never suggesting, for example, that every business should follow a simple formula) while also not falling back on the consultant’s refrain (“it depends”) or failing to give real, useful, pragmatic, and actionable advice.

The book is laid out into three key sections (you can see the whole table of contents online):

1. Understanding the Groundswell – in which they lay out the basic context of what has changed and why businesses need new approaches, as well as the social technographics profiles
2. Tapping the Groundswell – in which they lay out the POST method, and walk through all the ways companies can benefit from / leverage this new world
3. The Groundswell Transforms – in which they extend the argument to include how this new set of conditions can transform the enterprise.

Each section is supported by a handful of specific case studies and other examples, which are drawn from a wide variety of industries. There are indices by company and by strategy at the end of the book, so you can quickly find examples from your own vertical or place on the adoption curve.

Li and Bernoff are at their rhetorical best when they are describing the veritable sea change that the groundswell represents:

You cannot ignore this trend. You cannot sit this one out. Unless you are retiring in the next six months, it’s too late to quite and let somebody else handle it. The groundswell trend is unstoppable, and your customers are there. You may go a little slower or a little faster, but you have to move forward. There is no going back.

They also offer solid, sound advice to those looking to manage the cultural change required within an enterprise to successfully pull of “Groundswell thinking”:

• First, start small.
• Second, educate your executives.
• Third, get the right people to run your strategy.
• Fourth, get your agency and technology partners in sync.
• Fifth, plan for the next step and for the long term.

Not exactly radical or wholly original advice, but wrapped in the context of real business decisions made by people facing the issues, and informed by real experiences.

In short, I’d say the book is a must read for anyone from a traditional (by which I mean anything existing before the web) business looking to adapt to the internet age, anyone trying to convince their more traditional colleagues or bosses to adopt new strategies, and anyone hoping to sell such folks consulting and technology services.

Having said all of that, there are some minor blemishes – for example, when did del.icio.us become “a simple downloadable application”? Are they talking about the bookmarklets (javascript buttons for your browser to submit things to del.icio.us)? But that is really an exception in an otherwise well researched and well documented book.

Rather more difficult to ignore is the almost complete absence of Free and Open Source Software from a discussion of “Social Technologies.” There is a section titled “people collaborating: wikis and open source” (the lack of title capitalization is in the original – even the book title is in all lower case), but it really should be called “people collaborating: wikis.” Granted, Bernoff and Li aren’t technology analysts per se – in the sense of analyzing development approaches and platforms – and in the POST methodology technology is the last element. But I’d argue that it is critical to understand the context of mass collaboration rising out of open source communities in order to better understand the mechanisms by which communities are created and sustained, thrive or fail, and interact with each other in an online world.

Instead, the whole of the analysis of this phenomenon comes to a paragraph in which we learn:

The same sort of cooperation [as that which drives wikipedia and other wikis] drives other forms of online collaboration, including open-source software products like Linux (a version of the Unix operating system), Apache (a Web server), and Firefox (a Web browser). In open source, technically adept developers combine their efforts to build, test, and improve software products, and the code is available for all to see. Before you scoff at this form of development, recognize that Linux now underpins many Web servers and consumer electronics devices, including TiVo; Apache is the dominant Web server software on the Internet, and Firefox has gone from zero to over 25 percent market share in less than two years.

That’s it, basically, for open source. No analysis of the massive collaboration efforts behind those projects, or how they are managed, arise, die, become businesses, become communities, etc. No analysis of how these and other open source projects provide either models or anti-patterns to be avoided. Not even any analysis of how the open source development methodology and licensing practices have influenced other cultural practices through things like creative commons licensing, open access, and challenges to many fundamental corporate notions of intellectual property.

Bernoff and Li seem to assume that their reader has no familiarity with and no interest in development – which may be accurate – and don’t seem to have much interest themselves in the impact open source can and has had.

(Readers interested in these issues would do well to check out Chris Kelty’s Two Bits and Clay Shirky’s Here Comes Everybody – the former on the cultural significance of free software, the latter on how technology changes have enabled and facilitated changes in social organization – both of which I hope to write more about in the future).

What ultimately left me dissatisfied with the book, however – and here we return to the question of whether this reveals more about me as a reviewer than the text – is that it never steps outside its tightly constructed frame, which essentially comes down to “how do I use this to improve my business”?

It isn’t that I expected, or even wanted, Li and Bernoff to craft a revolutionary manifesto – a sort of Cluetrain II or Wealth of Networks for the MBA set – but that the tone is so relentless in its focus it can begin to feel like the only valid reason for the Internet’s existence (and the only valid use of it now that it exists) is to sell more widgets, make people feel better about the widgets they’ve bought, and maybe help a few companies make better widgets.

It ended up reminding me of one of my favorite 80s movie scenes, from Say Anything, when John Cusack is asked what he wants to do with his life, and answers:

I don’t want to sell anything, buy anything, or process anything as a career. I don’t want to sell anything bought or processed, or buy anything sold or processed, or process anything sold, bought, or processed, or repair anything sold, bought, or processed. You know, as a career, I don’t want to do that.

Again, to be fair, I’ve got no problem with businesses trying to understand how to adapt to the changing environment the Internet and social media represent, or even with helping businesses figure out how to leverage these new approaches to generate profit or awareness – in fact, that’s a fair description of what I do at Optaros, and what Optaros does more broadly.

It’s just that in the middle of the focus on tapping, listening to, talking with, energizing, embracing, and connecting with the Groundswell (every single chapter title involves doing something with the groundswell or enabling it to do something to your company), there’s precious little exploration of what is driving the Groundswell in the first place, or what it means more broadly as a social and historical phenomenon. Why the groundswell now? What impact is it having on us as a culture, other than just what toothpaste we think is cool?

(Yes, there is a section in the opening chapter on what the groundswell is and why it is happening now – but it is reduced to this level of causality: “These three trends – people’s desire to connect new interactive technologies, and online economics – have created a new era.”)

Ultimately, Groundswell presents “the groundswell” as something which is happening to us – something we are not creating but either passively suffering from or being carried by, like a surfer on a wave. It seems almost a force of a nature – an inevitable technology tsunami – rather than a collective project in which we are all engaged in actively constructing a specific historical reality.

So is it fair to critique Groundswell for staying within its own well-defined purpose? To criticize it for not being The Wealth of Networks?

If what you’re looking for is an eminently readable, well researched, pragmatic guide to business strategies for dealing with this set of social changes, Groundswell delivers. But in doing so, I wish it had taken more time to step outside the framing of this social change as a kind of natural consequence of the inevitable march of technology and understand the set of changes themselves in greater detail.

Disclosures: Forrester sent me a review copy of the book, as they did to a number of bloggers. Optaros co-sponsored a webinar with Josh Bernoff earlier this year on the topic of open innovation. Several of the companies discussed as case studies are or have been Optaros clients, though Optaros was not involved in any of the specific projects described. Swisscom Mobile Labs, an Optaros client project, was a finalist in the groundswell awards. Optaros is a Forrester client. I know a number of people who work there or have worked there.

In the meanwhile, here’s Chris presenting at a Berkman Luncheon Series event on June 17th, 2008:

The Berkman description:

A discussion of the recently published book, Two Bits, which will focus on the meaning and cultural significance of Free Software, its history and the manner in which it has been “modulated” into domains both close to and far from software and networks. Topics for discussion include anthropological approaches to studying distributed phenomena, the historical analysis of Free Software and the use of Free Software practices in education, science, music and culture generally.

Unfortunately I was out of town – in Chicago for Web Content 2008 – and unable to attend in person. Nice to see Benjamin Mako Hill, danah boyd, and Ethan Zuckerman (and, I’m sure, others who I don’t recognize by sight but would know by name and reputation) in the question and answer segment. That’s the kind of crowd you’ll really only get at a Berkman event.

Here are my rough notes from the talk, which are really more an outline of the topics discussed than what Chris has to say about them – for that you’ll have to watch.

Overview of the book:
I. Ethnographic and Theoretical Introduction: Hackers, Geeks, and Recursive Publics
II. Analytic History of Free Software – Five Practices which make Free Software
III. Modulations of those practices into other domains

Part One:
The important thing is the subtitle – the cultural significance of free software.
What would it mean to do an anthropology of free software?

Ability to participate in building the internet – recursive publics: the thing that draws them together is the thing they are building in common.

Part Two:
Breaking Free software into 5 practices / domains.

1. fermenting a movement
2. sharing source code
3. defining an open infrastructure
4. writing copyleft licenses
5. coordinating collaboration

Part Three: Modulations, carrying “free software” into non-software domains

College Textbooks – Connexions (collaborative textbook creation using creative commons licenses). (At Rice University)

Biology: BiOS, Registry of Standard Biological Parts, patent Lens, open source nanotechnology

Bio Nano: ATCC (Global Bioresource Center)

Difficulty of patents, not just copyright, in some of these other domains.

—

It’s interesting to me how much Chris focuses on the moment in 1998 when “Free Software” and “Open Source” underwent a decisive split, and how the distinction between the two plays out in the “Modulations” section. What difference does it make if the modulations are actually versions of “open source” in other domains rather than “free software” in other domains?

Of course, the book isn’t subtitled “The Cultural Significance of Open Source,” so one assumes the focus is more on the free software version – which focuses more specifically on copyleft, and ensuring (some might say requiring) freedom for downstream users – but when my copy finally arrives I’ll post some further discussion about what impact those differences might have. Would the more traditionally business friendly “open source” approach have made modulation into other domains easier, but perhaps less impactful?

Here’s my summer reading list. Tell me what I’m missing.

• The Future of the Internet — And How to Stop It, by Jonathan Zittrain
• Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations, by Clay Shirky
• Who Controls the Internet?: Illusions of a Borderless World, by Jack Goldsmith and Tim Wu
• Two Bits: The Cultural Significance of Free Software, by Chris Kelty
• Designing For the Social Web: Voices That Matter, by Joshua Porter

It’s a bit heavy, I know, but this is the kind of stuff I find interesting.

What are you reading this summer? What key new text have I left out?

There’s Jonathan Zittrain‘s new book, The Future of the Internet — And How to Stop It. (In addition to buying a print copy, you can download the pdf version under creative commons license). Presenting on that book, there’s video of Zittrain at Princeton on March 26th, at ISOC-NY on April 11th, and at the Berkman Center the following week. You can also read and comment on the book.

Finally, via Biella Coleman I found this fascinating video from an event April 16th (between the above two videos), from a meeting of the NY Chapter of the Internet Society, talking about “The Futures of the Internet.” The discussion was sponsored by the NYU Information Law Institute, Free Culture @ NYU, and ISOC-NY. (Shirky’s presentation is on the same cognitive surplus theme from his web 2.0 expo keynote I recently blogged about).

The Panelists:

• Clay Shirky, Author: Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations, Adjunct Professor, NYU ITP
• Tim Wu, Author: Who Controls The Internet?, Professor, Columbia Law School
• Lauren Cornell, Executive Director, Rhizome
• Jimmy Wales, Founder, Wikipedia and Wikia
• Jonathan Zittrain, Author: The Future of the Internet – and How to Stop It, Professor, Oxford University; Visiting Professor, NYU Law,

It’s a lengthy video (1 hour 30 minutes), so I recommend downloading a version and getting comfortable to watch it. But if you’re interested in generativity, free culture, online communities, geek culture, mass collaboration, and the larger questions of the internet-as-public-sphere, it’s well worth it.

Once you’ve watched it, go read Biella’s blog post which raises the question she also asked in the video about the depth of political consciousness in “geek culture” generally and free software communities like Debian in particular, as well as the comment thread following it.

I can’t help but relate the discussion also to ROFLCon, and what I perceived as an unfortunate lack of critical and political framing to the discussion there (with some notable exceptions). Don’t get me wrong – I’m a huge fan of LOLCats and potentially subversive power of humor. But what kind of culture do we hope we’re collectively creating on the ‘net?

One attraction of the internet can be how unlike the offline world it is – but as the line between online communities and “real world” communities blurs (as more and more offline groups and communities become digitally enabled, and more and more online communities develop offline manifestations) do we risk losing the generative freedom the internet has made possible in the last decade?

As we move in the direction of cloud-based and hosted computing platforms like Google App Engine, Amazon EC2, or even the Facebook API and Open Social, do we put at risk the basic freedoms the FSF is organized to fight in support of?

There’s a quote often attributed to Abraham Lincoln that the best way to predict the future is to create it – so what are we collectively doing to create the future of the internet that preserves its progressive and liberational aspects?

Atwood argues that:

when you buy a new Mac, you’re buying a giant hardware dongle that allows you to run OS X software.

and that:

When the dongle– or, if you prefer, the “Apple Mac”– is present, OS X and Apple software runs. It’s a remarkably pretty, well-designed machine, to be sure. But let’s not kid ourselves: it’s also one hell of a dongle.

I’m a Free Software Foundation member, and a big supporter of Free and Open Source Software. But I’m also a Mac user. More accurately, I use – at various points and for various projects – Windows XP, Mac OS X, and GNU/Linux – typically Ubuntu. But I recently switched back to Mac OS as my primary environment, on a new MacBook Pro.

So is it that I don’t care about Freedom Zero?

Not at all. I think Freedom Zero is important – in fact, using Mac OS and VMWare Fusion lets me run all three operating systems named above on the same machine, and that’s part of what attracts me to it. I refuse to buy songs from the iTunes store because they contain and encourage DRM (and hide the urls for podcasts to make it difficult to switch podcatchers), and run Rockbox on my iPod.

But Atwood’s right, that in switching to a MacBook Pro I’m supporting (indirectly, since it is really an Optaros laptop I get to use) proprietary development models, paying Apple Inc. for software I don’t get source code to, can’t run on my other machines, and can’t (legally) modify even for my own use.

But the combination of Apple’s user experience smarts and a BSD core, which lets me run X11 apps from the GNU/Linux world, is seductively attractive, and I can run the GIMP and NeoOffice (based on Open Office) and Firefox and Miro, and do PHP/MySQL development.

It’s a weird kind of lock in – I can bring virtually anything in (running many open source apps and frameworks in OS X directly, or worst case running them in virtualization) but there are some things I can’t take out (the proprietary Apple bits, other third party software).

Any piece of software I might write (yeah, like I’ve got time these days to create a software application) or contribute to (that may be possible) can retain Freedom Zero – I wouldn’t necessarily want to create or contribute something that only other Mac OS X users could run.

So, to get to the point, does the increasing popularity (at least perceived – look around at the crowd next time you’re at a *camp or an open source conference) of the Mac as a hardware platform reflect a general lack of concern over Freedom Zero, even among groups of developers who are otherwise insistent about freedom in the FSF sense?

Tuesday night Mike Krigsman (twitter.com/mkrigsman) organized a “tweetup” at the Boston Beer Works in the Fenway. I won’t try to list all the attendees, but a few notes on folks I talked to:

• Silona (twitter.com/silona) was in town from Austin (League of Technical Voters, Transparent Federal Budget, We Are All Actors)
• Met Laura “Pistachio” Fitton (twitter.com/pistachio) – now I won’t be just another face in the crowd of her ~1500 twitter followers
• Met David Fisher (twitter.com/tibbon) who works with Nate at Jazkarta
• Nathan Burke (BlogString, twitter.com/?), who works with Michelle at MatchMine
• Met Jack Vinson (twitter.com/jackvinson) from Aspen Technology, who lives in the Boston area despite his Twitter account saying he is in Evanston IL.

I also met Dan Bricklin, which is really a brush with greatness. (No offense to my fellow tweetup attendees, but dude basically invented the spreadsheet).

Not bad for a tweetup on Super Tuesday (also Mardi Gras, aka Fat Tuesday), in not so great Boston weather. Apologies in advance if I left anyone out – I did have to run out early to catch a train.

Last night (wednesday) was the February BostonPHP meeting, on “Choosing a FOSS License for your project.”

Karen Copenhaver and Ira Heffan presented, but it was less about formal presentation and was really a conversation with the whole group – we talked about different classes of licenses and degrees of reciprocity they encourage/require, GPLv3 versus Affero GPLv3, CPAL, etc. The audio was recorded and will probably turn up as a podcast shortly.

After the meeting Mark Withington, Ira Heffan, Greg Rundlett and I went out for drinks and talked about life, the universe, and everything. ;)

Tonight, I’m headed to the North Shore Web Geek Meetup in Newburyport – although this means missing out on Silona’s presentation to the Berkman Thursday Blog Group.

Sheesh. So much to do, so little time. Good to see a vibrant local community.