What are Communities Made of? Northeast User Group Leader Summit

Making Ice Cream
(Photo by Rachel J)

This weekend, freshly jet-lagged by back-to-back trips to the UK and Switzerland, with a brief stop in between for BarCampBoston 4, I attended the Northeast User Group Leader Summit, sponsored (thanks!) by O’Reilly Media and Microsoft. (Although I don’t technically lead a user group, I play host to BostonPHP at Optaros, volunteer for BarCampBoston, and participate in Boston’s Drupal and WordPress groups, as well as North Shore Web Geeks up in Newburyport.

The event, hosted in the new Microsoft NERD facility, brought together user group leaders from across the technology spectrum, and from New York to Maine. (See a shortlist of user groups represented in the wiki).
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Ignite Boston 3

Update: 14 of the presentation slide decks are available at slideshare.

Last night was the third Ignite Boston, at Tommy Doyle’s in Harvard Square. Ignite is an O’Reilly Media sponsored series of events in various cities around the US. Lots of O’Reilly authors, editors, and various Friends Of O’Reilly gather to talk about tech stuff and generally geek out.

Highlights of the evening (for me):
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Miro, Kaltura, and the Generative Future of Internet Video

Jonathan Zittrain’s The Future of the Internet (and How to Stop It) is quickly rising to the top of my summer reading list (about which more to come in a later blog post). The distinctions he draws (based on his recent talks, see video here, here, and here) between sterile and generative platforms, and the concerns he raises about contingently generative or tethered platforms, seem to me right on target, and consistent with the issues Tim O’Reilly has been raising (along with, of course, many others) about how to translate the freedom behind free software and the openness behind open source into a world in which services and data live in the cloud.

One major place where the conflict between fully generative and contingently generative comes into play is on online video. YouTube’s terms of service should give any independent video maker pause – both in terms of the license rights they claim and in terms of the susceptibility to take down on the basis of broad criteria[1].

Two things make me hopeful, though, for the future of video on the open web: Miro and Kaltura.
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