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).

Sessions Board (Photo by Rachel J)

It was simultaneously frustrating and reassuring to see that the core issues are so similar across user groups:

• Attracting and retaining members, speakers, volunteers
• Dealing with financing, venues, sponsors
• Keeping members and organizers motivated, active
• Making meetings useful, interesting to a broad audience
• Balancing newbies with ‘experts’

Reassuring because it shows that these problems are well understood – frustrating because no simple easy solutions will make them go away.

Ingredients we used for instant ice cream (my photo)

A few of the interesting sessions I attended, with links to notes which are all accessible from the event’s wiki:

• Care and Feeding of a Large Group / Large Event Financing – a combined session, for which I was the scribe, led by Shimon Rura from BarCampBoston and Darius Kazemi of Boston Post-Mortem
• Managing Event Overload – a more casual session, which the two of us attending turned by popular vote mostly into a discussion about NewB Camp, taking advantage of the time with Sara Streeter, who organized this session and also NewBCamp.
• Moving past the presentation – a very interesting session about the other ways one can manage a user group meeting, beyond just the traditional “talking head” format most folks are familiar with.

In addition to the formal sessions, Jeff Potter delighted all to a reprise of his food hacking demo from FooEast and BarCampBoston 4, making instant ice-cream using liquid nitrogen. This time, I participated, with a group of fellow vegans (and one ‘fellow traveller’).

Making Ice Cream with Liquid Nitrogen (Photo by Rachel J)

(Note for future food hackers: soy milk, at least the Light Vanilla variety we used, required a bit more liquid nitrogen and a bit longer to ‘set up’ – lower volume of liquid in the mixing bowl, longer time to mix in. At first it all just foamed up and spilled over the bowl, but thanks to a patient chef we were able to enjoy banana-coconut-rum soy ice ice cream custom made in a microbatch).

Ultimately, of course, what really makes any community successful is the people. While the problems of open source and commercial software user groups can vary a bit (I heard several Microsoft technology user group folks talk of having too many sponsors and too much schwag from companies to give away – a problem I’ve not seen in any open source based user group) they share an essential component, which is competition for people’s attention. The key to breaking through the noise and consistently getting their attention? Good, relevant content, consistency (of venue, time, and quality), and true community.

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):

• Juhan Sonin on Interface Design Tenets – looking to create a Strunk & White equivalent pocket reference for interface/interaction designers. (There’s a wiki just getting started)
• Benjamin Mako Hill talking about Selectricity, a free and open source framework for managing elections / polls etc. Also can be used freely as a hosted offering.
• Craig Freifeld talking about Health Map, which is a visual mashup of emerging disease reports – a sort of crowdsourced (though they use mainstream news reports) epidemic tracker.
• Jesse Vincent‘s Web 2.0 is Sharecropping, a quasi-rant about the limitations inherent in not owning your own tools.
• Lucy Mendel talking about Buy It Like You Mean It, which is a non-profit organization aimed at bringing rich information to consumers at the point of purchase about the social impacts of the products they are considering: environmental concerns, labor relationships, etc. They’re starting with the chocolate industry and she mentioned their impending launch party at Taza Chocolate in Somerville next Tuesday.

There were lots of lightning talks – so not being on my highlights list doesn’t mean the others weren’t good, just that they didn’t resonate with me as much.

Lowlights: The “keynote” speakers were excepted from the 5 minute lightning talk rule. I think that’s a mistake – not that what they had to say wasn’t valuable, but both were just too long for the crowd and the environment. Standing in a hot, crowded pub is not conducive to listening to a lengthy talk on a subject which may or may not even be relevant to you.

Also, unfortunately, Fish Fishman’s planned “5 minute mixed reality magic routine using Second Life and the Ignite audience” didn’t materialize. Always difficult to do any kind of live demo requiring connectivity in an unpredictable environment – I was looking forward to that one, if only for the “I’ve not seen that before” aspect.

Thanks are due to Microsoft for the free (as in beer) beer, though I don’t know that one-drink-ticket-per-pre-registered-attendee is exactly what I was expecting from such a large sponsor. I thought the open bars of the bubble-era Internet were back, but I guess folks are being more cautious this time around. O’Reilly also raffled off tons of books, through out shirts, and the like.

Looking forward to more Ignite events in Boston down the road.

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.

In other words, YouTube may suspend your account at virtually any time and for virtually any reason. Remember, since you’re also not allowed (per the Terms of Use) to download videos from YouTube, if the copy stored at YouTube gets deleted in theory it vanishes entirely, making your web browser connected to YouTube one giant tethered appliance. (“You agree not to access . . . YouTube Content through any technology or means other than the video playback pages of the Website itself, the YouTube Embeddable Player, or other explicitly authorized means YouTube may designate”).

And don’t even get me started on DRM, which aims to replicate the experience of a tethered appliance with content on your own computer.

Last week Dean Jansen from the Participatory Culture Foundation came to visit the Berkman Thursday blog group to talk about Miro.

Miro, which I’ve blogged about many times in the past, is an open source, multi-platform, standards aware video player, as well as a collaboratively edited channel guide. If you spend any significant amount of time watching video on your computer, you should have it. (It’s especially great for longer-form video, high definition video, and disconnected mode – planes, trains, and automobiles).

(Yes, those are actually my subscriptions – click for full size image).

Two things I did not know about Miro that Dean showed us:

1. You can add additional web sites as “Guides” inside the Miro player. If they aren’t formatted as guides they won’t quite work the same way, but this makes it possible to have multiple guides from different sources, ensuring distribution of control of the media.
2. You can create an account on the Miro guide, which tracks your ratings of channels and then can suggest channels you might like, on the basis of those recommendations.

I’ve also been looking at (and talking to the team behind) Kaltura, which bills itself as:

The first open-source platform for video creation, management, interaction, and collaboration.

Kaltura not only enables you to embed video on your site (a la YouTube, Blip.TV, or several dozen others), but lets users collaboratively edit video, providing a complex and full featured editing environment all hosted in the user’s browser.

Kaltura has an interesting partnership with the Wikimedia foundation (see Yochai Benkler’s blog entry about it) and make a video extension for MediaWiki is available now from their downloads page; extensions for Drupal and WordPress are “coming soon.” These extensions let you integrate Kaltura’s SaaS offering inside your hosted application.

The “Community Edition Video Platform,” which will let people provide the full Kaltura functionality from behind a firewall or on their own server, is work in progress, but you can register on their site to be notified when it becomes available.

While it may sometimes seem that free software is not required for generative platforms – an argument Zittrain makes in his presentations above – free and open source solutions do help us to avoid the kind of contingent generativity Zittrain describes, since the worst case scenario is to take the software and run your own, or modify it in order to remove whatever restrictions (intentional or unintentional) the platform imposes. You just can’t do that with most hosted offerings.

[1] From the YouTube Terms of Use:

YouTube reserves the right to decide whether Content or a User Submission is appropriate and complies with these Terms of Service for violations other than copyright infringement, such as, but not limited to, pornography, obscene or defamatory material, or excessive length. YouTube may remove such User Submissions and/or terminate a User’s access for uploading such material in violation of these Terms of Service at any time, without prior notice and at its sole discretion.