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SXSW 2009 Panels Proposed

Posted on by John

SXSW 2009 Last week, while I was on vacation meeting my new nieces and attending my 20th year high school reunion, the Panel Picker for SXSW 09 went live.

Although voting by prospective attendees is only “about 30%” of the decision making process, I figured I should promote my submissions here, and hope that readers of this blog might be interested in commenting on them or voting for them in the panel picker. (Although they call it the panel picker – no one can resist alliteration – it includes sessions which are solo speakers or dual speakers as well as more tradition 4-5 person panels).

So here are the sessions I proposed (links go directly to the Panel Picker):
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Community, Gender, and Free/Open Source Software

Posted on by John

Just came across yet another excellent post from Alex Russell of the Dojo project (and foundation): “The Price of Anonymity: Our Principles?”

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.

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Comment Fail

Posted on by John

If you’ve tried to leave comments here recently, bless you, and I’m sorry.

First, the WP-OpenID plugin for one specific version (2.2.0) had a bug which ate comments containing double quotes, which means all comments with links in them. 2.2.1 fixes the problem.

Then, Luis Villa told me in email that the Captcha on my site was unusable. So I tried it, and he’s right.

A while back I installed a plugin for Mollom, which catches comments which are thought to be suspicious in one way or another, and then asks users to solve a captcha. Problem is that they were all unsolvable.

Or, rather, they were perfectly solvable, and I solved them – as I’m sure Luis had. But Mollom refuses to recognize my solutions. Maybe I really am a computer, and thus fail the Captcha.

Anyway, the point is, I’m not trying to make it difficult to comment on this blog, just trying to deal with spam. I’ve turned Mollom off again, and won’t re-enable it until I try it myself and see that it works.

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Open Web Foundation is to Autonomo.us as OSI is to FSF?

Posted on by John

This morning David Recordon formally announced the Open Web Foundation in a morning keynote at OSCON. (The shorter url openweb.org will come at somepoint).

The OWF tagline / elevator statement is “The Open Web Foundation is an independent non-profit dedicated to the development and protection of open, non-proprietary specifications for web technologies.” The OWF goals, from their home page:

Following the open source model similar to the Apache Software Foundation, the foundation is aimed at building a lightweight framework to help communities deal with the legal requirements necessary to create successful and widely adopted specification.

The foundation is trying to break the trend of creating separate foundations for each specification, coming out of the realization that we could come together and generalize our efforts. The details regarding membership, governance, sponsorship, and intellectual property rights will be posted for public review and feedback in the following weeks.

This is wonderful, and it is great to see the large number of significant companies and well known advocates for open source which are part of the foundation and it’s efforts.

But I worry about two specific things.
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