open source

I got a chill reading this post from Seth Godin:

So, very soon, you will own a cell phone that has a very good camera and knows where you are within ten or fifteen feet. And the web will know who you are and who your friends are.

What happens?

What happens is that you have no privacy. Seth sees a big upside.

See a dangerous driver? Send a video snippet to the clowd. The clowd collates that with a bunch of other shots of the same driver... busted.

And the clowd also knows where you are, camera or no camera. So it can tell you when your old friend is just two gates away from you, also wasting time at the airport waiting for her flight. Or it can do Zagats to the ten thousandth power by not only suggesting the best nearby restaurant (based on your food circle of friends) but can also integrate with Open Table and only recommend restaurants that actually have room for you. Or it can let restaurant owners do yield management and find you a table at a good enough restaurant at the best possible price...

This is going to happen. The only question is whether you are one of the people who will make it happen. I guess there's an even bigger question: will we do it right?

If you do what he describes, can it be "right"?

Imagine the feeling of going to the doctor for that private medical condition, and everybody knows. Imagine being stalked by an admirer or resentful ex while you go about your day. Imagine broadcast spam being pushed at you via phone where ever you go. This adds a whole new meaning to the term "cyberbullying."

The drunk driver scenario? On one level, it's a description of being guilty until proven innocent. Everything you do is under scrutiny.

And of course, not all scrutinizers are equal. It's quite obvious that the government and big business will have more scrutinizing power than your snoopy neighbor. Is that the life we want in a free society?

There at least should be a toggle-able opt-in/opt-out, yes? Or are we to live in the Matrix, plugged in with no option, doing our duty by exposing our entire lives to the machine?

To me, the real possibility of this new age is the empowerment of the individual. That's the power of free (as in freedom) exchange of information. That's the power of open source. That's the power of collaboration, mash-ups, crowdsourcing. Empowerment, not simply a cooler, sexier sublimation to the System. Isn't that the real dream? Isn't that the un-tapped economic and cultural goldmine?

It has come time to consider a phone system. While most of the company clan uses mobile phones for personal calls, we do have sales and support that do need real phones, with voicemail, multiple simultaneous dialtones, etc. We tried the Vonage thing, but that had too many "can you hear me now?" moments for a business to suffer, so we went to the multiple Qwest lines, which required little in equipment investment but is far too costly each month -- not to mention every time we move or want to add a line.

Last week we got a pitch from Qwest reps. The part that probably does make sense is doing a T1 with dynamic bandwidth allocation and integrated access, opening up some channels and handling all the phone switching from a box. (Not sure if Qwest is best choice for that, but I'll reserve judgment for now.)

The part I'm less sure of is the Oracle Cisco box they are bundling with the service package. They are going to put some numbers together but my hunch is that it's going to be just a tad more expensive than we are wanting (or even able) to spend.

It's also a closed-source solution, which gives me pause. Any time I'm plunking down a good chunk of change, I want to know I have ownership of the future. While I don't figure on Cisco going away anytime soon, past experience has shown that a company doesn't need to go under to EOL a product line.

There is Asterisk, which is open source. It even has a Drupal module for integration with Drupal (maintained by fellow Boulderite hunmonk). I plan on giving Chad a ping to see what kind of insights he may have. And Matthew has some measure of experience with it.

But just because it's open source doesn't mean it's enterprise-ready. This phone system realm is completely alien territory for me. Any recommendations? Warnings? Happy tales with flowers and dancing cats?

Some exciting Drupal buzz was heard yesterday when Chris Pirillo made a call for extending functionality and enhancing the shine and usability of Drupal's powerful community architecture.

For the geeks: Drupal has so much power in its core, and enough fantastic community-contributed modules, that I think it’s time to assemble an Install Profile, complete with beautiful (accessible, microformat’ed, high quality) themes, pre-set Views for any Web community to either install on their own or have hosted at any given Web host that supports Drupal with optimizations. The benefits to you should be more than obvious.

And I don’t mean just the framework for the community platform, I mean… like, it’s ready to go. “It’s not the features, it’s the implementation.” This all started when we began to migrate the existing Lockergnome community to Drupal (5.x, as 6.x had not yet been released and many favorite modules have not yet been brought up to speed). OpenSocial, OpenID, OAuth… just there.

I’m posting this because it’s my hope that I can find partnerships, angels, brain-power, etc. - either from other communities or businesses willing to take part in an open source project that could benefit everybody and themselves at the same time.

The post is quite long and well worth reading. Chris offers a kind of stream-of-consciousness list of features he'd like to see, such as:

Why don’t I have the options to set the colors site-wide, or per content type? Why don’t user avatars indicate my relationship with them at a glance (either with a tiny corner color or border change)? Why do I have to load a completely separate page to launch a contact form, to sign up, to sign in? Why aren’t my notification mails filled with more information? Why can’t I… make this relevant?

Drupal experts will see that some of his feature ideas already exist in contrib, some are more about theming approaches, and others are new and quite interesting.

There's a lot more, with ideas that can also leverage existing modules (such as the Content Recommendation Engine into accessible, usable features.

He already has a growing pool of interested parties, and has set up SVN, an IRC chatroom, and a way for people to donate cash to the endeavor. There's also a module contribution from the effort.

I hope that the discussion in the greater community is fruitful, if nothing else - and I’m also hoping that holy wars don’t break out over which platform is better, because the best platform is always the one that works well for the person or company that uses it. For my personal blog, I’m quite happy with WordPress (can’t wait for v2.5 to go final). For my communities, it’s going to be Drupal.

My biggest fear isn’t that people will talk about it - it’s a fear that they won’t.

We're talking. Having this kind of energy coming into the Drupal community is a wonderful thing -- especially now that we're really just getting underway on the Drupal.org redesign effort.

Yesterday were the elections for the Drupal Association, and much to my surprise and excitement, I was one of eleven new permanent members elected to the General Assembly. I say "excitement" because I'm now more involved in the day-to-day activities of the Drupal Association -- not that I wasn't or couldn't be involved before. And I say "surprise" because there were 57 applicants, many of whom are community members I much admire and respect.

We all sat in an IRC chatroom while the existing Permanent Members discussed and voted on our applications. We were chatting nervously -- you had to almost speed-read to keep up with the chatter. What was happening in deliberations? We had no idea.

Board Member Angie Byron writes:

Trying to decide on where to set the bar for people who want to join the ranks of the Drupal Association was quite a harrowing experience. Permanent members are, well, permanent... unless they either resign or 2/3 of the existing members vote them out, which is likely to only happen in the event of some major drama. They can change the statutes (the legal binding documents) guiding the Drupal Association. They can remove Board of Directors members (and other permanent members). It's a lot of trust to place in individuals, and so we needed to make sure we chose very carefully...

All I can say is it could not have been easy.

Board Member Boris Mann notes:

My main piece of feedback for all applicants and community members is that being a Permanent Member just means more work.

Angie adds:

The down side is that the results obviously are missing a lot of people, too. They're missing new folks, as well as various as-yet "under the radar" folks, or hard-working, diligent folks who've been a little too timid to wade the community waters so far. They're missing folks from places like India and South America, who can't easily get to Drupalcons to meet the rest of us, and folks who don't speak English fluently. They're missing several people on the business/law/marketing side of things, whose important talents we as an organization are definitely lacking. I think that over time, however, as we further build our ranks of rock-solid demonstrated contributors, we'll be a little more comfortable taking calculated risks on these types of folks.

But to those people who didn't make it to the list, I highly urge you: don't get discouraged; get involved! If you wanted to help spread word about Drupal in your local community, do that! And post back to groups.drupal.org talking about your success, and work with other folks organizing local community events to help share best practices. If you wanted to help with marketing, do that! Collaborate with members of the Association to come up with ways to increase Drupal's profile.

Getting involved means you raise your profile in the community, along with your evidence of community contribution, which helps Drupal Association members become a lot less nervous about voting for you. And getting really involved makes your choice a no-brainer. :)

Along with everyone else, I am truly grateful to all the applicants for showing such dedication and interest in joining the Drupal Association. We have a really great community!

What is the Drupal Association? Khalid Baheyeldin offers a straightforward description:

To simplify things, and provide some background, the Drupal Association is the non-profit body that is equivalent to a Foundation in other open source projects. It is composed of so called "Permanent Members (PM)", who as a whole are known as the General Assembly (GA). The GA elects Board Members (BM) among them to form the Board of Directors of Drupal.

The official list of new Permanent Members elect:

• Khalid Baheyeldin
• Addison Berry
• Jeff Eaton
• Larry Garfield
• Greg Knaddison
• Michael E. Meyers
• Narayan Newton
• David Norman
• Jacob Redding
• Nedjo Rogers
• Laura Scott

We are joining:

Board Members:

• Dries Buytaert (Dries), President
• Dries Knapen (DriesK), Treasurer
• Angela Byron (webchick), Secretary
• Boris Mann (bmann/borismann), Marketing and Communications Coordinator
• Gerhard Killesreiter (killes), Infrastructure Manager
• Kieran Lal (amazon), Fundraiser
• Moshe Weitzman, Technical Project Manager
• Zack Rosen (zacker), Fundraiser

General Assembly:

• Bert Boerland
• Earl Miles (merlinofchaos)
• James Walker (walkah)
• Neil Drumm (drumm)
• Robert Douglass (rDouglass)
• Steven Peck (sepeck)

In very good company indeed. Now to get to work....

[Cross-posted from BlogHer]

I am thankful for so many things. It's so easy to take them for granted, especially these days when it can seem like there's so much to fear, so much that needs fixing, so much tragedy in the world. And most of my day is spent focusing on what's next to be done, what problem needs to be solved, what challenge I want to undertake. So, at the risk of sounding self-indulgent, here I remind myself of the good things for which I can be thankful.

I am thankful to be alive and in reasonably good health. I am thankful for my family. I am thankful for my friends.

I am thankful to be living in a country where we can still enjoy the freedoms we have. I am thankful for the education I received. I am thankful for my upbringing. I am thankful that we haven't destroyed the world yet. I am thankful that most of us want to make the world a better place. I am thankful to be living in a time when we all have so much potential to effect so much change for the better.

And, being a geek, I am thankful for computers for they are changing everything. I am thankful for the internet and how it is helping us all connect in ways that were impossible before. I am thankful for net neutrality, such as it is these days.

I am thankful to be alive and involved in such an incredibly interesting field of interactive design and development, with so many untested frontiers, so few written rules, so much potential to change so many things for the better. I am thankful that I can make a living as a geek. I'm thankful for being able to do the work I do. I am thankful for the really great people I work with.

I am thankful for open source. I'm thankful that I've been able to make a living working in open source. I am thankful for the good fortune of having found Drupal. I am thankful for the amazing Drupal community. I am thankful that, years ago, Dries Buytaert saw fit to open source Drupal.

I am thankful for the hope -- the hope -- that we might be able to enjoy the benefits of open source voting.

I am thankful for One Laptop per Child and other initiatives like it.

I am thankful for astonishing medical advances we're seeing these days.

I am thankful for not living under the Communist boot. (Ahem.)

I am thankful for bloggers who make me laugh or cry out in rage or both.

I am thankful for coffee and tea and bagels, and wine and cheese and avacados. I am thankful for sushi. I am thankful for hot water from the tap. I am thankful for my kitty, who comforts me when I'm over-stressed.

I am thankful to be able to write this here.

I am thankful for how truly lucky I've been. Luck is a lot of it. I feel blessed. I am thankful for all these things, and so many more, that help make being alive now a pretty great thing.

Thank you.

Happy Thanksgiving!

I've spent my Sunday morning mostly online. It's a lovely day, sunny and cool outside, and I've been wanting to get outside and do stuff. But I wanted to catch up online with some blogging and reading and such.

Which means that I've spent a bit of time struggling with the pathetic, slow, DNS-forgetful DSL service from Qwest I have at home. Every page view was taking ages to load. (How does Qwest even stay in business? Oh yeah, I forgot.)

And what's worse, among the slowest sites to load this morning was your humble hostess' own blog. And it wasn't just Qwest making things slow to start with -- it was the widgets. The slooowwwwww widgets. I'd sit there, watching the sun rise higher and higher while I wait for "Read" and "Transferring data from" messages in my status bar cycle through all the different services trying to load their widgets.

The. Widgets. Must. Go.

Into my feed-reader steps a new post from friend and pingVision colleague Greg Knaddison on how he just killed all the widgets on his blog. And rather than just rant about the woes of having page loads slowed down by widgets having to load from different servers in the far reaches of the virtual world, Greg has some useful advice for the widget-makers out there:

As I've pointed out, the problem can't be solved by "get faster" solutions like just speeding up the internet connections of users or making the servers that run the widgets faster. That would certainly help, but the "more files" problem means you are still limited to a few widgets.

The real solution, in my opinion, lies in solutions that are integrated into my site's software. Don't give me a flickr javscript widget - give me a flickrrippr module that pulls my photos into a local cache. Don't give me a comment plugin that takes years to load - create the "intense debate" by reading my comment rss and aggregating that information with some form of universal login so that my comments can be tracked from blog to blog (if I want). Having integrated applications you can take advantage of javascript and css aggregation/compression to reduce those files from 10 to 2. That helps.

Of course the problems with my solution is that 1) it requires lots of things like microformats that are only slowly picking up 2) site users will need powerful website building software that can be more difficult to install 3) some of these widget companies have "collect lots of data and do stuff with it" as a business model and they can do more of that without you knowing about it when they do it in this format.

Greg is dead-on. Maybe we can collectively "scratch our own itch" in the open source world (and in particular, Drupal) to help bring about widget reformation.

Meanwhile I'm going to rip out the widgets and put them into an "about me" post, so they are still there but don't drag down the entire site with every page load. I'm going to do that. Soon. Right after I get out and enjoy some of this gorgeous fall day.

While I was laying in bed last night, I found myself questioning my post yesterday and the attitudes reflected in Joe the Peacock's mocking of what appears to be a rather clueless potential client.

He seems to have struck a nerve, judging by Joe's forums:

Yes let us hear the douchebag please!

I think Joe's got to have at least a little bit of masochist in him to be a consultant, especially an Internet consultant. Sir Geek and I did it for several years and listening to the clients blather on about what they think they want/need is enough to make your brain explode.

Freaking hysterical.

Okay, at first reading of Joe's rant, I confess I did laugh a little. It certainly was outrageous enough to inspire me to post a link.

But to publicly share such mean-spirited attitudes towards potential clients strikes me as rather sad, and what I would consider unprofessional. Now maybe the person on the other end of the line was a jerk. I certainly have encountered my share of jerks.

But Joe mocks this "potential client" for his (?) ignorance.

We in web and software development live in a world that is scarcely understood by most of the people who use what we produce. That's all the more true in the corner of that world where I spend my time: open source, which is a community-of-a-commons concept that seems to elude even the majority of folks in Silicon Valley (who are much more attached to that other source, "outsource"). Quite often we are in the business of educating and enlightening the client, sometimes seemingly as much as we are developing for the client. It comes with the territory. After all, clients come to us, in large part, because we are knowledgeable in things which they are not.

Hello?

Jerks have what's coming to them, imho. But calling someone a "dipshit" for simple ignorance? That's ignorance.

I suppose it's natural that such cynical attitudes will bleed into all areas of business, even this "new economy" we're all a part of that's supposed to, you know, change (read: "improve") the way business is conducted in the world. People are people, and cynical contempt is all-too-common a human attitude. Just don't count me among its willing practitioners.

Then again, Joe is a writer so maybe it's all just fiction. If so, never mind. I'll just walk slowly away from the computer and sit down for another viewing of Office Space.

I've posted a request for input from those attending the OSCMS Summit regarding the theming session. If you're attending, please respond there. Or here, if it's convenient. We want the session to address your concerns and interests, and your help is requested.

It looks like the session we proposed for the OSCMS Summit has been scheduled for March 22nd at 1:45 p.m. 11:30 a.m [?], first last session after before lunch, in "the big room." Even though I feel confident in the topic and the deep knowledge of my co-presenters, I do feel some stage fright. Eeep!

Update: My session on community building was also booked later the same day. That concept from the start is for more of a round table discussion, so I hope people attending this one will come chock full of ideas and experiences to share.

I made a post on pingVision called, "How to do open source (and how not to)." It took me a few days to pull together.

In the meantime, Angie Byron posted a similar post, this one more focused towards developers. Must be something in the air.