Today marks six five months since I joined Google on my birthday on January 7. It’s been an interesting, busy time for me.

Having never worked for a big company (where I define “big” as having more than 100 employees), working for Google is a lot like moving from the suburbs into a big city — I’m just constantly meeting new people and finding out about stuff I had no idea was going on.

Still, to put things in perspective, Google only has about 20,000 employees, whereas, Microsoft has nearly 100,000 and HP has a whopping 300,000. Those numbers boggle my mind, but are useful to keep in mind when Googlers call their employer a “startup”, unironically.

Speaking of big numbers, Eric Schmidt threw some big numbers around recently about the amount of data being created relative today to the sum total of all data that’s been create thus far. Essentially, since the beginning of time and 2003, five exabytes of information were created; since then, we’ve been creating something like five exabytes every two days (skip to 19:43 in this video to see the actual quote; it of course also makes sense that Google would need to rev its indexing approach to accommodate this influx of data).

With all that data, it occurred to me that I should figure out what my contribution is — not in gigabytes, but in terms of other social media metrics. And given how data-focused Google tends to be, I figured I’d focus on areas of growth.

So in the last six five months, here’s my data:

• New photos and screenshots posted to Flickr: 1,520
• Total screenshot/photo views: 733,121 (via flickrstats)
• New Google Buzz followers:  2,377 (public), 118 (internal)
• New Twitter followers: 2,556 (1, 2)
• New tweets: 1,797
• New blog posts: 13 (including this one)
• New videos: 10
• Total video loads: 68,547
• Total video plays: 3,638
• Interviews given: 7
• Talks given: 6
• Views on slidedecks: 15,296
• Emails sent from my google.com email address: 2,233
• Trips taken: 11
• Countries visited: 2
• Listened to 251 different artists
• Weekly status reports submitted: 22
• Office moves on Google campus: 3

Also, based on my Fitbit weekly averages, I’ve also walked about 1,000,000 steps over the past 152 days (though it’d be so much cooler if they hurried up and offered an API!).

So, not completely exhaustive — and some data was more elusive than other figures to track down — but there’s a snapshot of various metrics from my first six five months at Google.

I highly expect things to only increase their “up and to the right” trajectory from here on out.

Yes friends, I’m turning 29 and I’ve decided to go work for The Man.

In all actuality, I’ve been mulling over such a move for some time, considering a number of compelling opportunities for my next step. After reviewing my options — in light of the progress I’ve made so far and my familiarity and existing relationships with the new team at Google that I’ll be working with — I came to the conclusion that Google offers me the best possible opportunity to continue my work in an environment and culture that is compatible with my outlook, goals, and work habits.

I was trained as a designer, but I’ve been involved with the tech scene since I arrived in Silicon Valley just over five years ago. In some ways, technology has reshaped the way I approach and solve problems — forcing me to think in terms of adoption strategies first, rather than always trying to find the simplest, cleanest design, because of the disadvantaged position I occupied as a non-coder. I can see the consequences of these effects on my approaches first to OAuth, and then to Activity Streams, as well as with OpenID, with positive and negative results. In some ways I’ve had to temper my designer training and put technology first in order to grow an audience. But now I’m ready for new challenges that will expand my ideas and tactics, force me to attack problems from new perspectives, and dip into my design thinking repertoire to operate at a whole new level.

Though I consistently aim high, I want more success in turning my ideas into tangible outcomes, and in doing so, prove the power that I see in open, interoperable standards that can make the web a richer and more intricately spun space.

In some ways, I’m still just getting started with my work.  In joining Google, I see the chance to have a greater impact than I might otherwise on my own. That said, I won’t lose track of what intrinsically motivates me — that I’ve always been about spreading the benefits of the web by creating technology that  fosters innovation and choice. And there’s where I see alignment with what I’ve been doing, and what Google needs to succeed. In fact, my new title at Google? The same one I independently gave myself a year ago: “Open Web Advocate”.

In this role, I’ll still be an active community board member of the OpenID and Open Web Foundations; I hope to help push the Activity Streams project forward with a 1.0 release of the spec soon. And I’m still hopeful about the future of my our semi-neglected and half dormant Diso Project! I’ll also soon be publishing the results of my collaboration with Mozilla Labs, which will provide some insight into what social networking in the browser might look like, and how OpenID Connect might play a role in it.

For good measure, I should also point out that my good friend and colleague Joseph Smarr also made a similar decision recently  — unbeknownst to me at the time! —  and announced that he’ll be joining Google later this month as well.

So, net-net, I’m stoked to be joining The Man Google, and very thankful to have had as much support from the many, many people with whom I’ve connected through the synapses of the social web over these past several years. This is of course a very happy birthday present for me, and I’m eagerly anticipating what’s next for the open social web in 2010…! This can all still be made better. Ready? Begin.

Feel free to leave a comment here, or get in touch via email.

Update: here’s the latest theSocialWeb.tv episode where I make my announcement:

I’ve probably said it before, and will say it again, and I’m also sure that I’m not the first, or the last to make this point, but I have yet to see an example of an open source design process that has worked.

Indeed, I’d go so far as to wager that “open source design” is an oxymoron. Design is far too personal, and too subjective, to be given over to the whims and outrageous fancies of anyone with eyeballs in their head.

Lately, I’m feeling the acute reality of this sentiment.

In 2005, I wrote about how I wanted to take an “open source” approach to the design of Flock by posting my mockups to Flickr and soliciting feedback. But that’s more about transparency than “open source”. And I think there’s a big difference between the two that’s often missed, forgotten or ignored altogether: one refers to process, the other refers to governance.

Design can be executed using secretive or transparent processes; it really can’t be “open” because it can’t be evaluated in same way “open source” projects evaluate contributions, where solutions compete on the basis of meritocratic and objective measures. Design is sublime, primal, and intuitive and needs consistency to succeed. Open source code, in contrast, can have many authors and be improved incrementally. Design — visual, interactive or conceptual — requires unity; piecemeal solutions feel disjointed, uncomfortable and obvious when end up in shipping product.

Luke Wroblewski is an interaction designer. He recently made an observation about “openness” that really resonated with me:

I read this quote last week and realized it is symptomatic of a common assertion that in technology (and especially the Web) “completely open” is better than “controlled”.

“But we’ll all know exactly where Apple stands – jealously guarding control of their users [...] And that’s not what Apple should be about.” -TechCrunch

Sorry but Apple makes their entire living by tightly controlling the experience of their customers. It’s why everyone praises their designs. From top to bottom, hardware to software -you get an integrated experience. Without this control, Apple could not be what it is today.

He followed up with a post on Facebook’s design process today that I also found exceedingly compelling.

I worry about Mozilla in this respect — and all open source projects that cater to the visible and vocal, ignoring the silent or unengaged majority.

I worry about OpenID similarly — an initiative that will be essential for the future of the social web and yet is hampered by user experience issues because of an attachment to fleeting principles like “freedom” and “individual choice”. Sigh.

I’m not alone in these concerns.

When it comes to open source and design, design — and human factors, more generally — cannot play second fiddle to engineering. But far too often it seems that that’s the case.

And it shouldn’t be.

More often there should be a design dictator that enters into a situation, takes stock of the set of problems that people (read: end users) are facing, and then addresses them through observation, skill, intuition, and drive. You can evaluate their output with surveys, heuristics, and user studies, but without their vision, execution, and insane devotion to see through making it happen, you’ll never see shit get done right.

As Luke says, Most people out there prefer a great experience over complete openness.

I concur. And I think it’s critical that “open source” advocates (myself included) keep that at top of mind.

. . .

I will say this: I’m an advocate for open source and open standards because I believe that open ecosystems — i.e. those with low barriers to entry (low startup costs; low friction to launch; public infrastructure for sustaining productivity) — are essential for competition at the level of user experience.

It may seem paradoxical, but open systems in which secretive design processes are used can result in better solutions, overall.

Thus when I talk about openness, I really mean openness from an economic/competitive perspective.

. . .

Early today I needed access to a client’s internal wiki. Having gone without access for a week, I decided to toss up a project on Basecamp to get things started.

When I presented my solution to the team, I was told that we needed to use something open source that could be hosted on their servers. Somewhat taken aback, I suggested Basecamp was the best tool for the job given our approaching deadline..

“No, no, that won’t do,” was the message I got. “Has to be open source. Self-hosted.”

I asked them for alternatives. “PHProjekt“. Double Choco Latte. I proposed Open Atrium.

Once again, as seems all too common lately, more time was devoted to picking a tool rather than producing solutions. More meta than meat. Worst of all, religion was in the driver’s seat, rather than reality. Where was that open source pragmatism I’d heard so much about?

Anyway, not how I want to begin a design process.

Ultimately, I got the access I needed — to MediaWiki. So, warts and all, we’ll be using that to collaborate. On a closed intranet.

In the back of my head, I can’t help but fear that the tools used for design collaboration bleed into the output. To my eyes, MediaWiki isn’t a flavor that I want stirred into the pot. And it begs the question once and for all: what good can “open source” bring to design if the only result is the product of committee dictate?

Ok, so I see it now. It’s not like I didn’t have some notion of it before, but now it’s really obvious.

It would seem as though I’ve become one of those mean and despised open source nut-case curmudgeons with nothing nice to say.

How soon we forget the lessons our mothers taught us.

While constructive criticism is essential for keeping in context the various actions and decisions of industry players, consistently taking on the role of the negative creep just doesn’t jive with the more powerful approach of positive reinforcement. Just because I’m personally disappointed or disagree with someone’s decision doesn’t mean that my way is right, nor does it mean I’ve got all the facts that I need in order to deliver a credible critique. Worse, all this negativity just gets people’s backs up — reinforcing the very walls that I’ve been trying to tear down!

Case in point?

Writing for CNET, Open Road columnist Matt Asay cites my post on Adobe’s Open Source Media Framework to demonstrate how open source advocates (acolytes?) are potentially doing more harm than good with their vitriolic complaints:

Sigh. In open source, no good deed goes unpunished. There is no greater enemy to open source than itself.

[...]

…why would anyone expect Microsoft and its ilk to continue to court a community that ridicules and second-guesses its every attempt at perestroika? I know from conversations with several companies that they’re actually scared to engage the open-source community because the responses have been so intemperate and ideological.

I’m convinced that this element of the open-source community, vocal and sometimes vicious, is a minority. I’m equally convinced that we’d better off if this enemy within would spend more time analyzing its own behavior rather than shouting down the supposed “mudbloods” of open source.

But it’s not just Matt that made this point. In personal conversations and on Twitter… it’s clear that my rhetoric, though well-intentioned (in my mind), is perhaps missing the mark and needs an attitudinal adjustment. Furthermore — to Matt’s point — other people in open source that I respect have called me out on it — people like Alex Russell:

Reading your post makes me grumpy as someone who’s spent nearly all of his career building Open Source products. It makes the fundamental mistake of assuming that everyone else who choses a set of licensing terms *does so for the same reasons that you do*. It’s human nature to assume that others can and do share your perspective, but it’s as often wrong in software as it tends to be in other aspects of life.

“open washing”? “anti-community”? WTF?

The good arguments for OSS are economic…and your critique doesn’t begin to address Adobe (or anyone else’s) moves in that context. The code is MPL. The community process is likely not 100%, and together those things will define who *else* invests in this code. MPL is a fine license. That investment will determine if (and for whom) this announcement is good. Trying to tar Adobe for not being sufficiently slavish in their devotion to a cause that they can’t *ever* get on board with (economically speaking) seems…strange. Why bother?

And he’s right. Why bother ranting on for 1100+ words when the intended target is going to end up feeling bruised and angry, if they don’t just walk away altogether?

A much more civil tone could perchance reach the intended audience as well as a wider audience — and be replayed across many contexts beyond this blog’s readership: a wider, and therefore more valuable, contribution.

Though it’s no consolation, I am at least an equal-opportunity curmudgeon. I’ve poked Mozilla in the eye just as I have Microsoft. Adobe and Opera were only the most recent in a long line of targets that I’ve besmirched. When I write these tirades, in my head my intention is to inform and elucidate — trying to achieve contrast, if not through provocation. But without counterbalancing my complaints with some positivity from time to time, it just ends up sounding grating and unhelpful. And that’s something that I clearly need to work on.

So Matt, Alex, Ryan — others — message received. Perhaps this little personal intervention will lead to a more constructive approach to the challenge of evangelizing open source, while promoting and highlighting the aspects of it that I think are being forgotten as it becomes a more mainstream concept.

Of course there has been great progress made recently by the most unlikely of industry players — and for that, they should be praised and acknowledged. Never one to be satisfied (especially in my own endeavors), maybe I’ve just assumed that I need to stay up on the offensive, even as things have shifted. I mean, perhaps we have made so much progress that this new narrative that I keep talking about is necessary — and that continuing to fight when the battle’s been won risks alienation and undoing much of the progress that’s been made!

If I really believe that “this can all be made better”, perhaps I should recognize when it finally has?

When I was laid off from Vidoop last month, I didn’t so much as tweet about it. The circumstances were different this time. But because the lack of information coming from the company is disappointing (if not frankly irresponsible) it seemed time that I wrote down my recollection of what went down.

Joining Vidoop

I joined Vidoop just over a year ago, in May of 2008.

To be honest, my initial impressions of the company weren’t exactly positive, having first seen Luke Sontag (Vidoop’s co-founder and president, or ” Chief Koolaid Officer ” as he called himself) launch the company with a slick pitch at the Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco in April of 2007, proclaiming that Vidoop was going to do a rev-share with OpenID relying parties as well as regular users of the MyVidoop service.

I remember muttering to Scott Kveton — friend and chairman of the OpenID Foundation: “Great, someone’s attempting to exploit OpenID already.”

I didn’t think about Vidoop again until February 2008, when I found out that Kveton had joined the company after leaving Strands, a former client of Citizen Agency.

Kveton urged me to reconsider my impressions, suggesting that I fly to Portland in early April and have Luke pitch me on joining the team. Over drinks at Clyde Common, Luke laid out his grand vision for the company and invited me to come work full time on the Diso Project under Vidoop’s stable. Considering the difficult changes I was going through professionally and personally, it seemed like a great opportunity to throw myself into my work without having to worry about finding new clients for a while.

So, with Kveton’s encouragement, I accepted their offer, pulling in Will Norris and announcing the news a month later — news that was met rather warmly.

I would work remotely from San Francisco with Will — our work on the Diso Project helping to raise the visibility of Vidoop in the open source and identity arenas — while Vidoop’s efforts would increase the relevance of strong security in consumer applications built on a raft of open standards, like OpenID.

The Oregon Trail

A month after I joined, I took a trip down to Tulsa to meet the crew for a company all-hands and get a taste of life in the wild wild west (as Luke called it).

I was surprised at the size of the company (around 40 at the time) and the feeling of familiarity ( in the “familial” sense ) among the employees — clearly these folks cared a great deal about each other and what they were doing and were eager to prove to the world that Oklahoma could product high-tech stars too.

The contrast between my initial impressions of Luke’s slick stage presence with the down-to-earth candor of the developers and rest of the company left me positively charged and ready to contribute. There was a lot of heart in the company; perhaps I had judged too hastily?

Joel Norvell — the unassuming CEO and one-time ballet dancer and former chairman and CFO of a jewelry manufacturer — surprised everyone, standing atop a stump to declare that the company would be relocating to Portland. The company would offer assistance for the move, taking care of various expenses and working with families to smooth out the transition. I was impressed by the amount of help offered to the employees — a level of hands-on support that I’d not seen at any company that I’d worked with. It gave me pause, considering the magnitude of asking some 40-odd folks to uproot their families and move across the country to follow a dream: “Would this actually work?”

As it turned out, this was not the first time that moving the company had been proposed. In fact, Luke had enthusiastically suggested a number of other possible destinations, only to be turned down by his more even-keeled CEO. This time, however, with Kveton on board as the resident “Portvangelist“, Luke succeeded.

The plan was to spend the summer finding housing and making arrangements and then leave in September, following the route of the original Oregon Trail in a train of rented campers and U-Hauls, recording, blogging, tweeting and podcasting the hell out of the whole ordeal (Silicon Florist coverage 1, 2 and 3 ) — culminating with a parade down mainstreet in Portland and a greeting from the mayor.

View Larger Map

Though thankfully no one died of dysentery (in spite of a few “unforeseen detours”), it turned out that the parade and mayoral greeting were just the beginning of several oversold and underdelivered promises from management.

Shiny, shiny things

Turned out that uprooting and transplanting an entire company from the middle of the country to the west coast is more costly than one might otherwise think.

The decision to switching from PHP to Python also had its costs, primarily on developer focus (even if the decision played to the strengths of the dev team). Between the upheaval of the move and switching development modes — the team lost a lot of time, resulting in missed deadlines, unfinished projects and lost contracts.

Merely two months after cozying in above Backspace in Portland’s Old Town, Vidoop announced “changes” — a euphemism for layoffs.

Blaming the economy, Vidoop shed 11 employees. Blogging as CEO, Joel prudently pledged to “concentrate on those areas that make the most sense in this economy.”

As part of the changes, they also cut me back to half-time — leaving me with rent money, health insurance and a shaky future with the company.

With a new emphasis on product, my work on Diso was scaled back and I was tasked with redesigning the company website, working on the UI for VidoopSecure and helping to architect the user experience for the-silently-launched VidoopConnect product (now defunct).

I traveled to Portland several times during the winter and spring. We were making considerable progress with a renewed sense of urgency and will to execute. The VidoopConnect team in particular, lead by Adam Lowry and Michael Richardson, was firing on all cylinders.

Some time in February, however, the focus again began to blur.

On top of the other half-finished products in Vidoop’s quiver, VidoopCAPTCHA was introduced a lightweight mechanism to promote the ImageShield — as well as attempt to dethrone ReCAPTCHA. Development on VidoopConnect ceased. Will Norris was reallocated to VidoopCAPTCHA and implemented a plugin for WordPress while the rest of the team produced an API and web service.

The shift from VidoopConnect was abrupt and unprecedented: just one more example of the chaos of Vidoop’s product strategy.

Now, I haven’t yet mentioned MyVidoop, Vidoop’s much-loved consumer OpenID provider and browser-based password manager. That’s largely because it too was deprioritized around the time of the first layoffs — kept alive on little more than life support. In some ways, the fate of myVidoop is both emblematic of the lack of focus and thorough execution that I believe contributed greatly to the fall of Vidoop, and remains one of the more problematic pieces of this story (more later).

The beginning of the end

This past March, I paid my own way to SXSW. Meanwhile, Vidoop picked up travel for Kveton (by now some kind of VP of Engineering Open Technologies), Sontag, Matt Selbie (VP of Marketing), and Scott Blomquist (CTO) who all shacked up in some sweet pad somewhere outside downtown Austin.

At BarCampAustin, Kveton presented on Bacn.com, a scrappy side-project he’d launched with Richardson that — get this — sells real bacon — and that took off with a life of its own. Turned out Vidoop didn’t take too kindly to Kveton telling the story of Bacn when he apparently should have been pimping their tech.

Upon returning to Portland, he found out that he’d been fired.

This was — for me as I’m sure for others — the beginning of the end.

Since Kveton had been helping to coordinate my work on the Vidoop side of things, I lost my representative at the company. Though I kept in close contact with a number of the developers, I ended up busying myself with speaking, traveling, and evangelizing OpenID on the road.

And then came the rumblings of financial problems. On April 15, I received word that the company was about to close a major round of funding — and just in time, too, because Vidoop had failed to make payroll.

Two days later — April 17 — I was in Sebastopol at Social Web FOO Camp when I received a phone call from Wiley Parsons, Vidoop’s CTO, with instructions to cut up my company credit card.

My first thought was that Vidoop had been sold, an idea later dismissed. To this day, I’m still not entirely sure what happened, but it was obvious that things were being kept together with chewing gum and shoelaces, threatening to split apart at any moment.

The final straw

On May 11, I was in Paris in the middle of a trip bookended by speaking engagements in Hamburg and Belgium. Luke messaged me, requesting that I call him ASAP. When I did, it turned out that Vidoop was out of money, unable to make payroll again. All but a skeleton crew remained. Luke assured me that he was going to keep fighting — attempting to sign some final deals to save the company. He promised to share more information by the end of the week but the only public statement that’s been made to date was a mealy-mouth blog post with no discernibly useful information whatsoever.

Two weeks later, Joel sent out what appeared to be heartfelt last rites for the company, again lacking any actionable information. A day later he clarified things, posting to Vidoop alumni mailing list that, “Vidoop LLC is officially out of business. Unfortunately, there are no funds to pay the unpaid wages or other liabilities.”

This was the memo that leaked to TechCrunch.

During the last two weeks of May, there were two parallel tracks of activity — segmented into those left fighting for whatever was left of the company — and those who’d been laid off. The unemployedstruggled to find new work, attempted to secure new Visas, grappled with the arcane unemployment and healthcare systems, and tried to pry more information from the company; others called it quits and moved back to Tulsa.

Those left fighting for the company — Luke, Blomquist, and Selbie — have provided strange accounts of what they’re doing to try to rescue the firm or — apparently — start something new.

There’s been no public acknowledgement of the situation, either on the company blog or on Twitter, save for this melodramatic post (presumably from Luke): “dead, no. bloody, yes. still got fight left. details soon…”

The media and wider community have been left to their own devices (and Arrington’s original post) to fill in the blanks. With no information forthcoming from the company, it’s impossible to know what to plan for, or what the fate of services like MyVidoop will be.

OpenID, myVidoop and unfulfilled promises

I’m writing this post not because I’m bitter — most startups fail and I knew this when I joined the company — but because the lack of information coming from Vidoop has been irresponsibly minimal — both publicly and privately. Vidoop has failed to speak clearly and consistently to the community that it pledged to serve and secure, and it has failed to produce definitive information for the staff that risked much and poured themselves into the company.

The failure of Vidoop was a failure of business and focus, not technology. It’s as simple as that. And yet, with the company out of business, those responsible for communicating clearly and transparently about the health of the company are failing to do so.

This is bad for several reasons. Among them:

1. First, those who continue to use MyVidoop have not been told what’s going on or planned for the service, and can therefore not make an informed decision about whether they should continue using the service. If they do — with the presumption that Vidoop is solvent — they may well end up locked out of not only their MyVidoop accounts, but also the accounts that MyVidoop holds the keys to.

   None of MyVidoop’s Terms and Conditions mention the availability of backups or access to data should the service be shut down — nor does it state what will happen to the servers that house personal data should the company file for bankruptcy. These are questions that Vidoop needs to have answers for, along with advice for people that want to leave the service. In contrast, Yahoo has taken aggressive steps to notify people a full 60 days in advance of the pending closure of the Yahoo! 360 service, providing guidance and tools to export user data.

   I discussed the fate of MyVidoop with Scott Blomquist when I was in Portland for WebVisions. I implored him to issue some kind of public statement about the welfare of the MyVidoop service, but so far he has demurred. He has proposed running the service as a “community project” and has attempted to enlist the help of several ex-Vidoopers, but I’m not convinced that his plan will hold water. Besides the trademark issues wrapped up in continuing to use MyVidoop.com as an OpenID provider, there are various licensing fees associated with keeping the strong authentication services functioning (voice confirmation, SMS-verification); and, even if those services were turned off, running a high-security service as a community initiative just doesn’t add up — not after all the fear-mongering that Vidoop does on its Twitter account!

   The responsible thing to do would be to announce the closure of the MyVidoop service in 30 days (if the servers can be kept running and secured for that amount of time); the “community project” idea should be scrapped in favor of building tools to export people’s data, and if it’s amenable to a company like Janrain, the MyVidoop users could be invited to move their accounts to MyOpenID.com (presuming that Janrain has reasonable data back up, export retention policies!) Otherwise, keeping the service running longer will just invite catastrophe with no one on the payroll to deal with issues related to security or uptime.

2. Second, this whole situation paints a negative caricature of a member of the OpenID community. It’s not the technology that isn’t sound or market-worthy — it’s that perception is oftentimes nine-tenths of the law. Vidoop’s drawn out failure highlights the risk and importance of choosing a responsible identity provider — or of using delegation — the feature of OpenID that lets you use your own domain as your OpenID, but assigns someone else the responsibility of serving your identity. Vidoop’s failure could be seen as a blight on the technology and community if people fail to recognize that the problem with Vidoop was not OpenID, but was the same thing that’s caused countless other companies to fail: the inability to focus and execute in a consistent and thorough manner.

To its credit, in its time, Vidoop assembled a cadre of highly talented and motivated folks who really did want to make their mark on the world, the right way.

Projects like Identity in the Browser (“IDIB”), Emailtoid and EAUT, VidoopConnect, and VidoopSecure exemplied solid and well-engineered solutions and proofs of concept that demonstrated an open, innovative approach to delivering secure solutions to the consumer web. To have those efforts sullied by the incongruous response from management is unfortunate and unfair.

With so much promise, it seems sad that Vidoop could fall so far, so fast.

Sometime last week, after two Manhattans, I decided to change my Twitter username from @factoryjoe to @chrismessina. In the scheme of things, not a big deal (yeah, okay, so I broke a couple thousand hyperlinks…). And yet, I can’t but feel like I’ve shed a skin or changed identities… at least to a specific audience.

I started using Twitter in 2006 as “factoryjoe”. Of course, this is the nick that I use everywhere —from Flickr to my personal homepage — so that choice was obvious. I essentially own factoryjoe on the web — people even occasionally call me “Joe” when we meet, such is their familiarity with my online persona. But that’s not my actual name.

When I talk in front of people and I introduce myself as “Chris Messina”, the disconnect between my real name and my online persona becomes distracting. And, over time, my motivations for having a separate online identity have waned.

But first, I suppose, I should provide some background.

In September of 2006, I wrote a piece called The Future of White Boy Clubs taking to task Ryan Carson for putting together a speaker lineup for his Future of Web Apps conference made up entirely of white men (for the record, Tantek resents being lumped in as “white”; he’s says he’s Turkish).

As a white male speaker, I wanted to make a point that not just lamented the dearth of female speakers, but also asserted a broader point about the value of diversity to tech conferences.

Two and half years later and the future of the web was yet again being presented from the perspective of a bunch of white guys — and were it not for a last minute substitution, Kristina Halvorson wouldn’t have made it on stage as the sole female voice.

Kristina felt compelled to say something and so she did, sharing the last 10 of her 25 speaking minutes with Ryan Carson and me, confronting this perennial elephant in the room and calling for specific action.

Without context, some members of the audience felt ambushed.

But Kristina hadn’t planned to bring this up on stage; she wanted to talk about copy! Had progress been made over the last two years, she wouldn’t have had to. But she felt strongly — and after receiving encouragement from Kevin Marks, Daniel Burka and me — she decided to raise the issue because, frankly, no one else had plans to.

She didn’t merely want to complain and didn’t wish to inspire guilt in the predominantly white male audience (what’s there to feel guilty about anyway?). Her point was to frame the issue in a way that helped people recognize the symptoms of the problem, identify where responsibility lies (answer: with all of us) and provide constructive means to address them.

Let’s be real: I doubt it’s lost on anyone that the tech industry and its requisite events lack women. We know this. And we all suffer as a result (for the perspective and experiences they bring, among other things). Lately it’s getting worse: depending on the study you read, there are more females online than males, and yet enrollment by that demographic in computer science is on the wane. Events that purport to be about the “future of web” and yet fail to present speakers that represent the web’s actual diversity serve only to perpetuate this trend.

Turns out, white men also don’t have the monopoly on the best speakers — even in the tech industry — yet their ilk continue to make up a highly disproportionate number of the folks who end up on stage. And that means that good content and good ideas and important perspectives aren’t making it into the mix that should be, and as a result, audiences are getting short-changed.

The question is no longer “where are all the women?” — it’s why the hell aren’t white men making sure that women are up on stage telling their story and sharing the insights that they uniquely can provide!

Why should it only be women who raise their voices on this issue? This isn’t just “their” problem. This is all of our problem, and each of us has something to do about it, or knows someone who should be given an audience but has yet to be discovered.

As a conference organizer, Ryan pointed out that he’s not omniscient. As a fellow conference organizer, I can tell you that you aren’t going to achieve diversity just by talking about it. You have to work at it. To use a lame analogy: if you want food at your event, you’ve got to actually place the order, not just “talk about it”.

Similarly, with female speakers and attendees, you’ve got to work at it, and you’ve got to think about their needs and what will get them come to you (remember, it’s the audience that’s missing out here).

Now, to be fair, I know that Ryan and his team reached out to women. I know that some were too busy; others unavailable; some accepted only to later cancel. Yet still, only two of eight workshops were run by women (with Kristina doing double duty as the only female speaker). It wasn’t for complete lack of effort that more women weren’t on stage or in the audience; it was also the lack of visibility of — and outreach to — women operating on the cutting edges of technology, business, and the web.

This is what our on-stage discussion sought to address by soliciting recommendations from members of the audience tagged with #fowaspeak. By bringing the negative spaces in the conference agenda to the fore — calling attention to the incidental omission of women presenters — we acknowledged that that lack wasn’t necessarily the realization of intent but something more insidious.

It isn’t that women need “help” from white men; this isn’t about capability. To the contrary, the saturation of men in technology leads to women become marginalized and invisible. They are there, and they are present, but somehow we don’t miss them when they’re not up on stage standing next to us. And that’s something that absolutely must change.

Turning the spotlight to deserving women who work just as hard (if not harder) than men does not diminish them, nor should it minimize their accomplishments. An intelligent audience should be able to discern who on stage is meritorious and who is not.

That there are fewer women in the industry means first that conference organizers need work harder to find them and second that audiences need to become vigilant about their absences on conference schedules. It is something that all of us must internalize as our own struggle and then take ongoing, explicit actions to address.

As far as I’m concerned, one of the greatest opportunities to seize the future of web apps is to cement the necessity of diversity in our processes and in our thinking, not for the sake of diversity alone (deserving though it is) but because the technology that we produce is better for it, being more robust, more versatile and flexible, and ultimately, more humane.

The future of web apps — and the conferences that tell their stories — should not be gender-neutral or gender-blind — but gender-balanced. Today, as it was two years ago, we suffer from a severe imbalance. It is my hope that, in raising the specter of consequences of the lack of women in technology, we begin to make as much progress in stitching diversity into the fabric of our society as we are making in producing source code.

Perhaps until now.

If you’re not interested in political discourse, that’s of course your prerogative and you certainly can skip this post. Personally, however, I’ve become increasingly interested in what’s going on in this country (my country), and increasingly enamored of political dialogue (however bereft of content as it sometimes is) as well as our representative democracy — an imperfect system to be sure, but one that at least, by and large, affords its constituents a voice in matters local, state and federal. And personal.

Here in California, we have a cagey system of democracy where voters are provided the opportunity to consider multiple arguments for and against several propositions presented on a ballot to determine numerous policies at both the state and local level. I voted absentee yesterday (as I’ll be traveling to Oceania later this week) and along with the ballot for the presidential election, there were two accompanying ballots, one for the state and one for the city of San Francisco, where I am a resident.

On the state ballot is Proposition 8, effectively an amendment to the California state constitution that would ban gay marriage by defining it strictly as a union of a heterosexual couple: one man, one woman.

I voted against this proposition. And I’ll tell you why.

Back in the day…

When I was a senior in high school (in conservative “Live Free or Die” New Hampshire), I supported an initiative to create a gay-straight student alliance, or GSA. At the time, I was on the staff of the newspaper and was more informed of the various controversies affecting my classmates, but I’ll admit, I was also pretty ignorant of other “lifestyles”. Still, if my parents taught me anything, tolerance and self-respect were a few of the more subtle lessons that must have stuck, which led me to support the effort.

As I had done for many of the school’s student clubs, I created a homepage with information on the GSA initiative and hosted it on my own website. I had also single-handed built my high school’s website (even though I couldn’t get any educator besides the dorky librarian to care) and inserted a banner ad into the site’s rotating pool of four or five ads promoting the other school club sites that I’d designed.

The ad for the GSA, which didn’t say much more than “Find out more” with a link off-site, was in rotation for several weeks when I was called down to the principal’s office to explain why I was announcing school policy without authorization. So it goes in the petri-dish of adolescent high school politics and unbalanced power relationships.

Rather than use this as an educational opportunity, the principal, who later became mayor of the city, decided instead to use this situation as a reeducational opportunity and externally suspended me for six days, meaning I wouldn’t be able to graduate.

I’ll cut to the chase in a moment, but in response, I took down the GSA ad — as well as the entire high school’s site (I was hosting that on my own server too — back in 1999 schools didn’t know what a “web server” was). I vowed that I wouldn’t turn over the site files until they’d written up rules governing what students were and weren’t allowed to post to the school’s site; meanwhile my mom threatened to sue the school.

My infraction was small beans (and eventually overturned) compared with the lawsuit that GLAD and the ACLU filed against the school district barring discrimination against school clubs. By the time the lawsuit was decided in favor of the students, I had graduated and moved off to Pittsburgh, but the experience, and impression that it left on me, has resonated since.

…history repeating

None of these contested issues really consume you until you’re personally affected, as I was in high school, and today I feel equally affected by this proposition, but more capable of doing something about it.

The arguments for and against are fairly straight forward, but for me it comes down to two things:

• First, I don’t believe that laws should codify discrimination. Our history as a nation has been blighted by both gender and racial discrimination, and now we’re facing discrimination against the makeup of certain families — specifically those of same-sex couples. Good law should strive to be non-ideological; discrimination is nearly always ideologically driven.
• Second, if marriage as an institution stems from a religious foundation, but is represented in law, by the principle of the separation of church and state and presuming the importance of tolerance to culture, we should cleft out the religious underpinnings of marriage from law and return it to the domain of the church, especially if the church mandates that the definition of marriage is strictly between a man and a woman. The state should therefore only be in the business of recognizing in law civil unions, or the lawful coming together of two people in union. Marriage itself would be a separate religious institution, having no basis in civil law.

In other words, should marriage persist in law, then it should not be discriminatory against same-sex couples. If marriage must only be for heterosexual couples, then it should be removed from the state constitution and replaced with civil unions, which would be available to any two willing citizens.

The examples that have informed my thinking on this come from real people — friends whom I’ve now known for some time, and who I could not imagine being legally separated from their partners because of religious zealotry and illogical reasoning.

The first is Hillary Hartley, a good friend and fellow coworker at Citizen Space, who has been with her partner for eight years, having known her for 15. They were recently (finally!) able to get married in California, but the vote on November 4 threatens to annul their marriage. Think about that: the potential of this decision could dissolve the legal recognition of a perfectly happy, stable and loving relationship. I can’t even imagine what that must feel like, and because I am a heterosexual male, I never will. And that’s completely unjust.

Marnie Webb is a also good friend of mine, who has been active in the non-profit technology space for years, and who I met through Compumentor, NetSquared and TechSoup (she’s co-CEO of TechSoup). Marnie faces the same fate as Hillary, but in her case, it would mean that Marnie’s daughter, Lucy, would grow up with parents who were legally not allowed to recognize their union, nor have rights for hospital visitation among other benefits of marriage.

The low-pressure ask

So here’s what I’m asking for. I’ll give you three options.

First, THINK about this. Talk to people about it. I’m certainly not going to make up your mind for you, but if you were (or are) in a heterosexual marriage and it was threatened to be annulled by changes in law, how would you feel about it? What would you do? The problem with discrimination is that someone’s always losing out; next time it could be you.

Second, VOTE. When you see Proposition 8 on the ballot, vote your conscience, not your ideology. Belief systems are powerful and complex, but they’re not always right. And times do change. It’s counter-intuitive to me that we’ve spent seven years and untold billions fighting for “Iraqi Freedom” when in our country we’re threatening to take civil liberties away from natural-born citizens.

Third, GIVE something. Obviously the presidential campaigns have probably tapped you out, especially given the uncertainly in the market, but you can give more than just money: you can give your time, or you can give mindshare and voice to these issues by widening the conversation, retweeting this post, blogging about it, or taking a video to record your own sentiments.

If you do want to donate money, both Hillary and Marnie have set up respective donation pages. The challenge we’re facing is that proponents of Prop 8 are better-funded and are able to put more ads on TV and make more phone calls. Money in this case can be directly turned into awareness, and into action. If you’ve got $5, it can make a difference, especially now, as your contribution will be matched dollar for dollar. It’s up to you.

Bernice Yeung’s character piece (“So Open it Hurts“) about my relationship with Tara is now available online (feels somewhat awkward using her full name, as she used mine in her post on the story, so I’ll take liberties and presume some familiarity on the part of you, my dear reader).

On the one hand, I feel a bit embarrassed and reluctant having had the entrails of our relationship splayed out over 15 digital pages or 13 print pages starting on page 57 of this month’s San Francisco Magazine (which I recommend, given modern reading habits).

On the other, it’s quite an honor that someone as talented as Bernice would take an interest in us and our work and spend over eight months gathering information, anecdotes and ideas through the tumult of our two-plus-year relationship. It is worth noting that the story began modestly about the germination of the coworking movement, but after several other media outlets beat her to the scoop, Bernice decided to bring the backstory of our relationship to the forefront. In other words, when Bernice started talking to us, our conversations were about coworking, not our relationship. I can’t even imagine how many times Bernice had to rewrite the piece, especially since, months into her research, as you know, Tara and I broke up. But in the end, that’s what Bernice decided to focus on and write about.

In trying to piece together what to make of this story and how to feel about it, in some ways I’ve been more interested in other people’s varied reactions to it — not quite in the same way that Tara described as “vulnerability” leading to defensiveness (though I recognize that effect in myself occasionally), but more from the perspective of a bystander witnessing other people thinking out loud about other people leading more public lives.

Some people seem to really support the choice (or ability) to live openly. Others question it, or even lambast the choice, calling it “egocentric” or “juvenile” or “self-important navel-gazing“. That’s cool. Some people are apparently able to devote more of their cognitive surplus ogling and critiquing the lives of others. Whatevs.

That our relationship was something of a spectacle is not beyond my grasp. I do see it — even if throughout the relationship I kind of held that idea in the abstract, like, “well, people know this internet concoction that is ‘The Tara & Chris Show’, but I’m still the same regular dude I’ve always been…” I don’t think it was ever the intention — or at least something that I put any conscious effort in to — to become known for being a publicish couple. It just kind of happened. I mean, hell, Tara says as much when she points out that it took her pushing me out a window to get me to show some gumption on the projects that I stoked and then ran away from leading! I guess to put this in perspective, the story is interesting, and it’s interesting to me, because as it is for most people who end up featured in articles, a lot of it is about being in the right place at the right time, surrounded by the right people. No amount of self-aggrandizement can do this for you. It happens to you. Oftentimes in spite of what you might have otherwise preferred.

I also think that we were something of an anomaly, especially in our pathetically male-dominated industry. Ayn Rand talks about it the Fountainhead. And in our case, you had it two-fold: two passionate and dedicated individuals coming together romantically, professionally and productively — even if only for a relatively short amount of time — able to produce results… And that we did it using new and unknown social tools, well, that’s kind of interesting. And says something about the period we’re living in. I mean, it is interesting to think that the design of Flickr and Twitter actually shaped the contours of our relationship: by facilitating openness as the default, our relationship was simply more open and exposed. And long after lonelygirl15 was proven to be a farce, the result was that we ended up with this amazing network of friends and contacts, made up of people who got to know us as individuals and as a couple, and to know that we are just your regular folks, and that we use the same internet as everyone else, and that we stumble humiliatingly and earnestly along just as everyone else, seeking the approval and attention of our peers, while giving away the source code to our ideas and our experiences all along the way.

Really, so what?

Really: so what?

. . .

Tara said to me that we’re at the end of an era. And that, in some ways, this story, now published, serves as a transition point. I was reluctant at first, but now I agree. I told Bernice that I felt like I’d aged six years in six months when she last interviewed me this spring, and that’s true; even though I’m still pretty naive and more ignorant than I care to admit, I’m older now than I was in my relationship with Tara. Tara forced me to grow up a lot and to take a lot more responsibility for my feelings, for my actions and for my thoughts. And so, as we (I) transition from the awkward adolescence of the social web, I take with me lessons about . . . the natural and effective constant exercise of free will.

. . .

. . .

Y’know, I didn’t say very much at all during the months following our breakup. Oftentimes I thought to myself, “you should write something about what’s going on… in case someone else is ever in this situation. Or to defend yourself.” But I always stopped myself.

Sometimes things are too personal to share, and sometimes experiences cannot, or should not, be generalized. Sometimes what’s there to be learned is in the going through, not in the seeing it done. I also think that it’s perfectly valid that each person make up their own mind about how open they want to be about their life, for better or for worse, to whatever extent fits their needs. I typically try to be as open as I’m comfortable with, and then a little more, but it doesn’t always work out that way. While I hope that I can provide one kind of example that might be useful in some cases, I certainly don’t imagine that my example is one that would work for everyone, or even necessarily anyone else.

Yes, we were open about our relationship to an extent that many people would probably prefer not to be; that was a choice we made, and that I think made sense at the time. I’m now in a new relationship, and a very different relationship, and I will treat it according to its own unique nature and internal logic. How “open” we will be, I can’t say. But that I am more open, in a much transformed, deeper, way, is unarguable. That much I know to be true.

I am honored to be a recipient of this year’s Google O’Reilly Open Source Award for being the “best community amplifier” for my work with the microformats, Spread Firefox and BarCamp communities! (See the original call for nominations).

Inexplicably I was absent when they handed out the award, hanging out with folks at a Python/Django/jQuery drinkup down the street, but I’m humbled all the same… especially since I work on a day to day basis with such high caliber and incredible people without whom none of these projects would exist, would not have found success, and most importantly, would never have ever mattered in the first place.

Also thanks to @bmevans, @TheRazorBlade, @kveton, @anandiyer, @donpdonp, @dylanjfield, @bytebot, @mtrichardson, @galoppini for your tweets of congratulations!

And our work continues. So lucky we are, to have such good work, and such good people to work with.