Open source – Page 22

Flock seeking interaction designer…!

So I have a funny thing to post… Flock is looking for an interaction designer — which is similar to the role I’ve played so far except that it will be far more… erhm… focused! Yes yes, we’re looking for someone who can really execute on pushing pixels into place, on coming up with real world, grounded solutions, and someone who can design user flows, soup to nuts and really get inside someone else’s thoughtspace to understand the problem opportunities that Flock can solve.

Check the description for details; the first test is whether you can figure out whom to contact about the job (hint: serious applicants won’t apply in my comments!).

Out of stealth at 106 Miles

Went and was a “contender” at Joyce Parks’ and Adam “I Find Karma” Rifkin 106 Miles gathering tonight against Kevin “Rank that Tail” Burton.

Yeah well, I think there was less antagonism than Joyce might have hoped for, but nevertheless, it was a good chance to actually express some of my varied views on the state of open source, the Bubble 2.0, the whole stealth/beta thing… and a couple other topics. Maybe someone will podcast it, I dunno.

David Weekly told me his biggest takeaway had to do with having some humility when launching something on the web… which, I admit, Flock did not. And which, I admit, caused us to experience a trial by fire that taught us a great deal about the way things are… and about the important of expressing, with clarity and honesty, why you might not exactly have the kind of humility one should have when coming out and boldly pronouncing that you’re going to change the world…

Well, I’ll keep it brief, but the story goes like this: I came to San Francisco a little over a year and half ago. And when I got here, I knew no one. But through the power of networks, open source… getting involved in Mozilla and CivicSpace at the right time, hell, I was able to get the job I currently have now, doing what I’ve always dreamed of doing: taking back control over technology and putting it to work for regular folks (myself included!).

So when I came to Flock and helped formulate the vision for what they should build, well shit, I was full of vim and vinegar and busting to tell the world all about it.

And so I did. Publicly. On our website. On our website that asked for your email address. And that was just like the countless other “private beta” sites that cropped up around the Web 2.0 conference.

Which was fine and good and so on, but that now represents something dirty or tainty it seems. Well whatever, that’s not the important thing here.

The issue is how we launched Flock… and how all this beautiful enthusiasm and hope and optimism turned into vengeful anti-hype and disdain. And whether or not, given the opportunity, I would have done anything differently.

The answer, simply, is, “no”.

We endured a trial by fire that any project with our level of visibility deserved. We underwent a continued scorching that demanded to know whether or not we were legit or just the first in what might become a trend in Mozilla-derivative businesses using the success of Firefox to get ahead.

Are we? Well, I don’t know. Really. That’s not the project that I think I’m working on, but I’m just a lucky kid who happened into this mix of things. And I’m emboldened by the success I found on the Mozilla project; on having my ad in the New York Times, on being mentioned in Wired and Rolling Stone. These are things I never dreamed of when I came out here — why would I? But having experienced them — serendipitously — I’m convinced, as I was prior to Web 2.0, that what we’re doing is important, is relevant, has the potential to change things… and for the better.

What we didn’t communicate when we launched was a timeline — was how long it would take to get to the fabled One Dot Oh, if indeed that denomination even makes sense anymore. While I was going off on how we were going to change the web and, by extension, the world, I forget to mention that, Oh yeah, this’ll take us a couple years. So don’t hold your breath… just yet.

But y’know, at the same time — well, I’m glad that we said what we said. I’m proud of the vision that we have for Flock. It’s saying something — it’s taking a risk where it might make more “sense” to stick with conventional wisdom of what a browser is all about… And heck, I don’t know if we’re going to succeed and make this thing happen now, today, this time around. In the end, it doesn’t really matter. What’s important is that we’re asking these questions, now, that browser-makers can start to think about expanding beyond the baseline concepts of “history” and “bookmarks” in the browser and start to incorporate “people”… “web services”… “syndicated content”. And on and on.

Anyway, as I’ve just blabbed all this out, this is part of the humility — the mea culpa of saying, “Man, did we learn a lot!” And yeah, I’m sharing it with you just because, well, it’s worth knowing that if we had it to do all over again, maybe a touch more of humility would have helped, but no, I wouldn’t do it any different than what we did.

Google + My Data = Crazy Conspicuous

See? This is what I was talking about. This is the slow steady systematic decline that I was talking about.

Don’t believe me yet, tha’s coo.

Coz see, now that Google can track your email, your search history, your chats, what comes next? Gee, let’s see. Would be nice if you could go back and grab your cell phone convos right? Oh wait, Gtalk and FON will help there… And where you’ve been? Dodgeball’s got that covered. Hell, you can even map that stuff on Gmaps — or one step bigger — Earth.

So what happens when Google rolls out wifi or flips the switch on all that dark fiber it’s got?

Tell you what, yeah, you’ll be able to get movies downloaded hella fast, but Google will also have the most lucrative person-database ever assembled. That Google credit card you just applied for? Ho ho ho. MAN I wish that kind of information about myself.

So look, I’m over it. I said as much before. Privacy is dead. Get over it.

Well ok fine, I’m not really over it, but it sounds more dramatic when I put it that way.

What isn’t finished, however, is how much control over that information you should be able to exert. You know how much you hate it when you walk into a party and all of a sudden everyone starts whispering, looking sidewards at you, raising eyebrows. Wouldn’t it just be so great if you could turn up the volume of what everyone’s saying and hear just what they think about you — and better yet, see which Dicks Jane is sharing that information with?

That’s the problem here. Once Google rolls out GoogleNet, we’re effed. It’s that simple. There’ll be a “personal information tax” that they’ll charge you just to take a look at your information (alright alright, I hear you snicker, maybe they won’t, but they sure could!).

So there’s got to be competition — and I don’t mean from the other biggies. I mean from us. I mean from the people who’s data they’re harvesting and already claim dominion over. I mean that we need to build our own economy and our own means of leveraging this data — and of course building the means to syphon it back out of the biggies. You think they’re going to give up this information easily, willfully? Sorry Toto, we’re not in Germany, here (can’t count on the government anyway when it’s just as eager to have this kind of information about its citizenry anyway).

So yeah. Just keep it in the back of your head. As Google grows, becomes more powerful, more all-knowing, whatchoo gunna do about? What can you do about it once they know everything about you — and all of your transactions pass through the Google network? I’m not scared of this — and I’m not raising the paranoia flag. Fuck that, it’s too late for paranoia. This is the future and the present; so the only question now is, what do we make of it now that we’re here? And, moreover, how do we put all this data to work for us?

The power of 1000 monkeys

When discussing my conceptual framework for leveraging multi-disciplinary work for the benefit of open source projects (um, aka “CivicForge”), I’ve made the point that we will achieve world domination because our thousand one-pound monkeys who build open source tools will be able to outwit, outhink and out-heart any 800 lb. proprietary gorilla.

Whether true or not, it’s a fairly accurate image of the open source community, given its neurotic and somewhat anarchic inner workings. Primarily owing to its quasi-egalitarian social structure, decision-making is often controversial, contested and often downright perplexing. Nevertheless, good tools are produced that stand the test of time, are oftentimes less fragile than their proprietary counterparts and hell, give a wide swath of folks with all kinds of disparate ideas and experiences the chance to get involved in building tools that affect (and potentially improve) their lives (this is why DRM makes no sense in open source tools: why would you handicap your own tools? — it’d be like building the QWERTY keyboard all over again!).

So let’s cut to the chase: 1000 one-pound monkeys acting by autonomously self-organizing provides an answer to the dilemma that Noah Brier raises about the attention issue (Via Alex Barnett):

“But here’s my widespread adoption issue: the general public don’t think they have an ‘attention problem.’ If you ask people how much television they watch, they’ll tell you less than they actually do. Most individuals have no clue what they actually spend their time doing … yeah new technologies will force people to split their time more and more, but will they notice/care? I think it’s really important to remember that the average person has no desire to sit around and read all these RSS feeds then blog about them. In fact, if you showed someone how I spend my attention online, they’d probably think I was an idiot who was wasting time.”

While in isolation and over a short enough time horizon, Noah’s point may prove true, I think this misses the historical significance that the experience of a thousands of monkeys can offer to a culture. I’m sure at some point some wise fella claimed that no one would ever walk around carrying a “portable phone”, but clearly after the monkeys got a hold of them, culture soon changed so that now that’s now the common reality (at least in developed countries).

So I wouldn’t poo-poo the notion just coz us geeks need to better attenuate our attention streams. We’re on the vanguard here, and what we need today will surely eventually be needed by nongeeks, especially those kids growing up on MySpace and LiveJournal today.

So think about it this way. The drains on our personal attention are getter greater and more promiscuous. We will need to manage it. The kids in school tomorrow will need more and more tools to manage it — and will be looking for tools. What happens next? The cult of a thousand teenage monkeys will go about the incremental effort of virally spreading those tools to their friends, and will ultimately install it on mom and dad and grandma’s computer… and say stuff like, “Oh no! You’re still using that silly [insert obsolete app here]?? Here, try this!”

And poof. One thousand elder monkeys will get the trickle up benefit of having their attention stream whipped, chopped, sliced and diced without ever knowing what RSS, blogging or the attention trust concept is all about owing to the tenacity and technological prowess of a generation of a thousand younger monkeys. Don’t underestimate the network, Noah. It might seem like all this stuff is just for geeks now, and that may be true for the next couple years. But as software improves and gets easier to use — we’re all going to be experiencing personal attention deficits like we’ve never witnessed — and then, yes then, just like the intarweb of today, the domain of attention attenuators will become the commonplace hangout of the jocks and divas, our moms and dads — and yes, we’ll still be there too, grappling with 3800 unread items.

Wanted: Monolingual Installer

So here’s one for the LazyWeb: I download and install a lot of software… I end up running a great little app called Monolingual monthly, though, to get rid of all the localization cruft that the software comes with… Usually saving on the order of anywhere from 100mb to 2GB, depending on how long it’s been (run it after you install iLife ’06 and you’ll see what I’m talking about!). So wouldn’t it be great if I could get a version of Monolingual that st in muy dock so that anytime I wanted to install something, I could just drag the .app to the "Monolinguinstaller" and it would cut all that garbage out for me and copy the result into my ~/Applications folder?

Wouldn’t that be nice? Hey, Monolingual’s open source… any takers?

Me and Microsoft, Part II

Executive summary: Had dinner the other night with Jim Allchin and some other wonderful folks. We talked broadly about open source, Internet Explorer and Windows, Window Media Center, identity management and passport and widely about DRM and how effed the whole system is. And though there were certainly MSFT-friendlies around the table, it was refreshingly not a total MSFT lovefest. Details follow. Part 2 in a series of a couple.

Okay, so you wanna know what I think? I don’t think MSFT is a bad company. Maybe I’m basing that only on my interactions with Scoble and Jim, Linda, Neil and James and others from MSFT that I’ve historically interacted with, but really I think that there’s some decency in there. Thomas told me that of the AGYM companies, MSFT employees seem to be the most open and willing to engage in honest conversations about the failings of their employer. Are there bad apples in the mix (maybe the wrong analogy to use, ehmm)? Of course. Has MSFT been arrogant, closed, anti-standards, proprietary and at times evil? Yeah, probably (though that last part is often in the eye of the beholder). Achieving the ol’ American dream doesn’t come without crushing some toes.

So here’s my beef (and Tara was totally right to push this issue with Jim): when it comes to certain, shall we say, “politically-charged” (and economically-impactful) issues, why doesn’t MSFT shore up on the side of democracy and freedom of information and expression and rally its allies against the intellectual police state? Ok, fine… scrap the hyperbole, here’s what I want: just let us use our media however we damn well please! Eff this DRM bullshit. You know it’s not good for your customers and it’s ultimately not good for your bottom line, either.

O o o wait. Ok. Call my bluff, go ahead. Well, see, I’m not that naive and Tara isn’t either. We know it all comes down to business (as usual).

We know that quote-unquote consumers are only part of your audience — that Hollywood is also one of your most well-endowed customers (I’m talking big feet, here); that they rely on you to lock down and handicap the technology and tools that you build so that they can maintain their stranglehold on eff-you-ectual property.

I git it, I git it. Duh.

But how about this? Who said I ever cared about bidness (as usual)? Now, I’m not down with making threats much (I mean, this is a personal blog, big friggin’ whoop what I have to say here), but it is obvious, at least to me and everyone I know, that you’re fighting a losing battle. I don’t even have to back it up. Time will tell. What the system can’t break down, it will route around. And DRM schemes are being broken so fast that the money you’re spending researching new ones is almost certainly costing you future allies in the Doomsday fight against Hollywood. So you’re losing in both respects: you’re certainly not getting points with your Media Center enthusiasts who just want to be able to play their legally purchased media anywhere and by not making a stand against the DRM that-turns-our-computers-against-us, it’s you that looks bad, even though you’re only pushing Hollywood’s agenda.

Oh, and about blaming it all on Apple and the iPod…. for a minute there you had me going… It did seem to make sense that geez, Apple’s the real offender here, keeping iTunes and the iPod all locked up and proprietary. But then hey, I realized that if your players were decent and you’d won the player war, you’d be doing the exact same thing that you accuse Apple of, which, by the way, is perpetuating their winning streak going and keeping you outta that business (hmm, didn’t you do this with the desktop? what comes around, goes around maybe?).

You can’t just say “well, they’ve found success with the iPod, they’re making boatloads of cash, they’re the ones that should fix the DRM problem and take on Hollywood.” That’s bullshit and now that I’ve thought about it, a bit insulting that you would suggest that MSFT has nothing to do with the problem.

But I’m jess sayin’, yoo kno?

Anyway, I’ve got nothing against you guys personally. That’s the beauty of working for a monolith: your individual actions have much less bite when it comes right down to it. So let’s call this an academic exercise: you all get F’s in my book for sticking up for the little guy and hell, I would’ve suspended Hollywood by now and sent it off for a remedial education in the importance of sharing ones trucks in the sandbox of life… but truly, I’m a peon in the scheme of things; you guys are the ones building your “open” DRM into our tools, into our media and into our computers. You do have the power to make a difference. So, uhm, sorry if I don’t buy your logic that Apple’s all to blame or that the problem is out of your hands. Personally, I can only choose not to buy your DRM’d crap and instead spend my money supporting causes that are working to dismantle the intellectual police state that you’re creating.

Ok, I’m done. Remember that this totally isn’t personal — hey, I like you guys — it’s just your and Hollywood’s big picture I ain’t too fond of! Kbai.

The death of the beta

The term "beta" will also collapse into irrelevance in downloadable software, predicts Chris Messina, who calls himself director of experience at Flock, a startup developing an open source browser. Users of Microsoft products know that when software products move out of beta, users are flooded with security and quality patches in short order, meaning that version 1.0 isn’t so much a magic milestone as just another point in a continual cycle of development.

"I see gradients of validity where for my mom I might wait until Flock gets to 0.8 before I install it for her," Messina says. "For friends who I like I’ll give them the development version that won’t crash the system, and then for people I don’t like they can have the nightly builds. So I think we’ll have three tracks."

Guardian Unlimited Technology | Are you a dummy for beta software?

So there you have it, if I don’t like you, go download an ~~nightly~~ hourly build. 😉

No, just kidding.

But the point stands — software development is indeed becoming more organic, without really even realizing it (or maybe it has been all along, but we’ve fought its natural state for business reasons — after all, selling upgrades is a lucrative bidniz). Sure, you’ve still got holdouts and beta logos plastered all over the place, but the reality is this: software is a process. It’s never really done. The longer we go on pretending that the vaunted one-dot-oh somehow indicates a sense of finality, security or stability, the harder time we’re going to have convincing folks not in the geek world that there will always be bugs, that there are no right answers, that, just like natural systems, we’ve got to design for imperfection, frailty, accidents and hell, the irrationality of human actors.

So listen, I’d read somewhere recently (I forget where — I wasn’t using Flock so I can’t full-text search my history) that this whole BETA program fad is just a way for companies to shirk responsibility for the apps they deploy. It’s like, you call something "beta" and poof, no more responsibility. Well, clearly no one really does read EULAs anymore or you’d know that, beta or not, no one takes responsibility for anything anymore. It’s all the in the EULA, usually in some big bold type like this: WE DON’T CARE IF YOU BLOW UP YOUR COMPUTER WITH OUR SOFTWARE, IT’S NOT OUR FAULT AND THE LAW IS ON OUR SIDE, GET OVER IT (copied from the IE7 beta 2 EULA).

(No, just kidding).

Anyway, I think the point that Schofield makes in his article is a good one, and I enjoyed the chance to talk to him about it. But really folks, and this was raised in that conversation, what the heck are we going to do with desktop apps and the ever-present push towards one-dot-ohs? I don’t see them going away any time soon and yet they simply don’t reflect anything useful, especially since webapps have the luxury of never really worrying about that problem and can be in a constant state of flux and no one really cares… As it is, Thunderbird has been downloading updates every other day, asking me to restart it so that it can update itself… I have no idea what version I’m running — only the knowledge that somebody, somewhere is working on the thing and that its stability comes in fits and spurts. And that’s ok, because I’ve come to Jesse baby, hallelujah!, praise the Ford, Zen-master dojo, taekwon-do and on and on. Yeah, now that software development is becoming more zen-like, how do we help the rest of the world cope with the realities of such uncertainty?

Microformats + Thunderbird

Microformats + Thunderbird The things that bother me about Thunderbird on OSX are certainly many, but I can come up with one above all others that totally kills me: the lack of integration with the Apple address book. Nothing more than this illustrates the source of Tantek’s fervor for wanting data portability and his resultant hope in microformats.

Think about it. If Thunderbird stored hCards, and Address Book.app read hCards (or used them as its storage format), there’d be no problem.

One format to rule them all: XHTML! Best of all, you could use Spotlight, Applescript, and whatever other Mac-centric technologies on this data as well. No weird one-off formats that nothing else supports, no conversion, no special readers or parsers… and you could upload your address book and view it on the web… anywhere.

Of community conferences, camps, pits; blowing things up

Yeah, it’s nearly 3am, but I figure I need to jump in and post a few thoughts that I’ve been sitting on or else I’ll never get around to it. Helps to have some inspiration, tired as I am.

So Saturday was Bar Camp Dallas, something like the 5th Bar Camp ever. The day after, yesterday, we decided on the spot to hold the second ever Mash Pit. Both events were resounding successes, as have been the previous Bar Camps — and we’re continuing to explore models for effective geek collaboration from the ‘Pits.

So the thing is this. The conference industry doesn’t make sense any more. At least to me. I know that some people make their livelihood running conferences, and that’s fine — really. Keep on keepin’ on. That’s your thing, I ain’t gunna knock it. But what conferences are supposed to offer, in my experience, can now be had cheaper, better, more intimately on the local community scale than what you might expect from the 1000+ person mega-conferences.

…which remind me of Disney World when I was a kid: that hot, sticky, popsicle-drip-drip, crying-babies, broken toy, long lines, sunburn kneecaps, are-we-there-yet, why-is-this-line-so-long kind of thing.

Yeh. You can imagine why that doesn’t sound so happy-happy-joy-joy anymore.

So let’s break it down. Benefits of a conference? Travel, meet people, hear things, say things, collaborate? Oh, and party. Ish.

So let’s focus on those for a minute. How can we bring those things to you today given what we’s gots?

Well, let’s make the whole thing free and more accessible (still need to work on universal access, yes yes). Then let’s make everyone a participant and responsible for their satisfaction with the event, during the event. If you don’t like it, you can fix it. Remember, you’re a participant, not just a passive attendee. (It’s free right? Set your expectations accordingly and then adjust as you see fit!) There are any number of roles to take on at any given point: presenter, documentor, collaborator, eater, feedback-giver, conversation-maker, realist, hacker, coordinator, wiki-editor, design-printer-maker, IRC-chatter, fucker-of-shit-up, and so on. Improvise. Surely your special brand of somefing-foo can come in handy!

Given that, find a medium-sized venue, pick a date, toss in wifi, food, alcohol and coffee, whiteboards, markers, projectors, rinse, lather, repeat.

There you have it, the special sauce that makes the community micro-conferences we’ve been running since August work. Amazing, sure, but they work.

Oh, and it helps that we’ve designated the mark of the event as belonging to the entire community so that you don’t have to ask permission to when starting your own event (you can use the mark however you want, but it’s wise to stick within the rules of the road if you want community support). So y’know, just go to the wiki, grab a page and start editing. Instant fame and riches comin’ up.

. . .

A couple other things. Owing to the generosity of the sponsors (who were capped @ $250 or a meal each) Bar Camp NYC ran a surplus. Yes. A free conference ran a surplus without whoring out the whole experience. The shirts were even sponsor-logo-free. I keep tellin’ ya, it ain’t about the money, man.

So does it scale? Hells yes. Know why? Because these are local community-sized events. They’re run of, by, and for community members with the remote participation from anyone who wants in. Infinite scalability via IRC… and things we’re still inventing…

Yeah, one last thing before I doze off… we’re building the tools to make these events easier to start, easier to run, and easier to participate in. Which means lower total cost and less effort necessary to stage future Camps/Pits/Unconferences.

If not already, consider conferences exploded soon. Very soon indeed.

Me and Microsoft, Part I

So I don’t think I had expected to really ever sit down for dinner with the guy who’s responsible for Windows Vista (his official title is Co-President, Platforms Products & Services Division). I mean, who am I in the grand scheme of things? Yet that’s the situation that I found myself in on Thursday, along with Make maker Phillip Torrone and his long-distance ex-MSFT wife Beth Goza, Tony Gentile of Healthline.com, Tara my co-conspirator (she finagled me an invite), Linda the organizer from Waggener Edstrom, Neil Charney of the underarm plasma 40″, Thomas Hawk (photographer and #655 on ‘rati), Jason Garms who curiously could have fit in on the set of Newsies (owing to his houndstooth jacket), Mena Trott, who I first encountered in Paris ($#!@% — I keed, I keed!) and John Tokash with two Passports.

As introductions were made around the table, I prepared for what I knew would be my outing — I didn’t know whether to expect gasps or sidelong glances… or perhaps even sympathetic eyes (“Poor chap, doesn’t he know that IE has 90% of desktops covered? What’s there to do with yet another browser?”). I began:

Uh, I’m Chris Messina. I work on an open-source browser called Flock and I, uhm, am interested in bringing things like usability, design, fashion to open source to make it more palatable for wider audiences… and I help co-organize and evangelize this event called Bar Camp and something else called Mash Pit.

Cat was out of the bag and no slings nor arrows had been flung. In fact, I felt quite welcome and in good company after all. Huh. All fizzled up for nothing. Ok.

So then Linda explained the dinner — apologized for Robert not being able to make it (no worries, mate) — and for arriving a little late themselves. (Ah, to work for one of the most powerful organizations in the world and to apologize for being late; yes, civilization has advanced some!)

Wine all around and the food started to arrive as conversations got underway. I can’t remember all that was said, but there are a few notable points that stuck with me.

First, there are some very interesting and weird presumptions about “open source people” which are probably as unfair as the generalizations many people make about MSFT folks. For example, Jim acknowledged that they had learned a few things from the open source community that had changed their approach to the Windows VISTA beta program — opting to be more open, transparent and agile, attempting for once to release earlier and more often. Of course this is a great thing for Microsoft and all the folks who run Windows since ideally this could mean that the product they ship will be of higher quality and more accurately reflect the needs or desires of the user community. We’ll see, but what was interesting after revealing this, was what he said directly to me, “…even though that might not be as open as you might like, we are learning.”

I was floored. I mean, wow, ok… I’m obviously an open source enthusiast and proponent, but I wouldn’t want MSFT to go in this direction to appease anyone or score points (of course it’s not that simple, but still). That’s not really the point of being open source, anyway. I’m really not an open source/free software zealot. Cripes, I’m from New Hampshire where our motto is Live free or die! Far be it for me to tell you what to do!

I mean, as anyone who’s tried to go from proprietary to open source can tell you, it’s not about just opening up your code and voila! a million worker bees will swarm to help you with your code! Far from it. I mean, first of all, you’ve got to want to be open source, in everything you do — and to take the good with the bad, the ugly with the magnificent. You can’t do it for anyone but yourself, and you’ve really got to believe in its superiority as a development and tool-building philosophy.

Still, it’s still promising to see that they’re observing what’s going on around them — and seemingly learning what the F/LOSS communities have for so long espoused and practiced.

To be continued . . .

. . .