Category: I care about…

Microformats + Thunderbird

Microformats + ThunderbirdThe 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

Bar Camp DallasYeah, 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

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 1 in a series of a couple.

Me and MicrosoftSo 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 ( 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 . . .

. . .

Mash Pit in Dallas Tomorrow

Mash PitDudes, so I finally made it to Dallas for and ended up talking everyone’s ears off. Oh well.

The good thing is that we’ve decided to hold Mash Pit Dallas tomorrow at the same place, starting at 10am. I’ve gotta get in touch with Matt, Chris and Brad to get the source from the previous projects coz I’m likely opening up an SVN repository for continued Mash Pit work… hells yeah.

Anyway anyway, get it: tomorrow, Mash Pit, Dallas, 10am, Architel, come in via the loading dock (just like today) or join up in IRC: irc.freenode.net/#mashpit!

Ok ok, I’m done.

Curse of a thousand blocked ports

PHX Wifi AgreementI landed in Phoenix two hours ago en route to Dallas for Bar Camp and missed my connection because another plane was in our gate… So instead of arriving at 1:40pm, I’ll be getting in around 4. Yuck.

So why am I bothering to broadcast this on my blog? (I realize this sounds like a big whiny complaint, but there’s a reason…)

Because Port 80 is my sole vehicle for outgoing web communications at the moment.

My email is blocked (another vote for moving entirely to Gmail), IRC is blocked, IM is blocked, Skype IM is blocked… I can’t even send smoke signals via FTP. On top of that, my SMS is totally backed up and I haven’t been getting texts for days.

WTF?

Now I know that more capable geeks would tell me to just tunnel into some other unblocked system, but c’mon, I’m a simpleton, remember? I expect (and need!) this stuff to just work. If this kind of service variability is the future of the networked environment, man, add that to DRM and we truly are EFFed. If we can’t even rely on publicly-accessible (though privately sponsored) wifi for these basic communication channels, we’ve gotta think about who should really be in charge of these networks… Who cares about my robot breathren taking over when we’re already turning our computers against us.

Seriously. WTF.

Pry, To

privacy is dream

personal privacy is an oxymoron. you know less about yourself than the mass of services and companies out there that collect, individually or collectively, information about you and your activities, for their own selective proprietary uses or for selling to other organizations, institutions and/or governments.

you think you have privacy left to protect?

privacy today in general is a fallacy: it’s an impossible dream that we should’ve woken up from some time ago.

a “publicity policy” isn’t enough, but it’s a cute idea. naw, it’s time for a whole mind shift in how we, as individual persons, address and engage the question of what it means to have little to no power to control who sees, studies, sells information about, the things that we do.

repeat after me: “PRIVACY … IS … A … DREAM.”

not for you. not for me. only for the government, big corporations, disappearing persons.

but hey hey, don’t fret. it’s not that bad. and maybe, maybe we can do something about it that won’t cost us all that much, if anything. so long as we follow the superstition that we have any privacy at all, we’ll continue to try to “hide” (in order to “control”) whatever information we can. but that’s just what keeps us in this situation, this is the very thing that keeps us weak.

get it? they already have all the juicy bits about us. it’s all out there in the ether already. and you spend this effort keeping these bits to yourself, bits that really could do you and your friends and your social cohorts some good if you just put it out there.

jamming, yeah, that’s what i’m talking about. flood the network with information of, by and for ourselves… so much so that only our friends and those we care about and are close to can make sense of the data.

yeh, come looking, come stalk me, come steal my identity. yeah, there’s nothing i can do to stop you whether i’m jamming the network anyway. so i might as well take the other approach, do what i can to subsume what’s subsuming me.

personal filters (maybe like Onlife) leveraged put our attention stream into service for ourselves… to improve our day-to-day experience by giving us the information to learn about what we really spend our time, attention and energies doing… so that we can improve, make better, more informed decisions… just like the credit card mongers and insurance brokers do about us.

this data is extremely valuable. there’s a multi-billion dollar market out there for this kind of information. but what they don’t want you to realize, is that this data is also available to you, cher amie, even though we haven’t built good tools for harvesting and using it yet… too afraid that these microscopic pixie dust embers of personal data will be scooped up by Evil, Inc., they’ve done an end-run around us, ignoring those teensy morsels that you protect to focus on grabbing up the good stuff (credit card records, travel behavior, cell phone calls, etc). they’ve got you p0wned. get over it.

besides, who are you kidding besides yourself?

get over it. flood the network.

listen, if it’s about you, it’s yours (yes, I believe that). and yes, you ought have a right to see it, to know about it, to correct it, to use it. you also should have the right to take it back, to conceal it, to lock it away forever.

but good luck, once it’s out there, it ain’t comin’ back. you step out that door, and forget it, you’re already on camera; say cheese.

repeat after me: “PRIVACY … IS … A … DREAM.”

what you don’t know about you, someone else by now already does and has sold off to a mailing label company, a magazine subscription company, a freeipods dot com rip off pyramid scheme. so look, if you don’t think of yourself as an aggregate statistic in your own life, for eff’s sake, stop treating yourself like one. flood it. c’mon, flood it. make it impossible for anyone to ever treat you as just another statistic again.

teh end.

sources, references and influences that partially lead to this flamebait:

Drupal bugfix meetup! Tomorrow, Jan 24!

My buddy Neil is hosting a Drupal bugfix meetup tomorrow at everyone’s favorite cafe in the Mission. If you code good, you should go. If you hack open source, you should go. If you deal with CMS’ or know what one is, you should go. If you play ultimate, yeah, you should go too.

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