Original Research

You may have seen Pete Forsyth's blog post about the Oregon Revised Statutes being proprietary information. In brief, even if you are a tax payer in Oregon you can't put a copy of the laws you pay for on the Internet -- and especially not if don't pay Oregon taxes. Now for the rest of the story: Pete and a few folks went down last Thursday to make a pitch to the Legislative Counsel Committee to change their minds on this, and I'm glad to write that the committee decided unanimously not to enforce any copyright claims.

I could say this is important by making a comparison to Roman history. One of the many conflicts between the classes was over the fact that the laws at the time were not written down, and while the upper classes possessed this oral knowledge, the lower classes did not and for that reason wanted the laws put in written form, so that personal security and happiness did not depend on the whims of the powerful. But, again, there is more to the story than reaching to that ideal -- some of which Pete provides in his blog. People have been sued for putting copies of the laws of their state online: one case happened a few years back when a fellow put the building code for his state online -- but was sued by a third party who happened to own the copyright to the model legislation that his state's laws were taken from. (I think that is the case referred to here.) And copies of building codes are pricey, because selling copies is one way these groups are able to pay their bills -- despite the fact the pricetag limits access to important information.

Geoff

Technorati tags: Free culture, Oregon law

Labels: free culture, portland tech

Pete Forsyth posted the well-deserved rant at a local historical society to the Portland Wiki-Wednesday list:

Folks,

Today's Oregonian carried a story about a joint project, http://oregonencyclopedia.org , by the Oregon Historical Society and the Portland State University History Department. In short, they're preparing the site for the state's 2009 sesquicentennial celebration, and soliciting $1 to 2 million to fund the project.

http://www.oregonlive.com/living/oregonian/index.ssf?/base/living/1202865909212180.xml&coll=7

Unfortunately, OHS presented their project in contrast with Wikipedia, in terms that are both unflattering and ill-informed.

In the last week, Wikiproject Oregon got the Oregon Portal, an introduction to Wikipedia's Oregon-related content, to "Featured Portal" status, joining only 98 other portals in the world. Last month, the article on the Oregon State Capitol was featured on the front page of Wikipedia, drawing over 22,000 visitors in a single day. But our proudest accomplishment is the collegial environment we're building, in which diverse Oregonians have collaborated to shed light on innumerable interesting bits of Oregon history. Even including a couple significant corrections to the historical record. All this has been accomplished without a single financial donation (although Wikipedia as a whole does solicit donations worldwide.)

Please check out related discussion here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_talk:WikiProject_Oregon#Dissed_by_the_OHS!

We will be working up a press release of our own, and hope to generate some press coverage for our project.

I am also considering buying a few domain names, such as oregonencyclopedia.com or oregonwiki.org, and having them point to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portal:Oregon

As Aboutmovies noted in the discussion on Wikipedia, "I guess having their site up for a few months wasn't working (what 20 entries) so they had to issue a press release. Though I fail to see much of a difference. They want volunteer writers, we have volunteer writers. They want reliable, we want reliable. They just have access to a crap load of good pictures. Otherwise I'm not impressed. Looks like Oregon History Project II, wikistyle."

Sheesh, at least Larry Singer has a reason to be pick on Wikipedia. These folks could have played it smart, put the material under a free license, used the articles in Wikipedia as a starting point and improved them, then encouraged Wikipedia to reuse their content to fix our shortcomings. No, they decided to offend the largest body of the volunteers they need, then start saying that they need money -- and put their content under a restrictive license.

With diplomatic smarts like that, I bet you all that in 12 months the site will be dead.

Geoff

Technocrati tags: Oregon Historical Society, Oregon History, Portland Tech, wikipedia

Labels: portland media, portland tech, wikipedia

I've been busy with many things that keep me away from my computer, as well as this blog, so I'm way behind in updating anyone who is still reading. But let me provide a paragraph or two on the most important things.

1. At the age of fifty, I've become a father for the first time. Which is the primary reason why I haven't written any new posts. We adopted Rachel Kendra Claire, to give her the name we selected; her birth mother named her Rachel Lynn. She was born Friday at 5:02 am; we got to take her home Sunday afternoon, and I took the next three days off work to be with my girls. I plan on taking a month off to help in the child-raising when Yvette's stock of vacation time has run out.

To anticipate the next question, you can find pictures of her at burling.myphotoalbum.com. And one of those pictures leads to the next item.

2. First impressions on John Broughton's book, Wikipedia: The Missing Manual. My review copy arrived Monday, and in the time between changing diapers, feeding Rachel et cetera, I managed to glance through the first two hundred pages. Although I have some criticisms of the book, overall it is a solid and comprehensive look at not only the technology one uses to edit Wikipedia, but also a levelheaded discussion of the community and how to work with it. Not only would newcomers benefit from reading it, but I believe that veterans like me would be served by keeping it nearby to help with the numerous policies, fora and nifty software tools of Wikipedia.

3. I became a member of the Working Group on ethnic and cultural edit wars. One of the chronic problems of Wikipedia has been to handle the nationalistic rivalries that arise from having both an encyclopedia that is open to all and from following the Neutral Point of View policy. One of my other members is Milos Rancic, with whom I have had many thoughtful discussions on this issue, and I look forward to seeing his input on many more. (A recent example is his post on art and ethnic strife.)

One of my hopes, besides reaching out to some of the members of WikiProject Africa, is to post a number of my position papers here, in hope of attracting more input -- or perhaps to explain some of the Working Group's ideals.

Last Wednesday was WikiWednesday, which brings me to my last two points:

4. Pete Forsyth's vision of WikiGovernment. He presented this vision of using Wiki technology to improve popular representation Wednesday night, and although there are many weaknesses, I stand by the first comment I made that night: almost any problem one could envision for this project has been encountered by Wikipedia. In many cases these problems were handled successfully, and in many cases they were handled poorly -- yet studying what Wikipedia did would be the first step to address the problem when it appears in Pete's project.

5. A new map of the World Wide Web Joe Cohen brought a schematic map created by Information Architects, showing the most important Web sites, and based on the Tokyo subway map. Maps always attract my attention, but I could not take mine off of this one. (A more recent one can be seen here).

Geoff

Technocrati tags: John Broughton, online communities, O'Reilly, Portland Tech, wikipedia

Labels: free culture, personal, portland tech, wikipedia, writing

Ignite Portland will have their next event 5 February at the Aladdin Theatre. Some of the proposed talks look as if they'll match the quality of the last Ignite Portland.

Pete Forsyth posted over at AboutUs a list of Wiki success stories. Amazingly, most of the examples he thought of were on Wikipedia -- and within the last few months. With all of the problems that get more publicity, it's nice to be reminded that Wikipedia does work for the most part.

Andrew Chen's post, "Public and private spaces, and why YouTube comments are so awful", could have been written in response to Moulton's comment on my last post. (No, I'm not trying to linkwhore myself here; it's just that Blogger, for some reason, doesn't allow me to link to individual comments.) In brief, Chen reflects on how anonymity and differences affect the culture of online communities. (Thanks to the Daily Buzz over at AboutUs for this one.)

Lastly, Chen's post led me (after a few jumps) to Chris Allen's post, "Dunbar, Altruistic Punishment, and Meta-Moderation", which discusses a few studies that look at the problem of why groups functions best at certain numbers of members, beyond the familiar Dunbar number thesis. (His other blog entries on this theme are also worth reading.) What I find fascinating are the dynamics he describes for the chronic problem of managing groups on Wikipedia: to have a functional group with more than 150 members (like the total number of active editors), one must not only have "punishing mechanism" to enforce cultural norms, but (to echo Juvenal's oft-quoted observation) a "punishing mechanism" for the "punishing mechanism" -- although Allen uses the language of "moderation" and "meta-moderation."

Geoff

Technocrati tags: Ignite Portland, online communities, Portland Tech, Web 2.0, wikipedia

Labels: portland tech, wikipedia

I've heard, unofficially, that next year's Recent Changes Camp will be convened to the south in the Bay area. (The link points to where "www.recentchangescamp.org" currently resolves.) But I know little more about it, except that Eugene Kim was in charge, and that Brandon Sanders wants to organize a WikiBus to carry attendees from Portland there -- which made it hard for me to make plans, let alone invite anyone to it.

So I'm happy to share that I've finally found its website, where one can also find a link to its working mailing list. More details as I learn about them.

Geoff

Tags: recentchangescamp, Wiki Technology

Labels: portland tech, Recent Changes Camp, wikipedia

I think I've mentioned how hard it is to keep posting to my blog once I leave off even for a short while. That is the reason why I haven't posted my summary the Portland WikiWednesday last week.

It should have been simple to write. Brandon Sanders had a clear agenda, and this time it wasn't a free-form socializing session. There were two items he wanted all of us to discuss. First was his plan to set up a "Wiki-bus" to take the Portland contingent to next year's Recent Changes Camp. (Eugene Eric Kim wanted to hold it in the Bay area next year, and since he was willing to do the work... ) The other item was to plan the topic for the next Portland WikiWednesday in December: we will invite members of the local politically progressive groups in and show them the power of Wikis for building communities and organizing.

Tak also had the useful idea that we ought to devote some time in every meeting to teaching ourselves about the different types of Wikis. After all, due to the success of Wikipedia many people have the mistaken impression that all Wiki websites run on MediaWiki; they believe that no other maintained Wiki software packages exist. Needless to say, there are many other Wiki software packages out there.

However, I ran into a series of delays. When I got home Wednesday, I didn't have time to do much more than to feed the cat and get ready for bed; I can't function on little sleep anymore, unlike I did many years ago. Thursday and Friday during the day, too many other things kept me from reviewing my notes. Thursday evening, Yvette and I wasted time in front of the boob-tube and Friday night we had to catch a class of at Emanuel Hospital. Then Saturday, Yvette and I spent the afternoon at a friend's house playing Settlers of Catan, and the evening together. Sunday I spent my time on working my way through The Royal Chronicles of Abyssinia for Wikipedia. It's a tediously written book in a mediocre translation; unfortunately, since it's the sole historical source for Ethiopian history between 1770 and 1805 (primary or otherwise, as far as I know), I had to work my way through it.

At any moment during those four days, I could have stopped and wrote a post, but every time I thought about what I should say I just couldn't get the words out. As easy as writing looks, it can actually be quite hard.

And I didn't think this is what I'd be writing about in my 200th post.

Geoff

Technocrati tags: PortlandTech, Wikipedia, Wiki Technology, Wikiwednesday

Labels: portland tech, wikipedia

As the blogsphere has documented, last night's Ignite Portland was a surprising success. The organizers expected between 50-100, hoped for more, and were excited to have 300 people sign up. I was one of them.

Weiden+Kennedy was picked as the host, in part because they generously offered to share their facility, but maybe more because their offices provided that cutting-edge, urban hip feel that the attendees expected at IgnitePortland. It was my first inside the building since it was converted from warehouse space, and the interior layout left me admittedly disoriented. Climb one flight of stairs, then climb another, and then one came to the Nike court -- named for Weiden+Kennedy's best-known client -- yet at least three more floor loomed above the visitor, beyond planes of concrete and laminated wood stretching in all three dimensions. I was left with the feeling that the environment was designed to make people to think about the poetics of space within a building, but instead I felt vaguely uncomfortable because I knew this environment would not make me think productively.

The people there were an eclectic bunch, most of whom were not the folks whom I had met or seen at Portland Bar Camp, OSCON, or Recent Changes Camp. Which is I consider a good thing, because it proves that the Portland technology scene is still vibrant and growing; the bleak jobmarket of five years ago is still wel-remembered by those of us who struggled through it. I did see a few people I knew -- but met a few I hadn't, like Mike Lucich (of Return and Kumquat), and Rick Turoczy of the always enjoyable blog, Silicon Florist. It was a thrill for this C-list blogger to talk with a couple of bloggers further up the food chain, and we wondered if Mike Rogoway, the technology reporter at the local newspaper, was there.

As for the presentations, I saw that they were being recorded, and eventually video files should be available; so I won't go into detail about their subject matter. One that I enjoyed were Kevin Tate talking about "Emergence in Business" -- maybe because I'm fascinated with the way, evocative of the language of the Tao Te Ching, that groups, networks and communities form their own environments, or maybe because he alluded to a number of books he recommended to us to read. Another was Scott Huber bemusedly recounting a real-life discovery that, in this time of posting and uploading so much information on the internet, some people inadvertently share too much information. On the other hand, a few presentations were very much contrarian, on such topics as re-wilding our environment, knitting, making cornbread, and a proposal to create an Oregon-style chain of gas stations.

Maybe those contrarian presentations were clearly post-Web 2.0, by forcing us to think about the tension between the context and their subjects in a post-modern way, and therefore examples of Web 3.0 technology. We should think of them ironically, not as open and sincere attempts to share something that the presenters had a genuine interest in; true sophistication has come to Puddletown. Then again, we all know that bloggers will say the most outrageous things just to attract hits, a tactic entertainers have used to drum up an audience for millennia. Is there any point in worrying that a large number of people got together, were exposed to some new things, and had a good time? Learning things and sharing them is one of the joys of being a nerd. And Web 2.0 has brought a new interest to the Internet because it is one more way to bring people together who then share, not because it makes its users more sophisticated.

Geoff

Technocrati tags: Ignite Portland, Portland Tech, Web 2.0, Web 3.0

Labels: blogging, portland tech, speculations

Last night I met up with the usual suspects for the Portland version of Wikiwednesday at the AboutUs world headquarters, where being part of a contemporary start-up means doing without heat. (I hope they fix that problem soon.)

I witnessed two things there worth mentioning:

First was the future of Wiki technology. A few weeks ago, I saw an email from Ted Kubaska asked about "how wikis interact with IM, live podcasts, video, webinars, etc." My sense of his question was that he was wondering if we will ever subject non-text media like, for example, videos to the collaborative power of Wikis. In any case, just the sort of question anyone might ask when he -- or she -- is introduced to a new idea. Then last night, Mr Wiki himself, Ward Cunningham asked the exact same question himself. I felt this was the kind of lesson that everyone who is interested in exploring the limits of technology should keep in mind: even the experts ask the same questions the rest of us ask.

Oh, so you want to know what kind of answers Ted and Ward received? Well, I did throw out the idea that one could resurrect the mid-1990s VRML (Virtual Reality Markup Language) technology, and use that as a basis to create collaborative videos. Ward himself mentioned how he was fascinated with the phenomena of machinima, where people create their own movies using video capture from such 3-D software like first-person shooter games. Then again, I've heard a lot of technorati remark about how they are fascinated by the machinima genre.

Second was Divid McCabe's impromteau presentation about Liquid Threads, an extention to the MediaWiki engine. He's been funded in this effort by a group called "Commonwealth of Learning" ("So what do they do?" David was asked -- "I really don't know. They pay me to code.")
This new feature offers the following:

• Instead of needing to edit a whole section (which contains the string), one only needs to click on "Reply" to write a replay -- just like many forum software packages.
  
• Built-in automatic archiving of threads that have done cold after 14 days. Threads in the Talk space on Wikipedia currently requires either an editor or a bot to archive them.
  
• A usable history record on every thread.
  
• Lastly -- in my eyes, an important feature -- while one can edit any comment in a thread, if any person's comments are altered by another user, that user's name appears on that comment. This makes falsifying other people's comments a little harder to do. (Of course, this has never happened on Wikipedia -- unless you know something I don't.)
  

Geoff

Technocrati tags: MediaWiki, PortlandTech, Wikipedia, Wiki Technology, Wikiwednesday

Labels: portland tech, wikipedia

One of the things I learned last night was that Raven Zachary decided to put aside his hope for a quarterly Portland DemoCamp, where new startups would have a short slot of time to make their presentations -- without the help of PowerPoint. Instead, this 25 October, the first Ignite Portland session will be held at Wieden & Kennedy (224 NW 13th Ave, Portland, OR). (Have a look at the video on the Ignite Portland website.) This method of presentation appears to have its roots in something called Pecha Kucha.

Would it sound like I'm Yet Another Shill if I were to say this sounds interesting? Well it does sound interesting to me -- and I hope I can at least be in the audience next month.

Geoff

Technocrati tags: Ignite Portland, Portland Tech, PowerPoint

Labels: portland tech

I saw the answer to my question Tuesday about Jimmy Wales in The Oregonian. Yes, he was at OSCON, where he delivered a keynote speech Thursday, then afterwards he and Ward Cunningham talked with Mike Rogoway. Rogoway's blog links to the electronic version of the article -- which vanishes after 90 days -- and the MP3 version of the conversation -- which might not.

For the Jimmy Wales fans out there, Rogoway also speculates on Jimbo's birthdate, and blogger Robert Kaye offers a partial transcript of the "Art of the Community" Session.

I wonder if Technorati will pick up the fact I've updated my blog this time.

Geoff

Technocrati tags: online communities, OSCON, OSCON07, Portland, Wikipedia

Labels: OSCON, portland tech, wikipedia

Okay, so far I just attended one session, but it was a good one: "Technology Community leadership Meetup", hosted by Dawn Foster. I had invited Mark Dilley from AboutUs.org in hope we'd meet up with Jimbo Wales. Jimbo wasn't at this session (is he even attending OSCON?) but we did have a chance to be in a group with Chris DiBona and Larry Augustin. (DiBona was just a guy in a black t-shirt; Augustin made an impression on me from the beginning by his story about some guy by the name of "Andre" who claims he can get his emails to Steve Balmer answered within four hours.) And as we waited to get started, a couple of of the people present chatted about some dust-up between Eben Moglen and Tim O'Reilly at the executive briefing on Open Source: apparently many people in the Open Source community think O'Reilly has sold out to corporate interests, but many people who watched Moglen rip into O'Reilly believe he didn't deserve quite that much abuse. I wasn't there, so I'm just repeating what I overheard.

I'm interested in online communities because I believe that Wikipedia can always do this thing better -- but from some of the comments I heard, Wikipedia is years ahead of the other communities. All of the other groups interested in online communities and how to make them work are struggling with many of the same issues and possible solutions that Wikipedia has been: anonymity, evangelism, troublemakers, decision-making, inward-looking versuses outward-looking conversations, a reputation system and the problem of keeping the community conversation in one place. I'm not sure that Wikipedia has better answers than anyone else, only that we're struggling with them on a larger scale than anyone else. They're trying to make their villages thrive: Wikipedia is struggling to keep its city from imploding.

And, as might be expected, the most interesting comments didn't come from the well-known names. (DiBona left half-way through the BoF session.) Mark Dilley talked a bit about a tool used on AboutUs.org called consensus polling, which Mark said had been adapted from the Omidiyar network (now being phased out of existence). And Wm Leler, one of the founders of Zat.com, talked about his research into a new model of for-profit open source businesses, which he described as being similar to the "old-fashioned worker's cooperative." I'll repeat what I said at the session: if he can make it work, not only will it mean the arrival of Web 3.0, but that I want to know his secret.

If I manage to crash another OSCON event -- or event better, Dawn's Thursday session "Art of the Community", I'll try to share it here.

Geoff



Technocrati tags: online communities, OSCON, OSCON07, Portland, Wikipedia

Labels: OSCON, portland tech, speculations, wikipedia

I made it to this month's WikiWednesday in Portland, delayed a week due to the holidays, over at the interim offices of AboutUs corporate world headquaters, overlooking the Willamette River. Unfortunately, the office we met in faced the less scenic parking lot.

In attendence were Mark Dilley, Ted Ernst, Brandon Sanders, and a couple of other AboutUs employees whose names I did not catch. Kristin Thompson, whom I met at Recent Changes Camp earlier this year, was supposed to be there but she didn't show before Mark and I closed the offices down.

I heard a lot of Wiki-related news that I'll try to remember to share when I have the time. The most important bit to share is that we've scheduled meetings for the next three months. The August meeting will be centered around a remote link with Wikimania in Taipei, hopefully taking advantage of the Wikimania Lounge. At least that's the plan at the moment; so far, since the rest of the attendees will be in Taipei, I'm the only person who promised to show. Where ever I decide to have it.

Geoff

Technocrati tags: Wikimania, Wikipedia, WikiWednesdays

Labels: portland tech, wikimania, wikipedia

It always surprises me -- a surprise that always leads me into hours of wasteful websurfing -- what there is in the Internet that I have never stumbled across before. I don't mean which company, organization, or government agency now has a website full of material to comb through; it's that there are complete, vibrant communities out there, which have been flourishing for years, and whose existence was unknown to me -- even when it shouldn't be.

Case in point is Wiki Wednesdays, an idea with a corny name. (My thanks to Mark Dilley for pointing me to this.) For years, a group of people (with a little help from SocialText) have been trying to encourage people interested in Wikis and their communities to meet face to face.

I haven't been very good about organizing face-to-face meetups -- mostly because I tend to concentrate more on content than social interaction. But the idea of an informal, once-a-month drop in appeals to me. Sometimes I just don't want to leave the house, and attend a gathering like this month's Portland Linux/UNIX Group meeting. But I find that knowing that these meetings will be held every month makes it easier for me. I don't feel guilty if I've had a busy day and need to stay home that night and vegetate.

I'm hoping that Portland will have these get-togethers on a regular basis.

Geoff

Technorati tags: meetups, Wikis

Labels: blogging, portland tech

Yesterday I felt guilty about not finishing typing up and sharing my notes of the first Portland barcamp. So I looked to the book I had written my notes in, only to be disappointed. I had made some notes during Steve Habib-Rose's presentation "Network Weavers network", but they didn't make sense even to me. So I'm leaving those unpublished in my notebook. (John Sechrest wrote some up during the session, which are at Lokkju.) And I found that was the end of my notes; obviously, I had decided it was a better use of my time to talk than to write.

I had attended only two more sessions at BarCamp. One was about Wikipedia, hosted by Pete Forsyth -- although Ward Cunningham sat in. I was too busy talking and listening, so didn't take any notes during that session; I can only tell you what I remember. One was that Pete is very interested in convincing the State of Oregon to release all of the material it produces either into the public domain -- or under a free license, like the GFDL or one of the Creative Commons licenses. The other is that I asked if anyone wanted to participate in a second Portland Wikimeetup, and somehow became the person in charge of that. I know both Ward and Ray King want to be involved, so I guess I'm committed to making it happen.

The other session was a discussion about the television show Lost, whose season finale is tonight. Raven Zachary and Todd Kenefsky were responsible for that one: both were very involved in the organizing of this unconvention -- so involved that although they wanted to talk about the show, they were constantly postponing their conversation in order to attend to what needed to be done; this session was their way to have a moment to talk about it. Although I had participated in a couple of online fora about the show, this was the first time that I had discussed it with anyone in person. (FWIW, we didn't figure out any of the remaining mysteries.)

One thing I got out of this get-together which doesn't come over in my posts is that here I had a chance to share warstories with other folks in the local computer business -- some of whom I hadn't had a chance to talk with in many years. This might not be networking, or sharing vital scraps of information that a career could be built on -- but sometimes, you just need to prove to yourself that you are a part of this industry.

Geoff

Technocrati tags: Portland BarCamp

Labels: portland tech

By that, I mean my postal mail, not my email.

I received a flyer about the O'Reilly Open Source Conference here in Portland this summer. This year they have a track on people and the community of Open Source. I propsoed a talk about three years ago based on my experience with Wikipedia, but they turned down my proposal. Either I was ahead of my time, or I wasn't friends with the right person.

Also in my mail was a catalog of non-credit classes at the local commumity college. One of the offerings was an online class on Search Engine Marketing, only $1795 (I you're interested, you'll have to do your own search for it; I'm not sharing any more information about where or when it is happening.) I could deliver a well-deserved barb about paying that much money just to learn how to annoy Google and countless other people, but I have a more important observation: this is the real way that spammers make money -- just like Multi-level marketing scams. The money doesn't come from the ads themselves, or from getting businesses to pay you to spam ("Send email to a million people? No problem. I just won't tell you that 999,000 of these addresses are invalid and most of the rest will delete my email unread"), but now it comes from charging people lots of money to learn a dubious skill. This report states that the real money in MLM doesn't come from selling the products or a franchise where people sell them for you; it comes from all of the training and inspirational materials that are sold to the people in the MLM itself.

One thing I've learned in the last seven months of blogging is that it's actually very easy to attract people to a website or a blog; most of the tricks I learned in ten minutes during a BarCamp get-together last November. The hard part is creating something worth reading that keeps people coming back, and I'm not always convinced that I've learned that part yet.

Geoff

Technorati tags: Advertising, Education, Internet, Multi-level marketing,Online communities, O'Reilly.

Labels: blogging, portland tech

Sorry about not posting this yesterday, like I promised, but I've forgotten just how much time and energy a fulltime job takes. I needed to take Sunday off and be unproductive for a while -- even though I made a lot of changes to Wikipedia. So here's the first part of my notes of the Portland BarCamp sessions I attended.

1. User Experience -- facilitated by Kara

One of the larger meeting rooms, packed & people continued to enter.

Session started by asking everyone for name & one word per person associated with "user experience". People began by throwing out a word, then adding their names -- eventually came to embrace the structure Kara asked people to follow.

Example of pyramid form Web Visions conference. Base represented the simple functionality of the application, middle level was the addition of widgets & other improvements, top was the user experience.

• "Don't be afraid to throw something away"
  
• Be sure to explain your choices in the application
  
• Failure in creating applications of the target audience: thinking of an elite who understand technology when the goal is to appeal to general users.
  
• Example of coding applications to the blind
  
• "Has anyone encountered the problem of the CEO-driven design?" In other words, the boss comes in the middle of the design process & insists on adding a feature to the application, complicating the process & design

2. Building online communities -- Dawn Foster

• Technology driving the online community
  
• Balance between face-to-face and online interaction
  
• Attracting the non-Geeks, non-technologists to the online community
  
• Case study of the online knitting community -- yarn/yarnporn tag on Flickr
  
• How to translate the thousands of years of civilized customs into online behavior. However, which "civilized customs" -- problem of cross-cultural norms; not everyone online is in the US or Europe.
  
• "Does anyone know of a best practices for finding moderators?" Moderators being people who can regulate behavior & keep interactions civil.
  
• Moderators also needed to not only welcome but to help newbies find the gaps, the opportunites to enrich the online community. "Where can I direct you?"
  
• Practice -- refers to the rules to handle people; tools -- refers to what you handle people with
  
• The need to find champions; & the need of a support structure for the moderators.
  
• Examples discussed ranged from aggregation of the customers of a proprietary product to communities creating their own dogfood -- e.g. Wikipedia
  
• Network weavers -- the drive to make these connections more intentional.
  
• Ability to communicate between the outsiders and the subgroups inside the online community. Chris Messina then commented about inreach (as opposed to outreach) to the subgroups of the community. Example from Souix Fleming: getting the developers to actually believe what the customer advocate told them, resorting to bringing developers & customers together where customers proved it aggressively.
  
• Notion of the community as an ecosystem. However, we don't currently have a business model for it to sustain it financially & allow its members to get by. "I would hope to do more than get by -- that we actually make money & prosper." The challenge of being on the cutting edge is figuring out the business model.
  
• Audrey Eschright: "What do you do when the community is at odds with the individuals running what unifies it?" Sports fans being upset with maangement of their team. I mentioned the example of labor unions: people who want to keep their jobs yet being at odds with management.
  
• The need to build a system/network of backchannels to support an online community.
  
• Related session: Web 3.0 at 5 pm

3. Decline and Fall of Gentoo (not the real title, but I think Donnie liked my wit)

Donnie started by sketching the current situation with Gentoo: a laisse-faire "benevolent dictator", & a community that has mushroomed. (Before the session he talked about problem users on the Gentoo Dev list; one of these has been repeatedly banned, but keeps returning to block any & every change.)

How do online communities arrive at a decision?

• FreeGeek is consensus driven -- consensus defined as "Here we have a decision. Does anyone have a concern before we enact it?" Looking for consent -- or at least people willing to live with a decision they disagree with.
  
• Debian works because its decision process is so beauracratic & detailed. This elaborate set of rules and procedures reminded me of Wikipedia's current struggles.
  
• Nature of the Linux kernel project. Its hierarchy eveolved out of the fact that "Linus didn't scale very well." He enforced cultural norms by the fact Linus was the only one with effective commit rights to the source code.
  
• Weiden & Kennedy -- respect plays more of a role than the Org Chart. People who point to the Org Chart are laughed out of the room. Benevolent dictators the ones with the most respect. Also, there is an explicit vision for every project.
  
• Question: Is there a way to restructure Org Charts to emphasize skills over management?
  
• The problem of piecework vs. project. Piecework means no continuity, lack of respect; projects tend to endure -- yet run into people issues.
  
• The waterfall model of Software design -- this points the catalyst. People who don't directly contribute to the project, yet projects work better when they are included. How do you find them?
  
• This led to the topic of "Wiki-Elves" & the writing documentation for software, the part of the project no volunteer coder wants to deal with. However, with the introduction of Wiki technology, the programmers no longer directly know about the quality of documentation or who is responsible for it.
  
• The problem of how to deal with a community that rapidly grows, and may be exceeding the optimal size for its culture. Weiden & Kennedy actually turned down work because it would force them to hire too many people to acculturate. Example of the Marine Corps faced by WWII -- they used Boot Camp to absorb the recruits. Another example given is a mentoring system, but no specific example of this working.

That's what I've typed up so far. But if you look carefully above, you'll see why there were so many knitters at this BarCamp.

Geoff

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Labels: portland tech

Since Yvette is out of town in Mississippi, helping to clean up the damage that Hurricane Katrina caused two years ago, I decided to relive my irresponsible bachelor years and called my best friend Phil earlier this week about hanging out this Sunday and drinking some of that fine bourbon I bought for him a few months ago. However I forgot Sunday was Mother's Day, and Phil had other obligations that day -- so tonight was the only night we could indulge together. Thus while I left BarCamp around 7:00pm tonight, I won't be posting a full report until tomorrow.

Despite this, I'm a little surprised that the reports about this gathering are still incomplete. Especially because we had a lot of people stuffed into the rooms at CubeSpace; I'd expect more people would be sharing their experiences and discoveries. So far only Donnie Berkholz has provided notes on the sessions he attended on his LiveJournal page. I guess that means I'll have to post my notes on the sessions I attended tomorrow.

Despite my evening activities, I will record a few immediate impressions. First was that a common theme of the sessions I attended -- maybe this reflects my own interest -- that thiswas a gathering of techies who had become aware of the importance of communities and relationships (both online and in real life), and were applying their analytical skills to them with the intent of understanding them and making them more useful. Another is that at least one participant was surprised at the number and variety of different techical user groups there are in Portland -- we techies need to build more bridges between ourselves. The last is that this had to be the first technical conference where a session was devoted to the craft of knitting; Audrey Eschright gets the credit for that innovation.

Geoff

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Labels: portland tech

Just got home from the reception and organization meeting for tomorrow's gathering. I had intended to get into the planning, but Ward Cunningham pulled me aside as I was getting another beer, and instead I listened to him and Rich (didn't get his last name -- and BarCamp.org is unresponsive at the moment) talk about the days when Tektronix was the major high tech company in Oregon. Well, I found it fascinating.

There was a point early on this evening when all of the sponsors had a chance to introduce themselves and give a short spiel, an elevator pitch, about themselves. Many added to the end of their spiel "and we're hiring" -- so it got to be a bit of a joke. But it's a good thing, because it's a sign that the industry is definitely making a comeback.

Some interesting notes on the schedule for tomorrow: Bart Massey will be convening a section called "Songwriting for Geeks". I hope someone attends and publishes a transcript. Also, organizer Dawn Foster asked everyone who is convening a section to add their cell phone so to facilitate contact. This led one wag to add to his announcement: "It's been a long time since I wrote my number on a wall ..."

Fun and humor obviously will be the rule tomorrow.

Geoff

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I delayed over writing up this report for the simple reason that I still don't completely understand Ward's presentation last Thursday night at the last Portland Linux/UNIX Group meeting. It's not hard to conclude that the problem lies with me: after all, he's a well-known software developer ("Mr. Wiki" as someone called him that night), and I'm just a guy who pays the bills by doing things with computers. However, knowing full well what follows is incomplete and likely fails to explain some of what Ward said, I'll try to write about it from my notes.

He was very excited to talk about the portal he helped to build for the Eclipse foundation. Not so much for something an end user might see as a new, attractive feature -- he emphasized through his talk that he aimed to keep the software simple and under tight control. Not because it pushed the boundaries of what one could do with Java -- the portal is written in PHP, and his approach to writing the code was for it to read a line, eval it, and if that resulted in HTML output, print that output. Nothing very exciting there.

His excitement was that the working code at every turn was anchored to the tests that assured the quality and accuracy of each tool in the portal. He did this in a simple manner: every time a user opened a field to add or update information, next to the button that would save the changes there was a link marked "explore". If the user followed this link, it would take the user to those test cases which were used to validate the code. By providing the visuals and the text cases used to verify that the software did what it was expected to do, Ward believed that he and Bjorn had provided the users with everything that they knew about the software. "Well, except for how the code itself worked," he added, "but after dealing with so much code, after a while I stop thinking about the code itself." At another point in his presentation, he made the memorable quotation that doing this exposes "your business model to the people you're inflicting it on."

Because these tests focussed on the business logic of the software -- not the webserver, the browsers or anything else about the CGI mechanism -- it helped keep the development simple. Ward reported that they made 76 breleases to production in the last three months due to this simplicity.

He did spend some time talking about the code itself, but I won't attempt to paraphrase him here; I'm stopping while I'm still behind. Ward has written about this in his blog about this portal. I direct the curious to look at his readable account there.

An addendum: after every PLUG meeting, we adjourn to the Lucky Lab brewpub on the other side of the Willamette to talk shop; the gathering after the meeting is a tradition that started in the first year or so of the user group. Sometimes the conversation is dull, and sometimes it can be more interesting than the meeting itself. This time, I was very lucky: that night two of the most recognizable names in Portland's Open Source community decided to sit down next to me and talk shop: Ward and Randal Schwartz. Well, Randal did most of the talking, specifically about his recent presentaion at the Eighth International Free Software Forum about git -- proud that his talk had been approved by Linus Torvalds himself. Randal complained about how hard it was to pierce the patina of Americanization in foreign countries order to experience their native culture (e.g., Brazilian kids prefer American pop music over their own samba, television channels full of dubbed bad American tv shows). Of more interest to Ward, Randal talked about git, and how much more powerful it was than other kinds of version control systems.

Geoff

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Labels: portland tech

I've forgotten just how much of the day a full-time job occupies. Then weekends come along, Yvette reminds me of all of the chores around the house that need doing, and I discover I have even less time to do what I love.

Audrey Eschright dropped me a note about her Wiki to create a list of local tech groups in Portland. Please help her by contributing information about your group.

Every time I pass by Cannon's Ribs on NE 33rd (next to the New Season Grocery), I see their sign, "Try our vegetarian fare". I'm still trying to get my head around the idea of a vegetarian rack of ribs.

Geoff

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Labels: miscellaneous, portland tech