Report from Foo Camp Day 2

I kicked off the morning by making a tough call: "Let's Help Washington DC" or "Education Sucks" or "Open vs. Government Works." I ended up heading to the last mentioned session since Michael Edson, Director of Web and New Media Strategy for the Smithsonian Institution was one of the session leaders. Having visited the Smithsonian numerous times, I was curious to see what challenges they faced in opening their collections.

Lots of good stuff discussed here. Joi Ito touched on the CC0 initiative, an effort to allow creators to easily give up all rights to their works, which is especially useful when these creators aren't interested in the copyright protections imposed on them by law. Joi also touched on RDFa and its importance in easily adding and allowing for the extraction of licensing and copyright metadata from online content.

What really surprised me in this session and in a few conversations with other folks at museums and libraries over lunch was the repeated theme that public institutions seem to harbor a kind of fear of making their works more accessible and open. I suppose it's understandable that a body of people dedicated to conserving physical objects might carry that same conservatism to their view of technology. However, coming from the world of Silicon Valley it's just strange to me that anyone would think that a digital offering would somehow supplant a real life experience of that object. The most common thing I hear about tech conferences is how great it is to meet the people you only know from email or IRC in real life.

For me the question of whether or not putting photos on the web of a currently displayed collection is much like taking a look at items in a catalog: seeing photos of a particular art print doesn't make me less likely to go to a store and purchase it, just as seeing a photo of a particular painting doesn't make me less likely to visit the museum displaying it. If anything, I feel more motivation to visit in person and, when possible, repeatedly; it's a pleasure to reexperience a particular work and to recapture the feeling of awe and wonder I felt the first time I viewed it. Trust me, I will never pass up a chance to visit the statue of El Cid at the Legion of Honor in San Francisco or the Hall of Minerals at the Smithsonian just because I can take a look at Flickr and see much of what's contained therein on the web - I'll feel nostalgic and further cement my resolve to get myself back to the premises in spite of my busy schedule.

I wonder if a useful argument could be made by analyzing data from repeat visitors or member patrons. Intuitively it would seems that those most likely to not visit and "consume" a particular collection would be those who had already seen it, but clearly that's not the case for me and many others. These folks might provide useful data points about what motivates patrons to experience physical objects in person vs. online.

There's also a genuine fear that people will somehow take the offerings of public institutions and use the work they made public to make money without contributing back to the institution. I think the experience of the Apache Software Foundation in terms of the amount of code contributions they receive even though the Apache License does not require code release in the same fashion as the GPL is instructive here. Shelley Bernstein, Chief of Technology at the Brooklyn Museum, mentioned that they've created a business model around sliding scale fees for high resolution images of pieces curated by the museum. It's not only exciting to see a real world overcoming of the aforementioned fears but to see that the museum continues its mission as a steward of the public by offering the images at a substantially reduced cost to those looking to use these works for public good causes.

Headed to another session generally on what happens when a technical project provides a much needed social benefit but does not make money. Many thanks to Jim Fruchterman from Benetech for suggesting the session, as I think it's an incredibly important topic as society has more strongly encouraged non-profits and social justice organizations to take an entrepreneurial approach to their efforts. A few great points emerged from this session, most notably:

• If possible, start your social project as a for-profit vs. as a non-profit. It is easier to move from for-profit to non-profit status, costs for setting up a non-profit are very high, proving that work for a non-profit is directly related to its mission can be difficult and the wait to get non-profit status is quite long.


• The government procurement process is at best difficult and at worst horribly broken. There's an entire culture and language to government procurement that can bar new entrants entirely when they're unfamiliar with the process. If you're interested in getting government funding, Steve Ressler, Founder of GovLoop, suggests finding an entity with experience in getting a particular type of grant and asking for their mentorship in preparing your grant application. Finding ways in which your group can add value to your would-be mentors efforts is the best way to start this conversation.


• "Free is expensive." Getting contributors to work for free on your development project can actually be more costly than hiring people to do the work for you. People volunteering their time drop out when more pressing needs arise, potentially leaving you in a worse position than if the work had not been started at all. Jim made the great point that the most successful open source foundations and projects typically have some sort of corporate backing to fund the core development team while still making effective use of community contributions, citing Apache and Mozilla.

It came up that one of the best ways to keep volunteers and other passionate individuals inspired is to "show" them the fruits of their work, e.g. sending an individual to see the cleaner water in a river recently cleaned due to their work on an EPA grant. The projects Jim works on actually employ a Product Manager whose job function is to motivate developers to contribute to the project, helping them see how scratching their own itch benefits the wider world and in some cases how the benefit to the wider world outweighs their desire to scratch their own itch. These folks tell the story to developers in a way that makes sense to them and help those in the non-profit world better articulate their needs to techies. I'd just call these people Community Managers.

Post lunch headed to a session on Opening Government Geospatial Data which morphed into a more general discussion of what data sets the federal government should open, as well as how it should be structured and licensed. The general idea was to create an immediate win in the open government data space and provide a model for state and local governments when opening their data. The best result to come from this session was to create a mechanism similar to a trackback URL for opened government data sets to measure how and where they're being used post-release. Paul Rademacher posed a truly great question: "What data is there to release?" Given there's little to no metadata available for government data sets, just knowing what's out there is incredibly hard.

Some suggestions for opening data sets included:

• Post office and address data


• Voter registration and voting demographics


• Census data


• GIS and other geospatial data at higher resolution for non-US NGOs

I'd be curious to know what a wider audience thinks would be the best data sets for the government to release, particularly at the state and local level since this conversation focused primarily on Federal data. I'd like to see more data around the National and State Parks, particularly in the areas of resource management and park closures. If parks are getting closed for lack of funding for maintenance, I see a real opportunity for citizen volunteerism that would yield immediate, measurable results.

Post lunch I had a hard time deciding between two awesome sessions, NerdCraft by Beth Goza from T-Mobile and Gavin Starks, Founder and CEO of AMEE, on Avoiding Mass Extinctions. As I'd spent some quality time with Beth last night talking about how to incentivize developers and making cool things, all over paper sculpture making, I decided to indulge my musings on the Apocalypse and head to Gavin's session. A few key take aways:

• A carbon trading market is, at best, a contentious solution to the climate crisis. Gavin's company is working to make the measurement of carbon usage and the trading process for carbon credits more useful transparent.


• The greatest impact the individual can have on climate change is to go vegetarian and give up flying. I'm not sure much of the geek community is ready to do either, which leads me to wonder why we'd expect anyone else to do so.


• If every woman on earth only had one child, we'd halve the population and thereby greatly reduce carbon consumption in only 50 years.

Last but not least, everyone discussed rather uncomfortably the idea that what's really needed is a benevolent dictator to simply order people to make change. Not everyone agreed with this idea. I know folks don't like this idea, but I can't imagine the world's governments working together effectively as a committee to solve this problem. And people aren't going to change without the immediate force of a crisis - think constant chaotic storms, for example - or the force of a dictatorship. I know I won't and I think about this topics pretty regularly.

Following this, erm, uplifting discussion, I decided I needed something a bit more focused on making positive change in the here and now. Danny Sullivan's session on dealing with email overload was very useful - see his 8 tips for Dealing with Email Overload article. It amazes me how many of us feel terribly guilty for not responding to everything and worry about how people will feel if we don't respond. We all agreed it takes some time to educate your contacts about what to expect regarding response times and using an auto-responder to do that or to point to a personal FAQ that answers most of the "please help me" questions one receives. Bottom line: don't feel bad for not responding and if someone needs you that badly, they will email again.

I headed for dinner, where I proceeded to eat a fair sized portion of some delicious roast beef while contemplating my next business trip to Washington D.C. for the upcoming Gov 2.0 Summit. Take that mass extinction! Dinner conversation was wonderful, ranging from topics like cultural expectations around communication with Jason Holt from Google Earth recommending Kiss, Bow or Shake Hands. Adding that to the ever growing list of things to read.

Tony Stubblebine was kind enough to recap his Happiness Hacks session, as well. Quick and dirty: be OK with saying no, manage your email and other inputs effectively and seek positive reinforcement for your work. Tony has even developed software that updates his team's IRC channel each time a task is completed so there's immediate peer recognition at CrowdVine for getting stuff done.

As I'd hoped, caught up with Adam Hyde and talked a bit about models for creating FLOSS literature. Adam's idea for making materials published by the FLOSS Manuals team most useful to FLOSS consultants by allowing them to customize the data in the manual for use with specific clients is fantastic. We're also starting to conspire about a book sprint for Summer of Code and are talking about organizing it for the weekend before the summit (October 17th and 18th for the sprint) and handing it out to everyone at the summit (October 24th and 25th). Six mentors needed, mix of newbie and experience. If you're interested in making this documentation for the program happen, you know where to find me - sound off. :)

Post dinner, headed for Ignite Foo. I really like the Ignite format and appreciate it when folks eschew slides completely. Highly varied topics, including:

• Bill Janeway comparing the Depression era financial crisis to today's financial crisis. Some quite interesting parallels.
• Sarah Milstein on how to crave kale. Nom nom. I like kale.
• Kevin Marks on "Stop saying real time when you mean flow." E.g. Twitter is not real time. Real time means code fails and something painful happens. Kthxbai.
• Shel Kaphan treated us to hacking the endocrine system and talked about how various foods affect us among other things.
• Andrew Odewahn gave us a glimpse of the US Senate's social graph, 1991-now, much of the data coming out of analyzing the US Senate's Facebook connections. The graph of votes along party lines over time were fascinating.
• Kim Rachmeler treated us to a view of happiness. We go after the wrong things to make us happy and we are only temporarily happy when we get what we want; this is known as the Hedonic Treadmill. Best insight: our brains work against making us happy all of the time; our inner judge stops us from trying new things. Think of mistakes as exploring the landscape of possibilities.
• Danny Sullivan on "What the Hell is Real Time Search Anyway?" Per Danny, real time search is finding things like microblogging content or Facebook or FriendFeed. Too bad for all the walled gardens and their impact on sharing.

Following the Ignite talks we moved on to an amazing musical performance by Zoe Keating playing the electric cello. Sadly no MC Frontalot. Was planning to head to bed but got sucked into yet another game of Werewolf.

Phew. Awesome but long day. Time to head to bed.

Feelin' Foo-y

Greetings from Sebastopol, California!

I'm heading for Foo Camp 2009 in about an hour, and the 3+ hour drive up here gave me some time to clear my head and ponder the past few months. It's been the usual mix of Summer of Code and conference talks (Open Source Bridge, FISL and OSCON most notably) and on the less usual side, a new love and a move to a much calmer, more pleasant and larger living space. My house has always been the unofficial hacker hotel, but now Hawthorn Landings boasts a dedicated guest room, a dozen restaurants of all cuisine types within 2 minutes walk and a Farmer's Market 3 blocks away every Saturday. Two of the local places serve Mediterranean food and there's also a chocolatier, so I'm in heaven.

I've been making much less use of this blog than I used to and even spending a bit less time using Facebook, identi.ca and Twitter, though as things are getting a bit less busy I'm sure that's going to change. For folks used to keeping up with me via this site, better to look for me on one of those social networks. If you're not to be dragged into the Mafia Wars and microblogging fray, then you can check the side bar for more regular updates.

On the education front, a few exciting developments. My friend John Britton has started work with Peer 2 Peer University, a company creating online peer learning communities. They were recently featured in Fast Company and I'm excited to see yet another example of people working to open education through web collaboration. I'm keeping my eye on these folks, and you may be interested in John's latest blog post on the applications they received for their first phase of course development. Copyright for Educators has particularly piqued my interest.

My friend Josh Gay continues his efforts to revolutionize the textbook during his day job at CK-12. They're providing free textbooks to various primary and secondary schools in the United States, and recently completed some work with the state of California around qualifying free digital textbooks. Check out this latest post on the non-profit's blog for more details, and the article on Ending the Education Monopoly is quite good, too.

I haven't been nearly as active in the TeachingOpenSource.org community as I'd like to be these past few months, but others have some great work well underway. Of particular note, several people are collaborating on developing a textbook for use in college classrooms that will help students and professors better participate in Open Source projects. Think Producing Open Source for the would-be project member instead of the would-be project founder. For more on that, check out the mailing list or, better yet, attend the Teaching Open Source Summit.

On the Summer of Code front, final results for 2009 were announced on Wednesday. Our best year yet with 85% of students passing. I'm so proud to be a part of this global community and to have been a part of growing it over the past four years out of its five year history. We'll be holding our annual mentor summit at Google at the end of October, and I'm kicking around the idea of asking the FLOSS Manuals team to attend and facilitate a book sprint to create the ultimate guide to the program. I think the most interesting part of the program is the mentoring model and I'd like to see all of the disparate how to documentation and words of wisdom coalesce into a text that's useful beyond the scope of the program for communities of all kinds who want to do their own mentoring initiatives. Fortunately, Adam Hyde will be at Foo Camp so we can riff on this idea a bit more this weekend.

Finally, I've never gotten a chance to post notes from our Summer of Code BoF at Open Source Bridge. Fortunately, my friend Jonathan Leto posted some notes so I'm going to salve my procrastination guilt by pointing you there. The major point that stuck in my mind was the need for a buddy system for newer folks, pairing them with experienced mentors so they know what to expect, what kind of performance is reasonable, and how to overcome common roadblocks. While I'm quite excited about creating a Guide to Summer of Code I know nothing beats a good chat in IRC or, better yet, over coffee or beer. Thoughts from the community on this idea? Anyone want to volunteer to mentor our mentors?

Speaking off coffee and beer, I'm off to get ready and head to O'Reilly HQ. Fabulous Foo time!