Heading to SIGCSE 2010

Tomorrow, Summer of Code opens for 2010. Going to be an action packed week; we're taking applications from mentoring organizations in less than 24 hours. Should be an exciting sixth year for the program.

Tuesday, I'm heading out to the city of Laverne & Shirley for SIGCSE 2010. It'll be my second trip to this conference for Computer Science educators, and I'm really looking forward to speaking at the Humanitarian FOSS Project Symposium on Wednesday. Hal Abelson will be keynoting at the Symposium, as well. It's a day not to be missed, so if you happen to be in and around Milwaukee, do stop by and attend the sessions.

I'll also be giving a presentation on Google's Open Source student programs with Cat Allman on Friday. She and I will be at Google's booth throughout the event, so if stop by and introduce yourself.

I'll be regularly updating identi.ca and Twitter while conferencing, so check for my updates from SIGCSE there. Time to go pack some very warm clothing.

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!

Talks at FISL 10

Greetings from Porto Alegre, Brasil!

It's my second trip to Brasil and I'm already having a blast. Heading for dinner soon with Nanda, but just a quick update before I head out the door. I'm giving two talks at FISL 10: The 10th International Forum on Free Software. Tomorrow, I'll be talking about Google Summer of Code and hope that any all GSoCers at FISL will turn up and share their experiences with the audience. Talk starts at 13:00. On Friday, I'll be talking about Community Management Basics, and once again hope everyone can come by and share their collective wisdom.

We're also planning a GSoCer meetup after my talk tomorrow, and you can join the planning discussion in this thread.

I owe the world a write up on the Summer of Code BoF at Open Source Bridge. It will happen, really. I have notes. 

More lolcats

Made. Of. Awesome.

GSD & LOLCATS

Tonight is devoted to GSD: clearing the old inbox, catching up on reading articles, etc. Got a chance to send around feedback to all the folks who put up Help Wanted listings at teachingopensource.org. Life is good.

This afternoon I suggested folks should create Summer of Code lolcats. Here are a few that folks have done.






These. Are. Awesome. Moar please.

Getting Started in Open Source: You Don't Need to be a Rocket Scientist

(Ed. Note: I'm spending more time microblogging these days than updating Hawthorn Landings, so if you're interested in what's going on in the wonderful world of LH and the Federal Republic of Northern California, you may want to subscribe to my notices on identi.ca or follow me on Twitter.)

Last weekend, I attended the birthday celebration of a dear friend, Angie Wolff. Most of the crowd were techie types, spending their day jobs thinking about genetics, scientific instruments and space. Late in the evening, we gathered around an outdoor fire pit for conversation, enjoying the night chill and the heat from the tower of flaming oak wood equally. I couldn't help but think that such gatherings have happened in much the same form since man first walked the earth.

The gentleman to my right worked for the local arm of NASA, and we wandered across topics like debris in space and government spending on the space program. Fascinating stuff all around, though I admit to delivering a disgusted rant about the fact that human beings can't seem to keep their waste production confined to this planet. It's bad enough down here, thank you very much. Eventually, the conversation lagged a bit and he asked the eternal question: "So, are you an engineer?"

I laughed and responded, "No. In fact, I have a degree in Medieval English Literature." He blinked. I'm used to this sort of surprise. "But," he said, "you ask all the right questions. You talk like an engineer. You think like an engineer." "Well," I countered, "I suppose that's because I spend so much time around them."

This weekend, my thoughts turn to the fifth Google Summer of Code^TM, and the topic of this post. Each year, #gsoc on Freenode fills with new nicks, and it's been wonderful this year to watch the community band together to welcome our newcomers, answer their questions and guide them as they begin to explore the world of FLOSS. Another year, another GSoC, and the same set of questions: "Will I get accepted?" "What are my chances?" "I am really excited about Open Source, but I don't think I know enough. Should I even bother applying?" "What if I'm a first year student in Computer Science, is that enough experience?" "What if I have been programming for years, but I have never done anything Open Source? Should I give up now?"

To those who are feeling intimidated, I cannot say this too many times. Go ahead and apply. The worst you can do is not be accepted. Even if you fall flat on your face, you are still moving forward. Even if you are not accepted into the program, you will still get the chance to learn more about some exciting projects and to get to know some of the folks who make those projects happen. You may not work on their code base in the next few months, but who knows when you'll find they provide an itch that you just have to scratch.

The pep talk I wrote two years ago holds equally true today. Go read it if you need some reassurance. Take a break from Programmer Insecurity.

As of tomorrow, I will have worked for Google's Open Source Programs Office for three years. When I got started, I'd written precisely zero lines of code. As of today, I've written just under one thousand, but nothing that was ever particularly useful — mostly just "Hello World!" type stuff — and I've never submitted a patch nor designed an elegant file system. I know my work, both for Google and in my volunteer time to the community, has had a useful impact, even though I don't write code. Consider how "little experience" I have and then ask yourself if you should really be wasting cycles worrying about how little you have to offer instead of focusing on how much you have the opportunity to learn.

And for those of us who know that all that glitters is not only code, there are many avenues of contribution to the Free and Open Source Software world that have nothing to do with fixing bugs. I'll be talking more about tips for newbies in the coming weeks. Assuming I can tear myself away from Denting and Tweeting.

FLOSS Flyover

I mentioned yesterday that I'd post about all the latest in the world of FLOSS that's been on my mind lately. Here's the laundry list:

The Google-O'Reilly Open Source Awards: After a bit of cajoling and nag mail (read: expert geek herding), we've nearly arrived at the list of winners for 2008. Awesome list of nominees this year and no, we won't tell you who won until OSCON.

Open CourseWare and Open Source in education are topics near and dear to my heart, so imagine my pleasure when this list of Linux Open CourseWare floated through my inbox (via the LinuxChix Grrltalk mailing list). LH sez check it out, both the site and the list.

I mostly talk about Open Source programs for students on the Google Open Source Blog, but I'd like to give a shout out to the folks at the OpenUsability for organizing another Season of Usability. Fantastic stuff, and many a former Summer of Code student involved I might add. I'm so excited that this meme continues to spread - while we're on the subject, check out the Haiku Code Drive - and it means a great deal to me that I have the opportunity to contribute to an effort whose effects are yet to be understood, but are far reaching indeed. Life is good.

Speaking of said meme, via the NOSI list about a month ago I saw a call go out for proposals and support for the Freedom Summer of Code, a program to get students designing software for advocacy campaigns and other "radical tech." There have been times when folks wonder why Summer of Code doesn't have an overt social justice component to it and the simple answer is that the program is about code. The more complex answer is that there's no effective way for our team to take a position on which social justice and world saving mission is better than another, so we focus on helping Free and Open Source projects get useful code written. Then other folks can use that code for whatever good they deem most worthy. I've got an email into the organizing team to find out how their call for student proposals went, as they stopped taking submissions on 24 May.

Speaking of Open Source as a catalyst for social change and a corner stone of the Open Culture movement - yet another topic near and dear to my heart - check out the awesome work being done by the folks at the Textbook Revolution project. The site recently relaunched and there are some great resources for finding Open CourseWare. The accompanying Stingy Scholar Blog also rocks.

I may live to regret this offer, but if anyone is looking into doing a Summer of Code like mentoring program, let me know. I may have some useful guidance to offer you. Free and Open Source software/culture projects only please.

Oh, Canada!

I'm heading up to Ottawa in about three weeks to speak at BSDCan 2008. The ever gracious Dan Langille suggested that folks attending would be excited to get the inside look at Summer of Code, a topic clearly near and dear to my heart. Rather than just explore the program at a high-level, though, I thought this talk would be a great opportunity to do something I rarely get to do while managing the program: get to know the *BSD projects a bit more closely and understand how they participate in the program, why they participate, how they structure their mentoring processes and how their overall community governance structures shape, mirror or are completely separate from the people infrastructure put in place as part of mentoring the annual crop of new contributors.

I've already had the pleasure of meeting with Jan Schaumann from the NetBSD project, and will be speaking with Justin Sherill of DragonFly BSD fame later this week. Many thanks to Jan for taking an afternoon to help me out while in media res of a coast-to-coast move!!

I have to confess that I'm particularly excited about having dinner with and picking the brain of Dr. Robert Watson from the FreeBSD project. For many reasons, not the least of which is the fact that I never get tired of saying "Dr. Watson." Fortunately I have had the good sense not to do so in front of him up until now, and I have to say I don't intend to vary that strategy. In addition to the joys of vague references to Sherlock Holmes, I'm looking forward to learning more from Robert than I already did from his excellent talk How the FreeBSD Project Works. Should be lots of fun, informative and a great opportunity for me to show off my favorite Thai place.

Should you find yourself at BSDCan or in and around Ottawa during the conference, stop by to say hello. Be forewarned that I remain deeply skeptical of poutine, but am a big fan of maple syrup. Well, truthfully I'm not, but as a big fan of breakfast it's hard to stay away from one of its star players. Waffles anyone?

Recap

I haven't posted in awhile, mostly because I've been busy with Lug Radio Live USA and Summer of Code. We'll be announcing accepted student proposals on Monday, so the craziness has died down and bit and we're in a calm patch for the moment. Things will heat up again in two days. Our duplicately accepted student resolution meeting in IRC yesterday was fast and furious as ever, but turned out very well and with no major damage.

I decided to take a break this morning, chill out, drink iced tea and read. Jeremy recently lent me Ben Elton's Blind Faith, and it was such a great book that I read through it all this morning. It's also left me with no desire to share anything whatsoever, so I'll just post some snippets:

Lug Radio Live USA was awesome. However, don't believe me, believe the hype. I learned a great deal over the weekend, especially about effectively managing a large-scale conference, spent some quality time with old friends, made some new ones, and even got to sing karaoke. Woot!

(Of course, that's not a particularly flattering photo and given what I've just read, I remain uncertain of just how excited I can and should get about karaoke.)

Among the many highlights, Emma Jane Hogbin's discussion of Women in Open Source was fantastic. She's right folks - we need more people in Open Source, and a great way to find them is to start with the very old and the very young. Ask her about her thoughts next time you see her.

Lessee, what else is going on....

After finishing off Elton, I now have a near irrepressible desire to go on to Atwood. So I shall. But first a few things about the house - the omnipresent laundry. Rearranging my office. Screwing around on IRC. I think I'll make some hummus. Perhaps I might even get saucy and include some roasted red pepper. Definitely a lot of lemon juice.

Then again, my blender is offline due to overuse. Meh. I also need to make myself some more iced tea.

The X.org folks were in last week, and it's always a treat to see them. We also hosted a MySQL architecture meeting on Friday, so I got to see Brian, Colin and Stewart. ++

Next week should give me some time to start preparing my speech for BSDCan.

That's about it heading west. Oh yeah, Lex is back in town. And happy birthday Louis!

On Slashdot

I'm mentioned on the cover of Slashdot. My wee geek heart rejoices. Twice now.

And yes, we've extended the student application deadline for Summer of Code of this year. Not an April Fool's Day joke. That's just cruel.

Life is good.

LinuxWorld Podcast: me on Summer of Code

The ever gracious Don Marti recently did a podcast interview with me about Summer of Code. Have a listen, tell me what you think.

I also realize that in my rush to get some rest last night I didn't say a darn thing about having lunch with the awesome crew from the Free Software Foundation whilst in Boston, but I think that's OK. We had some great conversation that should be coming to fruition soon, and once those things happen I'll have more interesting things to say about the whole experience.

Mind you, it was quite interesting for me. And I loved the whole GNU family of stuffed toys on their counter. First meal I've ever actually enjoyed eating brown rice. A good time was had by all, or so I hope. 'Nuff said.

Boston

Ed. Note: This post is a recreation and I'm pretty sure the previous version was much more elegant. Such is life.

I left for Boston the day after MJ's birthday bash, late in the evening. I'd spent the morning buzzing around the house with Steve, performing post-party clean up, in the suitably lazy style required for such affairs, particularly when you'll find any excuse to not probe some obscure nook for various detritus. Not sure you want to look behind the couch? Have a bagel. The wet bar excessively sticky with what you're pretty confident is maraschino cherry juice? Wander around wondering aloud just how many people were there last night. People still on the couch sleeping? Clearly you can't tidy up in that room just yet; better to go to the kitchen and slice up some fruit to have waiting for them when they awake. Grab a few bottle caps along the way, toss them into the recycling bin, feel a real sense of accomplishment.

Eventually, the entire house was back to its previous state of cleanliness, and shortly thereafter MJ awoke and we settled out on the patio for an afternoon of absolutely nothing. Steve has a lovely view of the entire Valley from his deck, and the day was absolutely perfect: shining sun, crisp air, windy and chill but not cold. The Santa Cruz Mountains were visible, for a change, and lovely; the air was utterly clear. Bliss.

I flew from SJC to LAX on a turboprop plane and I don't recommend it. I also intend to never do it again. It's a slow and loud experience, the insistent hum of the engines reminding you of the inevitability of software and hardware failure. They happen. In fact, Paul Fenwick catalogs some of them quite expertly in his An Illustrated History of Failure. I remain confident, with no evidence whatsoever, that an excellent way to not meet with failure is to avoid turboprop planes, and I intend to heed my own counsel on this matter in the future.

An hour in LAX, then off to BOS. Real plane. Real sleep. Really good. After a briefish cab ride to my lodgings, I crashed for a few hours before heading out to get my hair done at theEl Coco Salon. The gentleman who gave me a cut and style had once worked at Yosh for Hair back in the day, when they were still up in San Francisco. He brought me coffee and we discussed a new fashion spread with Lindsay Lohan as Marilyn Monroe. We both agreed Lindsay didn't cut it. It was my best salon experience ever, hands down. I usually only get my hair done while I am in New Zealand, so yes, at best, once per year, but I think Boston may now be a better option. The flight time is considerably less and it would finally give me an excuse to fly JetBlue.

Monday morning, Drupalcon began. So many reunions, most of them not mine. So many Summer of Code students and mentors, so many friends I was stoked to see again. As usual, I'll leave the commentary on the sessions to those better versed in the milieu than me, but Dries' keynote was quite spectacular; it's particularly exciting to see that Usability is the watchword for Drupal 7. Now if I could only hunt down Anna Dirks and have her teach me how to make those mobile usability labs I saw her present on at GUADEC 2006, life would be even better. I've got it on the ever growing list. The Drupal as a GIS Mapping/Platform session was also quite spiffy, but then again I have a map fetish. I'm much better with the hallway track anyway.

Drupal Makes Sandwiches Happen!
Turns out that there were several GHOP students at the conference, and they invited me to be on their panel. I was truly honored to accept, so we met up at lunch time to grab some food and then plan for the presentation. We discovered that the lines for food were incredibly long, so we finally gave up and decided we'd simply power through and get food later. As we wandered through the lobby of the Boston Convention Center, Angie stopped to say hello to a lovely lady, who turned out to be one Suzi Arnold. Suzi invited us to head out for lunch, but upon hearing of our predicament promptly offered to bring lunch back for us. Have I mentioned how awesome Drupal people are?

We headed to the room for our panel discussion, which is where I discovered that Drupal apparently also makes pancakes happen. Or something. As a big fan of pancakes, I was deeply pleased. This prep was my first chance to really spend time with these folks, though I'd corresponded with several of them. Adam shocked me by being the third open source doctor I'd ever met, and since I never thought I'd meet one, I am now fairly sure there must be a secret manufacturing plant for them somewhere, probably tucked away quietly in the Midwest. Like Indianapolis. But that was the following week, this is still Boston.

I sit in utter amazement of the accomplishments of these students. In addition to other Drupal magic, Charlie Gordon made DROP happen. Michael Fogelman writes great docs and after interacting with him for just a few hours it was plain to me that he's got that rare skill that allows him to glean the necessary information from the uber-techie without causing undue irritation. It also strikes me that he doesn't ask 'stupid' questions; certainly never asked me any. Then there's Jimmy Berry, with that whole Click HeatMap and Version Control API for Git thing. Not to mention Dmitri Gaskin, who was too young to participate in GHOP so instead he mentored other students. And gave a session on practical JQuery. If these gentlemen weren't so inspirational, I'd be feeling terribly inadequate right about now.

I finally gave in and got a Flickr account. If you're interested, you can see pictures of some of these wunderkind and the few scenes I snapped in Boston here.

Monday night was my first meal in Boston's Chinatown, where I accompanied Robert for a dinner with some folks from the Knight Foundation. Family style dining and a spirited discussion about effective engagement when funding community Open Source projects ensued. In addition to good food and good conversation, I was surrounded by really great company, including the lovely Lisa Williams and Benjamin Melançon. The former, a Boston native, graciously organized a tour of her city for us visitors, though I wasn't able to accompany them; the latter generously lent me his jacket, as I'd underdressed for the walk back to the convention center after dark. Drupal, apparently, is also proof that chivalry is not yet dead. I spent a few minutes at the Monday evening conference party chatting with Lisa, but it was a bit loud so I knocked off to get some sleep.

Drupal Makes Pizza Happen!
So knowing that Drupal makes pancakes and sandwiches happen, it may come as no suprise to you that it also makes pizza happen. The Tuesday evening Acquia party venue wasn't conducive to the under-21s hanging out and hacking, so someone was kind enough to organize a GHOP BoF/Games night. We discovered that catering wouldn't be able to deliver food and the pre-arranged space at MIT was a long and cold walk away. Contingency plan one: find nearby pizza place, walk there, eat pizza, return to convention center.

One slight problem - the nearest pizza place, 1/3 of a mile away, couldn't seat ten people. I also suspect we had more than ten people, but people were happily wandering in and out so a firm head count was not forthcoming. Well, they could seat ten people, but really they had seating for eight people and we could squeeze in a few extra chairs. I hesitantly made a reservation. Short walk notwithstanding, it seemed suboptimal to wander out into the dark and snowy night to an uncomfortably small space. Hrm.

Contingency plan two: get food delivered. We'd heard this was a no-no, but apparently security didn't have a problem with it. Yay to Mr. of Chaos on that one, btw. I phoned Salvatore's again to cancel our reservation and ask about delivery. They didn't deliver. I mentioned that we had seven hungry genius kids desperate for food and asked if they had suggestions for other pizza places near the convention center that would deliver. A short on-hold moment later, the manager let me know that he'd go ahead and bring over our food order, no problem. Awesome. Bliss. Pizza, salad and pasta occurred an hour later. Life was good. If you are ever in Boston, patronize these people. They really made our night.

Satisfied that everyone was well fed and well entertained, I headed out for the Acquia party. With three floors of music on tap, clearly a good time was had by all. The best part, though, was hanging out with Bevan, stalwart GHOP mentor, Season of Usability student, and Open Source Kiwi. Open Source Kiwis ++.

The rest of the week is a bit of a blur to be honest, but memory leaks being what they are and the fact that it's been more than seven days.... Somewhere in there I gave my first keynote with Chris, and I think it went rather well. Many thanks to Adrian for the many good times out in the cold, to Sooz for being she who must get it done, to Rok for giving me juice right when my blood sugar had utterly depleted and to Kàroly for being a stalwart mentor and generally being awesome. Many thanks to everyone for making me feel welcome and a part of the wider goodness that is Drupal.

On Friday, I ended up at the MIT Stata Center, where I got to write on a real MIT chalkboard. Several actually. Somehow writing on them makes you feel like your IQ has increased by no less than 30 points. It was lovely. The rest, as they say, is history.

I'm no doubt leaving out a bunch of wonderful people from this narrative, like Addi and Geoff, but it's late and this is the second time I'm writing this novel. Chicago later. New Orleans, later, if ever. I still need a cafè au lait. Cafè du Monde, here I come.

pcloadletter Episode 4: me on Google Summer of Code

Ben and Fitz interviewed me last week for pcloadletter. Check out the podcast (.mp3) and let me know what you think. I love audio recording. Video not as much.

I just finished composing my saga on LH in Boston, saved it as a draft, and came back to clean it up when I discovered it's gone. No mangled saved draft even. Just gone. Sometimes I hate certain blogging tools that shall remain nameless.

I'm going to take a nap. I'll try to rewrite the novel later tonight. If not, it can wait until I get to New Orleans.

The Merry March Travels of LH

I hit the road again this Saturday, though this time I won't be leaving the States. Heading first to Boston, where I'll be speaking at DrupalCon 2008 along with Chris. I'm particularly looking forward to the GHOP panel and the Summer of Code BoF, as well as Dries' State of Drupal talk. Also curious to learn more about how the relationship between Drupal and Acquia works, especially how their business model, which is centered around community support, functions on a day to day basis. Of course, it's always great to see old friends, meet new people and share their stories. I can't wait to hear the story of how DROP came into being, and am planning to canvas all available GHOPers and GSoCers for suggested program improvements

Most exciting, though, is getting to see Angie again. It has been far too long.

The following week I'll be in Chicago for our team all hands meeting, followed by PyCon 2008. It's always a blast to see Ben, Fitz and Trow in their native habitat. The pizza is not bad either. If you haven't heard it yet, Ben and Fitz's podcast PC Load Letter is a must hear.

Chicago Engineering has grown a bit since the old days, and it will be nice to spend a bit more time getting to know the guys I hang out with on IRC. Should be fun to hang out in their new office space, too. I seem to recall rumors of floor to ceiling white boards....

On 18 March I head to NOLA, where I am going to top off four days vacation with a visit to Penguin Day New Orleans. Louis has already promised to take me to Lake Pontchartrain, along with Cafe du Monde. I have a lot of ideas about what I want to pack into those four days. There is just never enough time to spend in New Orleans, and I have not been back in over four years.

Having never been to a DrupalCon, PyCon or Penguin Day, these next three weeks should be quite interesting. If you should happen to find yourself at any of the above, please keep an eye out for me, come on up and introduce yourself.

Man, do I want a café au lait.

It's Officially Hot in Here...

Google Summer of Code 2008 is on!

Spread the word, hang out with us in #gsoc on Freenode and apply, apply, apply.

Now I'm going to go relax with Ben and hang out with Pinkerton.

Life is good.