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!

Phone Conversations Are Hazardous

I truly hate talking on the phone. Business calls? Happy to have them when email won't cut it. Maintaining long term voice communication with friends and acquaintances when I can have a 'logged' discussion via IRC, GChat or email? Thank you, but no thank you. I have way to much going on in my life. Logs are required for getting stuff done. I'll gladly charge my phone to SMS you rather than pick up that land line.

Over the past year, though, I've learned to somewhat get over this whole phone aversion thing with my female friends. Specifically, Skyping with Lynne in Sydney. Video chat ++. There are no logs, but since it's kind of like being on your own TV show, I always remember what happens.

Then again, that's just me and Lynne - we play off each other well. Lynne and I keep threatening to tape our road trips and get our own YouTube show, but we've never managed to do it. Lynne, we really need to do this. I think we'll probably get to it around 2010 and it'll be set in New Zealand. Worked for Peter Jackson.

Lynne flew home a week ago, right after the first day of the Nonprofit Software Development Summit. This conference just rocked, btw. We'd spent the weekend herding cats at MeetBSD. MeetBSD featured copious amounts of dancing, and there was much rejoicing.

We also spent a week and a half touring the East Coast, which was eventful but not particularly restful. These things happen, though - I am fortunate to have many good friends to visit. Spent time in Boston thinking about Free Software, Obama and Crafting with Jag and Naphtali. They are two of the most awesome people ever. Lunch with the Free Software Foundation folks. Josh was in California getting acclimated at his new job, but he'll be out to California soon.

Walked the National Mall and went to the Smithsonian with Lynne and MJ. Ate delicious Southern Food. Drank delicious Taittinger champagne. Saw Addison randomly on the street, leaving a Drupal documentation sprint. Had a hotel room with a truly awesome shower.

D.C.'s highlights always remain the same for me: the Jefferson Memorial and the Hall of Minerals. So many beautiful shiny things, so many different structures and colors to engross the eye. Every time I visit I think that everyone who lives there could ostensibly visit them every day, free of charge. Spent a lot more time mulling about freedom at the statue of Thomas J.

Missed Arlington for the first time, which I regret. Stopped in a few small towns in Maryland and Massachusetts. Escaped from New York via the George Washington Bridge. Saw a few other friends here and there, caught up with even more online since I was in their time zone. It was good.

Which leads me to the entire point of this post. I looked at my iPhone (a.k.a. Steev - more on our impending breakup later) for the first time today and realized Randi had SMSed me about heading to the DNA Lounge. While it's a Monday night, it's also Thanksgiving week and not much is going on at work. Meh, why not? Since I'm out of AT&T's range here, I had to call. Sigh. Dialed. We began to do the version of the quick update, task-oriented, planning conversation about the evening, but turned out it just wasn't going to happen. C'est la vie, and likely for the best. Then we tried for the quick update, task-oriented version of gossip. Epic fail on that, though we have truly set a new standard for euphemistic discourse. Included in this conversation was at least two minutes spent discussing how much we hate using the phone.

When Randi finally walked out of the office to her car for the drive up to San Francisco, I pointed out once again that phone conversations were, in fact, awful and hazardous. We'd come to a particularly pivotal moment in the story, and we'd have to take it up later. It's like being stuck in a looooooong commercial break during your favorite Soap Opera. (Mine was Dallas.) Erg.

Decided the Soap Opera actually totally uninteresting, so I decided to watch James Bond instead. And James Bond, of course, makes me feel like writing. At last the poor blog gets updated. :)

Live and Let Die is the only Moore I can really palate, and that's because the New Orleans settings are beautiful. MeetBSD came with a visit from the lovely Louis and I saw Rob the next week at the Nonprofit Dev Summit. Erin swung into town to drive home with Louis. It's time to get back to New Orleans again soon, I can feel it.

I suspect I ought to do more work on this phone aversion for the sake of my carbon footprint. Chat can do in a pinch. Still, nothing beats having coffee with the people you love. Or iced tea. Or champagne.

I will make you iced tea. I will bring the champagne. Please don't make me use the phone.

2008 Nonprofit Software Development Summit

The good folks at Aspiration Technology are once again creating their magic with the second Nonprofit Software Development Summit. Given current economic conditions looking rather sucktastic to say the least, I'm looking for inspiration these days. And I find I'm really excited about the power of FOSS to help organizations that have limited IT resources to accomplish their goals. Pragmatism, accompanied by noble goals, is unstoppable. Provided there is action.

That's where the crew at Aspiration comes in. I go to a fair number of conferences. I spend most of my time with the hackers, documenters, artists, user experience researchers, users and partners of people in FOSS, and I know what motivates them to get things done. Hearing from people like Gunner, Lena, Michelle and San, people want to go GSD. (There are a whole host of other folks who belong on this list, as well; you'll find their names among those partners collaboratively developing the summit agenda.) Every time I go to an Aspiration led event I leave refreshed and inspired. And I get more good things done.

I'll be giving a talk about Google Summer of Code™ and how Google's support of the participating projects has helped provide tools to the non-profit world. I want it to be more of an open discussion and to find out what the non-profit world wants from FOSS developers.

In so many situations, I think we lose momentum because there are so few people who can translate between the divide of, for the sake of brevity, users and hackers. You know, those people who think their computer is, at best, a tool with many inconveniences. These are smart people. They are just not you - they do not breathe it, live it, love it, feel it in their fingertips the way you do. They want to accomplish a task and they don't have much of a budget to do it on. You can help with that. Though you likely need someone to help you help them figure out what they want. Then again, you may be one of those less-rare-than-previously-thought-but-still-rare-nonetheless social geeks who really digs talking to people. If you are, you should totally come. If you are one of those people who is good at getting people to geek out together when they are in totally different disciplines, you should totally come. I think we will learn a lot from one another.

Spending Time with the People You Love

A wise man once told me that time is really all there is.

I spent last weekend at GooCamp, the first Google unconference, ostensibly hosting but mostly just enjoying the weekend. Pips to Cat and Ellen for making this weekend what it was. Since the first rule of GooCamp is that you don't talk about GooCamp, I will just say it was quite lovely to catch up with all the folks from Zurich I hadn't spoken to in years - Douwe, Luuk, Michael and Sascha. It was wonderful to spend time with the Brits, too. Gregory, you're absolutely awesome. You too Neil.

Frankly, the entire weekend was spent among completely fantastic human beings. Good show all around. One of these days you should ask me about my Saturday afternoon In N' Out Burger experience.

I'm spending more time lately around the people who matter most to me. Kicking it with Andy a lot. And Andi. And Mark. And Shona and Kynan. And Mikal. Josh is coming into town tomorrow, and MJ sent an invite this morning for Steve's birthday bash this weekend.

Google Summer of Code 2008 Mentor Summit is in a little over two weeks. Life is good.

danderson Enabled

My friend David is visiting for the next couple of days. Mari comes home tonight so after picking her up it is back to the Valley. Life is good, but I think I'll miss living in San Francisco.

The LAH and GSD

Today is one of those awesome days. I awoke at 7:45 today, which was lateish. Waking up in the sweet embrace of a memory foam couch is also awesome. After wandering about to get a glass of water, I decided now would be a useful time to call my friend Mark, as we were supposed to catch up before he had company that afternoon. And, as he's in Virginia, where it was the much more sane hour of 15 minutes to 11:00, I figured I'd better get cracking.

We mostly chatted about the awesomeness of my good friend and hostess, Ms. Linsey Jackson, who will soon be marrying my good friend and host, Mr. San Mehat. The awesomeness of the Linsey does not map well to easy encapsulation in blog format, so I will summarize thusly: I hate bruschetta. I consume Linsey's bruschetta with a gusto I typically reserve only for hummus. And did I mention she provided us with four kinds of hummus last night? Plus her bruschetta is made with soy cheese, and it's still downright sublime. I don't even really like cheese. Linsey, in short, is amazing.

I heard the stirrings of people inside, bid Mark fond adieu, and wandered back into the apartment. San and Linsey and Mike and Vanessa and Dima and Rebecca all live in the same building, so communal gatherings on their balcony are a frequent occurence. This time, we were celebrating San's birthday (happy birthday again, San :), though Mike and Vanessa were off taking care of business in the Canadia. Linsey served champagne. With lemon pesto artichoke dip and other amazing accoutrements. And it's all vegan. And it all tastes good. Linsey is amazing.

I have only recently started attending said frequent communal gatherings on a regular basis, as I've been house sitting in San Francisco the past couple of weeks. I intend to continue attending for the pleasure of the company, but also for the pure bliss of enjoying the fine Lost Art of Hospitality (LAH), which clearly *is not* lost because Linsey does it. We all (that's me, Adriana, Linsey and San) converged on the kitchen, where coffee was made. Sigh. It was *really* good coffee. Followed by massive cleanup in approximately 15 minutes. About 3/4 of the way through, San looked up at me and said "Is this that whole GSD* thing? Because I want to recognize when it's happening." and I laughed and said "Yes."

Kitchen cleaned. San had business elsewhere. Linsey dropped him off. She returned, watered the plants, then escorted me to the nearby drug store, where I got to listen to awesome salsa music and people speaking Spanish. The she wandered out again, purchased champagne and made us all Pombosas, which is what I have decided to call champagne with blueberry pomegranate juice in it. I think we also should create a funky dance move to go along with it, which involves moving very gracefully but with a Latin shake. It must be lots of fun — fluid and free — but simultaneously you must make sure you are in no danger of spilling your beverage. It's too tasty to waste.

So just when you think your morning sitting in the shade next to the sun drenched tile patio on a balcony in the Mission in SF is just as good as it gets, Linsey disappears. Then returns. She has *drawn a bath* for Adriana. I am informed I may have one later, but Adriana asked first. Holy. Moley. Um, yes. When my turn comes, she later furnishes a towel, hot from the dryer, along with a pre-drawn bath complete with pre-included bubble bath. And extra tealight candles and incendiary device to make sure I can customize the light content of my bath experience. Linsey just GSD.

Linsey is a goddess. I am so excited that she and San are together and that I have the honor of being in their wedding party. Post-bath, I decided it was time to leave Adriana studying - GSD - and get back to my familiar computing environment so I could figure wedding logistics (flowers, suits, etc.) out efficiently.

Now here I am, comfortably sitting on Mari's couch in the lovely city of San Francisco, vaguely watching 300. GSD. Then before I get the change to push publish, Louis calls. I get the Real Time NOLA Update. Life is good.

* Ed. note: Failure to expand acronyms is the height of snobbery and also prevents GSD. If people know what you're talking about, it's much easier for them to GSD. Just a thought. NOLA, for those who don't know, is New Orleans, Louisiana.

G stands for getting. D stands for Done. If you haven't decided what S means by now, I leave that to your imagination. I don't want to impose my value system on you. Doing that sort of thing really gets in the way of GSD.