Dyepot, Teapot

I saw Dawn’s post about her Art of Community session tomorrow, and realized that not only is it already the week of OSCON, but I really ought to tell people about the things I’m participating in. How did we get to the middle of July already?

Wednesday (that’s today) at 5:20 I’m moderating a panel called Tools for Local Communities. We’ll be talking about our local open source groups and communities (spanning the US, Brazil, and Latvia) and what we’ve learned about making them go.

Tonight, I’m participating in FOSCON 2008, Cooking With Ruby, which starts at 6pm at CubeSpace. The highlight of the evening is a web frameworks cookoff between Ruby on Rails, PHP, Seaside, and Drupal. We’ll also have a fun set of lightning talks by local Rubyists.

Then tomorrow, I’m giving a lightning talk at the Art of Community session called “Friendly Anarchy”, about what I’m learned from participating in pdx.rb.

I’ll also be helping staff the pdx.rb booth in the exhibit hall, so stop by and say hello.

One of my favorite blogs right now is The Runcible Bin, because each post is a small brain-dump of what the author is working on and thinking about. If I were to do such a thing, today’s would look like:

The Lost Ring!

Now that MetroFi officially gave up, can we have Meraki instead?

Calagator. Now with fewer memory leaks caused by bad parser code (vpim. again.).

If I said I’d give a presentation on fun with location tracking next week, does that mean I’ll actually manage to build a working demo in time?

Julia Nunes is the best cure for a grouchy morning.

This might be of interest to fellow side-projecteers: the Portland State Business Accelerator is having a workshop next week called Advanced Invention to Venture, to help people learn how to fund their idea. It’s not just about venture capital, and covers several options. I’m also happy to see this in the description: “Focuses on how to successfully implement the new venture rather than on how to write a business plan.” Chris Dawson of Box Populi says it was a very useful experience and his team will be returning more at this year’s workshop. This is happening May 28-31 at the Portland State Business Accelerator offices in SW Portland.

This past weekend I attended WhereCamp, an unconference on all things geo-technology. I had a very fun time talking to everyone and camping in my Google tent.

I led two sessions: one on community-building and socializing with location-aware tools, and another the second day on social practice software, a term Anselm suggested to describe how we’re building Calagator.

Other things:

• Good group of Portland folks there. Me, Paige, Anselm, Jason and the Platial team, three people from TriMet, in all maybe a dozen of us.
• I bugged the TriMet team with all my burning questions about the tech side of what they’re doing. I hadn’t realized that they were such a key player in getting Google Transit started. These people need a blog. There’s a info about what they’re up to at http://developer.trimet.org/, and they’re really interested in hearing about anything people are doing with the API. I think I managed to convince Bibiana, the project manager, that they need to host a Portland TransitCamp. There’s some cool stuff they’re working on, and I’d love to see the local community collaborating more.
• Open Street Map. I first heard about them in 2006 when they gathered people to map the Isle of Wight. It’s easy to take access to geographic data for granted when you’re in the US, but not every country treats it as public property. If you’re not familiar with this project, go read.
• Andrew Turner and Seth Fitzsimmons led a lively session on privacy. The second half of the notes for this have a great summary of the current state of geo-privacy issues, which we talked through with the six de bono hats methodology.
• Dave Troy presented a neat way of encoding location data called geohash. It turns your lat/long into a single alphanumeric string. The cool thing here is that as you lose characters from the right side, the sequence remains valid at a lower accuracy, describing a larger and larger bounding box. I could see this being really useful for a site that had location urls matching some collection of data. it’s human-editable enough that people could expand the search area just by editing the url.
• NNDB does data visualization of the connections between people, that you can browse and edit. Best part: graphing conspiracy theories.
• Rich Gibson brought his Gigapan camera. It’s interesting to look at the results from smaller and larger spaces.

I think we really, absolutely need to have a WhereCamp Portland. Let’s say in October. There’s just too much interesting mapping and location-geekery happening here to not do it. Who wants to help make this happen?

This past weekend’s BarCamp Portland was a fabulous, fun, exhausting time. Thank you to everyone who came and helped out and lent their knowledge and interests to making this such a great event.

Keep checking Flickr for pictures, the Drupal site for session info and notes, and the Legion of Tech site for what we’re up to next.

Personal highlights: plotting the start of a new web service during Bikes and Geeks, Fermentation Club (coming soon!), the ongoing My Other Thing conversation, and getting to introduce my mom to more of the neat things going on in our local tech community.

I’ve been talking about doing some kind of survey of the local tech community for a few months now, but today it’s up and running. If you’re in Portland, and involved with any kind of technology activities for work or fun, please go to http://moourl.com/lotsurvey. The more responses, the better, since we want to see the breadth of our community, and whether Legion of Tech events are on your calendar. Tell your friends, coworkers, and neighbors. I’ll be posting here and on the Legion of Tech blog when we’ve crunched the numbers.

BarCamp Portland is happening just two days from now, starting May 2nd, 6pm, at CubeSpace.

If you’re not familiar with BarCamps in general, this is an unconference, an event with set times and dates, but the schedule determined on site by participants. It has a technology focus, but really anyone who can read this blog is likely to find something of interest. And it has one of my favorite rules for any event: if you’re not learning or contributing by staying where you are, then you should respectfully find somewhere else where you can be. If that means switching sessions, or adding something to the schedule, that’s great. You have the ability and the responsibility to make this your event.

Some topics that have been suggested so far:

• Design and geekdom
• Digital photography
• Object-oriented programming
• Erlang and Haskell
• A mini WordCamp (for users of WordPress) on Sunday
• Software business cooperatives

This is only a start. We’ll have over 100 session slots filled with … something … that you can help decide with the rest of us this Friday evening and through the rest of the weekend.

Wednesday I attended the inaugural Portland Lunch 2.0. Jake Kuramoto had the idea to try this locally, and AboutUs hosted. I really enjoy how each new event seems to bring out a slightly different group of people, which got me wondering: why don’t we have more daytime events? Obviously, most people have to work, but usually we get some kind of lunch break, and it seems easier than evenings for people with kids.

Coincidently enough, earlier in the week I had an interesting conversation with Jeff Schwaber about the function that Friday symposiums serve for academic communities, and how something like that might work for our local user groups. Linux groups have traditionally been the one place people working with different open source technologies all come together, but these days we’re as likely to be using Macs, and the LUG just isn’t our starting point anymore. So what about some kind of brown bag lunch symposium? User groups could take turns presenting their best talks from past meetings, and we’d all learn something.

Another type of daytime event I’m interested in are the Jelly-style rotating coworking meetups. I’d love to spend half a day every couple of weeks working from the same space with other local geeks. It would not be a bad thing for me to get out of my apartment while it’s light out.

Portland has a lot of cool things going on right now, and I’m eager for even more. But we shouldn’t wait for a good idea to import from San Francisco or Seattle. This is a place with it’s own unique characteristics, and most of the time no one worries about whether we’re as cool as Location X. In the tech sphere we can fall into that trap because there’s just so much noise coming from other geek hubs. Ask “what would help me get my work done or meet interesting people or have more fun?”—that’s the important part.

I’ve been meaning to write about my personal technology toolkit for a few weeks. Reading about executive dashboards at Jive reminded me again.

My main goals are to be able to connect with people, keep track of what friends and colleagues are up to, and spot emerging patterns in my areas of interest as they’re happening.

Component A: Google Reader

Recently I reorganized my feeds to be sorted by XFN tags, plus a few other categories. I stretched the definitions a bit.

• “Neighbor” is anyone in the Portland metro area.
• “Colleague” refers to anyone working on something I consider related to my own professional interests, whether they’re technically in the same field or not.
• “Contact” includes feeds from my contacts on Flickr, Ma.gnolia, and del.icio.us.
• “Muse” is any blog not in one of those categories that I’m excited or inspired to see. It creates some interesting emergent behaviors.

I can tell when my mom posts because suddenly I have new items under “parent”, “neighbor”, “met”. It creates an interesting subconscious motivation to read the posts by the people I have the most connection with first, because the game of using a feed reader is to make the numbers (unread post counts) all move toward zero, and what does that faster than reading items that are counted in more than one category?

I also have a few tags that have nothing to do with my relationship with the feeds’ writers.

• “News” encompasses both traditional news sources, and the blogs of companies whose services I use.
• “Fun” is my daily comics, plus a couple of low-volume sites like The Food Whore.
• “Research” is for search feeds on my name, projects I’m working on, and other things where I want to know if there’s new mentions somewhere.
• “Bucket” is the category for everything else. I’m interested enough to subscribe, but not enough that it’s in another category. I skim it when I’m bored or procrastinating (which are often the same thing).

This is already pretty long, so I’ll save the other pieces for other posts.

I’m reading Everyware, by Adam Greenfield, and finding it perfect timing with the discussion of Google’s new social graph API (see Marshall K.’s summary if you need a primer).

This is Thesis 35 in Everyware: “Everyware surfaces and makes explicit information that has always been latent in our lives, and this will frequently be incommensurate with social or psychological comfort.” Sounds like a pretty good description of the current conversation. It might be okay to expose that information. It might not. Maybe it’s inevitable. Regardless, if the decision is made solely by technologists, other people lose.

This isn’t information that people know they’re creating, like posting a picture or emailing someone. Google is mapping the network of connections between people, created as they go about other tasks. And it’s information that we consider very personal. I already feel awkward if someone adds me as their friend on Facebook and I don’t want to add them back.

I’m increasingly aware of the privilege I experience because I know how to write software. I understand how the tech works. I’m also in a position where nothing Google could expose would irreparably harm my career or personal life. I am not typical.

One of the things we’re trying to do with Calagator is to create software for and by people. Not developers. Maybe not even technologists. How can we know whether our project will meet the needs of the community it intends to serve, without inviting everyone to participate in its development? I want to see the social graph movement take this on as well. Open the conversation and explain what’s at stake.