Go Open 2008: People
As usual for a conference, I spent almost all of the time I was at Go Open 2008 talking with people (and occasionally talking at people.)
The following is a list of people I talked with (or listened to) along with the interesting or exciting things that they shared with me or that they're working on:
The [...]
Helping Businesses Catch the Cluetrain
Back in the misty reaches of time — just before the last millennium turned, to be precise — four smart people got together to write about the growing gap between companies and markets. The result was called "The Cluetrain Manifesto", a cogent and plainly-written set of theses about how the Internet changes some of the [...]
For Geeks, by Geeks: The Open Web Conference
In a binary view of the world, there are two types of of technology conferences: those run with a profit motive and those run for by technologists for technologists.
The Open Web Conference falls into the latter category. It is an event organized by the Vancouver PHP Users Association (who are a bunch of web developers, [...]
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Scale 6x: Stormy Peters: What is a Community Manager?
The first day of SCALE 6x, I camped out in the Women in Open Source track. One of the sessions that I caught during this day was Stormy Peters' excellent, "What is a Community Manager?" presentation. My notes - in point form rather than prose - follow.
Tags: Alolita Sharma, Bytesfree.org, community, Community Manager, conference, Dawn [...]
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Advancing the Mozilla Manifesto
Most regular readers of this blog are familiar with the Mozilla Manifesto and with the work that the Mozilla Corporation undertakes to advance the manifesto. It is good work. Actually, it is great work from a great community of people. However, the corporation focuses most on Firefox and the related software and communities. The manifesto [...]
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20000 km, $7000, 7 days and 4 tons of CO2
… or, "Making Event Attendance Count"
Late last year, I gave a keynote at paired Finnish conferences MindTrek and OpenMind. While the events were well worth attending, afterwards I spent a few bleak hours thinking about the actual costs of my attendance. If I had left Canada just for these events (which, thankfully, I [...]
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Dear Lazyweb: Esperanto and Gmail
A friend of a friend has done the work needed to localize Gmail in Esperanto. The FOAF has pitched it to Google (no strings attached), but they didn't seem very interested - at least, the Googlist he talked to didn't seem so interested. I tried to help by putting the FOAF in touch with one [...]
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OpenMind 2007: Monty on the Future (and Past) of Databases
After a break, Tommi Mikkonen of the Tampere University of Technology introduces Monty Widenius (who is, as most readers of this blog will know is one of the founders of MySQL AB)
Monty takes the stage wearing a suit - a nice suit - something I don't recall having seen before.
He starts with an overview [...]
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Confiscated Knitting Needles
It had to happen eventually… when I was going through security at the Helsinki airport today, they took away my Addi Turbo circular needles as being too dangerous to bring on the airplane.
The needles have made it through American, Canadian, Dutch, German and Norwegian security - who would have thought that the Fins would have [...]
The Age of Literate Machines: A Visionary Look at Free Software
About twenty years ago, Mr. Hughes (my excellent grade eight and nine science teacher) showed my class a television series called "Connections." The series, written and hosted by British wit and science historian James Burke, focused on how sets of seemingly disparate events came together to shape the modern world. Connections was (and is) [...]
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