Luis VillaRamblings on software, law, and the spaces in between.

I just experimented with what I think was a fairly successful way to run a BOF, for a mini-marketing discussion at the GNOME Summit. I sat off to the side of the room (not in the front/center) and jotted notes frantically on tomboy, interlinking as I went, with the tomboy notes projected on the big screen front+center. It was an interesting way of working, I think; it kept the ideas front and center (moreso than the BOF leader, which can be a problem for these kinds of things) and it hopefully in the end will be lead to more interesting/coherent notes for those who weren’t there.

Things that I’ll need to fix next time

• tomboy notes are large, so my screen got very cluttered, and when I didn’t have a full ‘index’ of notes, finding one could be hard. Maybe I just need a higher-res screen ;)
• Actually getting the notes out of tomboy and into something like HTML or another wiki is not there right now. I think, though, that this should probably be easy- I’m sure it wouldn’t be too hard for someone with clue to write a python script that would convert all entries in .tomboy into a simple tomboy.html, with post titles converted to HTML anchors and internal references linking to those anchors.
• pre-seed more topics- you know some things are going to come up (‘what do we do poorly’, ‘other sites we could learn from’, etc.) and having those notes already open would have made things more efficient.

Anyway, it was cool; I’m sure I’ll do it again at GUADEC.

And so the Summit begins. :)

Nice dinner tonight at East Coast Grill with Anna, Dan Winship, Tigert, Jakub, and a host of others. I’d never been before- fun place. Inman Square, as Nat said, really is a pretty happening place these days. Also, my drink had a flaming volcano in the middle of it. And that can’t be a bad thing. (I’m sure jimmac will post pictures of the volcano soon ;)

This is a great article on the new economics- the ‘Long Tail’- of media creation. I look forward to the day when amazon recommendations and blogs have more economic pull than Clear Channel, and the author makes a persuasive case that they will at least pull even shortly. Money quote: “Take books: The average Barnes & Noble carries 130,000 titles. Yet more than half of Amazon’s book sales come from outside its top 130,000 titles… In other words, the potential book market may be twice as big as it appears to be…”

Looking forward to the summit, despite one of my potential houseguests bailing. My only worry is that I may not have time to carve the 40 pounds of pumpkins I bought yesterday. We’ll see, I guess.

Some summit bits: I’m glad to see some folks are picking up on the Speed Talks. We need more :) It is pretty impressive that we can muster 50 people total on very, very short notice, as well. Obviously we need more warning for the next one, though, so people can make it from further out. Does seem like we’re getting at least a few Aussies, though :)

It would be nice to have something like this kept up to date and hosted somewhere on gnome.org.

Forgot to mention last night in the blog that there is space in the schedule for speed talks- hope that we can get about a dozen people to talk for 2-5 minutes and maybe spark some interest in their corner of gnome that isn’t being covered elsewhere.

Spent a lot of time tonight talking to Glynn and poking around the schedule. The wiki formatting looks sort of assy, but the rough framework of content is there. I hope we can find the right balance between the all-too formal first summit (and recent guadecs) and the totally too informal NYC Summit. Everyone, go look at it and add your own ideas :)

Sadly, no chance to play with the tinderbox this weekend. Some weird build errors ATM: control-center seems to want a version of libxklavier that doesn’t exist (wants 1.1, says it has 1.0, but I’m pulling from HEAD…). Also looks like Jeff did the right thing (tried to get people to test new code) but it doesn’t seem to actually build. :)

Oatmeal chocolate chip cookies are good. :)

Currently recovering after being attacked by three maple-syrup coated oatmeal-apple waffles. Tough life.

Hope to spend a little time tonight organizing the schedule page of the Summit Wiki. Please continue to update the ‘Tell Us You’re Coming‘ page- it’s the closest we’ll have to registration this time around. In talking with Tim, if the location is successful for us, I think we’ll push for the board to make reservations for the 2005 summit by late October of this year, so we can plan further out- this year’s planning was really hampered by thinking that we had the location all lined up, only to have it fall through. Still, we seem to have found a great fallback.

I’m personally excited to see Russ Nelson is coming- I’ve never met him, or even really emailed much, but Russ was crucial in the early days of mindstorms hacking. God, that was a long time ago :)

Cleaned like a maniac this weekend; laundry, vacuuming, dishes, and even reorganizing the living room. Pretty nice so far; still have to do the most daunting task- organizing bills and bank statements. But at least I can open the living room closet now. :) The new roomba is very nice- still can’t quite leap all the door jambs in my apartment, but otherwise is pretty slick. It can succesfully dock itself into the charger in the hallway after doing the living room. It has gotten a good workout the past few days.