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

Work

Off to Orlando for educause, to talk about playlists. Have started using playlist as a research scratchpad, creating a ‘hacking philosophy’ playlist that I hope might be useful as the outline for an essay at some point.

Lots of folks at the office are going to WSIS, despite it being in Tunisia, a known internet censorer. Sounds like they should have much fun.

Have been given responsibility for a reworking of our website. Should be an interesting task.

Open Bits

Very awesome to hear that gnomefiles has 1000 apps now. I’ve had my disagreements with Eugenia, and I wish some of gnomefiles’ ad revenue went to the foundation, but gnomefiles on balance is a critically important tool for gnome and gnome users, and I eagerly await 2000 and 5000 and more.

Heard about gobby from a wikipedian the other day. Am looking forward to the next release, and looking forward to more such applications. C’mon, gocollab :)

Enjoyed another dinner with smart people last night; met Alan Taylor of Amazon Light fame.

Have started on the outline of an essay I’m almost certain to never write on Marxism and Free Software-ism; the historical parallels between Stallman and Marx (deep perception of existing problems; created vital, influential movements; managed to offend nearly the entirety of those movements) have always intrigued me (and makes me predict that Free Software as a movement will flourish, as Marxism did, once Richard steps back from the scene). But I’d never considered until the past few days the possibility of doing the historical research to do a more complete parallel analysis of the movements. I think one could do some pretty interesting comparisons there- study marxism’s historical dialectic as it competed with the capitalist meme, compare and contrast ours as we enter the still relatively early memetic/dialectic competition with proprietary software. The punch line, of course, is that capitalism very definitely beat pure Marxism, probably for decent reasons, though it has adopted (coopted?) many of the insights of Marxism. The point of the essay/exercise would at least partially be to predict what aspects of free software/open source will be coopted by ‘traditional’ software development and why, and do what ends.

Personal

Long weekend. My grandfather is healthier and in a much, much better facility. But it isn’t clear he’ll ever really be 100% healthy again; he’s just too old and too frail for his body to recover fully from this type of thing. Avoid Shady Grove Adventist if you’re ever in the Rockville Maryland area and need medical care…

Work

Will spend part of this week at educause, talking about H2O. Should be interesting. Still boggled that they charge speakers to register. I’d be tempted if I were in academia to do talks/presentations for a camera, throw them on my blog, and pull a Miguel, handing out slips of paper with a time, the name of a nearby bar, and the URL for my talk at the entrance to the conference.

Open Bits

It took me a while to get used to gmail’s conversation view, but it is now driving me insane that evo thinks my sent mails are not part of a thread when I’m looking at it. I really want everything in my conversation view- mail, IM, docs, but I’d settle (for now) for my Sent folder :)

Spent a good chunk of the weekend listening to the tracks in the CC Mixter Ambient tag- CC-licensed ambient tracks, many of which sample from other such tracks. Some pretty good stuff, at least to my untutored ear. Worked great for plane flights and airport time. Someone with taste needs to set up an actively DJ’d/edited Radio CC to stream me the good stuff 24/7. Only downside was that since none of it is album-based, using muine for it was pretty impossible, which was frustrating.

A charming day today; was misrepresented (along with all of the rest of GNOME) by someone welcomed to our summit in good faith; was only mixedly productive at work (though I did find out at least about two possible hosts for our project CVS and start the ball rolling on a better harvard-local fedora mirror); was unclear in IRC and may have pissed off some folks working on something very near and dear to my heart (SIP in gnomemeeting); and my grandfather is very ill so I’ll be spending the weekend in a DC-area hospital instead of working on my school apps or the summit wrapup I’d planned on writing. I suppose it could be worse- I could have painful wounds on both heels from an ill-fated attempt to break in boots this weekend. Oh, wait, that too. Blah.

Glynn: sure there is something stopping me from installing OpenSolaris- point me to the iso. And Schillix doesn’t count. (And it doesn’t really matter what the motivations for CDDL are- the impact is to be GPL-incompatible, and that cannot have been a surprise that Sun only noticed later.) Look, I’m happy for Sun that there seems to be energy and innovation going on, and if that continues I think it will be healthy for GNOME, but it is very hard to understand why I can’t install OpenSolaris, and all too easy to understand why OpenSolaris is not GPL or dual-licensed like Mozilla and OOo.

I forgot to mention yesterday morning that gobby rocks. I expect to use it (or something like it) for more collaborative meetings in the future. We used it at the summit to take notes for a couple of sessions, and it was quite nice, though it did crash once on me without bringing up bug-buddy.

Software I poked around yesterday included Digital Bicycle’s Sprocket, a mashup of a blog tool, metadata editor, and torrent creator, and the Broadcast Machine, which I think is something someone in gnome should look into to create a gnome.tv for guadec and other related videos; we’ll be playing with it at work, I think, to distribute our content.

Jim Grisanzio has a great post on doing an open project in a closed company. Really, really great point by point advice- something I’m sure I’ll point people to in the future. (Could have used it yesterday, in fact, in conversation with one of the media folks.) It isn’t always clear that Sun as a company Gets It, but it is increasingly clear that many of Sun’s employees Get It at a pretty deep level, and that’s great.

lunchblogging! This is sort of like pie blogging except from the berkman’s lunch series.

Today’s speaker (sort of, he describes it as more of a panel) is Daniell Krawczyk of DigitalBicycle. Deeply ironically, our streaming hardware died right before lunch, so there is no stream. :/

Daniell says that in the past there have been collaborations to create media between local cable channels, but they have fizzled because of the physical limitations. They feel like local/community cable channels can now work with local community producers to create programming more collaboratively, if they have the right tools. No need to send tapes/dvds around, etc. Central theme is building community through media. The first target user group is existing community content producers- for example, Princeton’s University Channel (represented here by Donna Liu), which creates and distributes content from various universities. [Looks like they have lots of interesting content.] Later he calls this ‘building a network out of a confederation.’

Their goal at Digital Bicycle is to pull existing technologies together to build an open platform for people to share copies of the media they’ve created, and with other distribution centers those individuals are tied to- cultural/ethnic/geographic distribution centers. Work with bittorrent, drupal, rss, xml/rpc. They use mp4 as the codec, which they feel is less sucky than most other options in terms of openness. Goal is definitely broadcast-quality- with mp4s, still need 5-700MB/hour of data for that.

Definitely plan not to be a central media host a-la ourmedia, but more of a torrent tracker than anything else.

Daniell phrases one question very well- why is it so much easier to get things that the owners don’t want me to get than things the owners do want me to get?

Also here is Tim Halle of the Project for Open Source Media, who sounds like someone the fluendo guys should talk to. Maybe they need to update their news page, though. ;) They want to provide a platform for open, interactive TV that bypasses the cable channels completely- imagine having an open standard settop box that serves up content via a TiVO-ish menu that is based on RSS/torrent/etc.

Also here is Jesse Lerman of the Princeton Server Group, which makes tools for community TV stations (i.e., poor stations :) to become very digital- something big commercial stations did ages ago at high cost.

Daniell summarizes that for this to be successful it needs to have four components: Prepare (the video), Share (basically upload it more or less), deliver (easy for people to grab it), circulate (focused in their case on public access, to paraphrase him poorly).

Turns out that most public access channels actually have contracts with the cable providers that if they can fill all their hours with a certain amount of original content, they are entitled to additional channels.

Would like to see all public access offices/centers become torrent hubs for all the video stuff as well.

Daniell thinks this is a great opportunity for all public access, though it is a bit scary, because they are mostly dependent on cable companies and cable service fees for funding- if commercial cable dies, they are in serious trouble, even if the ‘net has replaced cable as their primary distribution method.

If all this stuff pulls together, it’ll be really interesting- leverage existing content creation centers who are good at what they do, creating a center of gravity and some momentum around digital distribution of content.

Dave Weinberger has also written up the lunch.

Some people asked at the summit about how to get more involved (including in the context of me getting less involved); if you’ve got some reasonable GNOME experience in any of a number of fields (including QA, building GNOME, release note writing, wiki cleanup, etc.), Uncle Elijah Wants You on the release team.

Summit was a lot of fun. Good to see people, of course, and good to see lots of hacking going on. We saw in the closing demos of lots of stuff that I have now forgotten due to lack of sleep but which I’m sure Jorge will blog faithfully about. The perf guys seem to have gotten a lot done too, though nothing to demo. Bottom line: successful, fun conference that moved us ahead in quite a few places. Looking forward to next year.

Yay us.

I think it might be worth experimenting with doing more targeted summits in the future, perhaps quarterly or something, with interested companies hosting and pitching in to get relevant people there. For example, a summit that was 10-15 of the ‘right’ people, focused purely on performance, or purely on QA, or art, or usability, might have some big, measurable impacts. And you could cram them all in a single company’s conference room, instead of having to host them at MIT, which should cut down the costs basically to transportation.

In other conference news, am excited to hear that London LWE went very well. Hopefully it will be the first of many successes. Thomas, and/or anyone else who attended and helped out, I hope you can find some time to flesh out the Conference and Show HOWTO in the wiki.

18 great quotes from web 2.0, mostly about software/web development. Is what it says on the box.

Once upon a time, I tried writing a paper about /. moderation; the /. moderation was (for the time) pretty innovative, though the paper was a mess. Apparently the BBC is going to take the style more mainstream. Should be a fascinating experiment.

Why I wanted to meet Nathan:

• from his blog, seems like an interesting person. As Dave has pointed out, I like to collect interesting people. ;)
• There are at least some creative commons people who believe that the Free Software community should be kept at arm’s length, as the Free Software community has a raging lunatic fringe, and CC very, very actively avoids being associated with lunatic fringes. I hope we can use Nathan as our secret agent on the inside to counter that perception.
• I believe (and I think the BOF yesterday confirmed) that we have a lot of CC-friendly people in GNOME who would find working with CC fun and rewarding, so introducing Nathan to some of those people would be rewarding
• I believe that for GNOME’s sake, GNOME must work with Creative Commons or Creative Commons affiliated content creators to counter the proprietary music stores that we are never going to (legally) have.
• I think it would be healthy for CC to have a ‘CC OS’ where CC is integrated throughout the creative experience, and I hope GNOME can be that.

Besides the CC/media stuff, I had a good day at summit. Enjoyed using gobby for the cc/media bof- we projected it on the monitor and that made it possible for everyone to follow along. We’ll do the same in the QA BOF this morning, I think. Great time seeing everyone, as usual; I hope the Bostonians I snuck away from at dinner didn’t feel too hurt that I tried to have dinner with out-of-towners who I only see a couple times a year instead of them :)

Am going to have a very interesting QA BOF, where I try to be a note taker and bugmaster emeritus instead of bugmaster. That will be hard.

Seth apparently was searching for friends names on missingmoney.com, and discovered that Duke University owed a ‘Luis I. Villa’ (which is what Duke called me when they were convinced my middle name was IV) owed someone who lived at one of my old PO boxes ‘more than $100′. So I guess I’ll fill out the paperwork and see what treasure is at the end of that rainbow.

I ended up not going to State of Play, which is sort of unfortunate, but the tradeoff was that I got to spend about 10 hours with Jeff today, and he ended up falling asleep on my couch. Always good to spend time with him.

One thing we discussed quite a bit was the board and the form and role of the board. After the talk, I have decided I am going to run for the board again, and I hope to continue on the board for some time. However, I’m going to run on a different platform, aiming for a different role, and a role that I think maybe (though I’m not fully convinced of this) more of the board should adopt. Specifically, every time I’ve run for the board, the focus has been on ‘what kinds of projects are you going to tackle as a board member.’ I am beginning to think now that the right question is ‘what kinds of questions will you ask as a board member.’ The shift, at least for me personally, will be from being a board member focused on activism to a board member focused on oversight, questioning, and cultivation of other volunteers. There are some big questions that an oversight-centric board would have to focus on that in my opinion we currently do fairly poorly at. What are the goals of the foundation, and how effectively do the board’s actions (our employee, our events, our spending) meet those goals? Instead of doing things ourselves, how can the board increase the effectiveness of the foundation’s resources in meeting the foundation’s goals? Recruit new volunteers? Create new resources? Leverage existing resources? It is quite possible that the right measure of a board’s term is not ‘what did members of the board do’, but rather ‘what did members of the board guide and encourage others to do, and under what principles did they decide conflicts that came before them.’

I’m sure I’ll write more about this in the next few weeks as we come to the election.

It is probably also worth noting that I plan to transition all my GNOME involvement during the next year away from the forms of involvement I’ve traditionally done (QA, release organization, and in the past year marketing) to news and data gathering of some sort; exact details TBD. Dave might finally get LuisNews; we’ll see. My goal is to reduce the need for my timely involvement, and refocus on a task I can do in a big chunk on a saturday morning every week instead of requiring my constant attention, while hopefully still being fairly high impact, by becoming a desktop journalist with good intents, good background, etc. We’ll see, I guess. Look for this to start this weekend as I take notes in the background instead of sitting in the front. I might still goad people into action, but it’ll have to be more indirect ;)