CommunityWiki
Jam session in wikilandia

Source : Alex Schroeder: Diary

Auf StefanBucher's Blog habe ich gerade gesehen, dass es ein spontanes Treffen in Zürich gibt… 19:00 in der Reithalle. [1] Tja, da ich Montag eine Megasitzung habe, sollte ich ja zu normalen Zeiten fertig sein. Wenn ich alleine arbeite bleibe ich sehr oft bis neun oder später im Büro.

Source : Alex Schroeder: Diary

Source : Lion Kimbro's Blog

I wish that the software development world were like the Evolutionary Salon.

If something is very much not right in your world at the Evolutionary Salon, the solution is obvious: When everyone’s sitting in a circle, you just stand up, and speak your piece. If people really aren’t getting it, you can pull a “J” (he doesn’t want his full name listed,) and just beg, plead, crawl around on the floor, and shout at people: “GIVE IT AWAY! OPEN SOURCE! IF YOU’RE REALLY SERIOUS HERE, JUST GIVE IT AWAY!”

In these Salon’s, people actually listen. And they respond.

…

On the Internet, it’s just: Somebody else’s problem.

“Oh, Lion’s on his 5th year of working on Local Names. And he’s having another rant. Oh well, that’s sad to hear.”

…

That is, at the Evolutionary Salon, for whatever reason, we have this culture where you listen and you respond. The salon is highly inclusive — if there’s somebody who’s needs are not being met, the group struggles to find some way of responding to that. I’ve seen the miracle of that, several times over. I could only afford $100; Somebody paid most of my way through, and I was only asked for $75. (The whole expense was somewhere between $200-$500.) People volunteered a room for me.

When one man said he’d put a ton of money into his project, and it wasn’t going anywhere, a bunch of people volunteered to help him out, figure out where he’s going with it.

…

Contrast with a mailing list on a standards development group on the Internet:

If you can ignore or kill an idea, that’s one man less standing: GOOD.

…

And that precludes the idea of trying to help incorporate labor, somehow. By “incorporating labor,” I mean: trying to figure out how to make sure that people’s projects are going, and that something is happening for that person.

This goes back to what I was trying to get out before: “What if I’m wrong?”

Well, ideally, if Local Names is such a horrendous idea, then someone would say: “Your idea is deeply wrong for reason X. But what’s important here, is that we value your labor, and we value that you want to do things for people’s benefit. We’d like to invite you to work on (related) Y, or (related) Z. We’d like to include you in the process. We’d like to make sure you’re working on valuable things.”

…

Right? See? And that kind of elimination rounds thing (for some perverse, twisted reason,) is systematic. The goal of all these little mailing lists is to make sure that a particular, single standard, is left standing.

Really, the vision is straight out of Mad Max: It’s two man enter, one man leave. Make no mistake, it’s Thunderdome!

We’re about as far away from the Salon as imaginable.

…

So, what is that “perverse” reason? I think it’s the medium. I think it’s perverse that we develop software in these horrendous online forums. It may be perverse, even, that we develop software in our fragmented free time. I don’t know, really.

John Abbe, in his stay here, mentioned that he hadn’t had much success doing NVC in e-mail.

Perhaps it’s not possible for us to have Fair Process until our communications technology is simple enough and easy enough to get on the same page, and have several long real-time meetings with full voice support, and the calendaring software to get us on the same page together, so that we’re all there at the same time.

I think we like to flatter ourselves a lot, that it’s all “humans.” But the reality is that our mediums and systems and what not make that impossible. It’s 95% technology and systems, in my book; We exert the humanity we have in that 5%, and try to make our systems receptive to the human touch. (You try to get that 95% in machinery, and then make the user interface the 5%.)

(Anti-technologists don’t get it: Even a conference hall is a technology, as is all the ritual and framework and stylings around it. It’s all technology.)

…

Anyways, just some things to think about.

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As a group, the group of Free Software / Open Source / Web developers, we need to care for our own.

We need to figure out how to make sure not just that software gets developed, but that software developers are happy, that they are recognized, that they are having a good time.

And it’s wrong to just think about the developers here: We want the users in this as well. We want to extend our invitation to users everywhere, and we want the users to feel welcome to participate, to listen, to speak what they’d like, to be present.

…

Perhaps what I’m talking about is different than Sunir Shah’s idea of “Fair Process.”

Perhaps what I’m talking about is “Human Process.”

I can imagine an event like the Salon, for web software developers. Large group open face meetings, breakout sessions, group responsiveness, accountability, users and developers.

This is actually different than the Camps, which I have very high hopes for. There’s nothing wrong with the camps; They are great, high bandwidth, places for meeting up and getting some face time.

But Camps don’t really have a sense of “responsibility to others.” It’s full of opportunity, yes, but there’s no network of obligation.

Many people would say this is a positive. I would have said that it was a positive, if I hadn’t participated at the Evolutionary Salon. But now I feel differently. (This is not to criticize the current Camp movement, in any way, which I am deeply excited about.)

Hmm… I’m going to think about this one for a while.

Source : Lion Kimbro's Blog

Source : Lion Kimbro's Blog

Last Saturday through Wednesday, I was at the Evolutionary salon. Please excuse me, as I crib my post on the CommunityWiki.

“What is the Evolutionary Salon?” Probably the best place to start is the Evolutionary Salon #2 web page. Then the Evolutionary Nexus website. Perhaps look through session notes from a few of the Open Space sessions. (Hmm, looks like the wikipedia article could use some work.)

I wrote up two sets of notes: a write-up of the intro, and a write-up on the session on artificial life.

The kernel of the Evolutionary Salon is “The Great Story,” which is a mythic telling of cosmic history (as presently understood by scientists- big bang, anti-particle particle annihilation, formation of stars, supernova and then creation of next stars, and then our galaxy,) showing just how old the universe is. Then there’s a telling of evolution. This is all done in mythic / human language; i.e., God / the universe is dreaming about what it might become, before the big bang, by this story.

It’s also explained that, as scientists study more, the story may undergo change.

Where this intersects with that I’ve been doing, (and that most of us are doing,) is that the vision includes groups assembling out of humans, and humans and groups becoming aware of each other and their functioning. It also includes the plausibility of mechanical life in the future.

There is very much a community, activist, and pro-communications technology crowd. That said, it also includes (thankfully!) pagan, wiccan, religious, and other crowds, and not all of them are excited about “yet more technology.” I see this as a healthy thing, and a very balancing thing. This is primarily a human (& transhuman) story.

As one of the participants spoke, in all seriousness: “Let us not forget to include, as we move into the future, the dryads, the sylphs, the gnomes under the ground, the fairies, and the angels above.”

This is a very diverse crowd.

(Later, I informed him privately, that they are all, for sure, alive and well on the Internet. In some places, it’s very difficult to avoid them, even.)

One of the things I learned at the Evolutionary Salon, was just how great a gap’ there is between the FL/OSS/technologist/creative-commons crowd, and the offline crowd.

I’m not just talking about “how to use computers”- I mean “what do we do with them” and even “what is our approach to activism” online.

For example, there was a tendency to want to establish replicating groups, and flows of money inwards. The younger generation was asking: “Who needs money? Who needs all that stuff? This doesn’t cost anything on the Internet. And, by the way: Have you googled? Are you sure nobody isn’t doing this stuff already? Who are you networking with?”

I realized that the “networking ethic” isn’t really there. Since communication is so costly offline, it’s a much later step in their order of process.

This is just one example of a disconnect between the generations.

At any rate: Long story short, I’m writing a book now. More on it later, some other time.

Source : RecentChanges.info - all things.

Source : Alex Schroeder: Diary

Life in Text Mode lists several command-line tools I did not know. This one I did not know: clacct (not that I'm going to start to do any accounting real soon now, since I've tried ledger and stopped using it again). There are also some that have counterparts in Emacs, therefore I do not need them (the calendar, the calculator, the todo-lists, the juke box). Anyway, all the pieces on one page. I should check my own SoftwareUsed on of these days.

I was planning on listing all the services I'd like to use one day for my own little three-person company, requiring no fancy IT infrastructure, and started collecting bookmarks and lists. A Life Online: living decentralised seems to be the current state of the art, so I'll just link to them instead. And there's stuff I didn't know, too: Netvibes, NumSum, and Openomy.

Both via LesOrchard [1]

Source : Alex Schroeder: Diary

Today in the news:

1. Switzerland: Paedophile gets five years for over twenty sexual acts with children and previously convicted multiple times.
2. USA: Couple gets twelve and nine years for trying to blackmail a fast-food chain with a cut-off finger.

One of the two systems needs reform, and I don't think it's Switzerland.