dave.ofmassdestruction.com

Ruby of OrangePolitics.org led a free-flowing discussion on online communities, activism, volunteerism, etc. I’ve been a lurker of her site for a long time so it was great to finally meet her. I come out of this talk with more of an impetus to make sure everything we do at Intrahealth is as transparent as possible. We are a non-profit and people would rather volunteer for a non-profit than a for-profit organization – but we have to make sure people understand everything we are doing before they will help out.

The last talk I went to (I skipped the last sessions) was Luis Villa’s musings on open web services. Just declaring all web services should be open source is an easy thing to say but is a place we just aren’t at yet. Luis is thinking about it as an unpaid intern at Red Hat for the summer (before returning to law school). I think its a topic I need to think on a lot more before attempting to comment on here. Nonetheless I like Luis’ first thoughts on defining what it is he wants to see from open web services:

• source code
• personal data available to users
• public data available to everyone
• permanence
• identity

That last point is in the sense of OpenID or ClaimID – Luis and Fred need to talk.

By the way, Luis, I didn’t get the impression that you were mooching, or had even made a mistake in stating your motivations. I’m glad you have a motivation to think of such things. It was a good discussion.

Quote of the day: I think I want to grow a UNIX beard – Luis Villa

Today is BarCampRDU – so far its going about like it did last year. Which is to say, a great place to “network” with local folks doing cool things while the talks are very hit-or-miss. Probably the gist for most unconferences.

I went to Brad’s BZR talk and learned some cool things about it but the talk was shared with a guy from Red Hat who spent too much time slamming SVN and CVS instead of telling me something new. Honestly, for all the bitching about CVS it was a very heavily used tool that did a lot of good, especially in the open source world. Its out-of-date for sure, but let’s give it its props.

I also have gone to a talk about Open Moko which was a yawner. I didn’t learn anything beyond the fact that it will be a while before its a usable thing. Sounds like there are some real big design disagreements on the core team.

Also the guy who gave the talk kept saying Ubuntoe Leanux – very disturbing. He’s also in the Jigs of RAM school.

More later.