connecting*the*dots

Thanks, Chris & Tara.

(photo snapped by Яick Harris and photoshopped by miss_rogue)

Let me fan out my geek cards on the table, face up, before I begin this post…

I’m all about open source, open content, open collaboration, etc., but I’m also East Coast, so please, FOC’s on the West Coast, help me out with this whole FooCamp debate.

Why do some consider Tim O’Reilly’s annual invite-only event of a few hundred friends, employees and people he thinks are interesting to collaborate and have some fun with, such a bad idea?

Dave makes an argument that the closed aspects of FooCamp sync up with the mindset of investors financing a narrow set of “proven” technology, which, he argues, leads to the formation of a bubble culture.

But couldn’t that be said about any closed event? I mean, Yahoo! has “Hack Days” for Yahoo! employees. Isn’t this the ultimate example of a closed event? (thanks to Chris for letting me know in the comments about the open Yahoo! Hack Day coming soon)

At least O’Reilly sends out invites to people outside of his staff… right? Or am I missing something here? Tim O’Reilly’s words:

…”You have to understand the objectives of the event. Its primary purpose is to make sure that O’Reilly’s editors, conference planners, and technical strategists are exposed to new thinking from people who are on our radar but haven’t necessarily been part of our community. Second, it’s to make sure that our individual contacts become collective contacts. Third, it’s to create a great mix of old friends and new, so that it doesn’t become “same old, same oldâ€?, and there’s always new blood.”…

That actually sounds progressive, especially from a business management perspective.

I mean, I dig what Dave’s saying on a philosophical level regarding closed-mindedness, but O’Reilly’s explanation seems to put that puppy to bed pretty quickly. Also, while I’m completely supportive of Chris and Tara’s BarCamp explosion as an alternate, open collaboration vehicle, even Tara accepted her FooCamp invite… so how can it be so bad for the industry?

If we could wipe out closed-events from the face of the planet, maybe open events-only would dent a VC-driven path to another bubble. But back on Earth, in this capitalist society of ours, people go after the short-term buck with the most tested approach available. Absolute conference “openness” can’t compete with the corporate investment mindset of my fellow East Coast money-men (I’m not a money man, I just lived next to them in a past life ;)

And seriously though, doesn’t this noise kinda give the influence factor of Foo a uranium supercharge?

Along those lines, does anyone know O’Reilly’s position on Israel’s right to exist? (heh)

We’re now a month away from the public launch of Krugle; a service that has positioned itself as the one-stop shop for developers to find open source code. If they can pull this off — provide an organized and retrievable library of structured code snippets — they’re bound to fast-track open source development, both within traditionally closed domains and innovative, freelance environments alike.

A snippet from Dylan Tweney’s Wired article:

Krugle, which launches officially next month, indexes programming code and documentation from open-source repositories like SourceForge and includes corporate sites for programmers like the Sun Developer Network. The index will cover around 100 million pages of what company founder Ken Krugler terms the “technical web” — high-quality technical pages for professional programmers. (By contrast, Google’s index covers about 11 billion pages.)

“This winds up being a window on all the open-source code in the world,” said Krugler, who estimates the Krugle index will contain between 3 and 5 terabytes of code by the time the engine launches in March.

The new service joins other source-code search engines like Koders and Codefetch, but Krugle intends to differentiate itself by allowing developers to annotate code and documentation, create bookmarks and save collections of search results in a tabbed workspace. Saved workspaces have unique URLs, so developers can send an entire collection of annotated code to a co-worker just by e-mailing a link.

Krugle also contains intelligence to help it parse code and to differentiate programming languages, so a PHP developer could search for a website-registration system written in PHP simply by typing “PHP registration system.”

If Krugle can be as intelligent as they claim, providing the capability to reduce gloms of source code into retrievable objects, not only by language, but by micro-functions as well, this could be the beginning of something huge.

The Contract And The Ammunition

No, I’m not talking about a professional hit. Well, kinda. Let me explain.

For the past three months, I’ve been volunteering part-time with the Participatory Culture Foundation, managing their Bounty County blog. In essence, I post submissions from organizations or funded individuals who are looking to pay individuals from the development community to complete specific open source bounty projects. I also cull the web for existing bounties, posting them within the Bounty County realm for one stop shopping.

One-stop shopping is becoming a theme in this post.

With the percept of open source evolving beyond the realm of specific code or pure ideology into an actual infrastructure for developers to find usable code and then smartly reshare structured, organized code snippets (Krugle), opportunities are beginning to reveal themselves; opportunities beyond just increased productivity within corporate or home offices.

Bounty County is a centralized location for developers to find open source bounties — a much more forward thinking concept than it’s current static execution. If Krugle can harness the energy of the open source development community, it only makes sense to develop a dynamic marketplace for sponsors to:

• post project bounties
• provide pointers to source material
• update project status

Well, I’ll be damned. That short list just happens to be the core features of the static Bounty County site.

Hey, Chris! Getting Nick and Ken together might not be a bad idea, no?

Open source developers know all about bounty projects, but for those of you who aren’t in the know and/or are looking to start working with open source, let me get you up to speed.

Bounties are mini-open source projects that individuals or companies will sponsor to get implemented. More often than not, a bounty project consists of fixing a known bug in a platform or product for a fee ranging between $50 and $300. Depending on where you look, you might even be able to find larger, more complex projects, with bounties upwards of $4,500.

Well, starting this past Monday, you don’t have to look all over the place to find a project to work on.

The Participatory Culture Foundation’s latest project, Bounty County, is your one stop shop for open source bounty projects and I’m serving as the volunteer… blogmaster?

Nicholas Reville is the the man with the plan and Matt Brett is the in-house guru, but I’ll be responsible for culling and posting bounties, and hopefully, steering the evolution of this blog into a dynamic interface and down the road, a sustainable market for forward-thinking, open source collaboration between funded resources and roaming talent.

Welcome to the county.

As I tried to explain to Anil, my move over to Wordpress was more of a philosophical move than a practical move. It’s absolutely true that I’m primarily a designer and writer (and not a programmer in the very least), and a simple interface for publishing my thoughts is a priority, but I’ve been feeling a bit too much like a Monday morning quarterback recently. I mean, honestly, how can I speak about the benefits of open source design/development, when I’m adverse to stepping out of my controlled TypePad experience to get my hands just a little bit dirty with Wordpress?

Anil, Ben/Mena Trott and crew over at Six Apart have a range of reputable services that meet the needs of a range of people and organizations; I just happen to be one person who has morphed out of their persona set. So to the fabulous ladies of TypePad support — Carla, Kymberlie, Colleen, Laura — thank you for everything, but I’m moving on to the Wordpress community. Speaking of community, a handful of people helped me get this WordPress blog up and running with relative ease:

• Christine, of the Ultimate Tag Warrior plugin fame, helped me pull my .php tweaks together from across the globe, in-between working her garden and prepping for a dinner party.
• Ianiv, of blogginghelp.com, pointed me in the right direction to get my permalinks synched up with my TypePad permalinks. His response time was practically immediate.
• The WordPress Codex community is full of helpful people and an immense library full of support threads.

So, I’m finally using the open source software I’ve been so geeked about. I gotta admit… it’s fun floating about, tweaking code and using a tool by the people, for the people.

UPDATE: Here’s a perfect example of why I’m finished with Typepad. I’m trying to download all of the images from my TypePad account (yeah, I know, I should’ve kept a local folder) and they don’t allow FTP access. This is the response I received from my help ticket to get FTP access:

“I apologize for the confusion. Currently, there isn’t a way to download all of your files at once, you’ll have to access each separately and download that way. We apologize for the inconvenience.

We’ll be looking at adding more options to the File Manager for a future release, so thank you for letting us know you’d find that helpful.”

Providing FTP access to my files is TypePad feature dependent? I’m sorry, but that’s bogus.