Luke's Open Web Vancouver 2009 Write-up

I had a really excellent and energizing time at the Open Web conference. Here are my highlights:

Pirate Keynote

Rick Falkvinge of the Swedish Pirate Party gave the opening keynote. The pirates are celebrating their first win of a seat in the EU Parliament. What I found most interesting was how instead of framing the Pirate issues as a "copyright fight", he explained it as a civil rights issue. "Next generation civil rights". Should we follow the entertainment industry towards stronger copyright and IP, we must say goodbye to many civil rights and privacy issues that have been part of our society for ages. The Post Secret goes away, whistle blower protection goes away, and others. Not to mention that this quickly becomes un-enforceable as technology continues to march on. And this is all just to save some industry that has refused to adapt to the technology.

Rick also compared the current entertainment industry to the Catholic Church back a few hundred years ago. The printing press used to be a government granted monopoly. And then some guy had the crazy idea to make Libraries, and that caused a huge stir - "... but libraries would mean the unwashed masses could read and learn about our culture WITHOUT PAYING!! zomg!". History has many parallels today.

Later on I gave Rick a high five and thanked him for his work. Like a real pirate he said that we are all peers and thanked me. :)

Women Keynote

Angie (Mumble) of the Drupal project gave a talk on Women in Open Source. Her research showed (shockingly!) that women only account for ~1.5% of open source contributions. Her talk focused on how men and women can help change that. Good Stuff.

Tor

I had hear about Tor for a while, through the Vancouver HackerSpaces club, but never completely understood it. Jacob Applebaum (@ioerror) gave a great security talk on Tor. Tor is a secure anonymous proxy for internet communications. He presented how this technology is useful for different kinds of people: regular citizens, companies, law enforcement, whistleblowers, and activists.

The most interesting part was that all the Tor sites were blocked from our new $800 million dollar convention centre. :( Bell runs the internet service there and has a sneakier proxy than the Great Firewall of China. Their firewall was pretending to be the Tor servers and serving TCP Resets to block the traffic. This is really bad IMO. There are many totally legal reasons for using these tools - and we simply cannot have taxpayer dollars paying for a completely opaque firewall run by an un-accountable company in a public place. Not cool.

Future of Web Apps

This presentation was by two Mozilla researchers, who showed what the latest browser technologies are, and what the future of the web tools will look like.

They demod the new HTML5 Canvas mode, and how easy and performant it was. They live-coded a simple text editor. Cool stuff. Felt very much like old school graphics programming, with bitblts and stuff.

Thunderbird

David Ascher gave an interesting talk on email and where Mozilla thunderbird is going. I have never considered using thunderbird, but their latest version may be cool enough to give it a try instead of Apple's Mail.app.

They have started providing useful summary views for folders, using the protovis library to produce very nice looking graphs showing your usage.

Identi.ca

The final talk of Thursday was by Evan Prodromou about laconi.ca and identi.ca (microblogging). It kinda felt like a sales pitch as Evan talked all about what he has been doing to build a decentralized microblogging ecosystem.

There are two "emerging standards" if we can call them that.

First, laconi.ca uses the Twitter REST API, so that all the twitter clients "just work" with laconi.ca. We could consider doing this as well.

Secondly, there is the openmicroblogging API to support federation to other servers and systems.

The interesting thing about laconi.ca's federation model is that it is not a server-to-server federation - it is a user-to-user federation. So I just subscribe to a user on another server (via a URL), and then those systems post messages back and forth. But there is no "server configuration", it's all done on the user level with tools like oauth. I think this makes the problem space much simpler.

Open Web Testing

On Friday morning at 8:30 (gasp) I gave my talk on open web testing. My message was basically that you need a Balanced Breakfast of testing strategies - that automation is just one part of your strategy along with manual testing and unit testing. I showed how we at Socialtext had evolved our test strategy over time, from unit tests & manual testing (2006) to qa led wikitest automation (2007) to developer led wikitest automation (today).

You can hear the first 5 minutes of my talk here: http://audioboo.fm/boos/29845 And you can find some notes from my preso here: http://www.openwebvancouver.ca/node/101

I had really good feedback from this talk. I was a bit nervous going into it, as it wasn't a "tools talk", where I made recommendations about which tools to use and how. Instead it was more about the team and the process and doing things with intention and looking at the broader picture. But the feedback was very positive exactly about this, @rtanglao even said, "This talk alone makes the conference worthwhile for me."

I'll be giving this same talk at YAPC.

My slides are here: http://awesnob.com/web-testing/index.xul (but it only works in Firefox)

Javascript Mobile Development with PhoneGap

Some vancouver hackers I know at Nitobi gave a talk on a framework they've built called PhoneGap, which allows developers to build HTML/CSS/JS applications that get bundled & built for mobile devices. They have created the "glue code" for iphone, bberry, and androids (with more coming) to provide simple Javascript APIs for all the cool features on these mobile devices.

One of my hacker friends, Joe, had created a simple android app for the conference itself with the schedule and conference twitter screens. It was suuuuper useful. This weekend, I pulled down the source and started re-writing the app for the upcoming YAPC conference I'll be going to.

Vancouver's Open Data

@david_a_eaves gave a talk that presented what the City of Vancouver has just done to promote Open Data & Open Standards. The City became the first city in the world to pass an open data, open standards, open source motion. David explained that "all web 2.0 sites have a bargain to their users". In this case, the bargain is that the city will begin to open up it's data, and in exchange us hackers need to build cool things.

Really exciting stuff - the room was packed.

After this talk and a quick lunch break, we had a "sandbox session" where several city staffers (the Head of the city's IT, and many others) sat with Open Web hackers in several small groups. We brainstormed where to go next with the open data, and then shared it at the end. Really awesome stuff. My favourite outcome was the creation of a vancouver-data google group to continue the discussion.

At the end of the session I gave a sincere thank you to the city folks for coming to "our turf" and taking time out of their day to talk with us as peers. I said it felt like "the future". I was surprised as the room erupted with applause and a standing ovation for the city folks.

Open Web, Open Mind

My friend @keeth gave a talk about meditation and some web resources. He is just launching a new site called http://findmeditation.com that walks people through guided meditations and puts them in contact with a meditation instructor.

Keith guided the audience through a 15m visualization exercise that seemed to fly by. Good stuff.

Hackerspaces

Finally I helped present a talk on HackerSpaces to an extremely small audience. It was super fun though.

Wrap-up.

Overall it was incredibly energizing week-end and weekend. Lots of talk about social media and social tools within organizations, and lots of energy about citizen engagement. Excellent times!

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Net-Parliament

I've started hacking some code to scrape http://parl.gc.ca and to pull down data on Members of Parliament, Government Bills and Voting details. My idea is to pull down this data into a KiokuDB (cause I want to give it a whirl), and then to create a webapp that exposes this same data with a nice RESTful interface for other people to build on.

So far, I've got the scraper code done as Net::Parliament. I'll probably push it up to CPAN once I feel it is ready and stable.

The other code I'm working on is called parlapi, and it is a Catalyst webapp that will display the data scraped via Net::Parliament. I hope to expose HTML, Text and JSON representations of most of the data, as well as splicing it up into different views. Perhaps I'll throw in some Webhooks too.

I'll try to keep this blog posted.

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My open source calendar

I just (re-)discovered my Open Source Calendar that marks my contributions made on github to open projects. So far my longest streak is 11 days. :)

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Thank you for the Tests

If there is one thing the Perl hackers at Socialtext have to be thankful for, it is the generous number of unit tests left by the founding generation of developers.

We've now got ~16,000 unit tests, ~1,800 API tests, and ~20,000 selenium test steps covering Socialtext. A solid run through this battery of tests gives us a lot of confidence in our software.

When our team makeup shifted recently, we decided that the developers would convert the story tests into BDD style tests. This then allows our talented qa people to spend more time with the product, testing and trying to break it. Importantly, it allows our testers to keep up with our developers without getting bogged down writing test automation. Now that developers are writing behaviour level testing, we can start with high level failing tests, and then work our way through the story tests.

The power of this is liberating.

So my appreciation goes out to all the past and present Socialtext hackers who keep us well tested.

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Lightning Renegade

At the 2009 Victoria Juggling Festival, I wanted to use my skills and present something at the Renegade Show. Renegade is an MC'd open stage show where people are encouraged to try out crazy ideas and new tricks. It's generally hilarious and impressive. This year was no exception.

Unfortunately this year, I've been doing way more facilitation and group work than I have been juggling. I'm a pretty good juggler, but I feel there are others in the festival with much better presentations of those skills. So I always try to do something fun and quirky, perhaps showcasing other people or working with them.

Several weeks ago, one of the festival organizers asked me to MC the Renegade show. So I started collecting ideas. Later on, we discovered that Tall Matt from Seattle had some good ideas for Renegade, so I was very happy to let him take the reigns. He did a great job as the Renegade Police. I talked with Matt early in the evening to suggest some ideas for the show.

I ended up doing 2 pieces in the show. First up, About half way through, Officer Matt called up Inspector Closs to present the results of the Jugglefest Poll I had taken earlier in the evening. The Poll was really fun to create, and then to get everyone to take it. It was cool, cause I got to be present with almost everyone at the festival for a few minutes. Presenting the results was pretty funny too. The best heckle was when I commented, "Now this one I found interesting ..." and pointed at the question. Tony Duncan shouted out, "FINALLY!". It was great.

For the second piece in the show, I decided to borrow an idea from the Perl Community, and the larger open source community. I wanted to take the idea of Lightning Talks - a super fast rotation of several presentations to the juggling masses. So before the show, I went around at asked 10 people if they could fill a 1 minute slot in my mini-show within a show. Only 1 minute is a pretty low barrier, so many people that wouldn't normally be in the show jumped in. I ended up with 13 acts, and being as it was the first one, I thought that was OK. In the future, I'd keep it at 10.

So when I was called down, I asked all the performers to come down to the stage. I set the ground rules: you have 1 minute (Matt had a timer), and you'll get the gong (in this case the tibetan chimes) if/when you go over. And with that, I opened it up to the acts. I had my ipod hooked up to the stereo, and played a different song (fairly randomly) for each performer.

I think this is a pretty good pattern - it encourages short little bits you wouldn't normally see, and helps build confidence for newer presenters/performers. I would love to hear about other people copying this idea at other festivals.

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2009 Victoria Jugglefest High Low Goal Crush Bane Surprise

Hey folks, I thought I'd spam everyone with my 2009 Victoria Jugglefest Wrap-up.

First, I have 2 pictures to share:

• The official Poll results: http://www.flickr.com/photos/48172732@N00/3423435140/in/photostream/
• The official games results: http://www.flickr.com/photos/48172732@N00/3422627499/

I have some video footage, I'll probably put that up some where.

Here is my High/Low/Goal/Crush/Bane/Surprise

Highs:

• leaving vancouver on a beautiful friday afternoon with a van full of jugglers!
• getting to better know many new people
• Listening to I'm on a Boat! as we boarded the BC Ferry
• Meeting the Vancouver hoop crew on the ferry
• Really nice feedback on my poll
• Really positive feedback about my Lightning Renegade act
• A nice looking festival t-shirt!

Lows:

• ipod to stereo connector stopped working on the trip, but the silence was still enjoyable
• no volley club

Goals:

• Contribute to the festival: YES - games & a poll
• Contribute something to renegade: YES - poll & lightning renegade:
• Use the large pad: YES - was perfect for polls and games results
• Make the best use of the jugglevan: YES - was almost always full

Crushes:

• yuki's limbo-juggle skills

Banes:

• damn ipod connector

Surprises:

• how many cool new people I got to know
• how quickly the idea of a summer vancouver festival went from a joke in the ferry lineup to having possible locations, a chair and a vice chair!

What can I say, a near perfect festival!

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Coming up in 2009

My summer is starting to feel busy already!

Some highlights:

• Victoria Juggling Festival
• I may have something to do with the Renegade Show (Friday night ~10pm at UVIC) - come if you're nearby.
• I will probably run juggle games on Sunday - suuuper fun
• Open Web Vancouver Conference - June 11-12
• I'm thinking of proposing some talks for this conference. I really enjoyed several of the talks last year.
• Talk ideas:
• Something about building the open web behind the firewall. That's what we're doing at Socialtext, and I think it can be an interesting talk to see what technologies work and don't work outside of the public open web, in the private open web.
• I can always give a talk about testing with open web technologies. The Wiki Tests system we've built at Socialtext is really quite cutting edge.
• Distributed Global Development for Fun and Profit - this is a talk I would like to give, similar to a talk on distributed agile I gave at the Agile Conference in 2007.
• Webhooks - I really dug giving a webhooks lightning talk at the last Vancouver Perl Mongers.
• And I really should dust off my "Juggling multiple languages in the enterprise environment" talk I gave at YAPC::NA 2005 - it was really well received and fun.
• Yet Another Perl Conference 10! - A bunch of vancouver perl hackers will be going to Pittsburgh for YAPC!
• Perhaps I should give some of the above talk ideas there too. More bang for my presentation buck.
• Beginning of July - Road trip in BC - Perhaps drive up to port hardy, take the ferry up to prince rupert, and then drive over to the rockies and then south and then east through the kooteneys.

I'd love feedback on any of the talk ideas (just hit the comment button), or on ideas for the trips.

Support your local economy!

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2009-02 Retreat Wrap up

I'm super happy to report back to the tribe that I just held (my first) day-long retreat here in Vancouver. After a retreat in Oaxaca, I really wanted to bring that energy and space to some of the people in my social network. It took me about 15 months of getting the right pieces in place and a friend putting his hand on my shoulder and saying, "Just pick a date, the rest will fall into place". And so it did. :)

I put together a single day retreat, with 3 ~2h sessions, a lunch and snacks. Out of ~40 people invited, 20 came to the retreat. I booked the Dharma Lab in Vancouver, a open studio space used by yoga, martial arts and sitting groups. There were no chairs, instead we were offered the use of sitting pillows. :) Expecting to be sore the next day, I was surprised that all the feedback I got was positive (so far! :). Beth said, "Sitting on plastic chairs all day isn't comfortable either."

Largely based on Jerry's format of open dialog and light moderation, I drafted a rough agenda (which I kept mostly hidden from the group) with 3 broad questions for each session. Before the retreat, I had set up a Socialtext wiki for retreaters to create a little profile and contribute what their challenges and questions for 2009 were. The day before the retreat, I made notes of all the different questions, and fit them into the 3 sessions. I had all of this on an index card FTW.

The idea I had in mind for the retreat at the start of 2009 was "making space". How are we creating time and space in our lives for our various passions and pursuits? What are the parts of that we're having trouble with?

Before the retreat, Jen bought a set of bells that produced a beautiful tone. This was the first time I'd use bells with a group, and it was exciting! (ha!) I realized after the retreat that the bells really got people's ears going and externally focused, and it's almost like I tricked them into deep listening. :) During and after the retreat, several people mentioned that they normally have a very active internal dialogue going, but during the retreat they noticed it was absent.

The bell led into silence, which hung in the group at times with what felt to me like excitement. I started each session with the main question, and then some of the patterns and related questions people had on the wiki. In each session, we started with a sweep around the circle - a brief introduction or an answer to a question. And then we went into discussion, and I would queue people when it got busy. At the end, I'd try to wrap it up and explain the next step. I really tried to not rush the silence away - to let everyone just be there.

I guess my computer hacker background was front and centre when I didn't plan for any physical activities. Thankfully, River offered to lead the group through a fun "car and driver" exercise he learned while teaching at a Waldorf school. After we renamed it to "bicycle and driver" and played, we got into the third session refreshed.

The first session was a decompression session and opportunity for the group to find it's place. We started with the choices about time and the struggles with time that we were facing. The second session was about what each of us would do with unlimited resources. And the final session was about looking ahead specifically to 2009 and the questions the group was facing ahead.

We started off with the idea that our lives often feel so hectic and busy as we try to get things done that it's hard to enjoy the now. The pressure we put on ourselves to do things, and the fear of missing out leads us to become stressed out. We talked about making choices about how we are spending our time, and to feel good about and accept those choices as the best choices we could have made at that time. On the other end of the spectrum is being happy with our chores, even finding joy in them. And then there is being happy to just be and not be busy with many projects. We talked about failure, and how some cultures (the software dudes) stressed learning from our failures and almost celebrating them. We talked about making public commitments to do things, or commitments to your social network to encourage you to follow through with them.

Looking forward, most retreaters felt they were on the right path and wanted to do more of the same - although now with renewed energy and focus. We talked about the desire to live in the city with friends and clubs and events and people. And the desire to also live out away from people in nature, and have all the fancy green eco-living alternative energizement. We talked about the good sides of co-ops and collaborative ownership, as well as some of the downsides. Many retreaters had visions to create places where their friends and family would feel comfortable to spend time. We talked about retreaters involved in group activities - brewing beer, pottery, hacking. We talked about children and families and how they change our lives.

We finished up the retreat with most of the group at Radha, a local eatery for a big group meal with partners invited as well. It was a great way to celebrate and relax after a long, intense day.

My takeaways:

• It was worth doing, I don't often have good deep conversations with people in my social circle
• I want to repeat this experiment in 9 to 15 months
• I really like the hybrid model of living in the city, but spending time at a special place out of town a few days a week.
• I feel more confident about my path and life plans. Perhaps this is better said that I'm accepting my path and enjoying it.
• I found the term 'eco-slum' fascinating. It was used in a positive way to indicate thinking about ways to build basic human structures with design wisdom.
• I really liked the idea of putting a section on your resume called 'Failures' of projects or things you really messed up.
• I've already got ideas for the next retreat! :)

thats so great.
i hate that i missed this one- hopefully that wont happen next time!!!

contributed by Melissa Knowles on Mar 5 11:33am

Great retreat Luke! Look forward to the next one, if you'll have me again.

contributed by Chris Simmons on Mar 6 3:38pm

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