When I first met Christine Peterson (now a Blue Oxen Associates advisor), she told me the story about coining “Open Source.” The sign of a good name, she explained, is when people naturally start using it on their own. At a meeting of developers and evangelists in early 1998, rather than argue strongly in favor [...]
(JMN) Sunday evening, August 7, 2005: (JMQ) Me: I took an incriminating photo of Ross Mayfield at Brotfabrik last night. Should I post it on my blog? (JMO) Sunir Shah: Hell yeah. (JMP) Sorry, Ross. Sunir made me do it. (JMR)
[I originally wrote this two days after the conference, but because of limited Internet access the past few days, I couldn't post it until today. -EEK] (JME) Wikimania is over. What a whirlwind three days. I’m so glad I came early for Hacking Days, because it gave me a chance to meet key members [...]
Bits and tids: (JM7) I didn’t plan my Hacking Days schedule very well. I missed most of the first day, when the Mediawiki developers apparently made progress on a new metadata design. Days 2 and 3, from which I based most of my criticism, focused on servers and reliability, an area to which I [...]
(JM5) Enjoying a brew at Restaurant “Haus Wertheym” in Frankfurt am Main. Photo is courtesy of John Breslin, who rescued me from tourism hell by recommending this restaurant for lunch. Also see John’s picture and comments of a group of us (me not pictured) at our prelunch discussion. I accidentally came out of the [...]
Today’s tidbits: (JLI) Ward Cunningham arrived this morning and gamely participated in the afternoon session, despite the long flight. At one point, he asked the Mediawiki developers what the consequences of a wrong architectural decision would be. The answers were revealing. These guys are faced with a tough problem thanks to scaling issues. By [...]
Tidbits from the day: (JLA) There’s now a conference blog. (JLB) The main order of business was Wikipedia‘s servers. As expected, they deal with some wild challenges. One amusing exchange occurred between Brion Vibber, one of Mediawiki‘s core developers, and a guy from MySQL. Brion asked if MySQL will ever support four-byte characters. [...]
Here’s a funny cartoon from Socialtext‘s recent retreat, courtesy of Ross Mayfield: (JL3) (JL4) Can you guess which one is Chris Dent? (JL5) I spotted Sunir Shah immediately, even though I have yet to meet him in person. And no, it had nothing to do with ethnicity. Sunir, looking forward to meeting [...]
I’m a veteran panel moderator. I’ve been doing it since high school, and I think I’m pretty good at it. But I’m thinking about retiring from the business. (JKL) Last week, I moderated the SofTECH / SDForum July meeting on “Architecting Community and Collaboration Solutions.” Tony Christopher had suggested me to Ron Lichty, the [...]
Seb Paquet and I were chatting on the phone last Friday, and the conversation turned to Old Boy Networks. In particular, Seb noted that it wasn’t enough to eliminate barriers to conversation or collaboration. You need to catalyze it. The oft-noted Echo Chamber nature of the blogosphere is Exhibit A in this regard. Despite the [...]
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