TWiki 4.0 Released

Congratulations to Peter Thoeny and the entire TWiki community for the 4.0 (Dakar) release of TWiki. They’re doing a release party tomorrow (Wednesday) night at WikiWednesday in Palo Alto. I’m gonna do my darnedest to make it, but if not, I hope to see many of you Wiki folks this weekend in Portland for RecentChangesCamp. I plan on visiting Seattle afterwards, so if you’re in Portland or Seattle and want to meet up, let me know.    (K4L)

How Hackers Collaborate

The January SDForum Collaboration SIG meeting is tomorrow (Monday), 6:30-9pm, January 23 at the Pillsbury Winthrop law firm in Palo Alto. The topic: “How Hackers Collaborate.” We’ve got an outstanding set of “panelists”: Lee Felsenstein, Jim Warren, and David Weekly. Lee is a legendary hacker from the Homebrew Computer Club days, the founder of the Community Memory Project, and the founder of the Fonly Institute. Jim founded the Computers, Freedom & Privacy Conference and Info World, and was the founding editor of Dr. Dobb’s Journal. He also founded the West Coast Computer Faire, a successful series of conferences in the late 1970s and early 1980s that was directly inspired by the Homebrew Computer Club. David is the co-creator of SuperHappyDevHouse, a Bay Area-based monthly hacker gathering.    (K3V)

I call them “panelists,” because this won’t be a traditional panel. This will be highly participatory, an opportunity to share your stories about hacking with others. It will be entertaining, engaging, and educational. So please come! (It’s free for SDForum members, $15 for everyone else.)    (K3W)

BAR Camp this Weekend

Chris Messina and others are organizing BAR Camp this weekend at Socialtext‘s offices in Palo Alto. It’s a grassroots gathering of techies doing cool stuff that’s open to all, an open alternative to O’Reilly’s invitation-only FOO Camp, which is happening the same weekend in Sebastopol. Even though it was literally organized this week, a lot of cool folks have already signed up, and it looks like it’s going to be a blast. Hope to see you there!    (JOC)

FLOSS Usability Sprint Redux

We wrapped up the FLOSS Usability Sprint last Sunday, and I’m just about recovered. It was a wonderful, wonderful event: thought-provoking, inspiring, and most importantly, productive. The key, as always, was having a great group of participants, great facilitation (thanks to my partners in this endeavour, Allen Gunn and Katrin Verclas), and a great space (thanks to Jeff Shults, environmental and listening master). Also, many thanks to our sponsors, without whom this event would not have been possible.    (ICD)

We accomplished many things. First and foremost, we helped improve the usability of the six projects that participated: AMP, Chandler, CivicSpace, Fotonotes, Identity Commons, and OpenACS. So far, the follow-through with this event has been significantly better than that of previous events with which I’ve been involved, and we’ll be able to point to some very concrete achievements that are a direct result of the sprint.    (ICE)

Second, we explored several broader issues surrounding usability and Open Source software. It was an unbelievable learning experience for everyone involved. Those of you who have heard my Blue Oxen spiel know that my ultimate goal is to foster a Learning Community around collaboration. My claim is that these collaborative learning processes are many times more effective and accelerated than traditional learning methods. They are also better suited for continuous learning. Our participants got a first-hand taste of this phenomenon this past weekend.    (ICF)

Third, we laid the groundwork for what I hope will be a burgeoning community devoted to improving the usability of Open Source software. This will not be a quick process, and it will depend on brilliant, passionate, good people. We were fortunate to have forty of them at our event, and I’m already looking forward to reconnecting with all of them.    (ICG)

I’m in the process of writing up a final report about the weekend’s accomplishments, but if you’re interested in seeing the unpolished artifacts of the event itself, check out the sprint Wiki and the photo gallery. I’ll also be speaking about the event at next month’s BayCHI (March 8 in Palo Alto), and I hope to see many of you there.    (ICH)