Denmark Assessment: What a Week

Posted on Published by Eugene Eric Kim

Damn. I’ve been back in the States for a little over 24 hours, and my body is still in pain. My Copenhagen trip last week started off great. It was mellow, I was walking around, exploring a new country, a new city, living in the moment while digesting my new surroundings. Then I started to meet people, passionate people full of energy, enthusiasm, and goodwill. You spend a few hours with these folks, and they blow your mind.    (L2Y)

That’s how it all started. The brain, which I had previously set to passive mode, kicked into active gear. Then WikiSym happened, and for three days and nights, I was constantly surrounded by another group of brilliant, passionate people. The brain kept consuming, and when the little safety valve in the back of my head told me to slow down, the brain kicked that valve shut and kept cranking. After dinner on the last night, slowed by a newly acquired cold and a week of little sleep, my body told me to shut it down. My brain just laughed. “You’ll be traveling for almost 20 hours tomorrow. Suck it up.”    (L2Z)

So I sucked it up. Went out for beers with a large group of people, closed down the bar, then headed to the hotel casino with the remnants of the group for a fresh batch of conversation. Shut down the casino too, and finally went to bed. A few hours later, I was on a train back to Copenhagen, and 24 hours later, I was back in San Francisco.    (L30)

Back in the day, I used to flaunt my endurance. Late night bull session? A mere jog in the park. All night work session? If the work was interesting, I’d gladly go two. Back in the day, I could back it up. Now, not so much. But old habits die hard, and now I’m paying the price. I’m suffering from severe jet lag, the cold has kicked into second gear, and I now have a stack of new information and experiences to digest into knowledge, in addition to the piles of work that were already waiting for me when I returned home.    (L31)

And you know what? I don’t regret it one damn bit. I had an outstanding time in Denmark. I saw many old friends, and made many new ones. My mind is churning with ideas, and I got a lot of work done. Sure, I could have stopped and smelled the roses a bit more than I did, but the roses are still around, and I’m smelling them now. Sadly, my body finally beat my bravado, and I’m missing the one year anniversary of Bar Camp this weekend, but it’s a fair tradeoff. Besides, that’s what the Wiki is for.    (L32)

My Danish Adventures, Day 1

Posted on Published by Eugene Eric Kim

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I arrived in Copenhagen today, a few hours late thanks to a caterers’ strike, which forced the plane coming to pick us up to stop first in Oslo for food. International travel never seems to be smooth, and that’s not even accounting for the terrorist scare.    (L2A)

The craziness started this morning (or rather, yesterday morning). My shuttle was supposed to pick me up at 5am, but at 4:20am, the dispatcher called me and reminded me to be ready in 15 minutes. I had just gotten out of the shower after a whole hour of sleep, and I responded drowsily, “You mean 5am.”    (L2B)

“No, 4:45am.”    (L2C)

After complaining for a few moments about the miscommunication (definitely their fault), I said no problem. After all, I was up, although it was a good thing I had decided to set my alarm for 4am and not 4:30am. I was out the door by 4:35am, just in time to see the shuttle pull up even earlier than expected.    (L2D)

My flight to Dulles was uneventful, and my delayed connecting flight to Copenhagen was a blessing in disguise, as it gave me more time to adjust my internal time clock. I fell asleep as soon as I got on the plane and got another three hours in before waking up at 6:30am Denmark time. My flight arrived at 10am.    (L2E)

Scandinavian Airlines is an excellent airline. The lady at the counter was friendly, professional, and apologetic for the delay, and she gave us all food vouchers, even though the delay wasn’t too bad. The plane was relatively spacious, and the seats had individual screens with a selection of movies and views of cameras attached to the bottom and front of the plane. There were also bottles of water in each seat, a welcome amenity given the recent ban of carry-on liquids. It may seem like an obvious thing to do, but United didn’t do it, and I’m willing to bet that most of the other major U.S. airlines don’t either. Its terminal at the Copenhagen airport even had these beautiful hardwood floors. (I’ll remember to take a picture when I return.)    (L2F)

I bought a calling card from CallingCards.com prior to leaving, but I couldn’t figure out how to dial the local access number, and the woman at the airport couldn’t figure it out either. Phone numbers are the next great frontier for standardization. We’ve got international standards for email and the Web, but I can’t figure out how to make a damn phone call in a cosmopolitan European city.    (L2G)

I’m staying at the Ibsens Hotel in Norrebro, historically the working class district of Copenhagen, but on the verge of gentrification today. The hotel itself is nice with helpful service at the front desk and free WiFi (in theory). However, I’ve only managed to find decent connectivity in one tiny nook near the hotel lobby. I get zero access in my room, which is a pain in the rear.    (L2H)

My room wasn’t ready when I arrived, so I slipped away to nearby cafe, Cafe og Ol-Halle for lunch. The cafe is a former workers’ bar dating back to 1892, with a cozy interior. “Cozy” seems to be a good word to describe a lot of the local eateries and cafes. I had three kinds of smorrebrod and a Carlsberg pilsner. I was a bit disappointed by the smorrebrod. They tasted fine, and I had to try them, since they’re a Danish staple, but I saw other patrons eating dishes that looked much tastier.    (L2I)

On the way back to the hotel, I passed Israels Plads, a local park. There was a large asphalt playground with kids playing basketball and soccer, and several stalls selling flowers, fruits, and vegetables. Near the park was a church, Bethesda, that advertised free Danish classes on Tuesdays and Thursdays. I saw that and thought to myself, “Excellent, I’ll stop by and learn a bit of Danish.” Sadly, it was not to be. When I returned to the hotel, jet lag and the lunchtime beer caught up to me, and I fell asleep while researching dinner options. That’s right, I was figuring out my dinner plans right after eating lunch. What can I say? I like food.    (L2J)

I forced myself to wake up after a few hours, took a shower, bought some toothpaste (currently banned from planes) and brushed my teeth, then set off for Galathea Kroen dinner. “Galathea” is the name of several Danish boats that have pursued long scientific expeditions over the past 150 years. My pocket guidebook claimed that the cafe served Indonesian food, but they only had Malaysian food and Danish meatballs. I had the meatballs, which were quite good, and another ubiquitous Carlsberg pilsner.    (L2K)

Copenhagen is eminently walkable, and it has this wonderful medieval quality. The city has this very old quality, but it’s vibrant and alive at the same time. It’s unlike any other city I’ve been to. Bikes and pedestrians own the road, with plenty of carless roads. Curiously, less than half the parked bikes I saw were locked. Walking to dinner, I passed Copenhagen University, the Nationalmuseet, the Christiansborg Slot, and other old buildings and squares. Although there are over a million people living here, it has a small-town feel, which I like.    (L2L)

Copenhagen is super liberal, moreso than San Francisco. According to my guidebook, Denmark legalized same-sex marriages in 1989. According to this week’s The Copenhagen Post, Denmark has been the world leader in foreign aid for three years running. Convenience stores have a revenue cap. If they exceed it, they have to cut back their hours. This prevents large chains from obliterating independent markets. I appreciate the spirit, but the means offends my conservative-leaning economic sensibilities.    (L2M)

Yet for all its progressive politics, Copenhagen feels very proper. People in San Francisco are wacky. We dress all sorts of ways (or not at all), homebrew bikes and Segways are ubiquitous, and there’s always a protest happening somewhere. People here just quietly go about their business. I wouldn’t have guessed the area’s political leanings had I not read about them beforehand.    (L2N)

Tomorrow, I’m going to pay my respects to Soren Kierkegaard and Hans Christian Andersen at Assitens Kirkegaard, and then I’m going to cover as much of the city by foot as possible. In the evening, I’ve got the Danish bloggers meetup. I may skip Tivoli entirely on this trip — it feels too touristy — but if I go, I’ll go on Saturday night, when they have a “toy soldier parade.” It’s also supposed to be beautiful there in the evenings.    (L2O)

Technical Debt

Posted on Published by Eugene Eric Kim

David Alban posted a link to Andy Lester‘s slides, “Get out of technical debt now!” to the San Francisco Perl Mongers’ mailing list. Andy gave the talk at a recent London Perl Mongers meeting.    (KRO)

It’s a very clever framing of a common problem. My favorite line:    (KRP)

When you can’t do the projects you must do, you are bankrupt.    (KRQ)

Update (June 29, 2006): According to Andy, he actually gave those slides at YAPC::NA 2006. Someone from london.pm happened to see his talk and posted his slides to their list.    (KS3)

The Story of Glormf: Lessons on Language and Naming

Posted on Published by Eugene Eric Kim

Jack Park recently asked about Link As You Think on the Blue Oxen Collaboration Collaboratory. I’ve written several blog posts on the matter, but there’s not much else out there. This was a great excuse for me to tell a few vignettes about Shared Language and the importance of names.    (KMO)

Glormf    (KMP)

This is Glormf, courtesy of the uber-talented cartoonist, Brian Narelle.    (KMQ)

(KMR)

Fen Labalme coined the term (originally spelled “glormph”) at an Identity Commons retreat in July 2003. We were strategizing about next steps, and we found that we were all struggling to describe what it was that we were all working on. Although we all had different views of the proverbial elephant, we were also convinced that we were talking about the same thing. In an inspired moment of clarity, Fen exclaimed, “It’s Glormf!” Much to our delight, Brian was listening to the conversation and drew Glormf for all of us to see.    (KMS)

Glormf’s birth lifted a huge burden off our shoulders. Even though Glormf was mucky, it was also real. We knew this, because it had a name and even a picture, and we could point to it and talk about it with ease. The name itself had no biases towards any particular view, which enabled all of us to use it comfortably. Each of us still had a hard time describing exactly what Glormf was, but if anyone challenged Glormf’s existence, any one of us could point to Glormf and say, “There it is.”    (KMT)

We had created Shared Language, although we hadn’t rigorously defined or agreed on what the term meant. And that was okay, because the mere existence of Shared Language allowed us to move the conversation forward.    (KMU)

Ingy’s Rule and Community Marks (KMV)

Ingy dot Net‘s first rule of starting a successful Open Source project is to come up with a cool name. I like to say that a startup isn’t real until it has a T-shirt.    (KMW)

Heather Newbold once told a wonderful story about how Matt Gonzalez’s mayoral campaign buttons galvanized the progressive community in San Francisco and almost won him the election. As people started wearing the green campaign buttons, she described the startling revelation that progressives in San Francisco had: There are others out there like me. A lot of them. I was amazed to hear her speak of the impact of this recognition, coming from a city that has traditionally been a hotbed of activism.    (KMX)

There’s a pattern in all of these rules and stories. I struggled to come up with a name for this pattern, and the best I could do for a long time was Stone Soup (courtesy of the participants in my 2004 Chili PLoP workshop). I loved the story associated with this name, the parable of how transformational self-awareness can be. But, it wasn’t quite concrete enough for my taste.    (KMY)

I think Chris Messina‘s term, “Community Mark“, is much better. Chris has actually fleshed out the legal implications of a Community Mark, which I recommend that folks read. Whether or not you agree with him on the details, the essence of Community Marks is indisputable: Effective communities have Community Marks. Community Marks make communities real, just as the term “Glormf” made a concept real. That’s the power of Shared Language.    (KMZ)

Pattern Languages and Wikis    (KN0)

Pattern Languages are all about Shared Language. Much of Christopher Alexander‘s classic, The Timeless Way of Building, is about the importance of names. In his book, Alexander devotes an entire chapter to describing this objective quality that all great buildings have. As you can imagine, his description is not entirely concrete, but he does manage to give it a name: “Quality Without A Name.” Call it a copout if you’d like, but if you use the term (or its acronym, “QWAN”) with anyone in the Pattern Language community, they will know what you’re talking about. Shared Language.    (KN1)

Ward Cunningham was one of the pioneers who brought Alexander’s work to the software engineering community. He created Wikis as a way for people to author and share patterns. Not surprisingly, an important principle underlying Wikis is the importance of names. Regardless of what you think about WikiWords, they have important affordances in this regard. They encourage you to think of word pairs to describe things, which encourages more precise names. They discourage long phrases, which also encourages precision as well as memorability. The more memorable a term, the more likely people will use it.    (KN2)

Ward often tells a story in his Wiki talks about using Class-Responsibility-Collaboration Cards to do software design. One of the things he noticed was that people would put blank cards somewhere on the table and talk about them as if there was something written there. The card and its placement made the concept real, and so the team could effectively discuss it, even though it didn’t have a name or description. (Ward has since formalized leaving CRC cards blank as long as possible as a best practice.) This observation helped him recognize the need and importance of Link As You Think, even if the concept (or Wiki page) did not already exist.    (KNG)

Open Source: Propagating Names    (KN3)

One of Blue Oxen‘s advisors, Christine Peterson, coined the term, “Open Source.” In February 1998, after Netscape had announced its plans to open source its browser, a few folks — Chris, Eric Raymond, Michael Tiemann, Ka-Ping Yee, and others — gathered at the Foresight Institute to strategize. At the meeting, Todd Anderson complained that the term, “Free Software,” was an impediment to wide-scale adoption. After the meeting, Christine called up Todd and suggested the term, “Open Source.” They both loved it. But, they didn’t know how to sell it.    (KN4)

So, they didn’t. At the followup meeting a few days later, Todd casually used the term without explanation. And others in the room naturally picked up on the term, to the point where they were all using it. At that point, they realized they had a good name, and they started evangelizing it to the rest of the community.    (KN5)

Names change the way we think about concepts, and so propagating names widely can shift the way people think about things. This is what happened with “Open Source.” This is what George Lakoff writes about in Moral Politics.    (KN6)

The mark of a good name is that people naturally start using it. A name can come from the top down, but it can’t generally be forced onto people.    (KN7)

An Inconvenient Truth

Posted on Published by Eugene Eric Kim

I saw “An Inconvenient Truth” last night. Go see it. It’s well done, and it’s not entirely upsetting. More importantly, bring someone who wasn’t already planning on seeing it.    (KL2)

My biggest takeaway from the movie: I had previously thought that there was scientific disagreement over whether or not global warming was real. Al Gore shows that this is not the case. They took a 10 percent sample of articles published in peer-reviewed scientific journals (almost 1,000 articles), and every single one of them acknowledged global warming as real phenomenon. They then took a similar sampling of articles in the popular media, and over 50 percent of them suggested that there were some scientific detractors. Propaganda stinks, but it sure is effective. (For more on this, check out Michael Shermer‘s Skeptic column in the June 2006 issue of Scientific American, spotted by the movie’s blog.)    (KL3)

This further reinforces my view on the most important challenges we need to address en route to solving the world’s biggest problems: transparency and dialog.    (KL4)

I’m a big believer in markets, but markets rely on “perfect information” to work correctly. When we live in a world that is so easily swayed by propaganda that the popular press reports that global warming is scientifically controversial and the majority of Americans believed that Saddam Hussein was behind 9/11, then we don’t have perfect information. I have no gripe with people whose beliefs are different from mine. I have a problem who base their opinions on misinformation.    (KL5)

We need more transparency in society, and we need tools that give us that transparency. For example, when I purchase food from the supermarket, I’d like to know the comparative “carbon costs” of those different items. As my friend Stephanie Schaaf has often pointed out, when you buy locally grown produce, even if it’s nonorganic, you’re helping the environment, because less energy is consumed in transporting the food. Everyone needs to know these things, and then they can decide for themselves whether or not to do anything about it.    (KL6)

One of the ways to create a marketplace of better information is by increasing and diversifying dialog. Talk is not cheap. We need more conversations with the people who already surround us, and we need more conversations with those who are different from us.    (KL7)

Several of the friends I was with bemoaned the fact that those of us watching the movie were the wrong target audience. I disagree. I don’t think the environmental community has maximized its group potential, and movies like this can help catalyze further progress.    (KL8)

Joel Makower at Worldchanging recently wrote about how Houston ranked last in last year’s SustainLane rankings for sustainable cities. The problem? Makower writes:    (KL9)

Houston’s problem, it seems, had as much to do with its lack of self-knowledge and coordination of efforts as with its actual performance. And that put it in good company — not just with other cities, but with thousands of companies that have good, green stories to tell, if only they knew about them. Sometimes, it’s the simple matter of finding the stories — along with good storytellers — that can begin a positive spiral of inspiration and innovation — leading, of course, to even more good stories.    (KLA)

Put another way: If only Houston knew what Houston knew. Now, increasingly, it does.    (KLB)

More thoughts:    (KLC)

  • Gore tells a moving story about how his father was a tobacco farmer (in addition to being a senator). His father had seen the evidence that tobacco was linked to cancer, but continued to grow it. What finally made him stop? When Gore’s sister — a smoker — died of lung cancer.    (KLD)
  • I enjoyed the presentation and the side bits, but I would have liked to have seen much more of the latter.    (KLE)
  • The movie ends on a note of hope. Gore says that we have what we need to solve the problem. He also says that we’ve solved complex world-wide problems before, and cites the hole in the ozone layer as one of them. I’d like to see other examples of this. I’m also a bit concerned about managing expectations. Wicked Problems are wicked because solutions generate more problems. The environmental problems we face today aren’t just caused by global warming, but also by environmental instability. Reducing carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere is another form of instability, and there will be consequences.    (KLF)
  • I was disappointed that things like buying local foods and Carbon Credits weren’t mentioned. For more on Carbon Credits, see Jamais Cascio‘s entry at Worldchanging and also Brad Templeton‘s thoughts (via Ping).    (KLG)
  • After the movie, I went to the web site’s Carbon Calculator to figure out my role in this crisis. It was disheartening, to say the least. My problem? I drive 20,000 miles a year. I’ve improved a bit since moving to San Francisco, as I take public transporatation more often, and I carpool when I can. I also drive a Honda Civic with great mileage. Nevertheless, I’ve got to figure out more ways to drive less.    (KLH)