Asymptomatic

Over the weekend, skippy flew in to hang out with me at BarCamp Philly. This was not my first unconference, but it was my first official "BarCamp" experience.

I would like to say up front that the BarCamp Philly organizers did a great job at building this event. Of the many free events I've attended over the past few years, this one was the best run of its style. Kudos to them and thanks for the wonderful effort. I want to spend a little time in this post going over not just what I think they did well, but also where I think all events of this type could stand to improve, either by following their example or doing just a little bit more.

Event Promotion

Interestingly, I think this may be the hardest one for me to judge because I'm not a promoter and I've got enough of a tap on our local community that I hear about events easily in advance of them happening. So instead of trying to see how they got people to attend, let's talk about something slightly askew....

It was bound to happen to Habari eventually, right? And in the dark recesses of my mind, I'm happy for two reasons. First because at last we merit inspection by "security consultants". Second because we are staffed well enough to have addressed the issue within a reasonable amount of time. But some questions have arisen about how to handle security announcements, and there are distinct sides on the issues.

Spinning out of Control

People are going to publish security notices about your software whether you want them to or not. Sometimes there is altruism at work - people want others to know that something is unsafe. Sometimes it's open malice - people sharing secrets of how to exploit software for their own malicious uses. In either case, as a software author, you can't control what people say about you, and specifically what exploits in your software they expose to the world. So in the end, security exploits result in more spin control than controlling the information.

Obviously, the most powerful thing you can do to spin the news in your favor is to provide an immediate release that addresses the issue. This may be harder to do with smaller teams, since you have so many fronts on which you fight: New features, documentation, support, bug-fixing, and now security-notice tracking. An advantage with open source teams is in the speed with which you can address the issue quickly and reliably, since there can be many people working at once....

Alex and I have been going back and forth in comments over the areas of our interest that overlap. In his recent post, he asks, "how long can organic communities self-moderate?"

I admit that I haven't read the Starfish and the Spider, although I did just one-click it into my Kindle, so it's doomed to suffer my analysis. Nevertheless, I had some comments about how leaderless organizations can thrive, particularly in open source communities, of which I happen to be a part of a couple.

Obviously, one of my passions is working with Habari and the people that have come together around that common goal. When we started, there were just four of us, each with various levels of ability and availability. I think you can pretty well call that "leaderless", since we all worked in tandem, and any small change any one person made was easily detected and reviewed by the other three. But as the project has grown, I think there is some kind of tragic irony in that the size of the operation inevitably leads toward a need for at least an informal management structure....

It's hard to make headway against the "leading brand" without showing exactly what sets you apart from them; what you do better. I think that Habari needs and can provide many examples of how we've taking what everyone looks toward - probably most rightly - as the "standard" in blog software, and done something radically better. This is one example that stands out firmly in my mind.

I am not the only person who has noticed that WordPress is released under the GNU General Public License. In the license, it very plainly states:

You must cause any work that you distribute or publish, that in whole or in part contains or is derived from the Program or any part thereof, to be licensed as a whole at no charge to all third parties under the terms of this License.

The only conclusion is that if your theme executes functions that are provided by WordPress, then your theme is indelibly connected to WordPress, and must itself be made available under the same terms as WordPress. more

On August 13, Berta, the kids, and I went on a cruise to the Caribbean. We made arrangements for this couple months ago via Carnival's website as our family vacation for this year. Our destination: San Juan in Puerto Rico, St. Thomas, and Grand Turk.

So on that Wednesday, we loaded our luggage into the car and drove to the port in New York City. We were running a little bit late because we had to drop off the house key with our cat sitter, and I was afraid we weren't going to make it, but we did manage to not "miss the boat". Nonetheless, that short delay did manage to affect our whole trip.

After dealing with the registration folks and boarding the boat, we were told that our state room was ready to occupy. So we went directly to our state room. What we should have done, is gone to the Phantom auditorium to watch the embarkation show. The embarkation show was a short show put on by the cruise director giving everyone the information they would need to know what was going on on the ship during the trip. Obviously, this was an essential bit of information that we somehow missed, and is really the only explanation I can see for why we hardly ever ran into any of the thousands of people who were on the ship with us....