Lars Pind

Nick Denton: The 80% Company. Thanks to Simon.

Counterpane/Bruce Schneier’s Crypto-Gram: What happens when you mix the online world with the offline world: How about writing a small Perl script that’ll search Google for “request catalog address state zip” and fill in all the 250,000 forms found with the address of someone you don’t like. And then just sit back and watch while the USPS dutyfully executes the sneakerware denial-of-service attack for you. Scary thought.

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I’m slowly catching my breath after a few very hectic days here, with more than 70 people from 12 countries participating in our seminar and conference here on .LRN and OpenACS. I’ve been having a big smile on my face pretty consistently since Tuesday last week, when the first people popped up in our office.

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Check out Jarkko Laine’s excellent photos with funny commentary from the recent .LRN/OpenACS seminar/conference/socializing in Copenhagen.

I’m slowly catching my breath after a few very hectic days here, with more than 70 people from 12 countries participating in our seminar and conference here on .LRN and OpenACS. I’ve been having a big smile on my face pretty consistently since Tuesday last week, when the first people popped up in our office.

I’ve been amazed to see how well this event, and in particular some of my more obscure ideas about it, have worked out.

For the .LRN seminar on Thursday, we had a pretty small room available for so many people (70+), but Advice, from whom we’re subletting, and all the other companies in our office building, were very helpful and accomodating, and they’d rearranged their days a bit, so we could have the whole basement for ourselves. That made it all work, so we could “spill out” a bit from the room.

I wanted to encourage networking among our participants. To do that, I’d arranged all the chairs in a circle, even though it was a bit tight, so everybody could see each other, and not just each others’ necks. And I’d planned for a round where participants from the educational institutions present could introduce themselves and their reason for being here. That worked out really well, and all the breaks we’d put in were filled with a frenzied buzz. My favorite part was when Ronald from from Cambridge University asked me to point out and introduce him to the other participants also from Cambridge. Another great moment was when I finally met Jeff Davis, with whom I’ve been pretty closely on and off since January 2000—for more than 3 years. I had serious problems getting people to get back into the room for the scheduled sessions, and I loved every bit of it.

I’d also decided that instead of having someone videotape the event, we’d ask the participants to do the filming. So we passed around the camera from person to person, and though I haven’t managed to get the about 70 GB of raw digital video onto a computer yet, it seemed to work really well. And the camera survived, which is always nice :)

I’d made sure to order good food and snacks. Our participants loved the food, and the kitchen loved our participants. Good spirits all around.

After the sessions were all completed, we had about an hour and a half for more networking (2 hours according to the program, but we’d run 30 minutes over time, even though we’d cut significant chunks of the program). We had some beer and wine here, before we walked everybody to Cafe Sommersko for dinner.

The dinner worked amazingly well, too. 45 people eating and drinking and paying individually can get really complicated but it actually went really smoothly. Some people got really loaded, some starting hitting on each other a bit. It all added to the enjoyable atmosphere.

Friday morning, we’d been rather ambitious about the starting time: 9.30 am. By 9.45 a bunch of people had actually showed up, and around 10 am we decided to start the show. My friend Alexander had asked if he could facilitate our Open Space meeting, and of course he could. So after I’d opened the meeting, Alexander started explaining the simple rules and concept behind Open Space.

Normally when you do an open space meeting, it takes a couple of minutes before people start getting up to suggest topics. But not with this crowd. Even before Alexander had finished talking, Danielle and others had already gotten up to start writing topics.

Friday was the more internal day for people already working with OpenACS, whether as users, developers, project managers, or something else. And we had about 20 workshops about things like encouraging diversity in the community, marketing OpenACS and .LRN, and of course about a number of more technical issues such as a content management system, internationalization, and external authentication.

At the end of the day Friday, Al was so enthused, that—to his later and Talli’s immediate regret, I’m sure—he suggested a group hug. I’m suspecting he meant it as a joke, but we were some who took him up on it. Over and over again all through Saturday night. Oops :)

As Friday drew to a close, I’d written up on a whiteboard our home address and two headers: “Cook” and “Eat”. Then I rang the bell and simply said something like “I’m inviting you all over to dinner at my place tomorrow night at 6pm. I’m not going to organize or do anything myself, so: If you want to volunteer to cook, put your name under ‘Cook’ and show up at 4pm, and if you just want to eat, put your name under ‘Eat’ and show up at 6pm. Figuring out where it is and how to get there is up to you.”

Pretty quickly, a team centered around Al Essa and Michael Hebgen had formed to do some cooking. I told them that they’d have to figure everything out themselves. I’d wait for them at my place at 4pm and point them towards the local supermarket. From there, they were on their own. In my own mind, this was an experiement, but I figured that the worst thing that could happen was that we’d just have to order some take-away food, so why not give it a shot.

It worked out excellent, and we got some really good food. To give you an idea of how eager people were to contribute, my financee Caroline were on her way out the door to get some butter, which the cookers had forgot to buy, but she was stopped in her tracks by people saying “sit down, you’re not supposed to do anything, we’ll take care of it. Just tell us where to go and we’ll do it!”

When the cooks had gotten back from the supermarket, I was talking to Nima from University of Mannheim, and it turned out he was a great jazz singer. Now, I play the piano, and I have a piano, but we hadn’t gotten it into our apartment yet, because it was still with a friend for a couple years while we lived in the US, and we’d just moved into this apartment a week before. So I figured that I’d call my friend who had it, and ask if he was home. He was. Then I called a trucking company and asked if they could pick it up and deliver it here right away. They could. “We’ll pick it up in 15 minutes”. About an hour later, the piano was installed in our dining room, and Nima and I started playing and singing “Fly me to the moon”. Awesome. (Al called me a madman for having a piano delivered in the middle of all the buzz, but I take that as a compliment.)

This self-organizing dinner party even self-organized dishwashing, cleaning, and in the end we were left with an (almost) clean apartment, and enough beer and wine to last us a very long time. And Al picked up the bill. I was so happy and grateful to everyone.

Sunday I met way too early with Don and the Greenpeace team for brunch at a cafe on Halmtorvet. The weather had finally started to behave, so we sat outdoors eating, sipping coffee and water (plenty of water, we were all pretty hung-over), and discussing greenpeace.org and Greenpeace’s desire to drive the building of a generally useful Content Management solution for OpenACS. It probably won’t surprise you that after these busy days, we just had a very quiet night and went to bed early. Ahhh.

All in all, this has been such a great experience. Eveyone’s been amazingly positive, helpful, eager to contribute, and just plain old good-hearted. I’m very grateful to be part of this community.

I’m amazed at what happens when you just provide for a little structure and context, and then get out of the way.

• See various people’s photos

Debunking the Linux-Windows market-share myth

Summary
There are dozens of reasons why people have underestimated how quickly Linux has been grabbing Windows’ market share. Windows starts out with a false boost and maintains its illusory market share even as it gets replaced by Linux. In 2004, don’t be surprised when Linux overtakes Windows to become the main focus for developers. (1,450 words)

Sounds like a welcome initiative.

Open Forum Europe is a new initiative, whose objective is to accelerate and broaden the market take up of Open Source Software (OSS) including Linux. Major vendors and distributors, software houses, services and integration companies, as well as major users are all supporting the project.

OpenForum Europe aims to strengthen the perception and credibility of the Open Source offer, particularly within Government and commercial organisations. But its credibility and ability to influence is built on delivering unbiased and accurate advice, raising awareness of real experience — benefits and issues, and helping to remove perceived and actual blockers. OpenForum Europe is designed as a non-technical initiative and focus is on commercial benefit for the user organisation.

Poul Nyrup Rasmussen, Denmark’s last prime minister, has started a web log. Cool. Now we’re just waiting for the incumbent to take up the lead. (Thanks, Peter, for pointing me to it)

Nice posting by Alexander about what we do over at Collaboraid. Thanks, Alexander.