Tag: conferences

SXSWi: Open Source business models

Posted on by Liz

Alan Shimel, Fischer, Levin, Jarrell, Cavazos.

Questions and statements from the audience.

Alan Shimel: there’s two categories of open source community members: consumers of open source. A company who wants to use open source. using linux, php, to develop their web site. Not developers. The restrictions and licensing issues are less of a hassle and not a focus. The consumers don’t care which license it is. People who use open source as components of their products are a different category. That’s where the excitement is. Is that company who uses components and sells a product a parasite on the community? It’s this category who is the focus of recent licensing changes, the people who are selling and trying to make a profit. If you’re profiting from my work, I should profit as well. It’s useful to break it down into those two camps. I’m on both sides of the table. We use the snort engine, etc. And we have a new product coming out which is open source.

Cavazos: The term open source license doesn’t give you enough information to have a meaningful discussion.

Fischer: … creating a level playing field with alliances, standards. Can you have a kind of Microsoft gigantic Office situation? The answer is no. Leveling the marketplace. Not gigantic market share. But you can do very well. That’s one way to play open source. 2nd aspect, companies who do customization more than open source. There’s Second Life, for example. Look at how much open source software is very very good. It wouldn’t succeed if it wasn’t. In-house lawyers do need to look at the licensing because it often enforces generosity.

Cavazos: Why would we do this instead of keeping it all ourselves? Models that involves customization or consulting. We’re going to bet on ourselves. We’re okay, we’re fine with allowing the core to be out there. And we’re going to take one step ahead and use our expertise. We have the smartest people and the most creative innovators and we can create a business model around that. Consulting and customization.

Levin: VP of product strategy at Socialtext. Open source has been our model from the beginning. We used an open source product called Kwiki. A lot of our developers come from the open source community and they have their own projects… Open source for us is kind of like weather. We shouldn’t fight it, we have to live with it and work with it. My personal interest is not in licensing expertise, my interest is with respect to business strategy. How does this help my company, how does this help our customers be more productive. The question from the audience was “How can I sell this to my customer base?” That goes to one of the value propositions around open source. You’re reducing your customer’s risk. If you’re a relatively small development shop, there’s no guarantee you’re going to be around in 10 or 15 years. You’re not lockkng them in. The open source community will be there in 10 years. You’re helping your customer. That’s very valuable. It’s not just the software itself. My company has a variety of models which reduce cost for the customer of maintaining the software. And we also offer an open source download.

Don Jarrell: I worked with proprietary companies. Open source offers the freedom to cooperate. … Beyond a layer of adaptation to an integrated product. Proprietary companies who make a companion product and break down the price point. So there is an open source version with a proprietary companion product. Comparable to making a “Lite” product. The open source part can be free. Can gain market share, can participate in the open source community, and have a viable model. A variety of proprietary companies are using this, for example, Compiere.

Alan Shimel: Linux as the most successful model. The core code from … 20 people. 60 companies. There’s a relatively small amount of people contributing the core code. The vast amount of users use it, find bugs and fix them, maybe 80%. In security, that’s the last thing on the budget. Open source kind of filled that vacuum very quickly. Linux and security. It’s not free though. We see a ton of companies who are commercializing that space. There’s something like 1.4 billion dollars invested in open source.

Mark Fischer: If anyone here has any of that 1.4 billion dollars I think we’d all like to have some of that… (audience laughter) The number of people writing sophisticated OSS is very small. The contrast between that and wikipedia is very sharp. Every 12 year old can write text. Not every 12 year old can write sophisticated code under a licensing model. Like Second Life and its server software, is this realy open source or is it user customization? The mix and match model is one of the ways you can make money off of open source. Add something valuable to it . Like the music indstry, in a world without DRM, making money off the addon stuff like backstage passes and tshirts. If you say everything’s open source and give it away, then it’s not going to work. You have to add some value to commercialize it and to build a base and attract investors. Not everything can be based on advertising.

Cavazos: We can look at open content models and think about that in relation to open source software business models.

Alan Shimel: Does Flickr have a right to those photographs? Does Delicious have any right to the content there?

Fischer: The free software model is fantastic but it’s not for everyone. Do you make every user a creator and they get a revenue share? The next frontier is users as creators. Open community but with revenue share for (some) users.

Adina Levin: Socialtext itself and some of our customers has…. Interestingly enough our documentation isn’t open. But we have sites with best practices information and documentaiton that we have open. We have customers using wikis for that kind of public information, especially to support best practice information. It’s less around how to share the revenue, but how do I reduce the cost of producing it while maintaining the quality of it and issues around control. A lot of people who have a traditional approach are concerned to lock it down to maintain quality. And then we try to explain to them that it’s valuable to open it up and get more contributions. And then spend more energy on the monitoring side and less on trying to prevent contributions.

Cavazos: The elements of community, what does it take to get critical mass and get the quality of development up. The communities of contributors are much smaller than you would think. It’s a small community, but the rest serves a viable part in that quality control. They’re vetting, calling it out as bad when it’s not good. And that’s what I that plays into what Adina said.

Alan Shimel: 92% of the people in the community don’t even play with the code. We have a freeware version of our code that’s not open source. People are still downloading it and using it.

Cavazos: How many people actualy read the licensing..

Adina: I’m glad to hear that Asterisk… we use Asterisk at Socialtext and we are not locked into one service provider, and as a software development company we can customize and build extensions. Basic use, basic quality deployed to a number of applications, and then the steps after that might include extensions. The ability to do that is of value to us.

Alan Shimel: I think you just described what a lot of people do. “It’s nice to know I could do it if I wanted.” But how many people actually do?

Adina: You’re paying for risk reduction and no lock-in.

Alan: I know, but how many people actually take advantage of that…

Jarrell: we started this conversation about business model. “Open Source” label but what we’re touching on is other segments like managing contributions, release, thinking very carefully about stuff other than the distribution model. We should turn our attention to some of those things.

Cavazos: …

Alan Shimel: Important to clearly, sharply define, where’s your value added. Especially if you’re combining open source with propriety. On the dual licensing, it boils down to this. If you’re using that software for your own company it’s okay, make your changes, contribute back to the communiyt. If you’re turning around and using that component and profiting and selling it as a component as a bigger package, you should be, the people who contribute that component should be compensated for that.

Audience: Why should that be a distinction? Every use is a profit motivated use. If you’re using it internally why aren’t you also obligated to give back?

Shimel: Explains the distinction with Asterisk as a model.

[Right, but why is that different, really. ]

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SXSWi: Non-developers to Open Source Acolytes: Tell me why I care

Posted on by Liz

Elisa Camahort is moderating. Annalee Newitz, Dawn Foster, Erica Rios.

Annalee Newitz explains the entire complicated insane definition and history of the Open Source movement in less than 3 minutes. Free redistribution, available source, derivative works okay, no restrictions on tech or users (http;//www.opensource.org/docs/definition.php) Licenses: gpl, MOzilla public license, BSD License. Commonly used open source software (oss): Firefox (MPL), OpenOffice (LesserGPL), GNU/Linux (GPL), BSD (BSD), WordPress (GPL), Apache (Apache License), Rails (MIT License), PHP (PHP License). The GPL is viral and powerful. Anytime you use software that uses GPL that you intend for redistribution, you have to release under GPL.

Elisa: I know some of the names of this software. But Rails? Apache? Okay, well, really I know what Apache is. But why does this matter to me?

Dawn Foster talks about OSS structure and leadership. It looks chaotic from the outside. Random people contributing code. How in the world can you end up with anything reasonable? But that’s not how it is. You’d be surprised how hierarchical it is. OSS community structure.
Users.
Bug Reports: Community members submitting bugs to improve the project.
Contributors: Community members contributing to committers for review.
Committers: Trusted community members with access to modify code.
Maintainers: Direction and decisions for a portion of the project.
Leaderships: Strategic decisions, project direction.

Elisa: So, I’m not the only one who had no idea that all this existed behind the idea of open source. Erica is going to talk from the point of view of a company using open source software.

Erica Rios: My role at the Anita Borg Institute is to maintain the technical aspects of the organization. We use WordPress, for example. I see myself as a customer for these tools. I want help with installation, configuration. Is it going to have an impact on my server maintenance, what cron jobs I should run, what about backups, patches. When I hire people I need to know what kind of time and money I need to invest to maintain the software. What kind of customer service support do I get from a tool? The staff, my users, who are also the customers for this software. Does the tool do what they need it to do? Is it easy to use? Are they going to be able to figure it out, with or without support? There’s a self-sufficiency question. Will everyone be coming to me for that help? I think of it like hardware. We’re lucky enough to have HP Labs donate space to us. Our machines are still on warrantee and I can get service. Do I always need to know the details behind why something’s not working? Is the community “friendly”? Am I going to go looking for help and be told RTFM? Because I’ve already tried.

Elisa: When you were looking at open source tools, was that part of your due diligence, did you look at the friendliness of that tool’s open source community?

Erica: Absolutely. And it doesn’t have to be a hierarchical traditional manual or documentation scenario. The community is so robust that I can type my question into Google and get an answer right away.

Guy in audience gets up and takes a mic. A lot of people don’t realize some open source tools and projects offer paid support. Ubuntu, etc.

Dawn Foster talks more about open source and paid support.

Erica Rios. Developing friendships with other users and developers. If you have a personal relationship then people are much nicer in their explanations. With documentation, when it’s written in plain language, it’s more helpful. I have a degree in computer science, but I appreciate documentation in plain language, and it helps me communicate to my less technical users. Quality community can demonstrate their intelligence through the quality of a product but not feel ego-driven to demonstrate it in their documentation.

Elisa invites questions from the audience.

Same guy from audience: Questions about where the open source software came from. Fear of patent suits from big huge companies, etc.

Annalee Newitz: I’ve heard people talk about their management saying “You can’t use an open source code because it’ll creep into our code and we’ll be sued.” People need to be educated about the legal ins and outs of open source licenses. For example the GPL is one of the most radical ones… A company lawyer is good to go through the license and explain to management. There’s a lot of online explanantions written by lawyers, for example through the EFF or some from Creative Commons. It’s sad that people move away from the GPL but from a business perspective it makes a lot of sense.

Dawn Foster: It’s less of a risk, because if there’s proprietary code in there, someone’s going to have noticed it. Or they can notice it. It’s not really that different.

Annalee: I would strongly agree with that. The fact that you can look at the code means you can tell if there’s a problem.

Audience member: Myth of putting it al out there and it being exploited.

Dawn Foster: I tend to worry less about being exploited by open source Eric Raymond “with enough eyeballs… all … are shallow” I worry about backdoors and things in proprietary code, that I’ll never know is there. The empowerment of being able to look at the code

Annalee: That’s why you hire security auditors, etc. BSD, used by the miliatry, you can lock it down.

Liza: I’m going to be the downer here. THere is a cost for making it useable for people with no technology background. For example WordPress, it’s so beautiful! But it’s hard for people to use and to understand. So, users assume that level of customer service is free and that it’s going to be free and that there’s no cost to maintain it. And this makes it hard for developers and consultants to monetize what we do. Upgrading, security issues, etc. People coming into open source, think that it’s going to be free .

Dawn quotes Richard Stallman, Free as in freedom, not free as in free beer. There are costs, time and money.

Annalee: When you’re looking for a return on investment, long term will it be more costeffective to have this invest in maintaining this rather than paying Microsoft for a new license every couple of years? So yes, the long term costs are way better.

Erica Rios: We look at it that way at Anita Borg Institute. That’s one of the key philosophical reasons I put to management, the flexibility we get.

Kimberly (from audience): Speaking as soneone who once upon a time had all sorts of Microsoft certifications and has now gone more into open source, there is more flexibility, there is very little barrier to entry, it’s really a meritocracy. They can contribute and there’s opportunities for them, they can build stuff for non-profits. To get Microsoft certified you pay a lot of money and yes there’s support and community but open source has way more opportunity.

Elisa: Is there a way in open source to validate what level they are in an open source community?

Kimberly: I’ve had people use me as a reference

Woman in back: It depends on the community.

Erica: Now that I’ve gone through this process I look at how much a person has contributed and how much of it has been accepted in to the main trunk fo the software.

Dawn Foster: It’s good for companies and hiring and companies can see people’s code and status in a community before hiring them.

Frank (from audience): Reliability and continuity. You can always get someone to maintain it because it’s not proprietary. Voting machines and cryptography. If the source isn’t out there there’s always someone out there who is so clever they can’t see their own mistakes. But a community can see it and can find the broken places. As American people we need to get the source out there so we can rely on our voting machines.

Elisa: Thank you so much for bringing that up and articulating it. Let’s talk about the philosophy and the reasons for supporting it. HOw many of you buy organic food, and free trade coffee? (Show of hands) We make economic decisions based on philosophical, emotional, ethical reasons. How many of you make technological decisions based on that? (Show of hands, a fair amount)

Guy in grey hoodie: (question)

Elisa: Kaliya Hamlin, getting non developers involved with open source communities. It’s extremely intimidating, I can tell you. I’m a wannabe, but there’s an idea that it would contribute to the greater good. Anyway, what’s the ethical reasons to use open source?

Annalee: Oviously there’s a lot of technical reason to choose it. And that’s an ethical choice too, to make the technical choice that would benefit the most peopl.e But when yo have a product made by people donating their time, or a company is giving 20% of their time to give back to open source, you simply get a higher quality. People are working together. They own it. When people own the stuff they produce, it will be better. When you produce software that is proprietary and your company owns it, you are alienated from it. But with open source you put your love into it. You can play with it, deploy it, use it with your friends, fix its security holes…

Erica Rios: analogy of the free library. If we can’t contribute and have free access to intellectual knowledge, we undermine democracy. Women and systemic reasons why girls and women often drop out of technical fields. Access. Open source is a unique opportunity for all women to have access to knowledge. If all software code was proprietary, I would never have looked at a pice of code in my life. I couldn’t have afforded it. Period.

WOW

Erica: Dr. Fran Allen, just announced as a Turing Award winner, first woman to be granted this award. It’s highly likely that a girl at the high school level right now, who has access to open source code, may achieve something as great as Fran. It gives other people access and opportunity and to contribute at higher levels. It’s a key consideration in us achieving equality between genders in technical fields, and as we increase participation, we’ll increase innovation.

Jory Des Jardines (audience): The Wisdom of Crowds. Ran an open source business project, because people didn’t ahve the motivation, aka, pay. Does money mean motivation? Money makes it easy to commit, people are flowing in and out of this project. The explanation you’re giving explains the structure, but what is the motivation for an engineer to bother?

Annalee Newitz: There are other rewards that people work for. We’re at a conference where there are artists. They’re hoping to make money, but they want people to appreciate their work. They want to create something beautiful and be acknowledged for it. Why do people want to have a higher reputation on Digg? They’re not getting money for it. Well, some of them are. (laughter … re. crowdhacking prank.) But there’s a point, Hey, I’ve spent 4 years doing this kickass thing, now pay me.

Dawn Foster: Contributors to the Linux kernel. They pay people fulltime to do nothing to contribute to those projects. Those companies are motivated for that software to be good.

Guy: Dispel that there’s anything anticapitalist about open source. More of them are libertarian than anti-capitalist. And about self interest and profit, my company went to open source, time, energy, money chasing clients on IP issues, waste of time. We got a better rate for our time to offer consulting services around it and provide the software as open source.

Erica: Who is mostly willing to work for free? Women. the motivation to work is there. There’s a lot of stereotypes that we default to when we look at what it is that isn’t working. There’s probably a lack of supportive culture. Asked by Mozilla to tell what could help keep women developers. My answer was I don’t know, ask the ones who are there and ask the ones who are leaving.

Woman with short black hair in audience: Ideals, but as a business manager, of a sucessful open source consulting and educaiton company, we charge a fair amount. It’s a myth that keeps developers away from open source. Like it kind of smells like patchouli a little bit…

Elisa: You will not find musicians in an orchestra playing for free. Actors will do it for free. Bloggers used to do it for free but that’s changing. Now we have blog consulting. People had passion that seemed to translate into not getting paid, Oh if I love doing it i shouldn’t get paid. Open source has that too, if I’m passionate about it I shouldn’t charge.

Annalee: You don’t have to do it for free, just get your boss to let you spend 50% of your time doing it because it helps improve the product.

Guy in audience: I’m not understanding, please explain, what is the distinction between building proprietary products on top of open source software.

(Well, it depends on the license! )

Annalee: that’s a good question and it gets debated a lot in open source communities. They are spelled out in the licenses. For example what will happen with Google and the GPL license. People need to be a little bit geeky about legal language and licensing.

Audience: How geeky do you need to be to say you’re into open source?

Erica: For example our crm system….Not important for us to customize that part. But to customize web solutions is very important. If we don’t need to hack it, let’s not do it.

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SXSWi: Attention panel

Posted on by Liz

Notes on “Every Breath You Take: Identity, Attention, Presence and Reputation”.

Christian Crumlish, Ted Nadeau, Mary Hodder, Kaliya Hamlin, George Kelly

Christian Crumlish talked about how new cell phones are. Etiquette still developing. How much of your attention can I have? Establish level of communication or mode of being present and paying attention. Maximize or optimize your presence. Let’s take a look at Plazes. Trazes, history of where you’ve been. “I finally gave in, last night, and I’m on Twitter”. Tribute to Leslie Harpold David Howard, who documented changing his name. (Me and the woman next to me snort a little bit… It becomes way important and interesting when men do it…) Porn search expose. People who have a separate computer for browsing porn. Cognitive dissonance on iChat as Thomas Vanderwal chatted to someone who was listening to his podcast. Unmasking digital identities. Attention spying on yourself.

Kaliya’s talking about OpenID. Namespaces are on the rise. Often people have 100 identities and that’s growing fast. Instead of us getting a different identity from every company we deal with, WE should tell the different companies and websites who we are. OpenID, inames, and LID all cooperating to have one login box instead of competing with each other, with the Yadis protocol, an XML-XRDS document. sxip also joined this protocol. Kaliya explains the

(I signed up with myopenid.com a while back. And at last week’s hackathon, a developer at Socialtext implemented OpenID in our wiki software.)

Ted Nadeau says our non-monetary assets are: Identity, Attention, Intention, Influence, Reputation. (In addition to Str Dex Int Wis Con Cha.)

He explains his identity in brief. Your reputation appears different to different viewers. You are not the authority on your own reputation. Systems based on reputation. EigenTrust. Whuffie. Karma. Opinity. None are compelling to Ted. Conceptual models – Pythia’s Framework for building reputation systems. “a ubiquitous, spontaneous, and highly efficient mechanism of social control”. It’s good to know. It’s useful. It’s good to know if someone’s scary when they’re drunk. Shame can be useful socially. Big reputations – corporations, wwf wrestling personalities. Polytheistic gods – Zeus, Ganesh. Films, soap operas, consistency. Big, consistent, shared. Bigger entities like nations. eBay, LinkedIn, WoW, Amazon, academia’s citation indexes (Hirsch number), Google pagerank. Problems: Reputation theft, damage, loss, stuck, Identity first, reputation later. ‘Sybil’ attack, karma-whoring. Call to action: Deepen the conversation. Implement Reputation systems.

Mary Hodder is amazed that Ted can be funny this early in the morning. She’ll explain a bit of background for academic views of attention, but then will talk about them from a user specific perspective. Systems collect data on you. IM data, you don’t spend a lot of time thinking about the meta data. Your google searches, too; maybe somewhere in the back of your mind you know they’re collecting information on you. It doesn’t seem that consequential, but it’s incredibly consequential. There’s an attention economy built on top of everything we do. Gestures. A gesture is a vote of confidence. The Attention Trust asserts that you own a copy of your information. You own a copy of your attention stream. The Attention Trust built a recorder. Citation of McCarthy and red scare. He said that certain behaviors were not common and therefore were outside the social norm. WE’re engaging in the social norms. If the government can subpoena the clickstreams for Microsoft or Yahoo then they’re segmenting a section of the population away from everyone else and saying they’re not normal. If only the Yahoos, Googles (and governments!) of the world have that attention pool, then that gives them too much power. If all our attention information is public then it’s more difficult for the government to make false claims.

I agree strongly with Mary Hodder. Public pools of information are a protection against abuse by powerful entities. They aren’t a perfect protection, but they give us all a chance.

George Kelly is talking about Mapping Persoality Visibility. Johari charts.

You know, I saw people doing this on LiveJournal last year but never followed the link. It’s like a slam book (a concept I learned from the Judy Blume book Otherwise Known as Sheila the Great. I thought it fascinating but never could get anyone to agree to try it.) Good, now I can try it: Johari window for Liz Henry.

Questions: The idea of a single repository where all this stuff goes is a problem. We have multiple identities and shifting identities over time. A blog means it’s too much in one place. (Lizzie ?? “prematurely grey” might be her old blog. Ah. Liz Burr.)
Christian: I don’t know. There are a lot of us that have multiple identities and then are merging them back together or splitting them apart.
Ted Nadeau: Working for companies. Integrating their identity moving forward. Youth maybe is more intuitively able to see that we’re one person not many. Identity, and maintaining and coalescing an integrated identity.

Wow, I dig all the stuff Ted has been saying.

Kaliya: People in this room have a unique opportunity to help with this problem. The physical world translating into the logical world and back. Things that have friction in RL now have zero friction online. Work on increasing identity friction. That will help. (Did I get this backwards? Kaliya will you explain that more somewhere online where I can read and link to it? You just blew my mind but I don’t think I understood.)

Mary Hodder talking about the “wearing my work clothes to bed” or “bikini at the bank” concept. Yes! Be able to move between multiple online identities. (That would increase friction rather than having all your online stuff and real life stuff be together in one repository.)

Well, we’ve been talking about that and having 4 different personas which are easy to switch between, since the first barcamp at least, but I haven’t seen it happen yet in any software or web platform. People still respond to this idea with “But you can just log out and back in again with a different name.” No. Not to the 20 places online that are all tied together and that I use together.

?? who works for Alternet and Jim Hightower etc. What people are putting out there about me or others. Firms googling potential candidates and not hiring them. Jill at Feministe. Her picture etc. up there and some conservative guys ranking her, etc as if she’s some kind of internet slut. But law firms will be looking at her and she’s afraid it will hurt her career. Unfortunate response was

Mary HOdder: Law school class, some guy playing tetris during a lecture. Video shot of it and put up on Dabble. He wanted it taken down.

Kaliya: It’s improper to make judgements about someone’s personal life and work places will need to learn that. If they judge people on their personal life they are going to lose good people. Creating social norms is important. Something bad happens to me now in email? I blog it. We have a personal platform to out bad behavior.

Christian Crumlish: We’re in a wild west phase and we’re waiting for that to mature…



SXSWi notes: High Class, Low Class Web Design

Posted on by Liz

Notes on High Class and Low Class Web Design.

Respecting your audience. Do you treat them as equals? Culturally, educationally? What if they’re not your peer group? People who call their audience “marks”. Fans officially, but the treatment in the industry is “marks”.

This is the 2nd panel that has used this carny terminology. Evan Prodromou was also critiquing the mindset that treats an audience as marks or suckers.

The room is very large and crowded, so I can’t tell who is speaking. Someone’s talking again about being too class conscious and how that leads to a lack of respect.

Methods of making design decisions. Measuring sales with varying design in publishing and in web design and with usability studies. Liz Danzico is talking about usability, class, and layout.

Web sites and products targeted at “lower classes” use statistical methods of determining good and bad design, while stuff for “upper classes” rely on personal expertise for design. That maps to other high end products like fashion and luxury goods. For high end they’re designed and they see what happens, while for “lower” they are the product of testing. Steve Jobs mentioned…

(I think that it’s pretty funny that this panel purports to be respectful, but they’re using terminology like “high” and “low” which I find inherently disrespectful. And I would talk about “working class” not low class or “unwashed masses”. Jeez!!!)

Khoi Vinh talks about the NY Times and their testing process. He disagrees, I think, that the NYT is high class, but also says that if you think it is “high class”, he would like people to know that they do do testing and usability studies.

Appropriate design and aspiration. If you are designing for an audience that is different than you, do you aim for uplifting their sensibilities? Or do you design based on what you know they already like? A question for designers in the audience to consider.

Liz Danzico talks about how to tell how much is too much. When you’ve gone over someone’s comfort level. The toothpaste ad with toothpaste smeared on the guy’s chest. (Audience laughter)

Brant talks about his experience at WWE. Expanding the design for a wider audience who would not be embarrassed to pick the magazine up. Men in their 20s.

Starsky and Hutch, Dukes of Hazzard, int he past. Now we have Sorpranos, Lost. Complicated shows. People stopped looking down on their audience. TV is better than it was 20 years ago. Quote from Paul Rand. The Language of design. The public is more familiar with bad design than good design. It is, in effect, conditioned to perefer bad design… The new becomes threatening, the old reassuring.” You’re exposed to a certain design style your whole life. Is this design taste related to class, what you learn ? Or is there an inherent goodness or badness that transcends?

This question relates well to a book I’ve been thinking about all year, A Framework for Understanding Poverty. It explains a lot of class conversations and expectations in relation to class. Working class geographies of understanding the world are based on people and trust of people. Middle class geographies of importance are rooted in stuff, in brands and quality of stuff. Upper class geographies prioritize aesthetics and discernment. Aesthetics is a tool often used to establish and maintain class boundaries.

***
Wow, Peter from Adaptive Path just made that very point about aesthetics and class mobility. Aesthetics is used to prevent that class mobility! I was just thinking about Widmerpool’s overcoat from Dance to the Music of Time; he gets it subtly wrong and the upper class characters know it and shun him; he can’t ever really pass. IMHO, in the U.S. this is also used to maintain race and gender boundaries that connect to class status.

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SXSWi How to Rawk panel

Posted on by Liz

Min Jung Kim is leading a panel for people at SXSWi for the first time. “How to Rawk SXSW”.

The gist of this panel is: We’re popular and cool. Here is what you should do: Stalk us. We offer ourselves up as stalkable. Follow us and what we’re doing, and you’ll have fun.

Their advice is focusing around how to make social contacts and manage them with techie tools, and how to manage a constantly shifting flow of social information.

  • remember to sleep and eat
  • Or not, but try not to look like a skeeze. If you show up in the same clothes, buy a sxsw tshirt downstairs!
  • If you meet someone famous that you hate, hand them your camera and ask them to take a picture of you and your friends. That’s what Nick did to Jason Calcanis. (huge laugh from audience)
  • Glenda: Talk to people you don’t know. Don’t stick with your clique.
  • Min Jung: Crash that party. Go to lunch with people who you don’t know but whose blogs you read.

    The room is packed, and right now the panelists are all making fun of being sanfransocial and the idea of “continuous partial attention”. You’re at dinner with people who are only halfway there because they’re texting with people across town who are cooler than you. What to keep from your swag bag and what to throw away. Keep: temporary tattoos, stickers, the “Make” booth stuff, the sharpie marker, the bag itself. The pocket guide.

    Actually I hear that you’re supposed to get other people to color in bits of your sxsw bag, which is meant to be colored in.

    They’re joking horribly about getting the autographs of people who are internet famous.

    Sync the sxsw calendar with your iCal or with your phone or ipod…

    Twitter, Dodgeball, keeping up with the whirl of activity by tracking or stalking your chosen geek hero or conference cruise director.

    Personally I can’t keep up with Min Jung! She’s a party animal!

    I didn’t catch what they said about microformats and the hcard markup for the sxswi site, but it looked good. It’s somewhere on Tantek’s site.

    Nick recommends mobile web and using twitter. He makes fun of Tantek some more and Tantek’s constant texting. A warning from Lynne Johnson not to run up a $250 text message bill. Use the web site instead (again, twitter…)

    I don’t use mobile web, but watching everyone do it here tempts me to get it all set up. The sxswi site looks pretty useful.

    I’ve been thinking I should make a Ning thingamajig for a sxswi social network. Not to diss microformats and hcard, but I want everything as a social network so I can remember “I met so and so, can’t quite remember what we talked about, but they were a friend of this other person whose name I do know.” I could find people again from that, where I can’t find them in a dump of a million hcards or even the stack of business cards I end up with post-conference. Now we’re looking at Lynne’s twitter page. Plazes. More Dodgeball. More twitter. Consumating. How to find open wifi spots. sxswbaby.com, Catherine Yu has put together a great checklist of stuff for the conference that will help you make the most of the conference.

    It’s the age of twitter. Damn, people! At least I know I’m not alone in my inability to shut up about it.

    There is a lot of advice about parties. I like parties, but am not really that into being in bars; bad knees, slightly deaf, and really I like to just be anywhere reasonably quiet, with computers and wireless. So, for the non-party animals, the geeks, the introverts, or the shy, I would say that you can “rawk” sxswi by inviting random people to hang out with you. Go to lunch or dinner with one other person, and make a more in depth connection than one you might make at a huge sxsw party or music show. Have a conversation, write about it and blog it, link up to people, engage with them online a little bit. Maybe make a connection outside your comfort zone, talk to someone you don’t know who might not be in your exact area of techie expertise. I believe strongly in the value of that kind of connection and conversation. For me, the point of conferences like this is, Deepen the Conversation.

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    • Women in Open Source

    Posted on by Liz

    Women in Open Source – at SCALE in LA next weekend. Stormy Peters, Jean T. Anderson, Strata Chalup, Celeste Paul, Bdale Garbee, Randi Harper, and Dru Lavigne.

    The Southern California Linux Expo (SCALE) will host a Women in Open Source Event as part of their upcoming 2007 conference, SCALE 5x.

    The focus of this event is on the women in the open source and free software communities. The goal of this event is to encourage women to use technology, open source and free software, and to explore the obstacles that women face in breaking into the technology industry. The Women in Open Source event will be held on February 9, 2007 at the Los Angeles Airport Westin Hotel.
    Time

    I’m so tempted to go…I could probably get a plane ticket and fly down there and back the same day. Or, Strata said she could put me up in her hotel room if going back and forth on the same day would be too exhausting.