Humanize the Earth!

At Michael’s urging, I’d love to share this video from Free Geek Chicago, except I can’t get the video to show up here, so head over to Michael’s post and watch it there. :-)

I’m in Montreal, near the end of day 1 of WikiSym, waiting for the Wiki Film Festival

including a trailer for a documentary on Wikipedia, “Truth in Numbers“. Other screenings include initial footage from “The Wiki Way,” “OpenFrame” (a documentary on RecentChanges camp in 2006 that everyone should watch), and a relevant selection from my absolute favorite group of videographers … CommonCraft’s “Wikis in Plain English.”

During my wait (everyone else is off napping or quick early dinnering or something or other), I checked out Twitter, which I’d signed up for long ago, but never used because I didn’t understand it and it seemed annoying. I updated my status, saying that I was waiting for the film festival, and then was shortly “followed” by Kevin Makice who’s not here, but wants to know what’s happening. So I posted a new status about writing a blog post, this blog post. Feels strangely and confusingly recursive to write about this process.

Anyway, today. Actually, let’s start with yesterday. It was a really early morning in Portland, OR for an 8:10am flight to Chicago. The flight was delayed and we missed our connection. Which meant a 5 hour layover in Chicago, where I live. But the CTA is eliminating slow zones this weekend so isn’t running trains all the way downtown, and it seemed like more hassle than it was worth to leave, so Ward and I took a nap on the lawn outside the hotel and had a pretty good dinner to kill the time. We got to Montreal pretty late, especially given my role today as open space facilitator, which required setting up and such.

So I got up really early to find room 510d and get set up. And the hotel conference rooms all had names, not numbers. That’s strange, I thought. The hotel calendar doesn’t list us either. Why am I paying over $200/night to stay here again? Anyway, the person at the front desk suggested another place it might be, and I looked it up online, and sure enough, she was right. So off I went down the street, found the place, and it’s huge, seemingly stadium size. After a really long walk inside the place, I found our breakfast setup (I wanted to have the open space set up before having breakfast), but no one around and our room locked. Bummer. Within a minute or so the room was opened and I went to work arranging chairs and making posters and such. All of my internal work and deep breathing seemed to go out the window as I started succumbing to the stress of the whole thing. It wasn’t too bad internally, but I did wonder if this was worth doing (open space inside a traditional conference, where things just aren’t set up well for doing open space).

In any event, “Whenever it starts is the right time” and “Whoever comes is the right people”, but the 8am start time coming and going wasn’t a problem for me. Once we seemed to have a good number, we began, and people filtered in throughout the opening itself, and then the morning. As usual, all I had to do was sit down and shut up for people to quickly move to the center to post topics. The whole thing then self-organized, as it always does, as I went to get myself checked in for the conference itself. When I got back, conversations were well underway. Some of them even go documented throughout the day. Very cool!

One of the most interested conversations of the day that I was involved in was over lunch, with Alain Desilets and Mark Bernstein about locations for next year’s WikiSym, co-location, and some issues and opportunities around a possible co-location with WikiMania. This is purely hypothetical, so please no jumping to conclusions.  Lots of interesting ideas about the nature of academia and publishing, and expense of certain conferences versus what it can do for one’s career to publish there.

Not sure what else there is to say at this point, as it’s much too long already, and I’m tired, and the film festival is supposed to start in 10 minutes, so I’ll leave it there, and if you have questions, feel free to leave a comment or a trackback and I’ll see what I can do.

In February this year, I had the pleasure of working with Kaliya, co-facilitating Recent Changes Camp Portland. She now announces She’s Geeky: An Women’s Tech (un)conference:

I am producing another unconference this fall. It is for women working in technology called She’s Geeky. It is October 22-23 in Mountain View at the Computer History Museum.
…
We have three simple goals with the event.

• Exchange skills and learning from women from diverse fields of technology.
• Discuss topics about women and technology.
• Connect the diverse range of women in technology, computing, entrepreneurship, funding, hardware, open source, nonprofit and any other technical geeky fields.

I gave notice today that I’m leaving my job of 6+ years to join AboutUs.org full-time, one week per month on-site in Portland, OR and the rest of the time telecommuting from Chicago.  Yay!

A few days ago, I wrote: finally, a use for spam! where I talked about wanting to work and live in a do-ocracy. Today I started reading Naked Conversations, about business blogging, and it occured to me that I haven’t written about my work at AboutUs.  AboutUs is a small company based in Portland, OR, that’s attempting to do it’s work as a do-ocracy, and teach the world that the world wide web is a two-way medium, and even more than that, is a place for collaboration.

Until today, when I had an idea about a way for AboutUs to get better, I’d make a wiki page about it, or talk about it in the company IRC channel, or I’d attempt to make the change myself.  It occurs to me that company employees (I’m a part-time contractor) could be communicating with each other and the public by blog as well.

AboutUs already does a fantastic job and communicating openly with it’s users, fans and critics (see ConcernsPage, for example), and yet the potential is there for much more.

Some things I’d like to see AboutUs doing:

• Publish a feed of some sort about technical changes to the site.  I’m pretty sure page names are no case-insensitive as of last week, but haven’t seen an official (or unofficial) announcement.  Maybe this could be a blog or wikipage with an RSS feed?
• For projects (see OurWork for a list of projects) that can stand to move slower, even just a little bit slower, put less staff resources into them on a weekly basis.  This slower pace, along with a clear list of tasks that staff thinks need to be accomplished on the project, allows visitors to the site to get involved and help.
• Encourage employees to blog, even just once a week or less, about what’s currently exciting them at work, or anything they like.
• I’ll write more when I think of more.

I really love the work that we’re doing and am excited to be working in this kind of an open organization, with such a great culture, and I am excited to see that culture evolve and get even better.

Geoffrey Burling mentions me in: A delayed WikiWednesday in Portland

:-)

Excellent news from Michael about some of his work bearing fruit:

The long awaited report from the Mayor’s Advisory Council on Closing the Digital Divide was released Friday June 15th at the Community Media Summit convened by the Benton Foundation and the Community Media Workshop under the title The City that NetWorks: Transforming Society and Economy Through Digital Excellence.Digital Excellence is both means and end for Chicago as the City of Excellence. The Chicago Digital Access Alliance (CDAA) had a large hand in bringing this vision into the public sphere. We’ll turn a critical eye to the details of the report, as is our duty, but for now we celebrate it’s release and the vision that has been established, and we offer our deepest gratitude to Julia M. Stasch for her service to our city in chairing the Mayor’s Advisory Council and shepherding this visionary and historical document.

Anyone know anything about this?  I’m using assertElementContainsText and assertElementNotContainsText but I’ve seen the seg fault with methods as well.

I’ve been playing the game go at Dragon Go Server and Online Go Server, both “turn-based” go servers, which means it’s like playing by mail.  You don’t have to devote an hour to sitting down and playing a whole game, like you do in person, or on a real-time server.  You might only play one move per game every day, or every couple of days.  Because of this, most people are playing more than one game at a time.  Each server has a status page where all of the games are listed where it’s your turn.

For DGS, tps12 wrote a greasemonkey script that enhances the status page by automatically refreshing it and also by putting the number of games where it’s your turn in the title of the page, so it shows up in a tab even when you’re looking at a different page.  It’s an awesome script!

I thought it would be cool to have something similar for OGS, so I wrote the: Online Go Server OGS Status Page Enhancer.  Let me know if you us it, or if you improve it, or if you have an idea for improving it (no promises I’ll be able to do it!).