typo(s), tendency and text

Tim put the different methods for connecting to and between social networks in relation to each other and explained what was good, bad and ugly about them:

• OAuth
• OpenID
• The Hire
• XRDS/simple
• Activity Streams
• OpenSocial

The talk was not so much about Drupal. But the point was that all those connecting methods were either very useful or very appliable. Tim argued that it was the main interest of nowadays social networks to have a centralized and locked-down user base and to own their data, and that therefore the interest of social networks weren't that big to build good open connecting methods or protocols.

Usecase: Compagnie des Alpes
Tourist attractions with their own branding, i.e. Parcasterix

One directory per site in /sites/*

Hosting: 2 apache servers and 1 MySQL

page views per day in the 100.000s
stable & dev/maintenace cost effective
code for all sites go in /sites/all/

different mysql-tables, admin-account is replicated through all tables (how?)

Boost module?

Although I got up really early, I missed the first minutes of the OpenAtrium presentation. I had a look at an OpenAtrium install earlier this summer when I quickly installed it for seeing what it is like, and it looked pretty nice and useful. If you customize Drupal for your needs, it is a process that takes time, more or less depending on how good you know Drupal and how much you know about what you want.

OpenAtrium is supposed to be an Intranet-like collaborative platform to share Documents, calendars and project/task-data. It is supposed to connect members of a group or a team at work. It looks appealing and it seems to serve its purpose from the beginning. It is one of the few approaches to package Drupal into a product, to download and serve from the beginning.

The talk showed its features, and also adressed the problem in Drupal development/site/feature building, where you have the very centralized repository of core at drupal.org, and the contributed modules, too. But when you want to make packages and built more features around them, there is no existing infrastructure to do so.

What was now implemented by pingvision, who took OpenAtrium by developmentseed in use, was a feature server, that is supposed to provide this function. It didn't get very clear, is this actually solves the problem, or if it is just a temporary workaround. It seems to me, that if OpenAtrium already steps out of the cvs/drupal.org way of working - using git and github - why not make the full step and host everything in open git repositories?

It is difficult to analyze the development of Social Media while it is happening, and the speaker, Chris Heuer, did not try to claim he is an expert. He tried to make a point that we are all constantly learning, about and via Social Media.

Describing all companies as Social Media companies (referring to their communication needs with their own channela, and probably also back channels), he stated that this was the way the Drupal community should see their end users and shape their products likewise. To fit the PR needs of companies.

I don't believe in this approach. Of course, the way in which capitalism and the web changes, one could say, that every entity in human society is its own company, and this is at least somehow the reality for many people that get identified as such, and self-identify like it.

But there are not only companies, and I don't see why Drupal should build their architecture in a way to fit this ideology. In social media use there are so many different realities. There are some with hierarchies, some with less hierarchical components, some without. Social realities on the web are fractioned in services and applications, and peole use them very differently.

This is where drupal has an advantage of having a core that is - with work and effort - configurable to meet the needs of different entities. Schools, libraries, self-educating efforts, non-profits, interest groups. Narrowing it down to market and companies doesn't really help the development of an open framework in Drupal to build social media.

Day one of the DrupalCon Paris 2009 started with a round-up of recent development on Drupal 7. Dries Buytaert, the initial coder and starter of the Drupal project, explained first how innovation seems to go in recurring curves that go up and down, but eventually go all up in the long run. He quoted Schumpeter, Saffo the Gartner hype cycle, and showed his own graph of how he feels Drupal development is happening.

After the DrupalCon weekend there will be a code freeze, and the rest of autumn will be used to refine the new features that have been taken into Drupal, and to do better documentation and allow for localization of the new Drupal release.

He also rose the question whether Drupal should be a framework, a product or a service, and opted himself for making it possible of being everything. A CMS framework for those who need the possibility to highly customize their publishing work, and a service to those who want to use modern web technologies with a certain amount of control, but don't want to set up all by themselves.

Drupal 7 looks like it is going to be even more customizable in terms of content types (CCK module goes as Field API into core), and üprovide a better layer for theming.

I have attended an unconference before, but never a BarCamp. Since Thomas brevik, Jannicke Røgler, Magnus Enger and I are organizing an unconference about libraries and Free Software in november in Bergen, it is especially interesting to me how those are methodically organized.

The 4. DrupalCamp Paris was organized with two white boards and one welcoming hosts who explained and motivated the attendees to write their topics into the time slots in the tables on the two white boards. Someone set up a microphone, and one talk topic was explained by the person having the talk. No others, but that was part of the productive chaos that followed. What was clear before, was which rooms where available.Everything else, which topics would be discussed or talked about, was unclear. The attendees brought their topics with them.

I scheduled two meetings by writing them on the white board. One for Drupalers from Norway, Sweden and Denmark. And one for people who use Drupal for libraries. But first I attended a meeting about the integration of the wave protocol and Drupal. It was a very interesting chat about possible social implications of this different way of communicating, about how Drupal could authenticate against a wave server, and what use case there might be.

The meetings with both the Swedish Drupalers and the librarian Drupalers were also very interesting. I got a lot of ideas of how to do different tasks, and discussed several ways hat I already knew about, but which are complex.

I would say that the BarCamp approach is very good to get to know people and discuss topics with a high comfort level regardless of how much one knows about the topic. But some things could be easily done to improve the experience. Mark the space for the discussion groups. If it is noisy, get up some molton-curtains between those spaces. (I could not even understand what I was saying at some points, let alone what the swedish people were saying in swedish.) And round up what was discussed and how people can get in touch afterwards. Make blank wiki pages to use as a form, or hand out forms on paper and copy up a booklet to give to the participants. But, well, there is always room for criticism and improvement. It was very nice, and now i have talked to some people and the awkwardness of not knowing anyone is now over.

Two pictures and a tweet by p4ula made me go to HAR, anyway. Planning of my vacation was very difficult this year. Or, not knowing which kind of vacation I would need, and a family member getting very sick just before my days off, made it difficult. Then I decided to travel to Germany, anyway, and some of my friends, planning and packing, approaching Vierhouten, made me wonder if I made the right decision, not going there.

My grandma got miraculously better, and p4ula sent a "Request for @r4gni", so I had to follow. And I did. I was badly prepared, I got to sleep in my friends tent and I spent most of the time having a good time, and hanging with good people and friends. But I regret not having done two things:

• Spending time in the fablab
• Attending the silent party
• making my own shirt in the c-base-dome

Ah, well. But the awesome laughs I had make up for it.

Today is Ada Lovelace day, and somebody started a pledge to make bloggers of all genders tell their human readers (and all the bots) about the women that made a difference in tech, and more specific in computing/science/communication. Ada Lovelace was the first programmer, and she was a woman. Today with a majority of male people in the computer science field, it is hard to imagine how this environment could not be dominated by men and have the connotation of success, innovation and power. There were times when this was different and it could be different again.

Being in the men/women paradigm, or within the binary system of gender roles, it is natural that many point to successful or important women, where they are not as visible as the men. I think this is an important thing to do.

But I would like to emphasize the many people that I am lucky and happy to know, that try to get over this binary and discrimintating system of gender roles. Those who try to not make it matter. Those who encourage people to do stuff, to think and act in new ways. Regardless of whatever attributes they might have. Those who help each other out, and not make situations of giving or receiving help uncomfortable. Those who are knitting, guerilla gardening, communicating, tinkering with circuits and microcontrollers. Those who do hacking in all sorts of ways and different stages and situations in life. Those who want to make the world better, bit by bit. Those who live to learn.

So this blog post is to all my friends and those who care. Many of them are great minds, others are great tinkerers. Some are both. It is a gift to have met them. And it is a gift to learn from them and share my thoughts with those people. They are girls, grrlz, women, men, ladies, femmes, butches, in-betweens.

Tonight I will hopefully get to know more of these special people, tonight is the first geek girl dinner in Bergen.

Feel free to write about your or my geek friends in the comments.

While most things at work seems to work out - after of course the "new job" hurry the first months, everything else seems to get out of control every once in a while.

• I haven't heard from my application at the Immigration Office since the beginning of december.
• My attempt to get my cat from Germany to be able to live with her turned out finde despite a lot of organizational trouble. But she died one week later, since she had a chronical disease. Her breakdown is most likely not due to the traveling, it could have happened anytime - and just as well a few years later. So I could not anticipate it, but it was quite stressful nevertheless.
• I have been a regular visitor at the taxes office in the city. Complications there are due to Immigration Office delay.
• My room in Germany, that somebody rents from me because I took off there on short notice, has suffered from a hole in the plumbing from bathroom right beside it, so the person living there now had several problems.

Not to mention all the difficulties keeping contact to my dearest friends and my family. I guess if you leave your nice, cozy perception of "home" and decide to become a nomad (I am pretty sure I should not call myself that, but in need of a better term), you have to let go of the thought that you can control your life. While this isn't true, anyway, it is certainly not the case if you are making a "big move".

Tomorrow co-librarian Thomas Brevik and I are going to have a lecture/workshop for librarians in North Hordaland. For the occasion I made a new site which will soon list workshops and lectures I have given and can give, as well as a collection of hints and resources. The site is called seminar,because its the term that all the languages I blog in can agree on. The site for the current workshop is in Norwegian only.