typo(s), tendency and text

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.

I couldn't blog every day about the event I am attending in Berlin. There is too much going on, talks to (not) see, all the interesting people in the hallways of the bcc, workshops, parties. So far I have seen talks about designing your own stuff you need and the upcoming (probable) development towards decentralized production of physical objects where design and production proces are open sourced, and people don't necessarily depend on fordistic production method anymore. I have heard a talk about a model and test case of decentralized social software as well, but otherwise I haven't seen many talk, and therefore it makes me really happy, that the filming and encoding process seems to go so much faster this year.

Since I moved to Bergen, Norway in october, I wanted to announce an initiative that I hereby start. Inspired by the Hackerspace movement I am convinced that it is much more fun and much more likely to meet likeminded people and do and make cool stuff, if you have a physical space, where all kinds of human beings can come and meet on equal terms to follow their interests. So far I have lived in a region where there was at least two such places to go to, whereas one of them was a designated Hackerspace. So I startet a wiki page on hackerspaces.org, a mailing list and a website so far. If you are interested, even remotely, please let me hear it.

Right now ideas and actions are needed, and I am very curious how everything will turn out.

Vor längerer Zeit wuchs mein Wunsch, einen längeren Roman zu schreiben. Leider war der Wunsch bisher recht kleinwüchsig. So auch dieses Mal wieder. Rechts in der Seitenleiste findet fand man ein Widget, eingefügt der Link zu meinem Profil und Wordcount bei NaNoWriMo. Und da der National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo) der November ist, habe ich auch brav am ersten November-Wochenende angefangen, zu schreiben und fleißig meinen Wordcount eingetragen. Die ersten zwei Tage. Danach fing mein neuer Job an, für den ich mit zwei Wochen Vorwarnung mal eben ausgewandert bin. Und seitdem war das Chaos und meine abendliche Erschöpfung so groß, dass ich mich zu nichts aufraffen konnte. Geschweige denn dazu, einen Roman zu schreiben. Nunja. Ich brauche weder organisierte kollektive Zwangsbespaßung, noch organisiertes kollektives Zwangsschreiben. Bilde ich mir ein. Also hoffe ich auf das nächste Mal, wenn mich die Muse küsst.

Weil: My muse can beat up your muse. With ease.

Für den Moment ist es aber leider so, dass ich in die Datei einen dicken Fail Whale einbauen müsste.

Fail Whale, lazzored by Bre Pettis in the NYCResistor Hackerspace, New York

Subversion, Git. Ja. Versionskontrolle ist gut für größere Projekte, die sich über längere Zeit entwickeln. Für Subversion auch für Texter und Autoren spricht sich Rachel Greenham aus, für git Tycho Garen. Auf diese beiden Möglichkeiten, die Versionen bestimmter Dateiformen nachhalten zu können, und im Nachgang auch miteinander zu vergleichen, können nur ganz bestimmte Menschen zurückgreifen. Und die Notizen, die zu den Änderungen gespeichert werden können, sind eben - zumindest in keiner Lösung, die ich kenne - nicht gerade für visuelle Menschen gemacht. Darüber hinaus fällt das projektbezogene Arbeiten mit Medien schwer, da eben nur bestimmte Dateitypen, versions-kontrolliert werden können. Und arbeiten mit hierarchischen Ordner-Systemen ist für jeden nervig, der häufig bestimmte Dinge projektübergreifend wiederverwenden kann.

Aber es braucht für visuell und textlich denkende Menschen auch eine informationelle Klammer, die Dokumente und Dateien zu bestimmten Themen und in bestimmten Kontexten sammeln, umorganisieren und wiederfinden lassen. Anscheinend tut sich da was, zumindest in der Open Source-Entwicklung. So schreibt Keywan Najafi-Tonekaboni bei open heise:

Für Mac OS X gibt es übrigens noch Journler. Das aber eben als reiner Informationsmanager es noch nicht trifft, und auch keine Dateien verwaltet. Taggen, visuelles Aufbereiten, smarte Ordner, Versionskontrolle und Wiki-Funktionalität - das hätte ich gerne. Also weiter nach dem Produktivitäts-Ei des Kolumbus Ausschau halten.

Das Beta-Prinzip ist ja seit einigen Jahren überall, und schon fast gehört es zum guten Ton, das Beta im Namen zu führen. Beim öffentlich-rechtlichen Rundfunk hat sich das in Deutschland allerdings noch nicht niedergeschlagen. Hier sind die Lösungen meist nicht nur konservativ-prioritär, sondern es wird jahrelang hinter geschlossenen Türen getüftelt, und ehe nicht alles rechtlich hundertprozentig abgeklopft und auch noch gegen die PR-Maschine der Verleger- und Provider-Verbände abgedichtet ist, kriegt das Publikum gar nichts zu sehen.

Das ist irgendwie schade. Warum nicht die Öffentlichkeit an den internen Überlegungen teilhaben lassen, warum nicht erstmal die Entwicklungen verfolgen und probieren und gleichzeitig die Gebührenzahler_innen darauf antworten lassen? So macht es beispielsweise NRKbeta, eine Versuchsplattform des norwegischen öffentlich-rechtlichen Rundfunks NRK. Hier wird über grundsätzliche Entwicklungen des Internets und die Zusammenhänge mit anderen Medien geschrieben, aber auch selbst entwickelte Überlegungen und Lösungen beschrieben. Und das alles geschieht unter dieser Maxime:

The only way to control your content is to be the best provider of it.

Und neben anderen Versuchen, werden bestimmte Sendungen auch über das Peer-to-Peer-Protokoll Bittorrent verbreitet. Dafür mussten bestimmte rechtliche Vorraussetzungen geschaffen werden, aber die NRKbeta-Macher bezeichnen die Bereitstellung von Inhalten per Bittorrent als einen großen Erfolg.

Some weeks ago NRK - Norwegian Broadcasting put up one of the most popular shows in Norway on bittorrent. For free, with no DRM, no country restrictions. It has been a huge success and so far about 100 000 episodes have been downloaded by our readers! After being featured on boingboing and digg, Eirik Solheim of NRK was interviewed by the German website Tagesschau. (Quelle)

Wäre zu wünschen, dass trotz der neuesten Entwicklungen die öffentlich-rechtlichen Sender den Mut finden, ihre Politik der hinter verschlossenen Türen entwickelten proprietären Lösungen zu beenden, und den Gebührenzahlern mit sinnvollen Mitteln das zur Verfügung stellen, was teuer produziert wurde.

Wikis. Was soll das sein? So was wie die Wikipedia? Jein. Nja. So in der Art, und ganz anders. Wikis eignen sich besonders gut zum Informationsmanagement. Einfach zu bedienen, einfach, unter den gesammelten Informationsstücken Verknüpfungen herzustellen. Und wieso für den Desktop, also für den eigenen Rechner? Nun, weil sich dort Informationen sammeln lassen, die sich in Browser-Bookmarks nicht erschöpfen. Die nicht öffentlich sein sollen. Sich aber gleichzeitig im Browser betrachten lassen.

Seit einiger Zeit wünsche ich mir im Grunde einen Dateimanager, der Wiki-ähnliche Funktionen hat. Weil es so viel einfacher ist, Infos und Gedanken zu einem Projekt, dass hauptsächlich am Rechner entsteht, auch dort zu sammeln. Und gleichzeitig Dateien zu beschriften und zu beschreiben - und sie somit in einen Kontext einzordnen. Zusammenhänge herzustellen, die über die Inhalte der Dateien hinausgehen. Naja. Gibts nicht, soweit ich weiß.

Seit einer Weile nutze ich als informationellen Backbone meiner Todo-Liste ein Wiki, das MoinMoin-Wiki in der Desktop-Edition. Auf dem Mac funktioniert das recht gut. Ich muss nur daran denken, die moin.py nach dem Rauffahren anzuklicken - und viola. Schon funktionierts. Die ersten Einträge waren in einer halben Stunde gemacht, die Präsentation ist optisch ansprechend. Und so übersichtlich, wie mensch es sich macht.