typo(s), tendency and text

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.

As the libraries in Nordhordland are preparing to get the "Aquabrowser" installed, a vendor-installed layer to their catalogues that is supposed to add advanced and eye-candy search possibilities to their collections, there is a very interesting module project for Drupal: The SOPAC, aka the social OPAC. It could provide a functionality that is comparable to that.

It is especially interesting, because what most of the libraries in the norwegian districts suffer from is lack of time and money - which often ends up forgetting how people tend to use - and how they are looking for media. Dividing your webside and the web interface of the catalogue is not helping.

This is a problem that all libraries want to fix, but not everybody is so lucky to have the necessary resources to do that. Still, library services are not less needed whether they are being online or offline.

You can get an idea of what the Social OPAC can do if you look at the catalogue of the Darien library.

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".

I am testing viable ways to display media data in a way, that libraries can show what they have - which is not unproblematic at the moment with having many different libraries with different catalogue systems from different vendors - and as it is with working in the public services sector: a limited budget.

So here is a test with WordPress and the open book plugin, which pulls data from the Open Library and points to the WorldCat.

The problem is: Book data from norwegian books appear, but very little and almost none of the Norwegian books have a cover picture. I don't know if librarians are actively taking part in collecting data for this open database of books, or not. Problem nr. 2: There is a non-trivial discussion going on in library world about in how far the WorldCat tries to own data that libraries deliver to them. I don't know if this is the reason while there is no support for Norwegian libraries on the WorldCat.

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.

One viable way of managing multiple cms installs of the same kind would be using version control and distributing the tested new version of updated software to the different locations. Since I have heard of and read up on git recently, I signed up for GitHub. You can find the first repository here, it's for trying out Joomla!.