Zadie Smith: “Upstairs, Alex picked up the case from his trip and emptied the contents into the bed. The clothes he lifted in one stinking bundle and dropped into the bathroom's washing basket. Books he put on the floor and then kicked into a reasonable pile in a corner. He filed through the paper by hand, throwing every other piece of it into the bin including all receipts, for he had long ago decided that he would rather pay the tax in full than allow himself to be the type of man who remembers a beautiful day by the expenses he ran up on it.”
Starting with the community site Urban Vancouver, then as the support cowboy for Bryght and Raincity Studios and now with an independent practice, I've enjoyed all of my almost 6 years with the Drupal community. In a couple of weeks, I'll fly to San Francisco to attend my first DrupalCon. With my flight and hotel booked, conference ticket registered, and a ticket to a Major League Baseball ballgame ticket received in the mail, I look forward to the 3 full days of sightseeing in the Bay Area, including the plans to take a tour of North Beach and ride San Francisco's historic streetcars.
Summary
Rob pointed to Andrew Morrison's favourite things to eat & drink in Vancouver. After a few hours of programming and manual data manipulation, I was able to provide a Google Map of Andrew Morrison's 50 favourite things to eat in Vancouver that Rob requested.
Doug Stowe: “I found just a bit more satisfaction as a fixer rather than consumer. To apply just a few moments of time in careful observation can save hours of time shopping, hours of time earning money to be wasted, and hours of time being frustrated by buying things you really don't even like in the first place. So before giving up on old stuff, be brave. Try to fix. You really can't make matters worse, so there are no risks.”
Almost a month ago, I organized the first ever Vancouver Brightkite users meetup, and we got 5 people to come out, as well as some people who had Brightkite accounts but may not have known there was a meetup. My tentative attempts to lure people from the GeoWeb 2009 conference failed miserably. I was able to distribute some t-shirts and stickers, and still have quite a few left for those who are interested. If you're in Vancouver, email me your shirt size and I can hook you up. One person was out of town during the official meetup, though she and I did eventually have coffee (she resides in my hometown, so we had at least that in common). A few others expressed interest in a subsequent meetup, so that might be something we can do in the near future when it it starts getting dark earlier. If you're a Brightkite user and want to express interest in a future meetup, post a comment in the Brightkite meetup t-shirts and stickers and beer photo.
Followers of @justagwailo, my automated ephemera Twitter account, know that I'm a frequent user of a service called Brightkite. Brightkite is a social web application that lets people check into physical locations with the intention of socially interacting online. With Twitter integration (you can have checkins, notes, and photos automatically post to Twitter with customizable text), it's an "where I'm at" application which also shows you who has checked in nearby. You can get SMS notification of nearby Brightkite users, and even set privacy settings so that only friends see your exact location and others see a more general city or municipality as your current location. The Brightkite iPhone app makes checkins easy, giving you the option to search for something if it isn't in the "pick a place" listing, using the built-in GPS to find out what's nearby.
On the heels of the successful Brightkite meetups in Berlin and Austin and the BayArea, the team at Brightkite wrote some helpful hints on organizing a Brightkite meetups, spurring me into action to organize one for the Vancouver area.
(I should note that I'm in no way affiliated with Brightkite. I'm just a frequent user.)
In a couple of weeks, Vancouver will host the Geoweb 2009 Conference, though I won't be attending. I would like to invite those who use Brightkite in the Lower Mainland, as well as people who are interested location-based online social interaction tools to join me at The Irish Heather at 7:00 PM on the 28th of July. (That date conveniently happens to be my birthday.) I'd be interested in doing a short introduction to Brightkite, and talk about the future of location-based online social interaction (one word: games).
I see Brightkite as an interesting way to explore a city and expand people's social network. I can also see roadblocks to the effectiveness Brightkite and its ilk, and would like those interested in discussing mapping, social activity online, and collaboratively mapping the world to join me in a week and a half to see where things are going.
Did I mention I'll have Brightkite t-shirts and stickers to give away? RSVP at the Yahoo! Upcoming event listing (understanding that the address is 212 Carrall, not 217 as listed there).
A couple of Sundays ago, I trekked out late in the afternoon to Columbia Station, entirely forgetting that my intended destination was 22nd Street Station in sunny New Westminster, British Columbia. The reason for the trip to Vancouver's suburb to the south: to explore the neighbourhood as I did for New Westminster Station portion of my SkyTrain Explorer heritage walks around the Greater Vancouver area. Limited at this time to Vancouver proper, Burnaby and New West, the book by John Atkin details the history of buildings and surroundings of SkyTrain stations in the Lower Mainland.
(SkyTrain is an elevated rapid transit system encircling the region. The book does not include walks around the stations located in Surrey, a shame since Surrey's history and current development is very interesting too!)
Last night I had the opportunity to visit the Vancouver Museum (or, Museum of Vancouver) to attend a lecture featuring three presentations about bicycle parking. Titled "Park This! Inspirational and Effective Solutions for Bike Parking" short presentations first showed implementations worldwide, then the second more generally addressed bike parking as a public issue, and the third discussed Vancouver's experience specifically.
The Vancouver Public Space Network (VPSN) took photos of the event and the subsequent Velo-City museum tour. As I sarcastically predicted, bike parking was inadequate for the event (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6).
Addison Berry, aka @add1sun, presented about her experience as documentation lead for the Drupal content management system project the other day at the Writing Open Source conference in Owen Sound. In her role as chief cat-herder, she found that the most difficult people aren't poisonous. Instead they just don't know how to communicate with the community, and they need to translate where they're coming from to the way the community operates. It's hard work, she reports, to turn them into a contributor. She referred the audience to the "Poisonous People" presentation by the Subversion people, as yet unwatched by yours truly.
Addison talked about religious wars that occasionally break out. That is, the crux of the issue is more important than the resolution, and often leads to inaction. She also discussed the differences between recruiting in the corporate world and recruiting in the open source world. For private companies, they hire a skillset that they can filter for by listing the job requirements, either explicitly or implied. In open source, she says, you have the skillset first and you work with it. Many cats scratching their own itch, hence the herding to get them to scratch the community's itches too. The people you get working on a project have a rich background, both in terms of skills and life history. Skillsets include a lot of non-technical backgrounds in open source (Addison has an anthropology degree, for example, and my education is in political science).
Drupal has a large mass of documentation, and Addison is trying to whoop up energy in managing the base of existing documentation for Drupal 5 and 6 while gearing up for writing the documentation for the upcoming Drupal 7.
Open source has a natural passion that brings people together. Showing the example of a rowing team on her slide illustrated the need to hire a coach to tell them when to row. Herding involves keeping lines of communication open and opening up new ones as well as banging on pots about documentation. Instead of telling people what they can do, empower them by including them in the conversation. Addison, as leader, knows what she won't do and has so far been able to find people who will. Tracking metrics around the documentation—answering a question I had before I had the chance to ask it—Addison is not interested in, but she found someone who is. Many "soft-skills", such as facilitation, have come in handy even if the person with the skill does not claim membership in the software community. Also universities and their students have found time and energy to contribute usability testing as part of course credit or as part of their graduate studies.
Letting go and getting out of the way: Addison wanted the vision to be perfect, but quickly understood that she can't lead the charge or drag it out all the time: instead she recognized the need to let people run with things and support them. Getting people to trust you that that's the right direction.
In a week, I will attend the Writing Open Source conference in Owen Sound, Ontario. I'm excited to meet some of my colleagues in the field of open source documentation, having written the bulk of the support materials for Bryght, the Drupal-powered hosted service. I'm particularly interested in meeting those working to document open source tools other than Drupal, to gain some perspective on what's out there and what's needed.
Writing documentation was my first task at Bryght back in 2004. I recall spending part of that Christmas break furiously jotting down the important steps to creating dynamic and community websites. This included checklists, instructions and descriptions of module settings and how people could take advantage of them. The initial push of documentation made the subsequent job of supporting customers easy: instead of each time having to explain how to do something, I quickly pointed to the documentation, either through a link or a copy & paste. Along the way I even heard from non-customers thanking me for the handy references. After the second time someone asked we documented the answer. (We even wrote documentation after the first time someone asked a question.) Sometimes it didn't work, and sometimes the documentation wasn't all that great or hard to find. We allowed comments and opened the forums and listened to feedback when what we wrote didn't make a whole lot of sense. That's the experience I'd like to share with the conference, and I'd like to hear of others' experiences in making complex software more understandable.
After the weekend conference, I'll spend a couple of full days in Toronto proper, getting some much needed distance from Vancouver. I'd like to meet with some of the Toronto Drupal heads, and others I know (but haven't met) from other online communities I'm part of. Sadly, my favourite baseball squadron, the Toronto Blue Jays, play on the road in late June. Surely a local pub will have the games in HD?
