Another unconference, this time held at the new Citizen Space office run by Citizen Agency. Citizen Agency is the new project for Chris Messina and Tara Hunt. As I understand it, it is a for-profit venture that gives community and the greater good at least equal footing with the profits themselves. Alternative business structures that give more weight to humanity are of particular interest to me. The description I heard about the venture made me think of one of my inspirations, Semco.

Semco is a Brasilian company that tore down their corporate structure and made everything transparent to their employees. Everything. Employees collaborated on everything from salaries, hiring/firing and office assignments to which products and partnerships to pursue. Everyone. Every employee that needed it was given lessons on how to read the company books. What happened as a result of this commie takeover? Pure capitalism baby. They made record profits, grew in size and quickly had the lowest employee turnover rate in all of Brazil.

Photo: Scott Beale / Laughing Squid

Citizen Summit was a gathering dedicated to showcasing some citizen-friendly ventures and networking with other like-minded individuals. The opening talk was by Scott Kveton of JanRain on the OpenID system. This one was right up my alley, as OpenID is basically something I'd been idly thinking of building for several years now. It is the underlying technology for TypeKey, which was my inspiration in the first place but I never knew that it was based on an open specification. It is a single sign on system where the user has complete control over their identity and with whom it is shared (as opposed to something like Microsoft Passport where a corporation controls access to your identity and can sell you out at any time). Even better, OpenID has a plugin for Ruby on Rails! As the maintainer of the Login Sugar rails user system plugin, I was somewhat shocked that I didn't already know about this project. In fact just the day before at the Ruby on Rails Camp the topic of user login packages for rails came up and I don't think anyone there knew about OpenID. I'm looking forward to giving this a whirl and then trying to see how I can promote its usage in the RoR community. There are so many relatively small rails based web sites out there, I think it would be a great thing if they banded together to promote a better Intraweb login system.

Tantek of Technorati gave a sort of feel-good recap of how the emergence of independent building blocks has allowed community efforts to spread like wildfire on the Internet lately. If I remember right it basically went something like IRC -> Blogger -> Wiki -> Del.icio.us tags -> Foo Camp -> Bar Camp. It was a fun walk down memory lane for me as I participated in all of those things in their early days.

Dave McClure led a round of Half-Baked which is a really fun game where 4-5 person teams grab two random words, mash them together into a dot-com and then in about 5 minutes come up with a product, revenue model, marketing strategy, logo and tagline. Each team does a pitch to the 'investors' and a winner is chosen. The DonutDivorce.com "Let's Make Divorce a Spectator Sport" team took first place with their reputation-based rss-enabled social-network collaborative quicky divorce site. My team somehow managed to snare second prize with VaporizeGrass.com, an SMS-enabled FlashMob lawn mowing service. All the winners got a copy of Ori Brafman's new book The Starfish and the Spider.

Ori spoke next about his book. The analogy is that if you cut off the head of a spider, the organism dies. If you cut off the head of a starfish (surely you watch Spongebob) then not only does the organism survive but you eventually end up with two whole starfish. Helllllo Al-Qaida. In fact Ori said he got a number of contacts from special ops folk in our government after publishing the book, because it gives them a new vocabulary to use in explaining what they are facing in places like Afghanistan. Of course in the context of this summit, the hope is to apply the resiliency of the starfish organizations to positive collaborative efforts.

Technorati Tags: citizen agency, citizen summit, halfbaked

On Thursday I went down to IBM Almaden in San Jose to attend the Ruby on Rails Camp held there. This was a one day unconference (Foo Camp style, more generally popularized by Bar Camp, where the participants create the schedule and lead the sessions) . I keep missing out on the official RoR conferences, so it was good to finally get to attend a rails gathering with more oomph than the local Ruby Meetups.

Some highlights:

• I gave a ride to guy named Caleb who recently spoke at a Ruby Meetup I had missed, so I got a bit of a recap on the state of rails debuggers from him.
• The very first session on memcached was perhaps the most perfect conference session I'd ever attended. Usually sessions are somewhere on the scale between too simplisitic where I learn nothing or too advanced where I learn little. This one was great. I understood everything presented, it was all new information and it was something It was something in which I was truly interested. Hats off to the presenter. Not only did he provide a good run down on what memcached is and how to optimize it, but he has released a number of great tools to the community: MemCache Client Extensions, Custom Benchmarks, and Extended Fragment Cache.
• The performance and scaling session which lasted about 5 minutes when no one could advance the high water mark for rails apps past basecamp. The field is still wide open for an impressive and popular rails based site to become the leader. I believe that the team I'm working with at Pivotal Computing is going to produce a high traffic rails site by mid 2007, but I'm still astounded that no one else has.
• Reg: "a library for pattern matching in ruby data structures. Reg provides Regexp-like match and match-and-replace for all data structures (particularly Arrays, Objects, and Hashes), not just Strings." This was demoed by Caleb (my passenger). Pretty cool concept, although not quite yet up to speed performance-wise.
• Running into a couple of friends at a limited attendance conference where I didn't expect to know anyone. Nym drove up from L.A. and Kaliya was actually the conference facilitator!
• AWS Console by Thorsten von Eicken which was my first exposure to this new EC2 offering from Amazon. His app is a front end to manage servers on the service. It should be released in the next few weeks. EC2 is an on demand virtual server web service that allows you to create a server image and then almost instantly replicate it to as many virtual servers as you want. Each virtual server "predictably provides the equivalent of a system with a 1.7Ghz x86 processor, 1.75GB of RAM, 160GB of local disk, and 250Mb/s of network bandwidth." Wow.
• Unexpectedly being one of the main "presenters" at a Test Driven Development session. It was actually quite a bit of fun although I wish I had been more prepared with examples and such. I think the next time there's an rails based unconference I'll plan ahead and purposefully lead a session. Ideally I'll have more experience with RSpec and BDD by then and could lead two sessions.

The conference organizers put up a decent summary about the general conclusions.

I've been posting to a separate blog over at Vox for a few months now. It has seemed to have evolved to where I tend to post technical and more pensive matters here at AkuAku and use the Vox system for quick postings of random things.

I like Vox. We would have gone to the launch party if Mie had checked her email in time.I wish it had more advanced user features, but it's very good as a hassle-free blogging system.

Anyhow, I just wanted to point out that for those handful of folks who would be interested in more fequent postings from me, there's a better site to watch. The feed is http://dav.vox.com/library/posts/atom.xml