Right, I’m off… my mum has invited me to her 80th birthday dinner in Amersfoort (The Netherlands), and who can refuse such a request! It’s a very respectable age.
My dad sadly didn’t make it that far, he died at age 72 when I was merely 9. To clarify: I was the last of 3 in his second marriage… I do remember him, it’s just a pity we didn’t get more time together…
Wanna learn something really interesting? Phoebe was born 100 years after my dad: 1905 -> 2005. How’s that.
Just a note that my personal blog resides on lentz.com.au/
The story is this… I first started my blog when at MySQL AB, the Community Relations gig. It was a mix of personal and MySQL-related stuff, and hosted at LiveJournal. Last year we managed to migrate all the LiveJournal data to the Open Query blog instance, but naturally there it’s not really suitable to write about non-OQ stuff. So I’ve cloned that instance and am deleting the posts that are really only OQ/MySQL-related. Some business/development topics that refer to MySQL as an example will stay.
In any case, this allows me to scribble about my (bio)diesel car, gardening, cooking, bushwalking and all that without bothering the Open Query blog readers ;-) Those of you who are interested can subscribe to both. Easy!
When: Tuesday 24 November (afternoon before first OSDC day), 12pm-5pm
Where: Brisbane, Mt Coot-Tha / Bardon area (near OSDC venue)
What is it? A picnic in the park. Yes, literally! It’s a workshop, but we’re doing a barbecue beforehand. The afternoon (including the barbecue) is $10 for members, $20 for non-members. We haven’t set a firm cap on numbers but we will have to limit it somewhat.
After a joint introduction to get everybody tuned in, we’ll split the attendees into smaller groups, each utilising the Upstarta principles and related strategies to accomplish tasks.
Among other things, we’re going to develop (fictitious but potentially viable) complete products/services including surrounding aspects such as business model, market positioning, pricing, distribution, marketing, etc. Then we’ll recombine, present and discuss what each group came up with.
It’ll be educational, challenging, and fun!
For more info and registration, go to the Upstarta Camp page.
It’s the day before the Open Source Developers’ Conference starts at the nearby Bardon Centre, so if you’re travelling to the conference you have an opportunity to join the Upstarta Camp also. Simply pick a flight earlier in the day!
It’s separate events, but you will want to (also) get to OSDC, earlybird registration ends this week!
Clayton Christensen has some excellent insights on Modularity vs Integration in “The Innovator’s Solution”. I wrote about this for Upstarta.biz. Particularly in the realm of Open Source, modularity is regarded as a panacea – a product, service or design must be modular. But modularity is not better (or worse) than integration. Like tools, they each have their place, depending on the state of the market/ecosystem where the process/product/service operates. Part of a system can be in a modular phase, where another part of the same system needs integration!
In this context, think of an Open Source project or company’s ability to handle contributions. If the process of interaction between a contributor and the core is not (for whatever reason) clearly defined and predictable, it won’t work. Jamming an additional [in this case external, but that’s irrelevant to the issue] interface for contributions somewhere in existing business processes can be doomed to fail.
We see the results of this in many projects that are Open Source, but find themselves unable to process contributions, or just don’t get any contributions. It’s quite likely that the underlying cause is not apathy (from the contributor’s end) or malice (from the receipient’s end), but it’s important to understand the underlying processes at work. It’s not necessarily the modularity of the software itself that’s an issue (tightly integrated code can receive contributions too!), but the surrounding business processes.
I had this realisation while camping with my good friend Steve Dalton and our kids this weekend. So a big thanks to Steve! I think it may help with understanding why Sun/MySQL (and MySQL AB before it) have had such difficulty dealing with contributions. And proper understanding could help resolve the problem. Good intent on its own does not suffice, otherwise it’d have been highly effective long ago!
Looking at twitter #songsincode (just search on #songsincode tag), it appears a large chunk of geeky/nerdy world has come to a halt while spending the day expression song titles in code. So far we’ve seen most programming languages as well as CSS and SQL come by. I think it’s a nice example of how “the collective” can become very creative. My favourite SQL ones so far (by @john_chr): SELECT * FROM walk WHERE gait LIKE '%EGYPTIAN%'
Update: a good friend of mine, Stephen Thorne (@Jerub), wanted to set up a site for this, so we hacked one up – since the meme has long passed, it’s now hosted at SongsInCode Archive.