Reviews of Events

I had a GREAT time at the party last night. There are so many great people here from SF and Seattle + a bunch of folks from all over the country – including Ohio
Part1:
The Opening Keynote was by Robert Steele. I unfortunately had a conference call to plan for ShesGeeky – the women’s (only) tech conference in October – so I had to miss the presentation.
However I had some incling about what he might present since I first met Robert at Nexus for Change – people there largely in the granola crowd listened to him because of his connection to Tom Atlee from the Co-Intelligence Institute and author of the Tao of Democracy.
I spent several hours dialogging with him there. In my conversation with was interesting on the one hand he was talking about ground up citizens deliberation (see NCDD) BUT – these are THE 10 Threats, THE 12 Policies, THE 8 Players. [Here are some of the “jems” from his talks captured in a live blog this morning. Here and here.]
Part 2:
I got to hear most of Daren Barefoot present he covered some interesting topics including:
Gross National Happiness (they have conferences on this – I found a Frontline that covers it.
Build infrastructure if you want to make a difference.
He put forward several great online ‘do good’ projects
* I could Be
* GeekCorps
* Get a First Life
* Nothing But Nets
He highlighted Web of Change as an Awsome conference – He asked if anyone had been. I raised my hand, agreed yes it was AWSOME.
He pointed out NetSquared as a conference.
I put forward the Nonprofit Technology Network (NTEN) which is a great network of technologists working on social good stuff. Bouns: Their conferences are 50% women.

Personal Side Note related to IT and Changing the World:
Just this week I began planning for the next Planetwork Conference – and where to begin but around Themes. The one we are currently playing with is Infrastructure Patterns for Collaboration and Sustainability.
Part3:
Guy Kawasaki closed of the morning asking us what we wanted him to talk about. We chose Evangelism.
The ART of EVANGELISM
1) Make Meaning
2) Make Mantra (2-3 words)
3) Roll the Dicee
* Deep 1.0 is plenty good eg. Fanning (Reef)
* Intelligent [DESIGN MATTERS]
* Complete
* Elegant
* Emotive
4) Niche Thyself (high and to the right. Value that is Unique).
5) Let a Hundred Blossoms Bloom
6) Make it Personal
7) Find the True Influnencers
8) Enable Test Drives
9) Look for agnostics, not atheists [or the religious]
10) Provide a Slippery Slope
11) Don’t let the bozos grind you down

I have had a a full week at OSCON for the beginning and BlogHer for the weekend. I was still in Chicago still at the W hotel as I wrote this yesturday.
So I will start-off with Slashdot Headlines:
Terms of Service for Online services can not be changed without notifying users. YEAH!
Hopefully this will create an insentive for the industry to become more transparent about the terms of service they are using and adopting an easy to understand set of icons.
Parents Encouraged to buy Office 2007 for their kids. Of course Slashdot wonders about free alternatives. A friend in Portland was telling me his girlfriend a teacher in the schools there was prohibited from downloading FireFox onto her Windows computer. She raised this issue and got the prohibition reversed and even BETTER the school district this year is adopting Open Office.
Outcomes from O’Reilly Open Source Convention
Eben Moglen take on Tim O’Reilly
From the Zend Blog:

Eben used this event to re-invigorate the debate about software freedom by attacking Tim O’Reilly, who he claims has wasted his time cozying up with the new powerhouse companies of the Web 2.0 generation and getting rich, while failing to use his influence for the bigger issue of software / knowledge freedom.

From Linux.com

Software Freedom Law Center director Eben Moglen threw down the gauntlet to O’Reilly founder and CEO Tim O’Reilly. Saying that O’Reilly had spent 10 years making money and building the O’Reilly name, Moglen invited O’Reilly to stop being “frivolous” and to join the conversation about software freedom.

From Snap Logic:

At first I thought it was simply old friends giving each other a hard time but soon it was clear that Eben had an agenda and was using the venue to make his point. I don’t have any problem with a speaker having a point of view and arguing it vigorously, but when it turns personal and vitriolic they’ve clearly cross the line.
I think this was clear to the audience as well. How else could you intrepret statements like:
1 You spend to much time with your billionaire friends
2 You’ve wasted the past 10 years trying to make money while freedoms are under attack
3 This Web 2.0 stuff is silly, ‘thermal noise’

Robert Kaye’s Take on it.
R0ml’s talk that I missed 🙁
On Perverting Code

The first was on “Preventing Code”, about how businesses treat code like some sort of dangerous weapon that their employees must be prevented from using at all costs.

An Open Source Lexicon:

After talking about the fallacy of rhetoric in modern business language, the remainder of the session was dedicated to replacing our modern business language with words from antiquity, almost all of which have meanings very close to what we want. I’m not surprised that most of the words come from the literary (as in books) domain. We are, after all, writing and publishing software. Shamefully, no one recorded this session. I couldn’t even attempt to do it justice here. [I COULDN’T AGREE MORE!!!!]
Who says the English language doesn’t have a proper word for what we mean by free software? Liberal Software.

I flew to Portland on Monday to attend OSCON. There was a BOF about Women in Open Source that had a goal to folks on the ‘what is next’ as opposed to support for experiences that women have had. A few books were mentioned:
Encyclopedia of Gender and Information Technology
Unlocking the Clubhouse Women in Computing
I happened to find this site of books from Center for Women and Information Technology when looking up these recommended book titles. It is a wealth of resources.
I put forward ShesGgeeky the (un)Conference that I am producing with some other women this fall. (More information to follow soon – I am working on getting the registration ready etc.) – If you want to save the date it is October 22-23. If you would like to help out be in touch.
Yesterday I went to the FLOSS Foundations meeting. We talked about Trademark issues for foundations and open source projects in the morning and fundraising in the afternoon. There was interest in leadership training in the group so I will now be working on moving an initiative forward in that area that I have been thinking about for a while.
I had a GREAT dinner with Mark Dilly and Greg Biggers at Rocket. This was all while David Recordon was being honored for his strategic efforts at the Google Open Source awards. Yeah DAVID!
Today I caught the end of Mark Shuttleworth’s talk in the Morning and attended
1) How to Heard Cats and influence people (I took notes blog post to follow)
2)the conversation on who gets to define what Open Source ‘is’ discussing the controversy between OSI and the SugarCRM and Social Text license. (OSI approved the license). This evening they had a conversation looking into the future of OSI – I offered that instead of talking into a mike for a layout set for 300 when there was 30 people in the room. So we did a fishbowl and I think got some where with their desire to define the issue they are trying to resolve. It was clear that more clarity on their mission would be helpful rather then just the tasks laid out in they bylaws.
I got a stunt double position at the OSGeo booth because a friend couldn’t make it so I filled in and temporarily became ‘geo-grrl’ fro the afternoon (I will be back there this morning.
There is alot of awareness of OpenID out there on trade show floor. Joyent is adopting it shortly. Rearden was considering it. I heard the positive inclinations from a key mainstream site that might adopt. (Ok I could have a major scoop here…but I have a feeling the programmer who let me in on this fact…was not supposed to have it show up ‘in print’ – so I am going to respect that.)
After the evening OSI conversation I headed “home” early to rest…because I have a red eye to BlogHer on tomorrow night. I would venture to say I am the only person attending both conferences this week.

Technorati Tags: oscon, oscon07

I found Marcia Conner’s Blog because she linked to me in a Friday Feast Question asking if she had ever met a blogging friend in person. I scrolled down her blog and found the answers the friday feast weekly. I clicked through and found list of interesting questions that come out every friday. I might try answer them some fridays now.
Last Friday’s questions were:

Appetizer
When you were a child, which crayon color was your favorite?
Soup
On a scale of 1 to 10 (with 10 being highest), how likely would you be to change jobs if it required you to move?
Salad
Take all the numbers in your birthday and your phone number and add them up, one by one. What’s the total?
Main Course
Have you ever “re-gifted” anything? If so, what was it and who did you pass it on to?
Dessert
Name something you need from the store.

This morning at RSA Bill Gates and Craig Mundie announced MSFT support of OpenID2.0. (Johannes has a good summary of the points they made too) I wouldn’t go so far to say that they got Married. But what exactly was announced? I spoke with David Recordon and Mike Jones after the announcement. (this picture is before the announcement).
The OpenID Relying parties will be able to request that the authentication be done in a Phising resistant way. Then the OpenID Provider will have it a way to assert that the authentication of the OpenID (a URL or XRI/I-name) has been done in a Phishing resistant way. CardSpace will be available as a primary way of providing this kind of authentication (for users on Windows machines).
This is a very exciting development as it expands the options available to users. Their are issues with Phishing in OpenID (as outlined here by Kim) and addressing this hole is key to making it a viable protocol that is good for users.
Kim talks about is request to the OpenID community in the blogosphere and in the meeting they had last week at JanRain (Scott blogged about that here).

My big ask was to add a way to request credentials based on phishing-resistant authentication…..[so that] the system is built to handle the dangers that would come with its own success.

The one question I have about this collaboration announcement why Cordance, NetMesh and other companies who have made major contributions and have critical stakes in the OpenID community were not listed in the announcement. I know it was pulled together very quickly but I think the contributions of those two companies have been extensive and deserved mention (and yes! they do have ‘code’).
There was also no mention of like Brad Fitzpatrick the originator of the OpenID and his company LiveJournal which is now a part of SixAppart.

I got the feeling walking in a Rock Concert for security heads. Among the music they played in the opening was OKGO’s Tredmill Song.
Then when the show started they opened up with a man and a woman singing Under Pressure with “security lyrics” complete with a backup choir of folks it seems that we have started a trend with Bohemian Rhapsody in the Key of ID (or maybe we are part of a trend).
Ze Frank came out as our host and talked about the risks and costs of new renaissance don’t outweigh the potential benefits.

This morning at WITI Cindy Solomon gave a keynote on courage – what it is and how to bring it into your work and life. It was quite introspective not a typical talk at any of the tech conferences I go to.
At lunch we had a talk about climate change – we got the science talk from a ‘government scientist’ this was really boring since Al Gore did the best PPT ever on the topic and made it a movie. I didn’t need to have a science lecture. It was very refreshing though to have this topic raised. I have never heard it spoken about at a tech conference (except for Planetwork). If other tech conferences could learn something from WITI is that topics related to inner work – like self-reflection, personal development and leadership and that topics related to the outer world like Climate Change have a place in the mix of topics.
You know I think combining these two would be a great theme for the tech industry to consider – “Courage to face Global Warming” Anyways.
At lunch I had a good conversation with Sumi Panchal from San Jose. She shared with me some of the ‘origin stories’ of WITI. This information helped me understand way more about what this whole scene was about. It reminds me of the importance of story telling for organizational culture formation and the transference.
WITI was founded in 1989 and in part to support women who were working in regular professions, medical, dentel, legal etc. who had no training really in computers but now found them coming into their work place. WITI was a place to go and learn about them.

Yesturday I went to DreamForce the Salesforce.com conference..the thing is that it is a meta-conference… a sales conference about sales.
The Nonprofit Track: It was great to see my nonprofit tech buddies, Steve who runs the Sales Force Foundation, Katrin who is the leader of the Nonprofit Technology Enterprise Network, Leda from Dot Organize, a new friend Khadijah from MassCOSH (the Massachusets Coalition for Ocupational Saftey and Health). She had a great story of frustration that speaks to the reality…she went with Drupal and and was optimistic about the potential of the platform but was totally disappointed by the tool and the ability to MAKE IT WORK well for her organizational context. As she said we are hoping this group of 19 year old developers will improve the platform…Well the fact is they haven’t really done it and disappointed a lot of folks. (I had high hopes too invested some money in customizing it for my constituents..but it never really got there). She was like SalesForce saved my ass. It is so good and I can get my 8 staff who need to use it to use it. She believes in open source still but needs it to work now…SalesForce solves that problem.
I got up and asked during the first session the first question…basically why should we trust SalesForce.com – why trust a big company with all my sensitive organizational data and what if they get acquired and change the relationship between the foundation and the company – making it not ‘free’ (for the first 10 seats). The response like – we are good people, the foundation is now part of the culture of the company, if they changed it …you would all get upset and cause a pr stir, trust is built over time and we have been doing this for 7 years.
The thing that really got me to shift was my conversation (later in the day) with David Donica the Information Technology Specialist for the Jefferson Economic Development Institute. I don’t know if you have heard of the stat of Jefferson but I am a big fan. It goes from ‘real’ Northern California into Southern Oregon. It is part of Cascadia that I broadly identify with. Jeffersonians are of course strongly independent so the fact that he trusts Salesforce with their data meant something.
In terms of identity related topics in this track one of the women asked .. ‘ how can my donors manage their bio’s or contact information on their own and just have it update’ This question resonated with a lot of folks. I offered up that the user-centric identity community was working on the solution to that problem. I talked to Steve a bit about it…he was like well we can just build that into App Exchange – I said well really it is going to live outside of that … the donors have an identity that they manage somewhere and it can talk to the nonprofit organizations they donate to. He got that it would be ‘outside’ their system and that it would be a good thing to have happen.
I got to seek Dick’s talk about Sxip Access it was a good talk and I think a great product for the problem it is solving. It helps the Enterprise Directory talk to ASP’s outside the enterprise ‘wall.’ This is a huge market and as more and more Office 2.0 ASP offerings are made it will only increase in demand. I case you were wondering Dick is still using the Viagra metaphor to talk about these subjects.
There were at least four office 2.0 applications at the conference and I talked with all of them about OpenID2 (Jive, INetOffice, ScanR, another one).
The internet cafe…was an uncafe. They had no terminals for you to use to check e-mails (I left my laptop at home). They had a rock concert by Train (I had never heard of them) in the evening and an openbar for like 4 hours (from like 6-the rock concert ended at like 10). It was very dot comish and people were commenting on that.
The product that seemed most interesting from an identity perspective was Domodomain that does ip analysis of the traffic coming to your website to let you know from where they are coming.

This we is a big week for i-names with the first trade show booth ever! The soft launch happened at the Berkman Conference and I got to introduce the count down. We opened up the global registry. DIDW is more of a hard launch. There is a growing number of i-brokers who register names. There are some basic services running and more interesting ones coming. One in particular is EQUALS “‘Super identity’ for communications my way.” being developed by AmSoft.
ooTao created EZiBroker to offer back end i-broker services and is participating in the promotion being offered this week. You can get a global name for a year for $5. They have IWantMyNameNow.com up and running.
In case you didn’t know as part of my freelance open standards for user-centric identity evangelism work on contract with the folks at Cordance and work on behalf the i-names ecology.

I am here at Digital Identity World and this morning and early afternoon we had a great Identity Open Space preceding it. We had a great range of talks. I lead introductory primer about the whole user-centric identity landscape. It was followed by primers throughout the day on technical elements – Microsoft’s Cards space, Open Source Identity Selector, , I-names/XRI, OpenID, Higgins, and more social elements Trust and Reputation, Identity Commons, Identity and schema mapping.