B. Mann Consulting

Myth of a core #Drupal team /via @greg_harvey

bmann — Sun, 17 Jan 2010 19:46:31 +0000

And the core Drupal team wonder why they don't get more help from all the Drupal contractors out there.

This was a comment in a thread on Greg Harvey's blog about duplicate issues. I see similar sentiments a lot. Here's the comment I left:

There is no core team. That's the myth. There are people who do more work, and there are version maintainers ... but other than that, it's whoever pitches in.

So, try not to think about "them" or "the core team" -- because it's simply a group of people that have decided to put more time in. The exact people grow and shrink depending on time and interest level, and usually per core version.

How do you get involved with Drupal core? Pick an area that interests you, and submit a patch (or review a patch, or test a patch, or design a mock up, or write some documentation). The barrier to entry for that first post is surprisingly low. And yes, from there on you have to put bit more time in - because there are many many "single post" contributors, who for whatever reason, don't follow through.

But it's worth it, and I encourage you to start by starting. Who knows, you might become part of the core Drupal team :P

Press: CBC "Paid to Blog" segment regarding FTC blogger disclosure rules

bmann — Wed, 06 Jan 2010 08:40:26 +0000

The New Year is kicking off with a bang. Bootup Labs moved into our new offices on Sunday (Cambie at Hastings, the Flack Block - come visit!) On Monday morning Danny was in the Financial Post (actually, @trevoro from @layerboom has much longer quotes on page 2).

Then on Tuesday (technically yesterday as I'm posting this), I got a call from @lalondetcbc and ended up with a short CBC TV segment talking about whether bloggers should be legally required to disclose payments and other bonuses they receive. I was "opposite" Rebecca / Miss 604. That is, it was supposed to be opposing view points.

Rebecca is an excellent blogger. She is a professional blogger (i.e. makes her living from her blogging activities). It's great that she's decided to use CMP.ly to indicate her disclosures: it shows the kind of honesty and transparency that makes her a great blogger. Do we need a law for it? Well, the FTC in the US thinks it does, but the guidelines seem over broad - a $5 discount at a restaurant and a positive review could net you an $11K fine? Of course, they say it will be on a case by case basis. Hmmm ... a law that is hard to enforce and is applied inconsistently? Sounds like trouble to me!

I like John Chow's disclosure policy -- everything he posts he's making money from. This is a pure case of media literacy - people need to learn about the sources they are consuming and make their own decisions.

Of course, journalists aren't covered under these laws at all. Why not? Good question, and quotes like this one in a Reason Magazine article don't inspire confidence: "Yet I don't remember any reviewer in any print publication ever disclosing that the record, the movie, the meal or the vacation was free."

Lastly, it seems like Rebecca and I were set up to have opposing viewpoints, since we seem to be on the same page. Oh well, at least they spelled my name right :P

I have a few quotes bookmarked under the tag FTC Endorsement Guidelines for further reading.

Global mobile content $ > music + movies + gaming all put together /via @rtanglao

bmann — Wed, 06 Jan 2010 08:12:03 +0000

In 2009, Portio Research counted the global value of 'non messaging' premium content (music, gaming, news, etc) downloaded or consumed on phones and sold to them worldwide, to be worth 85 Billion dollars. Yes, 250 times bigger opportunity for any content owner like say a Disney or TimeWarner or Turner etc to make money today, on ALL phones, not those few iPhones that are in pockets of some 4% of Americans and less than half of one percent of the rest of the world. Understand how enormous this number is. Just 'premium' mobile data income (I am excluding messaging) is bigger than ALL internet content revenues, and all internet advertising income - added together! (Morgan Stanley said they totalled 64B dollars in 2009). Mobile content alone, is worth more than all global cinema box office revenues, and all global videogaming industry software income, and all global music industry income - PUT TOGETHER. Again? Mobile data paid content industry is bigger that music, hollywood and videogames, all added together. Its that big. And some crazy journalists count free downloads on App Stores and think this is the mobile data opportunity for the industry. Now in our zoo we are obsessing about the standard field mouse rather than the elephant.
But even this is not the real comparison. I just said, that Portio measured 'non messaging' premium content revenues for mobile. What of the total mobile data industry? It is now worth over 284 BILLION dollars globally, including messaging income (says Morgan Stanley). Thats 825 times bigger in value than all apps stores. Its not mouse to an elephant in our zoo, it is focusing on the ant and ignoring the elephant.

via communities-dominate.blogs.com

I kept trying to figure out different parts of Tomi's article to quote, and realized I was selecting the whole thing. You really do need to read the whole thing to understand where the mobile industry is *today* (and it is gigantic).

*However*, I think Tomi (who is fantastically smart and knowledgeable about the _global_ mobile telecoms industry) is missing where this is all heading. I saw the same thing happen at Nortel when the bitheads (me and other people in the IP everywhere camp - death of scarcity) bumped into the bellheads (telecoms thinking, more similarities to railroads, supply & demand).

App stores are small from a global perspective, from a total industry perspective, even though on a micro scale many individual developers and services are making millions of dollars. It is, however, an Internet based business. There is flat ground in all directions, and anyone can build there. There are no bottlenecks, there are no checkpoints or speed traps to slow you down (aka mobile operators, government regulation, or even worse, government-run mobile operators).

The future is not mobile telecoms, which is the picture that Tomi paints today. The future is Internet + identity + payment, and app stores will figure heavily in that future.

But, if you can figure out a way to sell into the GIGANTIC mobile telecoms market today - go do it, just focus on the Internet end goal that I believe is inevitable.

Mac Tablet: A Tablet for the rest of us?

bmann — Sat, 02 Jan 2010 06:02:48 +0000

But will it actually be "nothing short of Apple’s reconception of personal computing," as Gruber opined? What I think he's getting at is the sentiment embodied by already announced products like the Litl and Google's Chrome OS. This is the middle ground between the desktop and mobile software platforms, which makes perfect sense for a hardware device that fills a similar position.

The "reconception" part comes in when you consider how many people really need the power—and the complexity that comes with it—of a desktop platform, and in what situations. As a computer geek watching the Chrome OS introduction video, it's hard not to think about how much easier some people's lives would be (hi Mom and Dad) if they could trade technical complexities they don't care about for vastly increased simplicity and ease of use.

via arstechnica.com

At the beginning of 2009, I had been predicting a Mac Tablet for 4 years. So, now we're at 5, and it might actually be here soon.

As linked above by Siracusa, do read the Gruber write up. I agree with Siracusa -- it's not the "Reconception of personal computing" -- it's a replacement for the Macbook that gives people that have a powerful desktop at home (Mac Desktop, iMac) an excuse to go mobile.

Or, for those that have an iPhone and no other Macs in their life to get a larger, more capable device.

Going more "cloudy" (see especially my recently linked Jolicloud OS for netbooks -- less local storage, processing, and so on -- just surfs the current trends AND makes the device "easier" for mom and pop.

The Mac Tablet would fit well into my life. I tend to use a paper notebook in meetings, mainly because you can't pay attention with a big screen in between you and another person. A tablet would fit well in that role.

I could certainly see getting an iMac for home, an iMac for work, and the tablet be my primary / only portable computing device. Given my typing speed, I think I would want an external keyboard, but I think the iPhone's soft keyboard has pleasantly surprised most people.

P.S. I'm experimenting with using Posterous. I have a new personal blog at bmann.ca, and I'm actually using Posterous as a front end to post asides as well. The asides will likely all be cross posted here, where some of them will make it to the front page, and others will remain "unpromoted" in this section of the blog. Google Reader / Delicious type content is what most of it will consist of.

BarCamp Vancouver 2009 wrapped

bmann — Mon, 05 Oct 2009 10:24:52 +0000

So, that's a wrap: BarCamp Vancouver 2009 is "in the can". I really enjoyed this year's event -- I even went to and gave some sessions! (yes, that's worthy of note - as an organizer, it can be hard to relax and get into the flow)

I attended a great talk by Dustin Sacks on the 10 principles of Burning Man and how they compare / contrast with BarCamp. It was great, and made me think about a ton of things.

One thing that stood out for me is that I think that BarCamp has "moved on" from its original core focus on making code -- in part because of the principle of "radical inclusion". We kept making it more inclusive until lots of people that weren't at the same "level" started coming (in tech, in background, etc. etc.). It's not a problem, per se, it's just evolution.

I used the phrase "Know when to fork" in a later session: and a bunch of local tech "makers" have done just that, with BazCamp Vancouver. Looks like it will be in early November - I'm looking forward to it, and I'm definitely going to have to follow up on the @MakerBot angle (blog post asking for "expressions of interest" forthcoming).

In any case, thanks to Dustin for leading this - I know we could have spent more time diving into these topics in even more depth. I definitely want to explore / focus / highlight some of these principles in future events. Gifting, civic responsibility, radical self-reliance -- all seem to resonate highly.

Passion and Frustration

I was further moved when Mark Busse pulled me into running a session with him on Balancing Frustration and Passion. The session took a lot out of me, as it is a line that I walk *all the time*. We ended up in all sorts of interesting places - many of which were themselves frustrating! :P Mark is an incredible person, and I really enjoyed tossing discussion points back and forth with him and other participants.

I think passion and frustration are two sides of the same coin. It's funny, but I've often told people - I bitch because I care. If I send you 18 usability issues with your website (frustration) it means that I care (passion). If I didn't care, I wouldn't bother writing up the email and sending it to you.

My main recommendation for tackling any project - that is, actually deciding that you will work on it - is that you ideally need to recruit a total of three people. Yourself, plus two others. With only two, each person needs to be aware of all the details in case the other person needs to take a break / gets run over by a bus / whatever. With three, the load is spread a bit more easily. Of course, if you're high on passion, you'll just go ahead all by yourself, but it's something to keep in mind for longer term / larger projects.

Co Working

Right after the "Passion" session was the co-working session. It ended up being mainly an information sharing and level set session, but judging from the amount of different initiatives we heard about, it was a necessary first step.

I started by talking a bit about WorkSpace closing down - the exact details aren't clear, but ultimately it wasn't financially sustainable as a for profit business. Then I covered the planning / idea stage that the Bootup Entrepreneurial Society is at - we'd love to solve the pain of flexible space for software startups, and to provide a core gathering space for entrepreneurs in the downtown core.

I had just met @NickMolnar the week before and compared a few notes, and invited him to participate as well. He is looking into building a commercial hack/maker/builder space. Nick wrote up a post on what he's thinking / planning. I think some of the existing Vancouver Hack Space folks got a bit miffed by Nick being new to the scene / misappropriating the term "hackerspace". I believe Nick's focus is perhaps similar to Tech Shop - which has a strong commercial component. Of course, VHS is growing as well, so this could concievably be something that existed "next door" to each other.

Next, we heard from Irwin a bit about the W2 Community Media Arts organization / space that is going into the Woodwards complex. If you want to volunteer, there is a Volunteer Meet and Greet tomorrow.

I would really liked to have gotten into some more needs and wants of individuals of potential spaces, but we ran out of time - hopefully we'll get to some of that in further face to face meetings, as well as via survey as described below.

The two main next steps are:

1) re-factoring and extending the notes on the wiki (thanks to Raul for liveblogging).

In particular, I'd like to see each initiative listed there with mission, capacity, cost, and current needs. For example, Irwin of W2 will have incubator space targeted at social enterprise - his example was getting an aboriginal film festival off the ground. This would need to be captured as part of the mission / goal of each space. The needs section is also supremely important. For example, the Bootup Society currently needs space and funding. The Network Hub is currently full, so their needs might also include "more space". If we can get a good overview of shared goals and needs, then we know where we can work together, and where we need to apply the principle of "know when to fork".

This might be a useful jumping off point for also listing spaces that are available for community meetups of various kinds - both James of Kontent Creative and Mark of Industrial Brand spoke up, offering space for ~30 people. The Society has a Vancouver Venues page / Google Spreadsheet that might be extended.

2) run a survey gathering information from people interested in co-working / shared office space / community space / incubator space etc. etc.

This is the main action item that I am taking on. I have a draft survey, which I will post to the BarCamp wiki. I would like to get everyone's input on what questions need to be included, and then we can ideally send this survey out once, to the broadest number of people, to get lots of useful information and feedback to help guide everyone's decision making process.

(Turns out Roland recorded the session, too)

Next Steps

The rest of the day is a bit of a blur. There are lots of sessions that overlapped and I'm sorry to have missed (esp. the Design Charette by @awesome). Lunch was good (we even had snacks in the morning, when all I thought we had was coffee). I think the space worked great, and I hope that Discovery Parks Vancouver gets a bunch of inquiries out of it (here's a direct link to the commercialization centre PDF). Vancouver Open Data was great. Clean up was quick. Yes, I'm fading here in the middle of the night. Go look here and there and you'll find more wrap ups a plenty.

What's next? Well, the organizers will send a wrapup email - please add links to upcoming events, much as we discussed verbally in the wrap up session. We'll also be meeting to debrief about the event. After the debrief, we'll be doing a "call for 2010 organizers".

If you haven't already, please continuing blogging, tweeting, uploading, tagging, wiki-ing and otherwise documenting the event. There is a long list of links right on the front page of talks with lots of links, so please continue to flesh them out. As well, if you have a blog post about the event you want to highlight, please start a new section on the front page - something like "Related Blog Posts".

Most importantly: take action. Documenting and sharing the knowledge is one thing, but the next is to take actions. I know I have a ton of follow ups to do, and I hope you all do as well.

Thanks to everyone for attending - and most importantly, participating. And a final note: be excellent to each other.

Form follows function: the growth of Drupal themes will directly mirror the growth of custom distributions

bmann — Fri, 02 Oct 2009 00:38:58 +0000

Yes, I've also read Morten, Todd, and now All Drupal Themes. Here's my take:

The growth of Drupal themes will directly mirror the growth of custom distributions. We are currently in the "it's so easy, we click together lots of Drupal modules from scratch" phase. Once there are more Open Atrium and ProsePoint type of distributions, with known modules / module options and features, then you can build great themes to support those functions.

Form follows function. I've tried to explain this a million times in the D7 process. Having a "great" core theme is impossible when we don't decide what kind of site Drupal should be optimized for out of the box. This same holds true for trying to build and market a theme that will apply and work well with the many vastly different kind of sites that one can build with Drupal.

Yes, CVS is "hard". Yes, all GPL is "hard". I would argue that the overhead of trying to create infinitely flexible themes for any possible view, module, and block layout is the hardest part. Define your functions, and we'll have the beautifully formed themes to match.

Federated micro-blogging for Canadian startup networking?

bmann — Sat, 22 Aug 2009 22:40:03 +0000

Some of you may have heard that Twitter was down the week before last. This kicked out all sorts of thinking and discussion that, perhaps, one company shouldn't be a single point of failure.

The other item that has been coming up again and again is a request that the Bootup Entrepreneurial Society run a "social network" of some kind. People really enjoy Launch Party and other events, and have found them a great place to network.

More specifically, running Co-Founder Speed Dating, we set up Crowdvine as a mini social network. What we found is that it was heavily used - lots of people used it to check out the backgrounds of other people and it continued to be used after the fact. People who couldn't make it to the event checked in and contacted people, some of which actually resulted in companies being founded.

Back to Twitter. Or, more specifically, Laconi.ca, an open source "clone" of Twitter. The company behind it is launching Status.net - basically, a fully hosted *version* similar to (and interoperable with) Twitter. It also supports a few extras that Twitter doesn't -- like tagging of user profiles (great to do stuff like #cofounder_wanted or #mentor to show lists of users) and groups (great for setting up more "channelized" communications or question / answer about specific topics -- e.g. a "Legal" group).

So, the concept is to run this at something like yvr.bootup.ca, parlez.montrealstartup.com, somecooltorontodomain.com, talk.calgarytechnologies.com, etc. etc. - one in any region that wants to take responsibility to run such a thing.

Each site would serve as a mini social network / hub -- listing profiles of entrepreneurs, mentors, service providers, and anyone else from the regional technology areas that wants to participate.

I'm most definitely not ready to just go ahead with this. Running infrastructure like this is something that has to stay up. Picking a domain is important -- the "namespace" is what defines the community, in part. And, if we go with Laconi.ca as a base, it's actually less interesting if we just stand up one instance - we need at least one other network to commit to setting up and federating with us.

So, those of you have said that Vancouver / Bootup should set up "yet another social network", what do you think? Is this type of federated microblogging a good choice? Go kick the tires on Identi.ca - set up an account, fill out your profile, tag yourself, and start searching for other people.

Other suggestions for tools or requirements for such a system? I'm still not convinced we need something, but I do feel that we need to connect more, to tell the stories that are happening all over Vancouver, and all over Canada.

Gnomedex 2009 - On First timers

bmann — Sat, 22 Aug 2009 21:44:27 +0000

I'm here at Gnomedex in Seattle. It's been a couple of years since I've attended, for a variety of reasons, but I love the participants and have made many great connections here over the years. I made the decision last minute and picked up an extra ticket from the Hop Studios. The experience - as always - has been great: thanks to @chrispirillo and the rest of the Gnomedex team.

I want to talk a bit something I've been thinking about for a while, which is "first timers". The thinking behind growing BarCamp Vancouver to ~300 participants last year was simple math. If we have about 50% new people every year, that means only 75 new people experiencing the unconference format and BarCamp experience. Growing it to 300, meant we double the "new experiences" we can enable every year.

But "new" is constantly shifting. At Northern Voice this year, the conference sold out in just a couple of weeks. And yet, when we informally polled the audience, they were again about 50% new people. Here at Gnomedex, the "show of hands" of new people seemed higher than 50%.

My hypothesis is that, in part, the adoption of new technologies, people discovering them, and connecting with other people using them, is what drives this shifting of new. With Northern Voice, it was the bomb of Twitter adoption in late 2008 - everyone "saw" people they knew through Twitter buying tickets. They felt a sense of blogging because they "knew" these people from Twitter, and so Northern Voice was the conference where they met a bunch of people from Twitter in real life.

Here at Gnomedex, @bre talked about his MakerBot. As part of it, he talked about his history. He did stuff on the Internet, but didn't really know anyone else. So in 2005 he came to his first Gnomedex and met the other people from the Internet.

In 2009, 4 years later, he's on stage presenting, telling us about @makerbot.

The Giant Ant Media team (go buy the Bongo Film album!) talked about something similar. 2 years ago, @jaygrandin didn't have a home computer, and he thought Hotmail was the best ever. Oh, and they used MySpace.

Whatever conference you're at, especially if you're there for the first time, think about that. The new is always shifting, and your challenge is to participate, and to chart your future so that in 4 years, you're up on stage.

Flow-based organizations can grow an archive with microblogging

bmann — Fri, 19 Jun 2009 08:49:57 +0000

My friend James at AdHack introduced me to the concept of Archive vs. Flow:

The web works in two ’states’ (for lack of a better word): flow and archive.

Flow: all the new content coming onto the web and its parsing, aggregation, recombination, etc. For short, consider this the new stuff. New blog posts. New Twitter tweets. New YouTube videos. Access is by RSS, browsing, email, IM, alerts.

Archive: all the content that’s no longer new but is still accessible and indexed for retrieval. For short, this is the culmination of not-new stuff. Old stuff organized and accessed by tags, categories, searches and links.

Most folks only get the archive aspect of the web once they’ve used it and managed websites for a number of years. It’s a little counterintuitive and different from all other media types.

Flow is short-term candy to fire people up. Archive is long-term value that ages and improves over time.

Once I started thinking like this - about content and experiences as Archive or Flow (or a combination, of course, if done right), it has permeated my thinking.

More recently, I've been thinking about organizations and their activities using this same model. And how many traditional, broadcast media organizations are all flow. They don't even *think* about archive. And this is epitomized by what I think is the very basis for all web-based Archive concepts: the permalink. If your piece of content, your experience, does not have a permalink, there is precious little I can do with it (including find my way back to it).

Two examples of media organization that are pretty much all flow: TV and radio (especially the news and/or local versions). Neither have permalinks in their "native" format. Their companion websites are slowly evolving some archive functionality, but it's not very good. Even worse, their websites do a bad job of showcasing the inherent flow nature of the organization and the content they serve.

Hulu is an example of a TV-related website that is starting to provide a great archive functionality. More like this, please!

Other TV sites do have some clips after the fact, and ways to link to them, but these are divorced from the native medium. You have to remember to go back to the website, somehow find the piece of content you were watching, and even then you might not have a permalink (think hour long clips, mini clips, or mystery meat javascript navigation that doesn't let you link directly to items).

Radio is the example that I think is:

in the most dire need of showcasing the "flow" nature of their content on their companion website and
has done a terrible job of doing anything to grow an archive that, as James says, has "long-term value that ages and improves over time".

A counter example is actually CBC Radio - they're growing an archive at a furious rate for most of their shows in the form of podcasts and interactive shows like Spark that blur radio and web and interactivity. But, I think the local "news" radio doesn't do nearly as good a job of moving from flow to archive on the web, arguably where it is the most important. The produced "shows" just happen to currently be broadcast over the air - but they are discrete chunks of content that can probably be better delivered via the web.

Last.FM is an example of a site that is tangentially related to this discussion, at least as regards music. They turn your "flow" of music listening into your own personal archive. And it grows richer over time. Radio doesn't do this for you, even on their own website. You can't favourite a song, or share it, or tell other people to tune in to a particular frequency RIGHT NOW if they want to hear it. It probably should.

So, how do flow-based organizations grow an archive? I think the prime example of native flow tools on the web today are all based on microblogging: Twitter, Friendfeed, and Facebook status messages. By looking at these native flow tools, media organizations can do several things at the same time:

Leverage the flow based, real time nature of their content and business - every item from their native medium becomes the basis for a microblog post coming from their own brand.
Build interactivity around this web-based flow version. What if your radio or TV station tweeted back at you? What if it used hashtag #traffic? or #news? or #contest?
Use all of this activity to automatically create permalinks which can be shared, rated, commented and in general, grow value over time. Since every microblog has a permalink "for free", there's the basis of your archive. Layer on other tools to remix, analyze, mashup, and visualize the depth of your archive over time.

Oh, and you probably shouldn't cede all of this great archive content exclusively to Twitter or any other third party network. Like cross-posting to YouTube, you definitely want to reach the audience on Twitter (and Facebook, and so on), but you first want to post to your "own" microblog. How do you get your microblogging network? I'm glad you asked!

There are a number of tools evolving to support the Open Micro Blogging standard that will let a number of different sites all talk to each other. This means that platforms like Drupal or WordPress can easily support implementations of microblogging.

More simply, Laconi.ca is an open source project designed to be a turnkey microblogging platform. The biggest single example is the Identi.ca site, and a good example of a community using it is Leo Laporte's TWiT Army. Evan Prodromou of Laconi.ca / Identi.ca recently shared with me that he's also working on a fully hosted option. Watch status.net to keep up to date with that option.

Much of the growth of the web has come from its Archive nature, rooted in the permalink and being able to instantly get back to a single piece of content. Google and Wikipedia are two prime examples of this. Flow and real time are more recent entrants, but they are making the web grow even faster ^[1].

How is your flow based organization going to participate in both?

^[1] Blogging is perhaps unique in that it embodies both Archive and Flow at the same time. We just never noticed its Flow aspect because interaction and "newness" spread out over hours or days rather than the minutes or seconds we can visually see with microblogging.

Social media is…

bmann — Wed, 17 Jun 2009 19:12:52 +0000

…cake. Sort of. John Ounpuu made an interesting comment the other day that I re-tweeted:

Social is not a new type of icing. It's a new way of thinking about your cake.

I then got a number of good responses. From Travis:

Actually, social is a new way of deciding what to make -- as Marie Antoinette found, the people might not want to eat cake.

And then from Justin:

Social is a cake fight. Everyone has a cake, and they're all throwing it at each other and trying to dodge.

Fun stuff, and a good excuse to make a summary blog post.