drupal

I’m back in Estados Unidos once more, surviving 10 days in bustling, socialistic, publicly drunken Yrup. I have more extensive scribblings on the subject of “does humanity stand a chance” based on my experience, but those are for another time.

For now, notable notes:

• Copenhagen = “Hopenhagen” and we did DrupalCon Europe under a 1.8Mw wind turbine. It was a rousing success.
• Signing party for a new company (Pantheon Systems, Inc) in some very Cybersyn-like chairs in our hotel. Many thanks to Vilas for handling all the paperwork.
• My new little Starling netbook did a good job on the plane/etc, but I need to get a bigger battery. Already on order.
• The first rule of Manticore is you don’t blog about Manticore.
• Pedi-cab driver fantasies about. If this whole company thing doesn’t work, I could still burn it all down and make an honest living.
• London was quite lovely, staying with The Rina. Strange what was familiar and what wasn’t from 15 years ago when it was my first big-city experience.
• Henry IV Part II at the Globe = Awesome. Watched from groundlings in a light rain, so sore feed and a damp jacket, but way to be up close and personal. Roger Allam is a superb Falstaff (I’m not the only one reminded of Christopher Hitchens it seems) and the whole experience was just magical.

• Also attended Carnival, which was a festival of public excess, but pretty great too. Innovative public urinals they have there; also, very large cans of beer. One hand just washes the other.

Anyway, back to the regular grind. So far I’m making the jetlag work in my favor with very early mornings and tucking to bed soundly by like 11pm. We’ll see how long that lasts.

Spent this past week at this little get-together called Drupalcon. I’ve done a poor job in general explaining what this “Drupal” is to my non-nerd quadrant of friends, and it’s a pretty long story with a lot of angles and beautiful idiosyncrasies. And also now kind of a big deal on these old internets. Like, 3000 people showing up for a conference we organized, with major sponsorships from technology heavyweights and a presentation from the White House.

Yeah.

The first wave of my professional life was very startup-oriented. Silicon Alley from ’98 to ’01. I never made any money of course, but as a 19 to 22 year old kid it was amazing experience both on technical and business fronts. The second wave was all about politics, but definitely had that scrappy startup kind of vibe, bootstrapping an insurgent campaign and then getting the non-profit equivalent of venture financing to try out some totally unproven ideas, including building a professional space around Drupal and participating in the dot-org boom. After that I took some time off and freelanced, then started a company. While starting ones own company is an integral part of being an entrepreneur for real-real, the first few years of this were a lot of hard learning curve for me, and to be honest it was a lot harder than I thought.

Now, exhausted from an excessively busy week and battling a devilish low-grade cold, I still feel like, once again, the buzz is back. It’s a new wave. I’m back to sleeping six hours a night and waking up jazzed.

And with this new momentum, I want to follow it up in my personal space, get healthy generally and re-initiate “Operation Get Very Hot.” My pre-professional background in the theater gave me a decent base physique, and more importantly a deep and lasting appreciation for the connection between mind, body and soul. I’m a confirmed believer in mystically ecstatic states and peak performance, and for me the base for all this is the physicality. I am, at my very best, an acrobat of the heart.

However, to be honest the past few years I’ve been sort of wasting away. Fits and starts in the gym, but more sitting on my ass (at work and at home) than anything else, eating great food and drinking tasty tasty beers. It’s immediately pleasurable and I don’t plan to deny myself any of that, but I’m really starting to notice how the infrastructure of my being is in decline.

This goes beyond simple gutfat and buttsag — some of which, let’s face it, is probably inevitable — and more to things like flexibility, stamina, posture, and how I respond to stress. Five days of conferencing shouldn’t have made my back hurt so badly. I shouldn’t had a cough that lasts six months. I should have more energy and zeal over the long haul, and not just the nervous spikey energy that comes from high pressure and big potential.

I’m a lucky son of a bitch, and if I’m going to make the most out of all this good fortune that means starting to take better care of myself in general. In a few weeks I’ll be turning 31, and where I wind up in a decade depends on choices I make now. It’s time again to take the initiative, push forward on several fronts in a dazzling display of personal synergy and virtuosic coordination.

This is my “good” presentation. I’m looking a little haggard here — this is after two more days of being on a boat in Stockholm, and two more nights out with the king of Denmark, then flying back to spend Friday/Saturday nights in Austin, Texas — but this is the best Video I’ve got of my “inspired by Lessig” deal.

Someday I’m going to get my own projector, a foot-pedal clicker, and a few weeks of time, and make some king-hell presentation-art. Lots of potential.

One of the things I did while on my world-tour last fall was give a talk about Drupal and academia in the belly of a ship in Stockholm. And the cameras we’re rolling.

How Berkeley and Stanford University Use Drupal (Joshua Koenig) from NodeOne.se on Vimeo.

It’s not my best presentation due to jetlag/sickness and a funky mic (I also never really had my breath working right, a big no-no from Theater World), but I did a decent job of regulating my pace and I think it’s a more or less accurate talk.

Huge thanks to my hosts who cut together this video really well, and gave me some lovely liquor that I didn’t quite get to drink. Looking forward to showing them a really good time when they come out to San Francisco in April!

(Note: updated with some next-day polish and exposition)

It's 4am+ in Paris, and I'm reading some Krugman. Week full of Drupal, head full of business, this jumps out at me:

Keynes considered it a very bad idea to let such markets, in which speculators spent their time chasing one another’s tails, dictate important business decisions: “When the capital development of a country becomes a by-product of the activities of a casino, the job is likely to be ill-done.”

This is why I currently lean against Chapter Three pursuing investors, venture capital or the like, even though we could probably do so successfully and there are some cool (Y-combinator) options out there. In my opinion too much of that is about angling towards a big payday from selling out, "an exit" or "liquidity event." This isn't a bad thing per se, and I'm certainly not knocking anyone's choices along these lines, but this question of "capital development" is a large one for me.

Even in the face of the Great Recession, the market my business operates in is growing. Not everyone's a winner and some people are having problems meeting their nut — something we think about a lot as we staff up — but there's tons of work out there and lots of enticing larger-scale growth on the horizon. Pretty decent prospects out on this here internet, honestly.

However, that in and of itself is boring to me. I like money, but beyond a relatively minimal point it's not really motivating or interesting. The personal threshold at which it becomes merely a way of keeping score for me is somewhere just north of paying all my bills and having enough left over to stay well-stocked on goat cheese and olives. That'll change if/as I end up taking on bigger financial responsibilities, family and the like, but for know that's where it is.

What's of enormous interest though is the growth and development of a whole new way of doing business, and one that addresses the principle task of empowering people to take ownership and agency over their personal (and of course organizational) destiny with regards to this information-driven world we all now inhabit. The "infrastructure play" as they say, helping this post-capitalist open source economy really take root and flourish.

At the same time, I'm increasingly disenchanted with the state of national politics. While I don't want to abandon things to be run into the ground (President Cheney???!?), it just doesn't feel like there's a lot that can really be done at that level given the constraints of the system.

Yet I'm ambitious and power-acquisitive as ever. Much as I wax nostalgic about the good old days of bohemian simplicity, I don't see myself abandoning my current career arc in any wholesale manner. I'd like to regulate my work-life a bit better, do more for the community, and spend more time on really interesting things, but overall "building the internets" is the best ticket I have to ride, and I'll be sticking with it for the foreseeable future.

So basically the plan is to continue to build my skills, capacities and resources, and start planning bigger and bigger projects/maneuvers. Towards that end, the best opportunities for me appear to be an lateral and local organization.

As The Girth is fond of positing, we could likely return home and probably beat out Jordan Papé/whoever for eventual control of the State of Oregon. Likewise, there's a lot of interesting work going on around citizen-level international solidarity, and my participation in the Drupal community gives me trusted contacts on five continents, spanning the gamut from government employees to avowed trotskyites.

So maybe there's a future in sustainable business ownership success which leaves me with enough free capital, latitude and connections to work these angles. My job title, after all, is "CTO", and if I do right I should be able to keep the business rockin' without having to spend so much time in the trenches on individual projects. Higher-level visibility. Put that together with a little long-term planning, and something pretty interesting could emerge.

If nothing else, I love these conferences because they get me thinking BIG again.

---

Credit where it's due, that photo is from a wonderful art installation put on by the EMU Marketing department that I helped assemble (throwing 60,000 lines of printed code around is fun).

I just can’t stop starting new businesses. Here’s the latest.

Want to see me piss off some sign language interpreters?

Oh yeah.

It really makes me feel bad as an actor. Look at my shitty posture and gesticulation. Listen to my non-warmed-up voice. Still, got good reviews because, in the words of the Professor Brothers, I talked about some real shit.

Exhausted and brain-swolen. Got some more things to do and some travel to figure out. Flying out tomorrow night.

Overnight flight to Boston. DrupalCon. My third. The first one was kind of magical, back in 2006, Vancouver BC, getting the real buzz for the first time. I haven’t been able to explain very well to my non-geek peers how awesome this software project is, which is a shame. Because it really is pretty rad.

To wit: some Belgan computer science students started working on a system for their dorm-hall community to use to stay in touch after graduation. Eight years later the open-source software, Drupal, is powering hundreds of thousands of websites, including bigshots like The Onion, MTV UK and others. But that’s not even the cool part.

The truly awesome thing about this project is that it’s been built by literally thousands of people. For free. There are a core cadre of a few hundred or so coders who do a lot of this, most of them (like me) making a living off it in one way or another, and an even smaller group of legendary developers at the center of all of it. But it happens openly, as a community affair, and it works in large part people people are friends over it, taking pleasure from working on something together.

This is what open-source is really all about to me. It’s the recognition that programming is an act of creativity, and the growth of communities of creators around their project. It’s no coincidence that many Drupalists have artistic backgrounds; it has many aspects of a theatrical troup, of a band.

This is a kind of cultural production that’s really new. Never before have people been able to be intellectually creative in this way and on this scale, and it’s deeply gratifying to be a part of this scene, exploring a new mode of association and camaraderie, proving that the ethos of a community can outperform that of a corperation.

I don’t know how much longer the exponential growth of the community and use of the platform can continue, but it certainly feels like each new year and each new release crosses a new threshold. The big news accompanying the 6.0 release is that project founder Dries has wrapped up his PhD (which was for unrelated computer science studies) and started a company, Acquia, with $7M in series A venture financing. That’s a first.

It’s also a first (for me) to pay for one of these conferences. Are the suits taking over? Well, by all indications, not jyst yet. Kieran Lal showed up in a Paul Revere looking hat to do a welcome session for first-timers, so that’s a good sign, and there are a lot of familiar faces and the crowd is a good mix of hip, square, scruff and smooth.

Should be fun. Nice to be back in Boston.

So on Thursday a message came across the Redwood Tech Consortium mailing list proposing to set up a website to help offer housing for people displaced by the SoCal fires. I thought it sounded like a good idea, and me and a few heads from the Drupal Dojo created a site in one night that’s up for the job:

HomeMatching.org

Big ups to Matt Koglin for cooking up an excellent design, Michael Welch for snagging the domain, and to Larry Goldberg for spearheading the organizing. He’s working w/the Rotary club to get folks registered, and gotten the site some press:

”We are going to simply be a broker between people in need and people who have housing to offer,” he said. “People, especially with children and families, who need to get out of the smoke can go somewhere temporarily until literally, the dust settles.”

Those who can provide housing type information, such as the number of people and pets they could accommodate and whether smoking would be permitted, into the Rotary Home Matching system. The site then matches volunteers with those in need, and it’s up to the person providing housing to contact the other party.

”We’re a facilitator, it’s up to the volunteer to contact the person,” Goldberg said. “It’s just a person-to-person endeavor.”

Anyway, it’s pretty neat that this can be done in a matter of hours. Speaks well to the potential for the internet to continue driving change.

This is one of the many reasons to go to conferences. You might end up at your nominal competition's rented beach-house, watching drupal 5.0 release maintainer Neil Drumm open beers with a cellphone.