nerding out

I’m in NYC, but thanks to a return to The Palace (from days of yore) I am moving slooooow. It was a good time though! Fab Dinner with Jeremy and Rachael (who have set a wedding date!) followed up by sister-dude, $8 pitchers of budweiser, Priest on the juke and me stepping up to some guy with my early-2000 street-cred. He was born in the neighborhood, so I ended up buying him a shot, but given that the place is overrun with kids these days I felt like I had to stand up.

Anyway, muddling through things, I goofed around with Pantheon a bit, and then google analytics data exporter, which I plan to start integrating for more accurate statistics of reads on my posts, etc. Fit of pride: 3,500 actual reads of this essay.

And now a txt from the momster. She’s arrived. Time to get up and go!

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!

Well, it’s all set up. Facebook users can now log in and comment. I think.

Anybody out there?

Update: ok, so maybe this totally isn’t working. Need to sort out some bugs, looks like.

Via Atrios we bounce to BoingBoing:

The internet chapter of the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement, a secret copyright treaty whose text Obama’s administration refused to disclose due to “national security” concerns, has leaked. It’s bad.

There are several parallel struggles going on right now to define the form and structure of the 21st Century economy both globally and here in Estados Unidos. Some are in the headlines (health care, transitioning off carbon-based energy and dealing with climate change, reforming finance) and a couple other big ones are not.

The two things which fly under the radar are that classic favorite, the military industrial complex, which is verboten for polite political discussion, and the struggle to define the balance of power around information. In this latter struggle, we have some real choices to make, and they’re pretty important.

If something like this treaty goes through, the future looks pretty damn dim for internet-enabled innovation, culture, and industry. In essence, the treaty denies non-creators any meaningful ability to “own” the information contained within products they purchase. It also creates highly restrictive requirements for “policing” infringement which will create enormous legal overhead for what are today simple staples of online life (e.g. forget about Flickr or Youtube).

The mindset behind these treaties is a dictatorial one. The powers that be in the information economy — large scale copyright holders — want the rest of us to remain dutiful non-threatening consumers of their data, digital serfs. If they are successful in cementing that vision in law, it will create at best a two-teir economy, with the conventional/commercial “mainstream” plugging away as a sort of digital shopping mall of culture, and a secondary, underfunded, alternative information underground of Free Culture competing. At worst, the shopping mall will strangle the alternative, and the underground will be reduced to simply grey/black-market activities.

This isn’t what any of us want, really. We want the whole of culture to be Free (as in speech, not as in beer) and for all the mighty talent and resources currently contained within the mainstream to be a part of that. This means change, which isn’t pleasant for the powers that be. However, it really will be better for everyone if the focus is on creativity and delivering value rather than hoarding and punishment.

So, it’s unclear what kind of leverage can/should be exerted on these secret treaty negotiations, but I’ll keep an eye on it.

Staying in on Halloween hopefully helps my cough. Definitely helped me knock out some updates. Best part: facebook integration. More to come here, but the basic login to comment is (I think) working.

File under (honest) narcissism — as my man The Girth says, the main reason he got into lawyering is that he like to listen to himself talk — but supposing you want to experience the rolling thunder that is my best effort yet at marrying my high-tech profession with my Bachelor of the Fine Arts, here’s your chance:

• October 9th/10th at Drupal Camp Portland
• October 16th at BADcamp
• November 11th/12th at Drupal Camp Sweeden

• December 9th-11th at Do It With Drupal in New Orleans

This is going to be pretty fun. I’m slotted to do basically the same talk at all of these events, talking about Drupal in the Cloud, so I’m thinking by the time I work up to New Orleans it should be a pretty killer presentation.

So um, otherwise, on the life-front, I’ve been a little overwhelmed. Things are good, but it’s been a series of 12-hour day/6-day weeks and I’m still behind. Hoping this all clears up over the next few weeks as I go into roadshow-mode.

(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.

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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).

Apropos what Matt’s been telling me, I would really like to get back to more juicy blogging sometime soon. That would imply more juicy living, of course, and who doesn’t want that? But for now, some nerd-talk.

It’s in keeping with the story of my year that instead of getting Spiritually Cleansed in the Black Rock Desert, I spent the past two days holed up in an apartment a few blocks from the Louvre, leaving only for coffee, toiling away. And the result? Five websites go out for public consumption:

• Refresh of our own piece (let us know what you think, momster)
• PANTHEON (our latest venture)
• DrupalCon San Francisco 2010 (it’s official!)
• NYU Polytechnic institute

• Townsend Center for the Humanities

Of course many other fine minds were integral to these processes, and more are on the way, and that doesn’t account for the other bugfixing and long-distance skype consulting bases I covered. Still, this was a pretty incredible clump to blow through in 72 hours in a foreign country. Doing things like this actually stretches the limits of what I think I can actually do, which is a pretty nice feeling.

All I’ve got to do now is knock my presentation out of the park on Friday, and I’ll have earned myself a little fun time.

Paris is pretty great so far. Staying in an apartment building built by a king, enjoying the sights, sounds and smells of Big Urbanity, feeling under-dressed in a fashionista stronghold, and realizing again the bliss of confusion and novelty. The world-as-puzzle experience of immersion in a poorly understood foreign language is really quite stimulating. Good for me to get kicked out of my regular routines.

Also, big ups to Amanda for successfully (and at long last) giving birth. Another member of the next generation joins us waking life.