Punderings

As a souvenir?

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For those not lucky enough to live near the Hub, the latest news on the Boston news scene is that those mean New York Times owners want to shutter our beloved Boston Globe, where the unions want to be able to keep their lifetime jobs.

Yes, perhaps both sides are engaging in a touch of hyperbole. But for all it’s faults, it would still feel odd to end up living in a one-newspaper town after all these years.

So – what’s the latest bet for what the boston.com domain is worth these days?

What I believe

The mission statement of The Apache Software Foundation should be:

To provide high quality, open source software for the public good at no cost, and to showcase our meritocratic and community driven method of building sustainable software projects.

Note that this differs slightly from the original Certificate of Incorporation, both in some clarifying details, and the addition of the “showcase…” part. The original incorporation papers – over 10 years ago now – very broadly defined what the Foundation was going to do as:

… engage in any lawful act or activity …, including the creation and maintenance of “open source” software distributed by the Corporation to the public at no charge.

Commentary

• It’s clear that the core mission is to provide software for the public good. That’s both the key value we provide as a non-profit serving the public, is what we were founded to do, and what we’ve been very successful at.
• I would argue we should add the “high quality” or a similar qualifier, because the greater public isn’t well served by projects that don’t work well or have major bugs. If we really want to serve the public good, our projects need to work for them mostly as-is to serve some useful function.

  Note that I don’t see any need to restrict the type or kinds of projects we engage in; I’d be happy to have an end-user browser come to the ASF, if the community aspect made sense.

• I believe adding the “and to showcase…” section is important. Our success beyond the actual software products we’ve provided for the public is astounding, in terms of our leadership position in the areas of software licensing, community development, and public and media awareness of open source issues. If our purpose is a public charity, then we should capitalize on what we’re good at.
• “Meritocratic and community driven” is another way of saying “The Apache Way”. Communities tend to build better software – in the long term – than individuals. And a healthy and diverse community is the best way for merit to surface and be recognized, typically within the ASF as being elected a committer. Note that diversity of community is important as a policy too, as our Incubator’s graduation policy shows.
• “building sustainable software projects.” This is the rationale for the “showcase” addition. We’ve proven that not only can we build software, we also have a pretty good method for doing it – and keeping it going. The sustainability is a key part of our value to the public: knowing that our projects will likely continue to support and improve our software is a huge benefit over short-term projects or ones that die out if key individual committers move on.
• Besides the fact that I believe the public benefits from learning about our methods, the “showcase” part also has an indirect benefit for the public as well. Teaching other software developers (and others) about how we work and succeed will draw more individuals, organizations, and projects towards us. This enables us to provide even more software for the public good, and helps to ensure that people wanting to donate time or code to the ASF will be aware of our policies, and it will be easier for them to join us if they choose to.

I’m sure it can use some minor wordsmithing; I can’t quite express the merit and community ideas in the clearest (yet concise) way yet. But I believe we’re selling ourselves far too short if we don’t acknowledge and embrace the fact that our impact on the world stretches well beyond simply the code that we release.

Besides courting IBM and then having Oracle buy you, of course!

• Introduce paid accounts. Very small fee to get one, but most services are pennies pay-per-use, so encourage people to put more cash into their “twitter wallet”.
• Editable tweets. Paid account holders can retroactively EDIT THEIR TWEETS TO CORRECT ERRORS. (Looking at @oprah here.) Although the internet and Google store everything forever, Twitter can control their own database & website (the primary source of twitter data), and could probably use their API limits as a whip to force most of the major third party clients to silently accept the edited tweets. To edit a tweet within 15 seconds of posting costs a penny; editing anytime after that costs perhaps a dollar. This is withdrawn from the twitter wallet the account holder already setup, of course.
• Put ads on the website – on all non-paid account holder pages. This doesn’t interfere with functionality, and won’t upset the geeks, who are all using third party clients anyway. For paid accountholders, have the option to include ads on their twitter.com homepage, and allow a small kickback of the ad revenue to cover part of the paid account fee.
• Add metadata to tweets for paid account holders. The sky’s the limit here (well, their database is the limit). Rich text formatting and Graphical smilies (in clients that support them, of course, which most will)? RDF / Hashtag / semantic web / SEO name=value fields attached to your tweet, and accessible from the API? All good things that people would pay for.
• Life vests. Each paid account holder with a certain number of tweets gets a free, Twitter-logo’d live vest for wearing as they jump the shark with Twitter.

Wanted: someone to do the cost analysis of email traffic vs. SMS traffic (showing how 10 cents for an SMS is something like a bazillion dollars per megabyte) and apply the lesson to twitter.

Although I had grand plans of putting all the local events into a fancy calendar to ease the process of figuring out which ones to attend, sadly, that didn’t happen this year.

Patriot’s Day event information is scattered across a number of different sites, although the most comprehensive reference is BattleRoad.com. Other worthwhile sites for event listings include:

• Minute Man N.H.P. official site. If you’re attending any of these events, be sure to get there early, and pay attention to where the parking lots are. They will fill up early, and you’ll likely need to walk a ways along the 2A corridor or wait for a shuttle bus in the official parking areas.
• Wicked Local’s listing of Concord/Lexington events.
• Town of Arlington’s event listings. The Jason Russell House Battle reenactment is one of the hidden gems of the weekend – you can often get closer to the action than in Tower Park or in the NHP events.

Someone ping me next year if they have good ideas for a great UI for creating a public calendar. I should probably also seek out some of the BattleRoad folks (Mark!) and help them organize their website a bit – frames are so 1900′s.

(tw?-dik?sh?n) n: the compulsion to continually check your twitter stream, and respond to as many posts as you can.

With the coming of mainstream celebrities doing shows while twittering live, and competitions for a million followers, I join in today with the bleeding edge geeks who cry: Twitter has jumped the shark with the mainstreaming of it’s millionth follower contest, and with Oprah’s widely publicised (BUT UNFORTUNATELY SHOUTED) first tweet live from her show. It is somehow disappointing that with all the fanfare, the handlers in the old media world still don’t understand the new web: check out the inanity of the few follow on tweets she made. C’mon, I could have produced a better set of follow-on tweets this afternoon in my spare time than they put up. Sheesh.

This is not to say that Twitter didn’t succeed in one thing: the servers stayed up even in the face of rampant follow/unfollow attempts for @aplusk.

Let me add one disclaimer to my shark proclamation: while the fresh new appeal may have worn off for many, twitter is still a useful tool, especially with the many third party clients and website integrations. It’s just moved beyond the social scene for geeks, and out into… well, entertainment, I guess.

/ Can’t sleep, midnight treat /
/ Counter, carton, guilty spoon: /
/ Neapolitan /


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Copyright (C) 2009 Shane Curcuru, All Rights Reserved, All Ideas Interesting.