B. Mann Consulting

Just as Drupalcon Szeged is kicking off, I'll be talking at this coming week's Net Tuesday event, "How Drupal can help you save the world!". Boy, that Joe Solomon really does like catchy titles :P

I'll be kicking things off with an intro to Drupal. I'll talk a bit about open source and how it relates / meshes with the mission of non profits. Or rather, why the heck aren't you using your non profit DNA to work together with other organizations?! I'll also do lots of my "question" tactics -- asking people in the room to think about their strategy, their use of the web, their use of open source software, and their approach to engagement online.

Following me will be the folks from Fearless City and Agentic talking about some case studies.

The event is this Tuesday, August 26th, at 5:30pm at WorkSpace. The Meetup event is now closed, but you can show your attendance on Facebook or upcoming.

P.S. yeah, I said I wasn't really going to post event stuff here much anymore, putting most of it on the Bootup Labs blog. Well, this is an event that I'm doing "solo" as it were. And never fear, I'm going to post over on Bootup about the Expression Engine Roadshow.

Chris Pirillo is picking up the torch first raised by Marc Canter over 4 years ago: open community platforms available for everyone, powered by Drupal.

Chris is a long time friend and colleague, and it's great to see him stepping up and saying that he wants to make an out-of-the-box install profile for social communities -- blogging, SEO, multimedia, content licensing. And the thing is, the pieces ARE there. It just needs some effort to put it all together and integrated, and that first run experience integrated into an install profile.

Here's a short quote with some thoughts from Chris on what he wants -- a Community Participation Platform. I think this meshes with Acquia's meme on social publishing:

I don’t want a social network, I want a socially *RELEVANT* network (both on-site and beyond). I don’t want a community platform, I want a participation platform where members are rewarded and ranked appropriately. I don’t want a place where people can just blog, because I’m going well beyond the blog. It’s not just about hosting videos, audio files, or any piece of random media - it’s the discovery mechanisms between them that make them more relevant.

It’s discovery - no matter the community, no matter the type of content. Imagine coming to a site and not just reading about what other people are interested in, but what interests they SHARE with you! Imagine coming to a site and seeing how someone ranks in answers pertaining to your own questions! Oh, I’m confident you may have seen these features elsewhere - but what about for your own site, what about for your own community, what about for your own ideas?

And Chris isn't just shooting his mouth off: he's already been working on this for some time, with Adam Kalsey just recently releasing Activity Stream (a Friend Feed clone), is going to be at the Drupal co-working in Seattle, and is hosting a Drupal hackfest all this weekend (March 29 - 30th). I won't be able to attend the whole thing, but I hope to drop in on Sunday (want to drive down to Seattle with me? leave a comment...).

My interest? Well, easy to use install profiles – whether brands of their own or "merely" great bundles of expertise put together to serve specific needs has been a long time interest and push of mine: it's the way we can make Drupal accessible and optimized for every web vertical and user community.

In a more commercial vein, I hope that Raincity Studios can be one of the first hosting providers to offer Chris' Community Participation Platform at the click of a button.

I'm looking forward to the next exciting piece in this adventure, Chris. You've made an awesome statement of purpose, and like all open source, I'm behind you 100% of the way.

I just did my first post to the Raincity Studios blog, about Dries announcing his Drupal startup Acquia.

I really am pleased for Dries. I know that he's had a number of different offers and ideas that he's had to think through. Doing your own thing is exciting. Doing it well-funded is even more exciting :P

I think there are a number of different business models around open source that need more examples and experimentation. I've seen a lot of companies trying to make installing open source applications easier, but that's a "do once" operation that, to me, is not particularly high value.

Distilling the knowledge of lots of smart people into a focused distribution is a great thing, and upgrading / maintaining an installation over time is the much harder thing that I'd like to see more solutions around.

So, Dries, congrats on Acquia. I think we've got a few more adventures to go on together, and I'm looking forward to it.

OK, OK, that's a ridiculously long title. But it's great to hear that David Ascher will be heading MailCo and taking Thunderbird in to a brave new adventure.

Stay in Vancouver? Yes, please! We're on a roll, here, and I'm rooting for more open source businesses to grow up here.

Good news! I've been in touch with Corey Leach of Expansys / Mobile Planet, and he's agreed to help out with both a bulk buy and with getting a loaner unit out to the Chief Babelhead for the open source GPS Babel project (thanks to Richard Akerman for making the post that prompted that connection). I've also had an update from the folks at LoadMyTracks, who have been contacted by the Globalsat manufacturer directly.

So, it's time to pony up some money and start geo-enabling yourself. The Globalsat DG100-GPS is the unit that I wrote about previously and it is currently listed at $100.95CDN.

If we get 5 - 9 buyers, the price will be discounted $5 USD per unit.

If we get 10+ buyers, the price will be discounted $10 USD per unit.

Corey Leach has suggested that the easiest way to make sure we get the discount applied is for everyone who is interested in purchasing to email him directly. We'll wait a couple of days to see if you get above 10 buyers, and then apply the discount and it will get shipped to everyone directly.

Note: this is open to *anyone* that wants to buy this unit -- the more the merrier. Just include a link to this blog post in your email and/or cc me on the email. What are you waiting for? email Corey to book your order.

Update: we are now at 7 people and only need 3 more to get the magical 10 person discount. We'll wait another couple of days, and then everyone can place their order, Corey will ask for your REF number, and the price will be reduced. Travis also pointed out to me a good thread on Vandigicam talking about geo logging.

Update 2: we are now at 10 people! Please go ahead and purchase the unit normally and email Corey your confirmation / ref number to receive the discount.

The Vancouver PHP Conference 2007 is coming up next week. I think registration is full or close to it. We've got Steven and James giving a couple of talks on Drupal and Identity / OpenID.

There is also a (free, as in beer) panel on Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) on Monday night. It's open to the public and sponsored by a group called Information and Communications Technology / Open Source Co-op. Never heard of 'em, but they run Drupal, so they can't be all bad :P

Some of the topics up for discussion include:

• Choosing a license
• GPL3
• Common Misperceptions about the GPL
• Growth in GPL
• Winning Over New Converts to FOSS
• Reasons Why Businesses Choose FOSS
• Current state of FOSS in North America
• Encouraging the growth of FOSS in Vancouver/N. America

Well, there's a selection of things I'm passionate about :P Should be interesting to see how the discussion goes, but I suspect it will be preaching to the converted in many cases.

I've missed Jonas Luster. I knew he was about to resurface as he left websites in his path -- like the redesign of SocialText in Drupal*. Luckily, I stayed subscribed to his RSS feed, and the posts just started pouring in again a couple of days ago. Jonas' title is Open Source Manager for SocialText, Dan Bricklin's wikiCalc is going to be a part of SocialText...and the whole thing is going open source:

So, here it goes .. Tadaa! Remember Dan Bricklin? The dude whose VisiCalc turned out to be a greta idea, and even greater invention, and to create hordes of College students trying to memorize cell macros? Well, he joined Socialtext’s board and with him wikiCalc joined Socialtext. We’ll be developing this beast in the months to come, under an OSI compliant Open Source license, of course, and hope you’ll find it as useful and cool as we do.

But that’s not all. It’d be kinda boring to now go back and hang with my homies, so - just in time for the World Cup (Socialtext has a Wiki for it, of course), my work starts to bring you all of Socialtext as Open Source. Yupp, that’s right, my boss and CEO role model Ross Mayfield spilled them OSI compliant beans today, as well: We’ll have Socialtext Open Source by OSCON 2006. I’ll definitively be in Portland for that, and had a chat with Nat, today, so chances are you’ll also see me say something on stage, as well. Yet another reason to sign up, no? :)

Read the rest of the Jonas's riddle on his site. Congrats to everyone involved, this sounds very interesting. And welcome back, Jonas...maybe I'll actually get to meet you in person one of these days.

This is the official first post announcing planning of the Open Source CMS and Blogging Tools Summit. I'm taking the opportunity of the Northern Voice conference (and especially the spirit of Moose Camp) to try and put together a mini-conference of a variety of open source communities.

The great thing about open source is that we can all share and learn from each other. Our only goal is to make our own "product" better and -- unlike proprietary systems -- there is a large incentive to work together on shared areas of interest. This is made even easier when there are other areas of overlap, like the standard "stack" of technologies that support these tools, from the Linux operating system, the Apache web server, MySQL and PostgreSQL databases, and Python/Perl/PHP coding languages.

I met with Zak Greant on Friday, who is an evangelist working with ez Systems, makers of the ezPublish CMS. Roland is going to be contacting local representatives of the Plone community, like Enfold Systems. Of course, the Drupal community will be here, with Dries Buytaert and other developers convening in Vancouver for our North American meetup (thanks Chad and Angie for kickstarting discussions about that).

I know that Matt Mullenweg is going to be coming up for Northern Voice, so perhaps he can extend his trip and talk a little WordPress.

In part, many of the ideas for this summit came about from a presentation by the Joomla guys to the DrupalCon Amsterdam 2005

Do you speak snake? A Jabber server written on the Python Twisted framework.

This is a new project of mine/Bryght's. I've long been an advocate for the Jabber/XMPP protocol. Now, I'm hoping to give something back plus form a community around a new jabber server daemon. For now, just redirects to a wiki where we'll organize and add some more details. Feel free to add "like to have" or other ideas of what you want to see out of a new Python-based jabberd.

Update: we changed the name to Pretzel. There is currently a placeholder project up at Google Code Hosting: Pretzel Server 

The best open source media player for OS X. Should play most anything you come across, and in full-screen without the Quicktime Pro tax.