B. Mann Consulting

It doesn't seem that long ago, but the first Barcamp Amsterdam was way back in October 2005, where RalphM and I first schemed about Jabber World Domination. But in reality, a lot of time has passed -- Jabber is now called XMPP, there have been many more Barcamps outside of the US (yes, Amsterdam was first! picture from Ton's Flickr pictures), and we've got a ton of interesting identity and social software standards / formats / tools to start integrating.

Ralph did a workshop on Federated Social Networks at the beginning of December, which I unfortunately wasn't able to attend on short notice. Now Ralph has set the date for a follow up event to be held along with Barcamp Amsterdam III on March 1st and 2nd.

I will, unfortunately, once again be missing the event, since Drupalcon Boston 2008 will be happening at the same time. I'm hoping that some co-conspirators on a couple of projects will be able to attend (I'm looking at you and you).

I suspect the technology stack that will be discussed includes DiSo, OpenID, OpenID Attribute Exchange, and OAuth, so anyone interested in those items and how they relate to social networks should plan to attend. Note: although I have a reputation as a handwaver supreme, this will most likely be a down and dirty technology, specs, and implementation discussion at its core, so pack your developers and throw them into the capable hands of RalphM.

I didn't get nearly as much time (hardly any!) to talk to Ton Zylstra at BarCamp Amsterdam as I would have liked to. He's continuing the conversation on his blog, with this post about P2P social networking:

I would like to have a true peer to peer social networking platform. Also I'd like to have my own spiders and agents.

FOAF isn't ready for this kind of thing I think, but we might look to an existing p2p infrastructure like Skype to be a carrier. Boris Mann pretty much repeatedly said Jabber can do anything during BarCamp, and seemed to be only half joking. Ton's Interdependent Thoughts: How to Get P2P Social Networking

You're right, Ton, I was only half joking. I think real time is very important. If the "IM Wars" have shown us anything, it's that we need to have common standards and formats. For XML message passing, including IM, Jabber is the answer to this (and might be the answer for voice and video as well, but I've got more to write about this later).

I just got back today from a long week in Amsterdam, having attended a grand total of 3 conferences: Euro OSCON, DrupalCon, and BarCamp. I met a huge group of people

I would like to thank Chris Pirillo (check out his new gada.be multi-search service) for supporting BarCamp. Chris: wish you could have been there, buddy...we could have worked on our plans for World Domination, and probably gotten pretty close.

It didn't quite turn out to be the "hackfest" that my preconceptions led me to believe. Or perhaps the hacking was more of the "hack your brain" kind. More on BarCamp and these other conferences later: one big thing I learned is that I am not very good at creating artifacts while attending conferences. I'm very much in the moment, having intense sessions with people and trying to integrate it all internally. Inserting a computer into the mix means I miss what's happening. Paper seems to work OK for notes (maybe a tablet would, too?)...now I just have to transcribe all the bits and pieces, especially what essentially turned into an interview with Ralph and Edwinn of the Jabber Software Foundation.

The Jabber guys are planning world domination with us here at BarCamp Amsterdam. Ralph is keeping the secret pretty close to his chest, but we've got it pretty well sketched out: our session is at 14:30 today in the kitchen

Apparently, Drupal isn't ranking highly in searches for "PHP CMS", so I'm doing some links to help with that. Funny thing is, searching for Broken CMS ends up pointing to a Drupal-powered site...but it has links to Typo3, XOOPS, and PHPWCMS. Yeah, we laughed.

I'm hoping that James will commit his Jabber module today, so that we can kick the tires on it. Of course, the ejabberd server already runs their community site on Drupal. We had a little bit of a discussion about have a new jabberd server that has some of the attributes of ejabberd -- distributed, fault-tolerant, etc. -- except, not written in a not very widely supported language like erlang. Python and the Twisted networking framework sound like good choices.

Well, I'm still in Amsterdam nearing the end of the week but it feels like things are just getting started. I'm actually sitting in de Brakke Grond, site of the DrupalCon, as Moshe Weitzman walks us through the simpletest framework for unit testing in Drupal.

The first OSCON in Europe is just ending. I was disappointed that we couldn't integrate more fully, but Chris Messina and I had a really long and fruitful discussion with Gina Blaber and Margi Levin of O'Reilly's conference team. The team is already looking at planning the next OSCON event in Europe, and I'm looking forward to have a really interesting set of satellite events in partnership with O'Reilly in the future.

And yeah, BarCampAmsterdam. It starts...well, it started about an hour ago, I'm just still finishing my last conference! Yes, things are busy, so busy that I didn't get a chance to bang the drum about some cool hacking stuff that I hope to see accomplished during BarCamp (there's a long story about the lack of Internet connectivity in Amsterdam as well). So, on to the hand waving, or Cool Things I'd Love to See Hackers Build at BarCamp:

The Drupal community was in the process of organizing a meet up around O'Reilly's EuroOSCON event when we heard the bad news: since this is O'Reilly's first OSCON event in Europe, they had limited space and wouldn't have an exhibit hall, and hence wouldn't have room for booths from open source projects. Károly Négyesi is giving a talk, but we would have no booth to man, making it hard to meet a lot of the interesting people that are going to be there.

We were somewhat dejected, but then we had An Idea: why not do our own event, and invite other open source projects to come along. Hmmm...what did this sound like? It sounds like BarCamp. So, please join us in helping to organize/attend/promote BarCamp Amsterdam*.

Messina, patron saint of BarCamps everywhere, has posted about this as well -- so we're off to the races!

* I wanted to call it HamsterCamp...after all, we've got a Moose Camp