I am speaking at the ACCT Canada 2009 Conference on November 10th. The Alliance for Commercialization of Canadian Technologies is the "national advocate for the value created by academic technology transfer and commercialization". The short form of that mouthful is that they primarily represent the tech transfer offices of universities. In university lingo, this is often done by the University Industry Liason Office (UILO). Yes, acronyms are fun :P

As part of my role at Bootup, I'll be first participating in the "Innovation Clusters, Incubators and Accelerators" panel. We'll be getting on a call to discuss the format and talking points for the panel tomorrow, but I expect I'm going to be the private industry / capitalist viewpoint. This is a free form panel discussion, so it should be interesting to see where it goes.

Back in September 2008 I got contacted by Backbone Magazine to answer a couple of questions about, well, corporate websites and business usage of the web in general. I forgot all about it, until my friend Laura in Ottawa was reading it and saw my name. It's apparently in the current issue (which I haven't seen the print version of). It's on the site as "Fixing a stale web site", by Andrew Rideout. Below are the original questions and my answers. I've added a few notes in parentheses and added links to things.

Bryght is shutting down hosting, so I moved to Rimu Hosting. I already run the Bootup Labs site there, and have recommended it to a number of other people. Do I have more to say about Bryght? Not right now, although it feels like I've got a lot of stories tucked away that need to get told at some point.

I've got a Miro VPS 2 - $30 / month, 400MB memory, 4GB of storage. I never get a control panel - it's running Webmin on CentOS, and I asked for the newest version of PHP, plus Apache and MySQL set to run at startup.

It's actually been a pleasure to "move in" to a new server. The old system had been running for a long time, and various failed experiments at different upgrades -- most around PHP and accelerator versions. Also various different test installs of a variety of sites.

Dries recently wrote about funding a code sprint for Fields in core. Acquia is committed to funding various bits and pieces and supporting it directly. I know what that's like -- Bryght and some of our clients funded many early Drupal improvements and gatherings directly.

So why should you support this particular code sprint? Well, for one, it means we can ideally have one of the key innovations of CCK / Views directly in the core of Drupal, making it a more robust / scalable / flexible system. Me? I just want to kill the profile module and move a few other alternate field-light systems to a native field solution (e.g. webform). Don't have money to donate? That's OK, head on over to the Fields in Core group and participate with golden code. Or golden UI mockups. Or golden patch testing. You get the picture...

I, personally, have a history of trying to round up funding for various improvements. Since I can only code well enough to convince other people it should be done better, I try and spend my energies describing possible solutions or rallying money/resources behind such ideas.

I actively encourage companies and individual contributors to put up donate buttons. I've recently been in need of large / multiple file uploads, so I approached the SWFUpload maintainers, helped clean up the issue queue, and set up a big chipin right on the project page. That money will go directly to developers working on making this solution better.

Privatemsg is another module that has a donate button, but they are actually few and far between. I've made some comments on commercial interests on Drupal.org itself, but at the same time, I absolutely want to help support a commercial ecosystem. One way of doing that is for module maintainers to put donate / contact me buttons directly on their module pages. Why, for instance, doesn't Earl put a donate button on the Views project page?

The danger, of course, is tying or expecting compensation. You share (primarily) for "community ROI" -- every piece of code, comment, design, support request that you interact with in a larger community is something that you are giving ... and the return on your invested time WILL come back to you many fold in a number of different ways. Increased exposure, increased business, better code, more connections. Direct participation in the community is worth MORE than money.

But look at the code you use and the people behind it. If you feel you can't commit time or your own resources, money is a perfectly acceptable substitute. Any of the items I've mentioned here are things I consider worth funding. Pick one of them, or think about a donation directly to the maintainer of some module that you use regularly.

Dave Olson sat down with me at the beginning of this week and did a long (50 minutes) podcast over at Raincity Radio.

We covered a lot of ground. Here are some short notes with related links on what we talked about:

Matt Mullenweg had to make a pretty clear statement that WordPress is Open Source in response to some sniping from MT.

I already left a comment in support of Matt, and he tossed it back my way:

Thanks Boris, I think the way Drupal and WordPress have co-existed is a great model to follow despite a few distractions along the way, and your role in facilitating that as an ambassador has been crucial. It’s rare for code for one project to be directly applicable to another, but ideas and values are contagious — in the good Isley Brothers way.

I know how this can be. We flirted with dual licensing around Bryght's mass hosting system, Hostmaster. In hindsight, it probably delayed development by 2 years. Now hosted on Drupal.org, Hostmaster has a couple of more developers buying in and it feels like we're developing some momentum.

We made a Bryght "install profile" -- a bundle of code and configuration and a little custom module for doing some cool stuff with CSS overrides. From day one, it's been hosted on our public SVN repository, and includes the original CVS tags from Drupal.org itself.

It was amusing to watch that MT4 actually had as a feature that other systems had adopted their templating system -- namely a single contributed module in Drupal that can support MT themes for bloggy sites.

Basically, sniping other open projects isn't cool. In the first meetings that the Drupal community ever had as a group, in Antwerp and Amsterdam, we had Joomla community members and senior devs. It was so fun playing with the Joomla guys and matching t-shirts and groups shots with Rasmus at OSCMS 2007. Amy Stephens +1 -- check out Open Source Community.

The "enemy" here is proprietary systems (and those really are quotes around enemy, as I recall having a great discussion with a proprietary Java based system developer this morning at CCI2008). They are not good for business, they are not good for communities, and they are not good for the growth of this interlinked web of data that is becoming truly useful.

I ran a couple of not really that successful because they were TOO Drupal heavy "Open Source CMS Summits". I'd love to do more of them, because we have so much to learn from each other, but we are all so focused on growing our own communities, each bit of *friendly* rivalry pushing the others to get better. Like the Isley Brothers :P

Hi, you may remember me from such roles as the first Drupal Association Board of Directors. This is a bit of a recap of my year's involvement with the Association, along with an explanation of my current feeling about it, and that I won't be applying for a Board position this next year. Oh, and if you're a current or prospective Permanent Member, you should probably read this.

Well, it looks like the press release is hitting the wires already, so I thought I would come over and announce on Drupal.org directly.

Bryght and Raincity Studios are joining forces. The Raincity team is going to acquire Bryght, and we'll continue to apply the Bryght brand to (more coming soon) install profile "products" like our current Bryght Light, and also to our hosting solutions.

It's been great to have Raincity sharing an office with us (they moved in at the end of September), and now we're one big happy family. Robert Scales, the leader of Raincity, is actually off in China making the company evening bigger -- we're opening an office in Shanghai!

I'm excited to have a bigger team to work with, especially lots of designers (I love the cool BADCamp logo that Hub from Raincity did!). But, not just design, but a production team with which we hope to "lead by example" -- contributing to and supporting many of the key modules that get used for every client project, and jumping on the bandwagon of test cases and code reviews.

So, from the entire 22-person Bryght-Raincity team, thanks to the whole Drupal community for building this shared space and shared project that we can continue to make better together.

Remember, BBQs are open every Thursday starting at noon, so please stop by if you are in town :P

The answer is "probably yes". I just wrote up a description of our Vancouver Drupal Users Group event over on Bryght, but saved the provocative title for here.

I think that maybe I'll lift my stance on only adding Facebook apps that have a "public Internet" face as well. Much as I hate locking data into Facebook, I do want to support local developers: ActiveState's Up4, DabbleDB's DabbleDo, and the soon-to-be-released Opus Player by the Donat Group / Project Opus.

But don't think I won't be continuing to push folks to figure out ways to nicely push and pull data in and out of Facebook in a way that benefits the open Internet as well as respects the privacy and security of user's content within Facebook.

Finally I wanted to share with you that yes, we did indeed continue to chat over beer. The strangest phrase that came up was camel cheese. Nice.

Joyent hosted a meetup for Joyent customers and friends tonight at Chill Winston. I'll place myself in the "friend" column, and really, if you host a get together in the lounge that is on the ground floor of my office building, you know I'll be showing up :P

I wrote up some more thoughts on virtualization and my discussion with Mark Mayo over on my Bryght blog (or included here directly via transclusion).