Month: March 2003

Monetary reputation appraisals

Henri Poole has been studying the dynamics of online communities for ~10 years now. In the early 90s, his first company, Vivid, prototyped a user interface for the Well. Later, as CEO of Linux distributor MandrakeSoft, he became intrigued by the idea of open source communities, and what made them tick. That interest led to his most recent venture Affero. Launched with 2 other MandrakeSoft refugees in the summer of 2001, Affero is trying to build a standard system of reputation measurement for the Internet.

i’m glad to see henri get some press for his cool venture. when i visited the company last fall, we had a couple very interesting discussions, and i helped them to debug their business plan. reputation management is crucial. so crucial that i would do some more free consulting for them if i still were in the bay area. i really want them to succeed. so henri, if you read this, hook me up with a plane ticket to san fran, and i’m game 🙂 we could probably build some infrastructure on top of their system to support OSCOM.

Offline schmoozing

I have done it. I’m now officially without a computer at home. Why? Because I feel it’s time to spend more of my spare time offline. The first few days have been hard, I admit. I certainly am addicted to the internet, and computers, and when I came home in the evenings I was like: ok, now what? I hadn’t yet found a good use of my newfound spare time. With no tv or computer to slack in front of, I was forced to entertain myself in new ways. I decided to use the opportunity to apply some of the schmoozing lessons I learned online the last 2 years to my offline environment. There a lots of old and new friends to meet. In related news I will probably have a mobile again, because I was being told repeatedly that trying to get hold of me had become exceedingly difficult. Without a computer at home I tend to agree 🙂 ps. If you send me email late at night or over the weekend, don’t expect an immediate response. I will deal with your email first thing in the (workday) morning, a fresh cup of coffee in my paws 🙂

trapped

its too early to tell for sure, but i think i’m headed towards a situation i found myself in repeatedly over the years. ingredients: adulation, spring time, imagination. it sucks big time.

sociology vs technology

we had our first blog course last night. it went rather well considering 🙂 the bottom line seems to be that i’d like to talk about the social impact of weblogs, while the audience expect the technical nitty-gritty. it will be interesting to fine tune the program, find the target audience, and go live.

Dissecting oss development

i have long planned to eventually update my thesis with new developments. apparently, some people are actually reading what i jotted down 🙂 i got an invitation from ieee to submit an article for their software journal today:

Increasingly, we develop software by integrating components, libraries, and subsystems. The open source software movement has generated an extensive repository of potentially reusable software elements of varying quality and integrability. The free availability of source code might address 2 reservations often raised when deciding on the use of COTS components: unknown implementation quality and long-term vendor support. However, the use of OSS in commercial software development has not yet been formalized as an established practice. Developers need to know what types of OSS they can reuse, when such reuse is a promising strategy, how they can locate and evaluate OSS, and how OSS will fit into their development and maintenance processes. In addition, drawing on OSS in ways that go beyond unmodified as-is use (by modifying the source) raises further issues of long-term maintainability and its own set of interesting economic, business, and legal aspects.
We seek submissions that address one or, preferably, more of the following topics: taxonomies and repositories of available OSS; searching and evaluation strategies; success stories and failures; development strategies, models, and methodologies based on reusing OSS; economic, business, and legal aspects; the maintenance and integration of evolution paths; cooperation with the OSS community; and challenges and benefits.

the submission deadline is in august, and publication is in january 2004. geez, talk about lead times. on the other hand, it gives me time to come up with something original.