Fri, 17 Mar 2006

Link-ification

Whoa. Stormy Peters is blogging. For those who don’t know, Stormy was with the open source group at HP, and on the GNOME advisory board. Very cool, very sharp.

Work

Spent a big chunk of yesterday at the JOLT symposium. My panel went well, I thought, though turnout was slightly disappointing given the great group of panelists. The second panel was also interesting. It seems the OLPC guys (or at least Walter) really get it- the next wave of educational innovation and creativity can come from the bottom up, instead of from the ivory towers, if we give students the right tools. My favorite line of the day was from him- ‘I believe there is intelligent life outside of Cambridge.’ It feels like (to me) that MIT and Harvard have a choice- they can lead that innovation, and extend their brands and hegemony even more (the interest on Harvard’s endowment, applied to creating top-quality, low-cost online educational materials, could put every high school textbook publisher out of business, or they can sit on their hands and get made even more niche. More rumbling on this some other time, probably.

GNOME

Steven O’Grady was talking about Tomboy’s lack of tagging the other day, and I agreed wholeheartedly, so it was particularly awesome to wake up this morning and see Juri’s post on leaftag and tomboy. This is exactly the kind of experimentation I was hoping for when I talked last April about exploring new ideas incrementally– someone hacking up a lib, and others playing with it and seeing what happens. Looking forward to seeing similar things happen around gimmie (particularly the currently under-loved ‘people’ tab, and around the potential of a document-centric UI), and around the totally awesome Abiword collaboration. If all these chunks of code become centers of experimentation and innovation, we’ll be having a damn exciting time soon- and we’ll finally be well on the way towards the 3.0 we’ve been punting around forever, in an organic, sustainable, hacker-oriented way. Yay us. :)