Category: personal

Three LLM-assisted projects

Luis Villa1 Comment

Some notes on my first serious coding projects in something like 20 years, possibly longer. If you’re curious what these projects mean, more thoughts over on the OpenML.fyi newsletter.

TLDR

A GitHub contribution graph, showing a lot of activity in the past three weeks after virtually none the rest of the year.

News, Fixed

The “Fix The News” newsletter is a pillar of my mental health these days, bringing me news that the world is not entirely going to hell in a handbasket. And my 9yo has repeatedly noted that our family news diet is “broken” in exactly the way Fix The News is supposed to fix—hugely negative, hugely US-centric. So I asked Claude to create a “newspaper” version of FTN — a two page pdf of some highlights. It was a hit.

So I’ve now been working with Claude Code to create and gradually improve a four-days-a-week “News, Fixed” newspaper. This has been super-fun for the whole family—my wife has made various suggestions over my shoulder, my son devours it every morning, and it’s the first serious coding project I’ve tackled in ages. It is almost entirely strictly personal (it still has hard-coded Duke Basketball schedules) but nevertheless is public and FOSS. (It is even my first usage of reuse.software—and also of SonarQube Server!)

Example newspaper here.

No matter how far removed you are from practical coding experience, I cannot recommend enough finding a simple, fun project like this that scratches a human itch in your life, and using the project to experiment with the new code tools.

Getting Things Done assistant

While working on News, Fixed a friend pointed out Steve Yegge’s “beads”, which reimagines software issue tracking as an LLM-centric activity — json-centric, tracked in git, etc. At around the same time, I was also pointed at Superpowers—essentially, canned “skills” like “teach the LLM, temporarily, how to brainstorm”. 

The two of these together in my mind screamed “do this for your overwhelmed todo list”. I’ve long practiced various bastardized versions of Getting Things Done, but one of the hangups has been that I’m inconsistent about doing the daily/weekly/nth-ly reviews that good GTD really relies on. I might skip a step, or not look through all my huge “someday-maybe” list, or… any of many reasons one can be tired and human when faced with a wall of text. Also, while there are many tools out there to do GTD, in my experience they either make some of the hardest parts (like the reviews) your problem, or they don’t quite fit with how I want to do GTD, or both. Hacking on my own prompts to manage the reviews seems to fit these needs to a T.

I currently use Amazing Marvin as my main GTD tool. It is funky and weird and I’ve stuck with it much longer than any other task tracker I’ve ever used. So what I’ve done so far:

  • wrapped the Marvin API to extract json
  • discovered the Marvin API is very flaky, so done some caching and validation
  • written a lot of prompts for the various phases/tasks in GTD. These work to varying degrees and I really want to figure out how to collaborate with others on them, because I suspect that as more tools offer LLM-ish APIs (whoa, todoist!) these prompts are where the real fun and action will be.

This is all read-only right now because of limitations in the Marvin API but for various reasons I’m not yet ready to embark on building my own entire UI. So this will do for now. But this code, therefore, is very limited to me. The prompts on the other hand… 

Note that my emphasis is not on “do tasks”, it is on helping me stay on priority. Less “chief of staff”, more “executive assistant”—both incredibly valuable when done well, but different roles. This is different from some of the use examples for Yegge’s Beads, which really are around agents.

Also note: the results have been outstanding. I’m getting more easily into my doing zone, I think largely because I have less anxiety about staring at the Giant Wall of Tasks that defines the life of any high-level IC. And my projects are better organized and todos feel more accurate than they have been in a long time, possibly ever.

a note on LLMs and issue/TODO tracking

It is worth noting that while LLMs are probabilistic/lossy, so they can’t find the “perfect” next TODO to work on, that’s OK. Personal TODO and software issue tracking are inherently subjective, probabilistic activities—there is no objectively perfect “next best thing to work on”, “most important thing to work on”, etc. So the fact that an LLM is only probabilistic in identifying the next task to work on is fine—no human can do substantially better. In fact I’m pretty sure that once an issue list is past a certain point, the LLM is likely to be able to do better— if (and like many things LLM, this is a big if) you can provide it with documented standards explaining how you want to do prioritization. (Literally one of the first things I did at my first job was write standards on how to prioritize bugs—the forerunner of this doc—so I have strong opinions, and experience, here.)

Skills for license “concluded”

While at a recent Linux Foundation event, I was shocked to realize how many very smart people haven’t internalized the skills/prompts/context stuff. It’s either “you chat with it” or “you train a model”. This is not their fault; it is hard to keep up!

Of course this came up most keenly in the context of the age-old problem of “how do I tell what license an open source project is under”. In other words, what is the difference between “I have scanned this” and “I have reached the zen state of SPDX’s ‘concluded’ field”.

So … yes, I’ve started playing with scripts and prompts on this. It’s much less further along than the other two projects above, but I think it could be very fruitful if structured correctly. Some potentially big benefits above and beyond the traditional scanning and/or throw a lawyer at it approaches:

  • reporting: my very strong intuition, admittedly not yet tested, is that plain-English reports on factors below, plus links into repos, will be much easier for lawyers to use as a starting point than the UIs of traditional license-scanner tools. And I suspect ultimately more powerful as well, since they’ll be able to draw on some of the things below.
  • context sensitivity: unlike a regexp, an LLM can likely fairly reliably understand from context some of the big failures of traditional pattern matching like “this code mentions license X but doesn’t actually include it”.
  • issue analysis and change analysis: unlike traditional approaches, LLMs can look at the change history of key files like README and LICENSE and draw useful context from them. “oh hey README mentioned a license change on Nov. 9, 2025, here’s what the change was and let’s see if there are any corresponding issues and commit logs that explain this change” is something that an LLM really can do. (Also it can do that with much more patience than any human.) 

ClearlyDefined offers test data on this, by the way — I’m really looking forward to seeing if this can be made actually reliable or not. (And then we can hook up reuse.software on the backend to actually improve the upstream metadata…)

But even then, I may not ever release this. There’s a lot of real risks here and I still haven’t thought them through enough to be comfortable with them. That’s true even though I think the industry has persistently overstated its ability to reach useful conclusions about licensing, since it so persistently insists on doing licensing analysis without ever talking to maintainers.

More to come?

I’m sure there will be more of these. That said, one of the interesting temptations of this is that it is very hard to say “something is done” because it is so easy to add more. (eg, once my personal homebrew News Fixed is done… why not turn it into a webapp? once my GTD scripts are done… why not port the backend? etc. etc.) So we’ll see how that goes.

Announcing the Upstream podcast

Luis Villa2 Comments

Open is 1️⃣ all over and 2️⃣ really interesting and yet 3️⃣ there’s not enough media that takes it seriously as a cultural phenomenon, growing out of software but now going well beyond that.

And so, announcement: I’m trying to fill that hole a little bit myself. Tidelift’s new Upstream podcast, which I’m hosting, will:

  1. Pull from across open, not just from software. That’s not because software is bad or uninteresting, but because it’s the best-covered and best-networked of the many opens. So I hope to help create some bridges with the podcast. Tech will definitely come up—but it’ll be in service to the people and communities building things.
  2. Bring interesting people together. I like interview-style podcasts with guests who have related but distinct interests—and the magic is their interaction. So that’s what we’ll be aiming for here. Personal goal: two guests who find each other so interesting that they schedule coffee after the recording. Happened once so far!
  3. Be, ultimately, optimistic. It’s very easy, especially for experienced open folks, to get cynical or burnt out. I hope that this podcast can talk frankly about those challenges—but also be a recharge for those who’ve forgotten why open can be so full of hope and joy for the future.

So far I’ve recorded on:

  • The near past (crypto?) and near future (machine learning?) of open, with Molly White of Web 3 Is Going Great and Stefano Maffuli of the Open Source Initiative. Get it here! (Transcripts coming soon…)
  • The joy of open. At Tidelift, we often focus on the frustrating parts of open, like maintainer burnout, so I wanted to refresh with a talk about how open can be fun. Guests are Annie Rauwerda of the amazing Depths of Wikipedia, and Sumana Harihareswara—who among many other things, has performed plays and done standup about open software. Will release this tomorrow!
  • The impact of open on engineering culture, particularly at the intersection of our massively complex technology stacks, our tools, and our people. But we are often so focused on how culture impacts tech (the other way around) that we overlook this. I brought on Kellan Elliot-McCrea of Flickr, Etsy, and Adobe, and Adam Jacob of Chef and the forthcoming System Initiative to talk about those challenges—and opportunities.
  • The relationship of open to climate and disasters. To talk about how open intersects with some of the most pressing challenges of our time, I talked with Monica Granados, who works on climate at Creative Commons, and Heather Leson, who does digital innovation — including open — at the IFRC’s Solferino Academy. I learned a ton from this one—so excited to share it out in a few weeks.

Future episodes are still in the works, but some topics I’m hoping to cover include:

  • open and regulation: what is happening in Brussels and DC, anyway? Think of this as a follow-up to Tidelift’s posts on the Cyber Resilience Act.
  • open and water: how does open’s thinking on the commons help us think about water, and vice-versa?
  • open and ethics: if we’re not technolibertarians, what are we anyway?

I’m very open to suggestions! Let me know if there’s anyone interesting I should be talking to, or topics you want to learn more about.

We’ll be announcing future episodes through the normal Places Where You Get Your Podcasts and the Tidelift website.

Writing elsewhere; the pain of moving platforms

Luis Villa1 Comment

I’ve been doing a lot of writing elsewhere of late. Some links:

  • I’ve written a fair amount in the past year for the Tidelift blog, most recently on the EU’s Cyber Resiliency Act and what it might mean for open source.
  • I wrote last week at opensource.com; the latest in a now multi-year series on board candidates in elections for the Open Source Initiative.
  • I have a newsletter on the intersection of open and machine learning at openml.fyi. It is fun!
  • I’ve moved to the fediverse for most of my social media—I’m social.coop/@luis_in_brief (and you can subscribe to this blog via the fediverse at @lu.is/@admin).

I don’t love (mostly) leaving Twitter; as I’ve said a few times, the exposure to different people there helped make me a better person. But one of my primary political concerns is the rise of fascism in the US, and that absolutely includes Elon and the people who enable him. I can’t quit cold-turkey; unfortunately, too many things I care about (or need to follow for work) haven’t left. But I can at least sleep well.

Book Notes: Summer 2022 (burnout and the good life)

Luis Villa1 Comment

I promised in my post on water to blog more this summer. So far, so fail, but in part it’s because I’ve been reading a lot. Some miscellaneous notes on those books follow.

“An interesting bookshelf photorealistic”, as rendered by Midjourney’s image-creation AI, another summer hobby.

Those of you who have emailed my work address lately will have noticed I’m also on sabbatical this summer, because after five years of focus on Tidelift I’m feeling pretty burnt out. This is not a criticism of Tidelift: it’s a great team; I’m very proud of what we are doing; and I will be going back shortly. But a big theme of the summer has been to think about what I want to do, and how that intersects with Tidelift—so that when I come back I’ll be both a strong contributor, and a happy and healthy contributor.

Work—burnout and better futures

The End of Burnout, by Jonathan Malesic: Malesic puts the blame for burnout squarely on our culture rather than us as individuals, which means the book has very few prescriptions for how we as individuals can deal with burnout. But it has interesting meditations on how we can create a culture that mitigates against burnout.

I hope to do a fuller review soon, because I find it difficult to summarize quickly, and much of it applies to open collaborative communities, where the line between self-affirming creation and self-destructive labor can be very fluid. In the meantime, I’ve put some of my favorite quotes up on Goodreads and annotated many of them.

Imaginable, by Jane McGonigal: I found this equal parts fascinating and frustrating. 

Good: it helped me ask “what the hell am I doing” in much better ways. Two key tricks to this: asking it in a ten year timeframe, and using a bunch of neat futurist-y brainstorming techniques to help think genuinely outside of the box. For this reason I think it might end up being, in ten years, the most influential “self-help” book I ever read.

Bad: it’s a classic “this book should have been an article”, and it is the first time I’ve thought “this book should have been an app”—the structured brainstorming exercises could have been much more impactful if guided with even minimal software. There actually is a companion(?) pay-to-enter community, which so far I’ve really enjoyed—if I stick with it, and find value, I suspect in the future I’ll recommend joining that community rather than reading the book.

Other big failure(?): it focuses a lot on What Is Going On In The World and How You Can Change It, when one of my takeaways from Malesic’s burnout book was to focus less on The World and more on the concrete people and places around me. The book’s techniques are still helpful for this, which is why I think it’ll be impactful for me, but I think it’d be a better book if its examples and analysis also drilled down on the personal.

Place

I’ve had the luxury of spending the summer in Bozeman, visiting my sister and nieces/nephew. So a few books on Montana:

History of Montana in 101 Objects: Terrific. Great selection of objects; thoughtful but concise essays. I wish someone would write the same about SF. Highly recommended for anyone who spends time in the state.

Ties, Rails, and Telegraph Wires, by Dale Martin: A thing that is hard to wrap one’s head around when it comes to Montana is the vastness of the place; fourth biggest state, and 7.5 people per square mile. (CA: 254/mi2; SF: 6,200/mi2, The Mission: 30K/mi2.) This book does a lovely job capturing the vast spaces of Montana at the beginning and end of two massive technological changes: the coming of the train and the coming of cars. Bonus: lavishly photographed (largely via the work of Ron Nixon). 

Water, Climate, and Climate Action

A disconnect I’ve been struggling with is between my digitally-focused work and my increasing concerns for/interest in the Real World. Related reads:

Introduction to Water in California, by David Carle: Recommend strongly if you’re a Californian wanting to geek out, but for most the Wikipedia article is probably sufficient.

How To Blow Up A Pipeline, by Andreas Malm: I recommend every citizen of the developed, carbon-dependent world read this. It might not motivate you to commit violence against carbon-generating property, but it will at least put you in the right place to react appropriately when you see reports of such violence against property. There’s a lot to unpack, and again, I recommend reading it, but at the end of the day much boils down to an image from the end of the book: when the author and other allies took down a fence around a brown-coal power plant, even Green party politicians condemned that as “violence”. The emissions of the power plant themselves? Not condemned; not considered violence in our discourse or politics.

Asceticism I didn’t read

In the past, I’ve on occasion turned to a certain sort of philosophical asceticism when in a frustrated place. So I packed these:

Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: I liked this book a lot in my teens and 20s, and much of the focus on Quality still resonates with me. I thought it’d be fun to re-read it in Bozeman (where much of the book takes place). But ultimately I haven’t even cracked the cover, because right now I don’t want to retreat to craft, no matter how well done. Instead, an outgoing, community-centric approach to life feels more appropriate.

Meditations of Marcus Aurelius, translated and annotated by Robin Waterfield: Unlike Zen and…, I have started this one, and would highly recommend it—the translation is very accessible and the annotations are terrific. But again, the detached life feels like the wrong route right now—even if it is one that in the past I’ve fallen into very easily.

Fiction

Read a fair bit of fiction over the summer, much of it light, trite, and not worth recommending or even thinking much about. If you want every detail, it’s in my Goodreads feed; the best of it will get added at some point to my mega-thread of diverse science-fiction/fantasy recs over on Twitter.

Water on the brain; joining OpenET board

Luis Villa1 Comment

I’m becoming a Westerner (in an age of aridification) because I have water permanently on the brain.

An unpaved dirt road, with a large puddle in the middle of it and green grass on both sides.
Sprinkler irrigation, gone awry.
A dark green tree-covered hillside, with a brighter green swathe of grass below it and a browning stretch of grass and a fence in the foreground.
Center-pivot irrigation. Enjoyed showing to A how this looked in satellite.
A farm scene. In the foreground, rows of small vegetables. In the middle ground, a red barn. In the far distance, a snow-covered tall mountain peak.
Drip irrigation, with Mt. Shasta.
Wooded green hills in the distance, framed by a wooden structure. Far off farm accoutrements are visible, including a tractor and farm building.
View from vacation dinner. In almost the center (but you’ll have to squint) was a pump that was filling trucks, moving the water to other (nearby?) farms.
Four forms of water usage, one farm.

Quite related, I’ve joined the board of OpenET to help bring open data on evapotranspiration (a key part of the water cycle) to Colorado River water management, and eventually to the whole world. I’ll be advising on both basics like licensing and of course the more complex bits like economic sustainability, where (via Tidelift) my head mostly is these days.

Many thanks to John Fleck (GNOME documentation project, ret.) for dragging my head into this space years ago by writing about it so well for so long.

My Wikimania 2014 talks

Luis Villa9 Comments

Primarily what I did during Wikimania was chew on pens.

Discussing Fluid Lobbying at Wikimania 2014, by Sebastiaan ter Burg, under CC BY 2.0
Discussing Fluid Lobbying at Wikimania 2014, by Sebastiaan ter Burg, under CC BY 2.0

However, I also gave some talks.

The first one was on Creative Commons 4.0, with Kat Walsh. While targeted at Wikimedians, this may be of interest to others who want to learn about CC 4.0 as well.

Second one was on Open Source Hygiene, with Stephen LaPorte. This one is again Wikimedia-specific (and I’m afraid less useful without the speaker notes) but may be of interest to open source developers more generally.

The final one was on sharing; video is below (and I’ll share the slides once I figure out how best to embed the notes, which are pretty key to understanding the slides):

Final(?) Wikimania 2013 idea and notes dump

Luis Villa6 Comments

Luis at Victoria Peak, the morning after
Me at Victoria Peak, the day after Wikimania, with thanks to Coren.

More random, more-or-less stream-of-(un)consciousness notes on the last few days of Wikimania:

  • The cab driver who got me to the airport had (at least) five cellphones. Two were mounted on each side of the steering wheel, and then a fifth appeared from somewhere else half-way through our drive to the airport. Two were Android(-ish?) smartphones, the others older phones. I’m sure there is some perfectly good reason for this, but no idea what it could be.
  • I had been under the impression that the island was essentially entirely either built up or too vertical to build on, so I had wondered how they’d managed to squeeze an entire Disneyland in there. Now I know; it is really quite amazing how much green, open space there is.
  • I was glad to hear Sue say that she cried while watching the South African Wikipedia Zero video, because I did too. As did lots of others, apparently. Still such a long way to reach the 13 out of 14 people on Earth who don’t use us every month, and so many different challenges to surmount – first access, then language, then engagement… oof. But obviously a worth challenge.
  • The 7-11s and Starbucks everywhere in HK are a reminder that the lines between national cultures are blurring faster than they ever have. I still got chicken feet as an unrequested pre-dinner appetizer one night, and unidentifiable fungus of some sort another afternoon. And I did get to see the very interesting, traditional Man Mo temple. But the trend is in favor of homogenization. This is in some ways very sad, as distinctive cultures make the world a richer place, but it will also over the long run make it easier for various contributors to understand each other – the classic mixed bag.
  • At the same time, was reminded in a few ways that barriers to communication are often surprisingly high- for example, a Chinese Wikipedian asked me (quite earnestly) about whether people disagreed about edits on English Wikipedia, which suggested we’re not very good at communicating to new Wikipedians in other languages even the most basic facts. (Asking “do English Wikipedians argue” feels to me like asking “is the sky blue for English Wikipedians?” – almost inconceivable that we haven’t already communicated that.)
  • Chinese Wikipedians are also working on an “intro to Wikipedia editing” tutorial that looks pretty cool. Made me sort of wonder if translating the newly-released How WP Works wikibook (or perhaps a shortened version of same?) might be a good/useful project for young Wiki movements, or if it is better to learn the same lessons through trial and error?
  • The German chapter has three policy people; the Foundation has zero (though all WMF’s lawyers pitch in on policy issues from time to time). I had sort of known this before, but not really internalized it. Still thinking through what that implies. (I had many great conversations with a bunch of the German chapter, and look forward to working with many of them.)
  • Very curious about the economics of the Octopus card. My impression as an outsider is that, through the Octopus cards, Hong Kong has established a defacto digital standard currency without relying on the inefficient, uninnovative, tax-on-the-body-politic leeches known as Visa and Mastercard. But that sounds too good to be true; there must be a catch to it.
  • Several Germans raved about the efficiency, politeness, etc. of the Hong Kong medical system. I chalk this up as a point for the Matt Yglesias “how government services are delivered and executed matters a lot and the US government should pay a lot more attention to that” school of thought.
  • The London organizers are extremely Bold; I wish them great luck in their planning and endeavors. I don’t think it’ll hurt the core conference to try these new experiments, and the payoff if it works could be huge, but I can understand the trepidation on the part of many long-time Wikimaniacs.
  • Had the opportunity to talk to a great variety of people who are passionate about the project; most who were excited and optimistic, some really concerned for a variety of reasons. I hope, of course, with my lawyer hat on, that I was able to calm those fears; in the mean time, it was a good reminder of the depth of passion for the project. (This was one of the many ways where I felt right at home, coming from years of GUADECs- the passion is real and deep and unfakeable in both places.)
  • That said, my biggest personal goal for the conference was to meet a broad cross-section of the community, rather than just the usual suspects from chapters, the board, etc. I feel like I had mixed achievement in this respect- I did have some pretty good conversations with non-chapter, non- (especially with people I met in line for food!) but at the end it was hard to do quite as much of it as I would have liked, especially for non-hacker folks. (The hacking days before the conference made meeting hackers much easier for me than it was to meet non-hacker editors.)
  • This really drove home that in the future, when I go somewhere for a non-Wiki conference, I really need to drop the local village pump or other comms channel an email and see if there is a meetup, editathon, etc. that I can crash.
  • We are deeply adaptable creatures, of course; I was quite overwhelmed by Hong Kong on day one and reasonably comfortable running around it on the free half-day I had before I flew home, and wish I’d had more time tosee it.  Still, it seems to me a city that would be very difficult for me to live happily in without gigantic piles of money.
  • Surprising to me to realize (once it was pointed out by Mako) that many WP articles about a place don’t have a clear link to the equivalent WV page. That seems like low-hanging fruit; I found a couple Monday while seeing the town before my flight and will try to remember to fix them once I’m back on a real network connection.
  • Pretty happy with the two LCA team talks I was part of – we received a bunch of compliments on them, and many great questions from the audience. That said, I think we probably went too broad on the open licensing talk. It either needs to be narrower (only one license or class of licenses) or longer (time-wise) next year, if we make this subject an annual thing. But that is a quibble – overall, I’m pretty happy with the quality of my first impression.
  • I admit that I played buzzword bingo during the Board’s Q&A. I actually think it helped me pay attention to certain topics I might have zoned out a little bit on otherwise, which is good, but the fact that it seems to be played fairly widely may suggest something about the format. I’m not sure what I’d change, though – doing that sort of interaction really does seem like an important way to build trust in the board. (You can mark “social capital” off your Luis Blog Post Bingo card if you’ve read this far.)
  • The closing beach party was a lot of fun, but (with no slight intended to the HK organizers) the top for me will always be the various beach parties at GUADEC Vilanova. For those of you who weren’t there in Vilanova, imagine something like the WM party, but with the broadest beach I’ve ever seen in my whole life, the bar literally in the middle of the sand, and the bar open until 4am. Now that the bar has been raised, I look forward to London’s beach party! ;)
  • Real joy to meet Risker; reminder that these sorts of meetings really allow you to get context and build up a mental model of someone in a way that you just can’t do offline, which makes these soooo important.
  • Copyright reform was a constant and recurring theme of discussion. In six years, certain aspects of Mickey Mouse will start creeping into the public domain, and that means we’re going to have another copyright bill in that time period. I suspect that the as a movement have to be ready and prepared for that, shape and form To Be Determined.

Bottom line: I’m exhausted, and (as I hit my six-months-iversary) more glad than ever I took this plunge. :) See everyone in London!

Random notes on Wikimania, Day 2

Luis Villa1 Comment

I’m pretty sure this is a cold, not jet lag. Not sure which would be better/worse browse this site. More notes:

  • Continue to hear Wikidata licensing concerns; need to work on communicating about that.
  • Multimedia round-table is well-attended (to the point of people sitting on the floor), even as someone points out that the day when “multimedia” was an exciting word was a long time ago.
  • Fabrice is a real pro at running a session – well-prepared and a great, positive guide to a topic; seemingly also getting solid, constructive feedback. The resulting discussion was quite high-quality for this sort of session.
  • Relatedly, I did not attend the session on preparation/constructive critique for speakers, but (1) it’s a really good idea and (2) maybe something similar could be done for panels? And of course should happen online before we come to the venue :)
  • Great to meet Jon Davies of WMUK, Dimitar, Niko, and a bunch of other interesting folks.
  • It is minor, but someone at the multimedia roundtable suggested that there should be a WordPress plugin to allow easy insertion and use of Common content into WordPress. To which I say: amen! It’s weird how often open projects neglect to promote their platform by building plugins for popular open content platforms (like WordPress) . [Later: apparently there is such a thing, but not updated in two years – too bad.]
  • I won’t call attribution in commons a minefield, exactly, but it’s extremely complex; was reminded of that today in the discussion of a media viewer that could show a more “black box” popup around images when viewing them. I’m adding it to my long-term radar…
  • Editor motivation is implicit in a lot of discussions, but can be hard to focus on or explicitly surface (or maybe more correctly, easy to lose track of when you’re focused on other things). I don’t mean this as a criticism, just an observation – I find myself also making the same mistake in conversations.
  • The EU-based chapters have a very interesting set of challenges around changing Brussels. Was interesting to discuss, and will be interesting to see how it goes.
  • Spent some time reviewing the schedule for the next few days to figure out what I’ll attend; it is more overwhelming than I’d even really realized.
  • Party was fun and views were insane. This HK factoid was pointed out and is also insane.

Notes on day 1 of my first Wikimania

Luis Villa8 Comments

HK_Yau_Ma_Tei_廟衙_夜市_攤販_Temple_Street_night_63_food_restaurant_Apr-2013_Spicy_crabs
Temple Street Night Food Restaurant by Marim68821, under CC-BY-SA-3.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Collected bullet points from day 1 of my first Wikimania:

  • Hong Kong is intense. I am used to, and like, big cities, but HK feels like a scale different even from, say, Cairo, New York, Delhi, or Bangalore. Had great fun last night walking around with a few friends, ended up at Temple Spice Crab (which was amazing in a vast number of ways) and along the waterfront.
  • Doing surprisingly well with jet lag, so far. We will see. (Late update: crashed pretty hard last night.)
  • This is such deja vu from GUADEC, in terms of watching reunions, seeing organization (or occasional lack thereof ;) seeing people just joyful to be in each other’s presence and working on shared practices/goals. I look forward to seeing more of the differences as the conference progresses.
  • First difference may be that there are a lot of structural committee meetings; not just board, but also AffCom, WCA, etc. Different from more specifically developer-oriented conferences. (I am mostly going to focus on the hacker days myself, but will also crash parts of WCA and others.)
  • Khmer wikipedia is represented in the meeting I am in as I write this. Khmer is not a terribly small language (16M) but I am still heartened to see it here.
  • First mention of merchandising came more than an hour into the WCA meeting. Not drawing any conclusions, just really the first legal thing. (Later they came thick and fast- so many interesting questions; some I could answer, some I couldn’t.)
  • Met another engineer-turned-lawyer, who appears to have (wisely) kept his engineering career viable while doing law school. Slightly jealous ;)
  • Need more stickers! Got wikidata on my tablet, at least.
  • Lots of fun meeting new people.
  • The map embedded here is amazing, showing not just geodata but historical change over time. Shame we’re not yet technically ready to make them more wide-spread.

At the Wikimedia Foundation (for, um, three months now)

Luis Villa16 Comments

Since it was founded 12 years ago this week, Wikipedia has become an indispensable part of the world’s information infrastructure. It’s a kind of public utility: You turn on the faucet and water comes out; you do an Internet search and Wikipedia answers your question. People don’t think much about who creates it, but you should. We do it for you, with love.

Wikimedia Foundation Executive Director Sue Gardner, from http://blog.wikimedia.org/2013/01/14/wikipedia-the-peoples-encyclopedia/

As Sue says, the people who create Wikipedia are terrific. I’m lucky enough to say that I’ve just wrapped up my first three months as their lawyer – as Deputy General Counsel at the Wikimedia Foundation. Consider this the personal announcement I should have made three months ago :)

Wikimania 2012 Group Photograph, by Helpameout, under CC-BY-SA 3.0, available from https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Wikimania_2012_Group_Photograph-0001.jpg
Wikimania 2012 Group Photograph, by Helpameout, under CC-BY-SA 3.0.

Greenberg Traurig was terrific for me: Heather has a wealth of knowledge and experience about how to do deals (both open source and otherwise), and through her, I did a lot of interesting work for interesting clients. Giving up that diversity and experience was the hardest part of leaving private practice.

Based on the evidence of the first three months, though, I made a great choice – I’ve replaced diversity of clients with a vast diversity of work; replaced one experienced, thoughtful boss with one of equal skill but different background (so I’m learning new things); and replaced the resources (and distance) of a vast firm with a small but tight and energized team. All of these have been wins. And of course working on behalf of this movement is a great privilege, and (so far) a pleasure. (With no offense to GT, pleasure is rarely part of the package at a large firm.)

The new scope of the work is perhaps the biggest change. Where I previously focused primarily on technology licensing, I’m now an “internet lawyer” in the broadest sense of the word: I, my (great) team, and our various strong outside counsel work on topics from employment contracts, to privacy policies, to headline-grabbing speech issues, to patent/trademark/copyright questions – it is all over the place. This is both challenging, and great fun – I couldn’t ask for a better place to be at this point in my life. (And of course, being always on the side of the community is great too – though I did more of that at Greenberg than many people would assume.)

I don’t expect that this move will have a negative impact on my other work in the broader open source community. If anything, not focusing on licensing all day at work has given me more energy to work on OSI-related things when I get home, and I have more flexibility to travel and speak with and for various communities too. (I’m having great fun being on the mailing lists of literally every known open source license revision community, for example. :)

If you’d like to join us (as we work to get the next 1/2 billion users a month), there are a lot of opportunities open right  now, including one working for me on my team, and some doing interesting work at the overlap between community, tech, and product management. Come on over – you won’t regret it :)