Anarchogeek

This past week i took a break from building selenium tests for pipes to attend the Nonprofit Software Development in Oakland. It was great fun to connect back with old friends from radical designs, riseup, the bratt collective, and many others. I only got a few jabs for being a sellout.

I facilitated / lead 4 workshops during the summit. Introduction to Ruby on Rails with Josh from the bratt collective where we walked people through building a basic rails app and convinced a few people to convert. Then we did a Power Ruby on Rails where we more had a discussion about best practices and spent a long time talking about how to scale rails down to running many rails apps on a single server and up to having dozens of servers for a single app. There weren’t great notes taken in the other two sessions. Open Standards: Calendar Formats and Event Syndication we talked about the history of protest.net, ical, mod_event rss, ways people are using eventful and upcoming today. We wrapped up with a discussion about a potential glorious calendar interoperability future with CalDAV and apple’s open sourced Calendar Server. The last session was Smelling the ajax koolaid. We didn’t have any net connection. Have you ever tried to give a talk on ajax with demo’s but without a net connection? It doesn’t work. I had to revert to using flip pads and writing out examples of javascript on there. It went pretty well i think, people liked it.

Gunner and his Aspiration crew are the best people i know at creating unconferences, they manage to connect people, share knowledge, empower everybody as participants, include experts and newbies. Every conference i go to i wish was an aspiration event.

Unfortunately he’s just one person. So next week i’m trying to pull off a bit of an unconference myself. On Tuesday the 27th i’ll be helping coordinate the FreeTel – Calls For Change conference as a free part of the O’Reilly Emerging Telephony Conference. It’s free and will be fun.

Etel will also be a bit of a coming out party for the Asterisk Cookbook which i’ve played a very small part in helping along.

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