One of my duties as a Developer Evangelist at Microsoft is to document things. Someone once said the main difference between a journalist and a spy is a journalist reports on government for the people, and a spy reports on people for the government. I wear both hats as a DE – I talk about MS stuff with people on the outside, and I take their feedback and report it back to the Mother Brain. (Yes there is a Mother Brain at MS; it is totally in a standing jar thing just like Metroid. But I digress.)

Anyway, I thought it would be fun and in the spirit of openness to post my internal trip report from Open Source Bridge here. Read and enjoy. (And a big congrats to Selena, Audrey, Jake and the gang for their efforts in making Open Source Bridge a reality – a truly impressive effort.)

Open Source Bridge is a new conference for developers working with open source technologies and for people interested in learning the open source way.
http://opensourcebridge.org/about/

Open Source Bridge was born out of the void created when O'Reilly decided to host OSCON 2009 in San Jose after a six-year run in Portland. Local open source advocates saw the potential for not just bridging the gap, but in providing a more open alternative organized by the community themselves.

Open Source Bridge is unique among conferences in that it is non-profit, organized entirely by volunteers. The key point here is this is a true developer conference -- unlike Code Camps or other "unconference" style events, this wasn't held on a weekend or provided for free. People were paying to attend. It was held in the Oregon Convention Center, the venue for OSCONs past and even our own product launches (at least before we started doing them for cheap in movie theaters :)

The "Open Source Citizenship" Philosophy
As described by co-founder Audrey Eschright:

When we started working on Open Source Bridge, Selena and I came up with the term “open source citizenship” to describe what we hoped to explore. We’re planning a conference that will connect developers across projects, across languages, across backgrounds to learn from each other. We want people to experience something beyond “how to use tool X” or “why databases keel over when you do Y” (even though those topics are important, making up our tools and trade, and will be a central part of the conference content). We’d like to share what open source means to us, what it offers, where we struggle, and why we do this day in and day out, even when we’re not paid for it.

In order to do that, it seemed important to bridge the kinds of roles we have in open source, user/contributor/owner/institution, getting down to something more fundamental. What else are people who interact in this multi-directional way? Perhaps we’re citizens. Not residents—we do more than live here. We are, like citizens of a country, engaged in the practice of an interlocking set of rights and responsibilities.

Pasted from <http://dyepot-teapot.com/2009/02/17/open-source-citizenship/>

It is this sense of responsibility that drove the citizens of this community to work over the course of 7+ months to successfully organize and execute a professional developer conference for zero monetary gain. I've been involved with organizing many different events and know first hand the sheer amount of work organizing a conference of this size entails. Add to that the damage our current economic climate has done upon industry conferences across the board, and I have at times questioned the sanity and feasibility of such an endeavor. They pulled it off though, and with gusto. They've already made it clear they're doing this again next year, and with the momentum they have I expect it to be an even bigger success.

Business Model
The business model was based mainly around corporate sponsorship, with Yahoo!, Google, WebTrends, Mozilla, and SourceForge among the principal sponsors. Conference passes were $250, with early bird pricing of $175, $99 for students, and discounts offered for user group members (as OSCON is known to do). People could also earn a conference pass by volunteering 8 hours worth of time staffing the conference, which is how I got my ticket.

By covering costs through sponsorship, the ticket price is more for establishing the conference's value. Many participants got in for free either through speaking, volunteering, or just walking in the door -- I didn't notice anyone checking badges. This approach has been discussed in the past amongst our team, and has had demonstrated success with events in LatAm. It would be nice to be able to put a price on more of our events, even if most of the attendees end up having their tickets comped -- it sets the perception that this is worth paying for.

Format
Open Source Bridge was held as a three-day conference, the first two being more traditional with prescheduled sessions, and the third being the "unconference" day with OpenSpace/BarCamp style ad-hoc scheduling. Sessions ran throughout the day, followed by BOF sessions until 10pm at night.

Simultaneous with the conference sessions was the Hacker Lounge, found on the top floor of the Hilton downtown. The Hacker Lounge was open 24 hours a day for the entirety of the conference. (The conference actually adjourned at midnight on Friday as the lounge shut down.)

[Silicon Florist: A peek at the hacker lounge]

Keynotes

Sam Adams, mayor of Portland, made the call for increased collaboration between the city and the open source community in an effort to make Portland the "hub for open source". He wants to help the city move away from proprietary solutions and made a commitment to "out open source" Vancouver BC, which recently set goals to become a completely "open" city.

[good write-up about Sam's keynote on Silicon Florist]

Sessions
Sessions were organized into five different tracks: Business (9 sessions), Chemistry (14 sessions), Cooking (31 sessions), Culture (21 sessions), and Hacks (12 sessions).

Over 260 session proposals were submitted, only about a third accepted. (I'm guessing there was a conscious decision to keep this first conference under control and not have too many sessions happening at once, but haven't verified that.) I had submitted two proposals and had both rejected. The only session with anything approaching .NET friendly on the agenda was Sara Ford's talk on CodePlex. (Speaking of which, about a quarter of the sessions were led by women.)

I found the sessions to be consistently high quality. Lots of passion, and better presentation skills exhibited than what I've seen at some OSCON sessions in the past. Reminded me of Code Camp in some respects. My favorite sessions included an overview of the Clojure language, and Chris Messina's talk on Social Network Supermarkets and how to defeat them (which was filmed and should appear on blip.tv sometime soon).

[note: I have more detailed notes on individual sessions that I can post if people are interested]

Web Commentary

• ReadWriteWeb: Open Source Bridge a Huge Success
• Twitter
  • Tags: #osb09 and #osbridge
  • Skjalf: I'm making a note here: HUGE SUCCESS @osbridge #osb09 #osbridge | Thanks to organizers and community... 72 hours of win. /salute
    Pasted from <http://twitter.com/Skjalf/statuses/2255639883>
• http://poelcat.wordpress.com/2009/06/17/open-source-bridge-day-1/

Notes

• Great experience overall for attendees. Event exhibited a high level of professionalism.
• Exhibit hall virtually empty. Not sure if this was due to vendors not seeing the value in product pitches at a community-run conference, the expected attendance, or what. Sponsors by and large were more involved with presentations from Yahoo, Google, and the like.
• Participants good about spreading the word for things to do, where to go for lunch, etc. Made a good time for out-of-towners.
• Not sure about attendance - looked on the ground to be somewhere in the 300-400 range, but a third-party source mentioned "500+" in a write-up. Registered attendees was in the 400 range as the conference began, so 500+ seems a bit unlikely. Whatever the number is, to get several hundred attendees for the first run of this conference I would consider to be a big success.
• Code Camps have been moving more towards a traditional sponsorship model, tiptoeing away from tenets of the Code Camp Manifesto. Maybe the "camp" aspect of Code Camp should be called into question as well. Some orgs don't get involved with Code Camp because of the perceptions around a weekend event. What about combining a Code Camp with a Bridge-type event? There are multiple ways to go with this.
• This event unfortunately demonstrated some "open source doesn't include MS" perception about it, not that there was a conscious effort to exclude us… but there wasn't much effort to involve us either. There were definitely some .NET developers in attendance, just not the content. This event could be twice the size easily if it was. For next year's conference I want to encourage more sessions on .NET, Windows Mobile, etc, and broader involvement to embrace open source on all platforms.

A new version of XNA Game Studio hit the streets today – go get it! Among the new features is the ability to play video in your games, which has been a long-requested feature. Full screen playback, playback to textures, controls like pause/resume and stop, play multiple video streams simultaneously… very handy. There are other new features like support for Avatars to represent characters within your games, Xbox LIVE Party support – check out all the new stuff on the XNA Creators Club announcement.

Does your current programming language leave you feeling… not so fresh? Interested in F#, the new functional .NET programming language that’s shipping with Visual Studio 2010? Missed my talk at Portland Code Camp because there were 15 million other sessions scheduled for the same time?

Well you’re in luck; I’m presenting on F# tonight at this month’s meeting of the Portland Functional Programming Study Group (pdxfunc). It’s at Cubespace at 7pm… hope to see you there!

Here’s the event link for more info.

Everything in tech these days needs a camp. With the buzz around cloud computing, like clockwork CloudCamp was born. CloudCamps have started to spring up around the globe and now it’s Portland’s turn.

Today (June 5th) we are having a planning kickoff meeting at Beer & Blog, which is held at the Green Dragon pub. We’ll be there from 4-5pm to talk about how to pull this together. (Look for either myself or Dawn Foster.) We’re shooting for a fairly aggressive schedule so your help would be appreciated. If you can’t make it to today’s meeting but are interested in participating, please email me and I’ll get you looped into the planning group.

On a related note, Microsoft is holding a developer challenge called new CloudApp(). It’s for .NET and PHP developers to create cloud applications and services on the Azure Services Platform. Prizes include being featured on azure.com and major Microsoft events, $5000 VISA gift cards, and being able to gloat over lesser developers. Check it out at www.newcloudapp.com.

Get ‘em while they’re hot!

While it’s downloading, check out what’s new in Visual Studio, dynamic programming in C# and Visual Basic, the beauty that is the F# language (which is now included in the box!), what’s new in WPF 4 Beta 1, parallel computing in the .NET Framework… and that’s just scratching the surface. Time to put the geek hat on and start soaking it up!

I’m not much of a TV watcher, but one show I did get hooked on is Lost. Tonight is the big finale of the fifth (and penultimate) season, and they’re starting to run out of time to come up with more crazy stuff – they’re actually starting to answer some of the questions about what’s going on with the island now.

Anyway, I’ve had my own theories about what’s happening, and I wanted to blog a bit now so I can totally brag about it later on if I’m right.

In the last episode, Locke indicates at one point that he doesn’t believe Jacob even exists, and has started to take his merry band of followers to go and see him. He then says he’s actually going to kill Jacob. (I suppose disproving his existence is akin to killing… but I digress.)

Not only do I think Jacob exists, but I think that Jacob is actually Jack. Why?

• His family members (Christian and Claire) seem to be connected with the island.
• Jack made it back to the past, which means he could have been on the island already (as Jacob) when they first crashed on the island.
• Jack could be short for Jacob.
• The whole temporal consciousness thing may explain why people couldn’t see Jacob.
• I heard on an interview once that Jack is the only cast member who knows what happens in the story… there must be some reason why it’s him. (maybe from filming certain scenes, etc)

The incident that should be happening on tonight’s show may be the thing that turns him into Jacob. Can’t wait! (I’ll probably end up totally wrong and pulling out my hair for the next six months as I wait for the next season to start, but that’s entertainment I suppose.)

Yesterday Twitter made a “small settings update” and removed the ability to receive your followers’ tweets in reply to people you aren’t following. Let’s say I’m following @bob, and @bob replies to @joe… previously I had the option of seeing this reply even if I wasn’t following @joe. That’s what Twitter removed yesterday.

Although Twitter claims this was an “undesirable and confusing option”, Twitter users have raised a big stink over this removal of functionality. (Currently three of the top ten Twitter trends pertain to this change.) Personally I found this feature useful as it gave me discoverability into the conversations of the people I am following. I wouldn’t be following them if I wasn’t interested in what they had to say.

But I write this not to debate the merits of this one feature. The real problem is having a single for-profit company like Twitter serving as overlord for a particular way that we use the Internet as a service.

Twitter, Micro-blogging, and Standards

Is Twitter standards-based? It depends what you mean. Take a look at twitter.com today and you’ll see an HTML page (with relatively few errors) served up via HTTP. RSS feeds are exposed throughout the site. Individual tweets have URLs. Looks pretty standards-based from that perspective, but it’s missing the forest for the trees.

Twitter provides a micro-blogging service, much in the same way that Yahoo! Mail provides an email service. But because email is a service that is standardized, you aren’t limited to one provider to use email on the Internet. If Microsoft buys out Yahoo! tomorrow (I know nothing about that by the way :) and you want to switch to GMail as a result, you’re free to do so… email is email regardless of where you get the service.

Standardization enables choice, which is why you don’t see Twitter trying to standardize the service that is micro-blogging. Then people wouldn’t be forced to go through Twitter in order to “tweet”.

Federation

Standardization is only half of it, though – federation is important as well. Continuing with the email example, there isn’t one big email server in the sky handling all the Internet’s email… there are thousands upon thousands of email servers hosting their own batch of users. Email is transmitted between these servers as needed. The TCP protocol that is the backbone of the Internet follow similar concepts.

In the email world I’m me@jasonmauer.com, but on Twitter I’m just @jasonmauer. This is like going back to the old Compuserve days before you could send and receive email outside the bounds of your BBS. Twitter doesn’t communicate directly with any other micro-blogging servers like Identica because it’s a walled garden of information.

Federation is also important from an architectural perspective – Twitter is a scalability nightmare scenario, just ask the fail whale. In short, there are good reasons for federation beyond enabling choice for users.

Business Model

Twitter is like a descendant of the dot-com Jurassic era that somehow survives today purely on venture capital funding and zero business model. Well that’s not entirely true… their business model basically like the underpants gnomes from South Park: (1) establish a platform and capture the community, then (2) something happens and (3) profit. Maybe it’s being bought out by another company (though they’ve avoided that to date), who knows. All that matters is that to them, you are there for them to make money off of your participation somehow. This wouldn’t be a bad thing were it not for the lack of choice users have, since they’re locked into Twitter’s walled garden.

Worth reading is Dave Winer’s post about why it’s time to break out of Twitter, using the phone company as an example of the problematic relationship between Twitter-the-service and Twitter-the-company.

Twitter and Community

My friend and community cat herder Dawn Foster posted on this topic about how Twitter doesn’t get community. Although I totally agree they aren’t getting it, I don’t believe the solution is to be found by Twitter hiring a community manager. It is the community that should be managing the service that Twitter currently controls. There is no micro-blogging without content and participation, and those are all supplied by the users.

What You Can Do, Fellow Geek?

The Internet ain’t what it used to be, with all these “normal” people using it. :) Maybe your parents are Twittering because they know people who are, or they saw it on CNN, but they may not have the technical background to see these issues with the service.  The tech savvy have a special responsibility to speak up and call out companies like Twitter when they pee in the pool.

My suggestion – don’t waste your energy calling for Twitter to restore the replies functionality they removed yesterday. Call for a micro-blogging standard that enables choice in service providers so users are put back in the driver’s seat.

One possibility is Activity Streams, which is a standard in development that Facebook is already supporting with their new Open Stream API. Please comment if you know of other efforts, have experience with Activity Streams, think I’m full of crap, etc. :)

Today the Windows 7 Release Candidate (RC) has been made available on MSDN and Technet subscriber downloads. General release for everyone else is slated for May 5th. MSDN was having some issues this morning due to the onslaught of download attempts… after giving it some time I was able to login and get the download started. (At the current rate it should be done downloading shortly after the Blazers beat the Rockets at home tonight.)

This RC is the last planned release of Windows 7 before it ships, and should be stable enough for general use. If you’re currently running the beta you should definitely move to the RC soon as the beta expires on July 1st. (The RC doesn’t expire until June of 2010.)

While you’re monkeying around with the new OS, something else worth checking out is the Windows API Code Pack. It’s a .NET library that provides access to Windows 7 (and Vista) features previously unavailable from managed code. This is your ticket for using Windows 7 features in your own apps like Taskbar Jumplists, icon overlays, task dialogs, libraries, you name it. If that weren’t good enough, the full source code is included… no mystery meat here.

Hope you enjoy Windows 7 as much as I have!

The Microsoft MVP team has been announcing new MVP Award recipients as they do every quarter, but this time marks the beginning of an award for Silverlight. I’m happy to see that one of our local rock stars, Erik Mork, is among the first to receive the Silverlight MVP award. Congratulations Erik on some well deserved recognition! (And thanks MVP team for recognizing Erik’s knowledge and community contributions, otherwise I was going to have to strangle somebody.)

[side note: if you haven’t already, be sure to check out Erik and Monica’s Silverlight podcast at www.sparklingclient.com … good stuff]

This past week I presented at the Corvallis .NET User Group and Boise Code Camp about a new language Microsoft has been developing called F#. It’s a functional, object-oriented, hybrid sort of language that I think will make a big impact in .NET development of the future.

Microsoft has been working towards an overall goal of raising the bar for software development through declarative code – expressing what you want done and letting the machine worry about how it gets done. We humans get to express ourselves more clearly, and the machines get to do what they’re good at – analyze, optimize, and execute. You can see this push towards declarative code with technologies like Windows Workflow Foundation, LINQ, and XAML. F# is a piece of that pie as well.

Our networked world forces us to deal with asynchronous code more every day. Combine that with the steam running out of the gigahertz train (we get more processing performance through additional cores, not cranking up the clock speed) and the resulting need to parallelize code, and languages that focus on behavior instead of intent start showing the errors of their approach. It shows through code wrestling trying to wrangle with concurrency, multiple threads, coordinating asynchronous callbacks… it ends up making a mess of what you were actually trying to do in the first place. This is an arena where F# really shines, and is why I believe every .NET developer should make some time to take a look at the language and start “unlearning what you have learned” from the backwards world of imperative code.

Some blogs worth checking out about F# include Don Syme (creator of the language), Andrew Kennedy, and Luca Bolognese. Luca also has a great F# overview presentation from PDC2008 online that I highly recommend you checking out if you’re interested in the language. There’s also the F# Developer Center on MSDN, which you can reach with the handy short URL of http://msdn.com/fsharp . (If you have an online F# resource you enjoy that I didn’t mention, please let us know in the comments!)

Also don’t forget to check back here as I will be focusing on F# (and related issues like asynchronous code and parallelism) with some code samples and apps. Hope you check out F#, I think you’ll enjoy it!