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Radical Techies Brunch

So I went hookie from NYC DrupalCamp3 to go to the Radical Techies Brunch, an elaborate black-tie affair in the most expensive steak restaurant in New York.

Or maybe it was an apartment with homecooked vegan goodness (plus eggs for an overflow crowd). Whatever.

I contributed litle, but it was great to absorb the discussion...

Take CCK, Views, other essential Drupal modules, get it all working together and put a tarball out. Use a more Debian model, this is our version, and we're only going to release when it's secure and ready

But, CCK adds critical functionality weekly.

There's a new module for checking CVS numbers of installed modules.

GPL V1 says you don't have to share if not distributed.
GPL V2 -- no, V3 -- says you have to release it if it's "public facing"

Drupal -- and Linux Kernal -- will stay V2.

  • freelancers / supporting each other

We're often working on projects on our own.
It's good for other people to know what your working on, details
in case you do something crazy like go on vacation
someone can cover for you

Open Planning Project -- Plone-based

idea I'm kicking around
nonprofit SMS text-messaging
if you want to build an application that's SMPP

have to negotiate with each of the cell phone
carriers that you want to use the network of

Jamie: the carriers detect when you're sending messages
you can do stuff with SMPP that you can't do with SMTP

the aggregation in a corporate setting is between a company that integrates a bunch of smaller

Who uses text messages?

depends on who I'm dating

"same as whether you're a vegetarian, right?"

I'm not sure this room is an accurate gauge of the general adoption of anything

commercial project called Cruxy
*the person who understands video SMS (MMS) -
[collective oooh]

sending over SMPP
Multi Media Messages

can do it via push, link with URL

an attachment with an e-mail

every cell phone number has an e-mail address associated with it
slowly got contracts with all the major carriers

huge rally
say text this number to sign up
when peoeple are pumped up

  • Here's my e-mail
  • here's my phone number
  • here's my credit card

That's the first use: to rapidly populate contact databases

and if you have a rinky-dink application it will break when 10,000 people text

Sign-up for bands: text this message
"You saw Jay-Z?"

Text-mob during RNC
flooded the network, then they shut it down

There are plenty of ways to trigger messages to be sent out

Asterisk: if you have an office phone system, PBX-- Asterisk let's you do the same with just one server

I have two asterisk cards that are sitting unused

learned with RNC
if your goal is to shut down, setting up for failure
if your goal is to energize activists, then you can really get busy

I felt really proud of the work we did to surf that media tide-- a lot of coverage of issues and grassroots activists

there was a lot of 'bad protesters ruined everything' coverage

but also a lot of careful articles, especially in the local press

back to SMS

What's the barrier to entry?
Up to them to approve or not approve

organizational structure to do that
if they put pressure on that one organization, they turn off everybody's stuff

use existing infrastructure without going through modes of approval

short codes go across carriers

still have to go to each carrier

You need to promise carriers a certain amount of traffic, and they don't want flooding or political content

All messages are logged

to get this to work, you need backing of big mainstream organizatios like MoveOn, Amnesty International

really, it is nonprofit for nonprofits
support a lot of nonprofit things

there would be this fog of traffic

the NYPD in Minneapolis find out what it's going through, and shut it down

ultimately the problem is in this country we don't think of communication as a right
For telephone lines there's still some sense of right, common good

Remind people

create our own cell phone network-- we give out shortcodes for free, we'd be popular

and you also put up wifi where you put up the cell towers

Verizon squats their towers-- I lost cell coverage in my area when they cut off power to an abandoned building

Cell phone VOIP

everything converging to Internet, fiber, and wireless anyway

that's a very important point to keep track of

the cell phone companies saw what landlines gave up by letting people assert infrastructure rights

  • buying infrastructure

meaty topic
critical mass

Next time
community wifi, and what's going on in New York

GIS - Global Information Systems
coming out in open source
long-term goal of mapping server
takes a lot of resources but can start small

me: how about a subway station finder right now?

http://hopstop.com

cmap

overlay

wasn't someone going to put up a server and someone else was going to put software on it
sandbox server

have guy working with open source mapping
more than willing to help us configure it

U.S. government puts out yearly updates of street information

takes forever to build
dozens of gigs of postgres database
we're decades ahead of other countries

can do modular installs of geographic regions
NYC data application
I have NYS tiger file, with water and everything else

postgres set up on a server

we colocate a few servers, when we manage them,
$300 a month

if there's a project we want to do anyway
we can figure out a way
mostly it's about sysadmin and taking care of it
as long as server is rack-mountable

GIS really gets interested when you start linking data tables into your polygons

when you bring in data sources and you can do stats in it

Man who in addition to having done a fair amount of GIS mapping projects, he's got a kind of world map package

some chunks of stuff similar with Google maps. It's worth trying to get him to come out. He'll probably be at GMC.

Also coming up:

USSF - June 27 to July 1 in Atlanta
August in Berlin hacker camp

the NTCC, no illusion-- it's corporate nonprofit

Grassroots Use of Technology in Lowell
- Schizophrenic about what they mean by grassroots
- lots of language about community organizing
- then the keynote speaker had me rolling my eyes

Grassroots Use of the Technology has a lot more small groups

Grassroots Media Conference is more politically edged

database project
- motivation, a lot of small organizations which may have a little (or no) money to spend
need to keep track of donations, keep track of contacts
off-the-shelf software like spreadsheet, e-mail program may be able to barely do it, until
organization gets to a certain size or complexity, gets hard to keep track of interdependencies
who attended what meeting
lots of work for people to keep track of data

Then there's publishing a web site and keeping it up to date

I think certainly with things like Drupal they seem flexible and powerful
but if you don't have someone to manage it

my dream
may overlap with these CMSes
something that works through the web
go and edit rich information
the difficulty here is just interface
how can non-technical person understand it

collection of very simple data types-- string, rich text, numbers
web interface for data
aggregate into objects
have basic interface for editing complex data

thought about it a lot
objects rows in a table? relational database?

stumbled across this semantic web stuff, RDF
an object
describe just by naming it, URI (URL)
once you have a name of a resource you can start making statements about it

repository of these statements

coded a client-side interface in javascript

have multiple repositories and draw from it

the hope is this interface could be so simple that people could start typing in information
and then clone a thing with that shape

a general way of editing complex information

only a part of what Drupal would do

sounds like to me like Drupal is a way to put tools together in a framework

easy to glue on presentation module to what I have

most of the other stuff is being developed for developers

nontechie would only update web site, not even install modules

semantic web:

"I want to create a person. A person has many donations."

Went through many months on the data model. Finally came up with this

Problem with database, schema evolution can be really difficult
as changes
and as new objects have to be used

RDF makes it very easy to flexibly add statements

could be many repositories of statements

statement is this really simple thing: subject, predicate (verb), object

if I own a domain name, I know I can create unique locations

Object is defined by all statements with a given subject

You come up with a kind of graph

is it better than other things that are out there?

I am an academic, trying to avoid doing just for academic

we also know that the most important thing about creating databases is deciding what needs to be done with the data later, how it needs to be viewed or manipulated

could tack [this RDF] on top of database

elected officials database. Everyone wants this common database. This could make it easy to extend.

one guinea pig. I built her web site on top of her data, so I'm trying this interface to let her edit it

[me, note to self: I'm interested in this, and if it can't be done in a distributed way PWGD would love to do it in a centralized location, in our normal model of providing fantastic services to groups in a way that helps the groups greatly, but that doesn't leave ultimate power with the group but with the community that it's building. (E.g., the contact list it creates can vote to become its own group, and still have access to all the donor database resources and such.)]

freelancers concerns, brick and mortar support, asking tech questions, getting coverage when you go on vacation
being present in the community
knowing enough about each other's clients

If I know Good Freelancer's phone number, I can take responsible for some of his clients if I can call him to get walked through

Mentorship - mentoring people to the point where they can be radical techies and sustain themselves as such

Of late I've been thinking a lot about idling in a SILC channel
often doesn't work
helps to ask a community of folks one knows all at once

network effect

socially I really appreciate the interactivist SILC channel
just for contact with humans

Secure Internet Live Conferencing
encrypted IRC

SILC lets you run a command and get key and
"I'm Mark--" you can run get key, the second time you can check it is Mark

Next brunch in six weeks, key everyone
PGP keys also

use keys instead of passwords whenever possible

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