JavaOne notes
I attended JavaOne this year for the first time. I went to CommunityOne sessions on Monday, prior to the main conference. Then, I worked the OpenSolaris pavilion booth the rest of the week. Following are my notes from the event.
Rich Green keynote (CommunityOne)
Why get together? Rich talked about the importance of face-to-face meetings now and then in our virtual world of work. JavaOne is a great time to gather and have verbal conversations.
Aside: Some folks are currently discussing this same idea WRT user groups on the OpenSolaris main list today. I agree with Rich and the reason I go to user group each month is to learn by having new conversations with folks interested in OpenSolaris. I have a much greater understanding of the documentation needs of the OpenSolaris community by going every month to meet and talk with folks about documentation. You cannot know unless you ask.
In addition to Rich Green's insights on live conversations, he said "simplicity and access is far more important than technical perfection". WOW. read that again everyone. This is big, McNealy was saying this years ago and I still don't think we get it a Sun. I still see a lot of complexity and secrecy, not as much, but we're hearing this from Rich because we've still got WAY too much. He went on to say that the power to share technological information overrides technological limitations. That is, the desire to communicate is the dominant force today. I think this is all very cool because communications is my trade.
Then Tim O'Reilly took the stage to moderate a panel discussion with Rich Green, Tim Bray and Ian Murdock. He started the discussion with a statement about 'How do we help developers to 1) harness collective intelligence, 2) create live software, and 3) think about open source and open standards in lock-in for the future (fuzzy notes on that last one).
Tim Bray complained about Tim O's use of terminology right off the bat. Which is right on target for a Sun conversation because we always nitpick terms first, get on same page, then have a discussion. O'Reilly did a nice job of heading off a full-blown terminology death spiral and focused on the real questions he'd posed: how do we get developers software toolkits to extract the data they need. How do we make it easy for developers to extract, implement and deal with all the data? Ian chimes in with commodity and expertise. Tim Bray mentions advent of Spring/Rails makes it easier to contribute. He talks about the convergence of human and compute communication.
Then, O'Reilly mentions web 3.0, there will be no typing, we'll use gestural interfaces, voice, movements instead. Tim Bray reacted with surprise to this idea. [I was relieved because my typing stinks, always has. Go W3.0!] Ian jumps back in with the importance of the operating system. ? Then, there was a discussion of the processes needed to grab all of what is written out there, or creation of the process to pull-through the right information, how to create more value than you capture. People contribute for their own self-interest, not to contribute to XYZ project.
O'Reilly and Bray are impressive in this conversation. I wish they'd discussed this topic a lot longer, as they only just scratched the surface and had to finish up just when it got interesting. I highly recommend taking any opportunity you have to hear those two talk, very exciting!
