The upcoming Nova special, and the Commonwealth Club interview (with Amy Novogratz, Kate Stohr, Maria Giudice, and myself (video courtesy fora.tv))
serve as proof points that this phenomena has exceeded meme status and is spilling over into the broader socioeconomic graph. But we knew this was inevitable, right? We just needed the right conditions for humanity's collaborative tendency to come out of the proprietary deep freeze.
The substrate upon which this new culture is rising pairs flexible licensing models a'la Creative Commons with accessible technology for building collaborative online communities a'la Drupal and Wordpress, Yahoo!groups and PBWiki. Among the catalysts for this reaction are frustration over obscene economic inequities around the world, abuses of people and planet for profit, and utter neglect by federal governments. As was discussed here in the video interview about the Open Architecture Network, these frustrations can be overcome by collaborating for change on the net.
Need more proof of the trend toward an open source economy? Just check with the folks at Open Everything. They're tracking numerous open collaboratives, which are exogenous to the software world, but infused with many of the same principles, practices and tools as open source software projects.
One of the most prominent tools applied to these new collaboratives is Drupal, and we discuss it's role in the Open Architecture Network in the video (at :37:30, :46:30, and :51:00).
Yet these, and plenty of other examples show that collaborative culture is on the rise. Does this signal the next generation economy in which businesses profit less from market lockout and legal protection and more from direct value delivered in open markets? Or does it lead to a more fundamental shift wherein socioeconomic prosperity derives less through commerce than through collaborations for which the primary incentive to contribute is sociocentric good?
More evidence that Sun's open source strategy is serving Sun's growth objectives came in my Inbox this week.
The founder of a pre-startup company developing a specialized SaaS offering replied to my cold-contact inquiry about their business:
"We're big users of Solaris - we've standardized on Solaris 10 for our
systems, and rely heavily on DTrace and ZFS - it's great that it's all
open source (well, free-as-in-beer is probably our primary motivation
at this stage)."
Two things about his response are strong validations of Sun's strategy. First, no one from Sun had any prior business contact with this company, afaik. Second, he goes on to say,
"... We'll be considering Sun hardware, and we'll also be thinking about support contracts..."
which is precisely the market behavior Sun is trying to drive with it's open source strategy.
It would be hard to draw any conclusions about the effectiveness of a $15B company's strategy from one such response, but this is not an isolated case. The frequency and relevance of "pre-company" contact with Sun is sky-rocketing. These are organizations that are incubating businesses and have yet to spend significant IT dollars. They're looking to avoid technical debt and brace for break-away growth. They want to embed efficiency and reliability in their architecture. They want to get started at the least cost possible. Sun is redesigning itself to serve these objectives, and it's working.
And today at the CommunityNext conference in L.A., the CEO of Real Time Matrix, Jeff Whitehead, repeated the theme to 200+ entrepreneurs who are launching media companies on the web:
"We started on Linux. We hit a wall ... Now we're on Solaris. We use Sun's Coolthreads servers. We saw a huge performance gain ... We needed to make this switch to succeed."
No sooner had I captured that quote, when a message pops up in my Inbox from another startup founder here at CommunityNext:
"... I'm really looking forward to a potential relationship with Sun. Our architecture and technologies certainly seem like a good fit."
Our initial introduction was through a discussion about our open source technologies, specifically NetBeans, OpenSPARC, and OpenSolaris. He wanted to know if he could run Erlang on these technologies. Answer: yes, he can.
Back now from DrupalCon, I'm parsing all that happened last week in Boston. For me it was a whirlwind, interrupted by a plethora of hassles, including a nasty head cold, keyboard and trackpad on my MBP crapping out, a crashed demo, and several hours separated from my Treo while it rode around in the back of a Boston cab. All that negative energy converging on me was more than offset by the positive vibe at the four day conference. The kindness of the cabbie who drove crosstown to return my phone helped too.
One of the highlights for sure was spending time with a new Sun colleague, Brian Aker from MySQL. We had breakfast at Henrietta's near Harvard Square before his keynote on Wednesday. I asked him about the merger with Sun, what's next for MySQL, and how he'd like to see our field organizations work together. He said the merger has been pretty well received and there was a general appreciation at MySQL for Sun's commitment to open source (something I hope will rub off on Brian's Slashdot amigo Chris Dibona, who conspicuously left Sun off of his Tuesday keynote list of companies that "get" open source). There is a tradition of collaboration between Sun and MySQL too, which Brian indicated ought to help smooth the integration. Lot's of his work is going into memcached these days, particularly in the libmemcached client. He cleared up a misconception for me regarding Innodb: since Innodb is GPL'd, the risk of Oracle smothering it is nil - the community is driving it, and it's not the dead end many had feared. What's next? Don't expect to see MySQL 5.1 until 2009; do expect a maturing and further specializing application of the MySQL engines MyISAM, Innodb, BDB, and Archive; and plan for an adoption ramp for DRBD. Brian had some great advice for Sun's field engineers: get familiar with MySQL technology by taking advantage of the many training resource available at MySQL.com. MySQL University is a great place to start, (be sure to catch Brian's talk on EC2 March 29). I also caught some good audio one-on-one with Brian after his keynote which I will post separately, along with his advice on scaling up your database.
RDF and Semantic Web were topics of much conversation and at least one BoF session. With the addition of RDF modules in Drupal 6, developers can mashup data from multiple sites in very interesting ways. If Web3.0 is massively distributed data mining, indexing, and mashing it all up, then Drupal is positioned to be the portal for this convergence, as Dries Buytaert resolutely declared in his Monday keynote
I gave a talk on running Drupal on Sun, with some help from Chris Cheetham from Project Caroline,
at the end of the day on Wednesday (slides at right). As luck would have it, my demo
froze up, but I did manage to show Drupal running in a Solaris Zone,
and DTrace to count function calls from Drupal. Chris's demo of Drupal
deployment to Project Caroline went much smoother.
There was a lot of support for the next DrupalCon to be held in Hungary this fall. It will be hard to top the Boston event, but I know this community will do their best to have the best one yet.
Here are just a few of the highlights I've had the privilege to experience at TED in Monterey:
Phil Zimbardo prepared Tedsters to become everyday heros by informing us just how closely we dance with evil. Evoking Solzhenitsyn, who said "The line between good and evil cuts through the heart of every individual," Zimbardo's research reveals how susceptible we all are to falling in with Bad Apples. But we're able to resist it best when we're not in a Bad Barrel, i.e., the situations and institutions we inhabit must foster cooperation not separatism, empathy not blame. I.e., the opposite of the conditions in Abu Graib pre-scandal.
Irwin Redlener prepared us for survival in the wake of a nuclear attack by elucidating a few relatively unknown tips: (1) post blast radioactivity within a mile or so of the blast is lethal on the ground, so get shelter below ground or on the 10th floor or above, (2) know the prevailing wind direction (and ideally the actual wind direction at time of blast) and head perpendicular or away from it, (3) don't rely on the government or other government preparedness programs to protect yourself. They're not ready to deal with it, and (4) keep your mouth open so your sinuses don't burst in the aftershock of the blast.
Neil Turok, whose dream is that the next Einstein will be African. He's building a model for higher science education in Africa with the AIMS school, delivering RICH (Relevant, Innovative, Cost Effective, High quality) education in major African countries.
Dave Eggers, founder of 826 Valencia and merchant to buccaneers. His model for neighborhood driven afterschool tutoring in the back of a kids emporium is being imitated all over America, and has even sprung up in Dublin.
Karen Armstrong, author and scholar of comparative religions. Her wish is perhaps the most audacious TED wish to date, which is has something to do with getting Jews, Muslims, and Christians together on matters of universal justice and respect, but I'm a little vague on the details. I thinks she wants some help with that part.
Anyway, Karen and the rest made a believer out of me.
Sitting in the Is Beauty Truth? session at TED2008 today, I am reminded of a phone conference with TED Curator Chris Anderson last fall to bring him up to date on the status of one of the previous year's TED wishes.
When Sun wrapped up its formal role in developing the Open Architecture Network (OAN) it handed over a sustaining challenge to the site's owner and community leader, Architecture for Humanity (AFH). When TED Curator Chris Anderson asked Sun why the TED Prize winner was left in a lurch I gave a short answer, "It was primarily due to reasons of expediency". In actual fact, Sun never walked away from AFH. Sun was, and continues to be, committed to their success and continues to be involved. As of today, we now we see a clear path to a sustaining model that leverages the Drupal community and frees AFH from the dependence cycle it was caught in with Sun. I look forward to bringing that good news to Chris before the conference wraps up on Saturday.
The first step on this path is to refactor the site such that it runs on an unadulterated Drupal core. To do that AFH and Sun have contracted with CivicActions to migrate the OAN from a hacked Drupal 4.7 to a clean Drupal 5.X. (It was the hacking aspect that I explained away to Chris Anderson as "expediency". Corners were cut, compromises were made, but AFH's and TED's primary goal, to launch the site at TED2007, was achieved. Incidentally, of the three TED2006 prize winner, only AFH's wish was realized by TED2007.) CivicActions won the bid to perform the migration by doing a professional and efficient assessment of the OAN's current state and the effort required to bring it up to the high standards of a showcase Drupal site.
My next few posts will describe the process of setting up this development environment as we open Chapter 2 in the OAN's odyssey. I'll describe how we use OpenSolaris to enable efficient development, testing, and deployment for multiple contributors working on multiple tasks and timelines.
I had the pleasure to chat with Robin Chase last evening. Earlier in the day I snuck past security at the Connected Urban Development conference to meet her following her panel discussion on Connected and Sustainable Mobility. I felt like a KT Tunstall groupie slipping back stage after the show. Overtly, I wanted to understand her experience as a Facebook Platform developer, and see whether and how Sun could help her company, GoLoco, prosper.
Covertly, I wanted to find out what she'd been up to with mesh networks since her TED Talk last March. We agreed to meet at the end of the day.
One of the first things I learned about Robin when we sat down at at Cafe de la Presse in San Francisco is that she is a connector within the mesh networks community. Despite her successes and notoriety with Zipcar and GoLoco, she has bigger fish to fry with Mesh Networks, and is working hard to build the (social) network to change personal transportation and the way we access the net.
She is making the case that mesh networks can help solve three major socioeconomic challenges. The first is encapsulated in one sentence from her TED Talk, "If we started today [replacing every car with a fuel efficient one,] ten years from now, at the end of this window of opportunity, those fuel efficient cars will reduce our fossil fuel needs by 4%." Basically, she is saying that no amount of efficiency built on top of a combustion engine will reduce our carbon emissions quickly enough to avert disaster. The second is the deterioration of our transportation infrastructure at the hands of tax cuts and neglect at the federal level. The third is the lack of free and ubiquitous access to the Internet.
Her vision is an open source model for building decentralized, ad hoc, peer to peer networks by distributing simple mesh network transceivers in every car. Once these devices are sufficiently deployed they work as sensor networks to enable congestion pricing and road use pricing models, plus they will provide ubiquitous and free wireless Internet access.
Obviously, some engineering will need to be done in order for her vision to be realized, but she claims it's already well underway. Maybe Sun can help her in a more fundamental way than just scaling up her Facebook app efficiently. Afterall, Sun knows a little bit about Open Source models and has already delivered devices that can form sensor networks. I hope I can help bring another degree of connection to her network.
I'm excited to see the launch of Connected Urban Development happen here in San Francisco this week. It is fitting that Cisco should jump into the fray with a community building initiative centered on ICT's role in sustainable development. They've been among the vanguard of companies innovating in IT and in International Development since their beginning. John Chambers, et al have a long record of prioritizing Cisco's role in bridging the digital divide and investing in our shared future.
But do we need Yet Another Climate Change Initiative? Clearly, Cisco can do great things in fulfilling their commitment to the Clinton Global Initiative and help to reduce carbon emissions, but are they detracting from other important programs already well underway to address the same issues? I hope not, and I certainly will watch this space to see what actually occurs after the conference closes today. If the list of business and government leaders they've assembled for the event is any indication, CUD is already doing much to help foster the all important public-private partnerships that are so hard to sustain over the life of a long ranging initiative like this.
Among the programs whose mission overlaps with CUD are ICLEI and Natural Capitalism Solutions. Both organizations have been at this Sustainable Urban Development business long before global warming entered the business world's conscience. ICLEI (International Council for Local Environmental Initiatives) was founded in 1990 to help local governments connect with each other and develop cost effective means of sustainable development. Hunter Lovins and her posse at NatCap Solutions have made available an incredibly valuable resource for urban climate change programs: The Climate Protection Manual for Cities. Neither of these two veteran groups appear to be involved in Cisco's climate_change_initiative_come_lately. Hopefully the connections will be made soon enough and some real efficiencies can be gained in collaborating on development of environmentally sustainable cities. I'll see if I can run over to the conference at lunch time and help Cisco build their network. Maybe I'll even get to meet my new business idol, Robin Chase, TEDster and CEO of GoLoco, who is on the conference agenda today.
Whilst installing Drupal 6.0 on Solaris Express Developer Edition (SXDE) 1/08 I ran into a few glitches with the brand new Webstack, which makes it's debut in this build of OpenSolaris. (SXDE is Sun's distro of OpenSolaris. It's the best way to get access to all the latest stuff in a relatively feature complete distro of OpenSolaris without having to build the whole O/S yourself.) With the advent of Webstack integration you don't need a separate
download to get all the AMP stack integration and optimizations previously only
available in Coolstack.
The executive summary of the solution to the Drupal 6.0 install glitches is:
Edit /etc/php5/5.2.4/php.ini to add '.' and Drupal's base dir (/opt/drupal-6.0, in my case) to PHP's include_path:
Now, with these fixes in place, I have the advantages of the Service Management Framework (SMF) and DTrace, plus an AMP stack compiled with optimizations for Solaris and the processor architecture (AMD64, in my case).
If you're interested in a more detailed account of the glitches and fixes, read on...
The first glitch prevented the Drupal index.php page from rendering, and appeared in the apache error_log as:
which was remedied by adding '.' to the include path in include_path in
/etc/php5/5.2.4/php.ini
include_path = ".:/usr/php5/5.2.4/include/php"
Then, proceeding to the database setup, MySQL gave an error:
"Client does not support authentication protocol requested"
This was easily resolved by the procedure posted on http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.0/en/old-client.html, but that's a compromise on MySQL password strength, so not ideal. This allowed me to proceed to the next glitch, which apache error_log explained as:
"ld.so.1: httpd: fatal: relocation error: file /usr/php5/5.2.4/modules/mysqli.so: symbol mysql_set_local_infile_handler: referenced symbol not found"
Turns out that spoofing the library name like this also solved the "Client does not support authentication protocol ..." problem too, so I'm back to full MySQL password strength.
After these three simple but obscure fixes it was all clean sailing. I now have Drupal running in six zones across two separate instances of SXDE 1/08 using the latest Webstack.
And that's just a sample of the news emanating from Drupal in recent months. Clearly, this community is not waiting for the future to come to Drupal, they're creating it with Drupal.
I'd never seen the reference outside of Sun before today, but there it was, in the conference program for DrupalCon Boston :
*AMP
Describing the Site Building track at the conference, the program lists track topics, including, "Drupal and *AMP, a systems level view". The asterisk clearly denotes a substitution variable, which had previously been the constant "L", preceding the abbreviation for Apache-MySQL-PHP/Perl/Python. This is a clear tip of the hat to Solaris. The new acronym, presumably pronounced star amp, bestows equal opportunity status to Solaris and Linux within the Drupal community.
I expect there will be plenty of interest in Solaris and other Sun technologies at DrupalCon, which convenes March 3-6 at the Boston Convention & Expo Center - the news of Sun's intent to acquire MySQL did not go unnoticed, and high profile sites running on Solaris are turning up frequently. I guess that's why my Inbox has been overflowing with correspondence from the Drupal community.
Sun is a Gold sponsor of DrupalCon Boston. We'll be handing out Solaris Express DVD's and we're giving a Sun Fire T1000 server to the winner of the Drupal Showcase competition. I'll be a panelist in the Performance Tuning session, and I'll also be presenting some Solaris deployment techniques and best practices similar to what I presented at a DrupalCon last September in Barcelona. I'm hoping we'll also have a contingent from Project Caroline to let the community in on the next big thing in Web2.0 development platforms. As if all that from Sun wasn't enough, rumor has it, MySQL Director of Technology, Brian Aker is going to keynote the conference.
The Demand Response Research Center (DRRC) at LBNL provides a system that enables electric utility customers to automate energy load shedding during peak demand periods. It's called Demand Response Automation Server (DRAS). Basically, it takes a feed from the utility whose payload includes data for: Event Pending, Price levels, and Price Schedule. The system can interface with environmental management systems to turn off lights and raise set points when curtailment events and price jumps occur. It could also be used in combination with systems management software to automate data center load shedding, but has yet to be adopted for this purpose. With advanced virtualization and automation technologies, there is ultimately no reason that workloads could not be migrated according to a demand / cost equation.
The barrier to DRAS adoption in the data center has been a mix of scant awareness, legacy perceptions, and a shortage of creative thinking. But all that is changing. DRRC is on a campaign now to build awareness among all eligible facilities and IT managers about the potential for DRAS. And the old saw that says power cycling a computer reduces it's MTBF is just that: old. Today's systems, for the most part, are engineered to withstand daily power cycles well beyond the typical useful life of a computer. With the benefit of this knowledge and the findings of a Harris Interactive Poll commissioned by Sun, IT and facilities managers are inducing employees to turn off their computers when not in use. But we still need more creative thinking.
While the traditional facilities folks appear to be abundantly creative with power saving measures (in a DRAS webinar last month, Aimee McKane from LBNL, cited one example where a bakery participating in DRAS bought more bread pans to avoid running the dishwasher during peak demand periods,) creative applications of DRAS in the data center are in short supply.
Still, the conversations are happening, as Walter Bays demonstrated on his blog today. If a courageous (and creative) company were to combine Dynamic Infrastructure technology from Sun and DRAS from DRRC they could begin to realize the savings possible in Walter's energy utopia. Services from Sun and others specializing in Demand Response systems like EnerNoc, can help these first mover companies develop strategies for capitalizing on these huge energy saving opportunities.
Dave Douglas kicked off the EnergyCamp "Unconference" and incited a heated debate by asking the opening session panel, "Do we need five big innovations or billions of little ones?"
Hunter Lovins responded first, saying we have the technology to get to sustainability: efficiency first, to buy time, then follow the model of nature, strive to produce products locally, at ambient temp, using waste from one production as inputs to the next. The economics are beginning to make sense, as evidenced by the emergence, in China, of the world's first green billionaire.
Adam Werbach answered facetiously, "Kill the experts." What he means is that the "experts'" legacy thinking is getting in the way. Grass roots non-experts, in the shape of WalMart employees, have turned off the lights in coke machines in WalMart's employee break rooms (and Pepsi machines too). Once Coke saw sales dip, they responded by putting up a "My light is out but it's cold inside"sign, then saw their sales rise while Pepsi's fell.
Ted Nordhaus said our priority is to grapple with inexpensive energy, which is a root cause of climate change. This will be a process of unleashing human power to change the political reality, he predicts.
Michael Shellenberger claimed that international policy alone is not a solution. He cites that, since Kyoto, GHG emissions have risen in Canada and the EU faster than in U.S.
The panelists' positions having been posed, debate ensued over many topics, especially the potential role of nuclear power in solving climate change. Nice to see some substantive disagreement - Sun did a great job picking a panel that would not mimic the too oft aligned community of experts.
The San Francisco Bicycle Coalition will be doing community outreach at tomorrow's OpenEco EnergyCamp. SFBC is one of San Francisco's most influential grass roots organizations. They've been a model for many other urban bicycle coalitions, and have helped change the character of San Francisco's streets by advocating for bike lanes, and helping promote bicyling to events like EnergyCamp.
Check out the EnergyCamp wiki to see what sessions are being planned for this "unconference" sponsored by Sun. It looks like it's shaping up to be a great event.
EnergyCamp will take place tomorrow Thursday, January 10 at the Mission Bay Conference Center in San Francisco. Register here.
The New York Times ran an Ope-Ed piece by Jared Diamond last week entitled "What's Your Consumption Factor?" In it, Diamond posits that living standards are not tightly coupled with consumption rates. To support his thesis he cites the relative living standards of Western Europeans, who consume only about half as much oil per capita as Americans, yet by many reasonable measures live better than Americans - they have longer life expectancy, fewer diseases, lower infant mortality, more vacation time, better financial security after retirement, better public schools, and greater support for the arts.
Mr. Diamond's essay suggests that consumers can stave off resource
depletion and environmental degradation while enjoying stable or improving
living standards. How? By reducing waste and consuming less.
While I agree with his claim as it relates to today's socioeconomic conditions, I take a different position for the long view: ultimately, living standards are tightly coupled to the rate of consumption of natural resources, but they are inversely related. A higher rate of consumption will accelerate the depletion and degradation until a global scale tragedy of the commons is experienced. Living standards will eventually suffer if patterns of consumption
continue unchecked. Some environmentalists would say we're already
seeing evidence of this inverse relationship, citing trends like rising cancer rates, increased traffic related deaths, and species loss.
I don't think Diamond's point is to deny this relationship between living standards and consumption; his is focused at the consumer level, which is where he says action should be taken to avert tragedy.
What concerns me about Diamond's call to action is two fold :
First, the path to higher living standards is not obvious in the context of shrinking rates of consumption. We can't look to Western Europe's economy for the answer. Modeling after them is merely a postponement strategy. Western Europe is among the population of one billion in the developed world that consumes at 32 times the rate of the rest of the world. By most predictions, that gap will narrow as the developing world plays catch up.
The other 5.5 billion people on Earth are racing to use more oil and
metal and timber and plastics, and they'll produce more GHG's and
pollutants and landfill along the way. Add to the mix a predicted 2.5
billion additional people before global population levels off at nine billion by mid-century. These growth trends are playing out in a
closed loop system made of finite resources, so consumption as we know
it will inevitably slow down. But this slow down will not be voluntary. Natural limits will dictate this ultimatum. Can we rely on consumers to make choices that steer clear of these natural limits? Maybe, but we don't have any evidence they will do so within current market structures and under current modes of commerce.
Second, consumers do not have the tools to be successful in their new mission to save us from diminishing living standards.
Diamond's conclusions conform nicely to the IPAT equation, but only in one dimension. IPAT is a model developed in 1970 to better understand forces affecting the environment, where (I)mpact is a function of (P)opulation, (A)ffluence, and (T)echnology (I = P x A x T). IPAT does not purport to quantify environmental impact, only to describe relationships between wealth, population and the environment. Technology, in IPAT's modern interpretation, is the dampening force against the negative effects of Population and Affluence. Technology can be used to prevent pollutants from entering the environment. McDonough'sCradle to Cradle model for sustainability uses Technology to isolate technical nutrient cycles into closed loops thereby preventing them from mixing with (contaminating) natural nutrient cycles. The field of Industrial Ecology is based on this mitigating potential of Technology. Government and industry can apply Technology in myriad designs for a sustainable economy. But the consumer does not have an active role in these designs. Consumers appear to be left with just one method: "Stop shopping". This focus on the A in IPAT is a version of what Paul Ehrlich called "environmental roulette". It leaves an awful lot riding on the chance that consumers will alter their self-interested behavior. Diamond does not incorporate Technology into his prescription for consumers. Yet, without better tools for making smart choices, consumers will have difficulty tapping their enormous potential to influence the Impact equation.
So, how can Technology be applied to this seemingly intractable consumer dilemma? My resolution for 2008 is to write substantively about this here on downstream. In particular, I hope to propose uses of Information Technology to better address the consumers' sustainability dilemma.
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Curator 
Kudos, Scott on your humble, insightful comments o...
In regards to your collaborative culture, i jus...
In regards to your collaborative culture paragraph...