But why is that? Why is it that something that has filled my free time almost totally for almost fifteen past years is now a source of anxiety and anger?

My use of IRC has evolved from being fun way of passing time and communicating with friends to source of information, connecting with people interested in similar issues and surprisingly, keeping in touch with the professionals, enthusiasts and issues I consider vital to my work and learning new skills. This comes with a downside: I expect a level of professionalism from people I discuss with.

I’m not saying being casual is bad. God knows my jokes are sometimes horrible, punchlines somewhat questionable and sometimes I’m just irrational. But I still expect a certain level of professionalism, not only on IRC, but in conference speeches, blog entries I see in various places, like Planet Ubuntu and Planet Gnome and all the rest I follow, in discussion forums and IRL meets. What I’m looking for is a atmosphere you’d expect to find in a pub on a weekday, after 5pm, but before 8pm. I call it The After Work Beer -atmosphere.

What is it? Lets do a thought experiment. Imagine going to a pub for a drink (be it alcoholic or just your favourite fruit juice) with your colleagues. While you might still talk shop, the atmosphere is notably more casual than at the office or on the shop floor. There’s still most of the social norms of the work place in effect – social faux pas that should be honoured in most cases, right?

This includes how you interact with your colleagues of different gender, sexuality, race, nationality, religion and so on.
A) Think of how you’d behave?

Consider then another group coming in the bar for an AWB just like your group has. They might be all female, all Indians, all Finns, all LGBT, all Somali, all Russians, all Muslim (or Jewish or Bahá’i), all English, all Mexicans.
B) How would you behave towards them?

here’s some hints:
A) You treat them respectfully as you’d treat them at workplace. You don’t hit on them, make racial slurs, tell them they’re going to hell because of their religion or sexual preference, you don’t aggressively pick them out from the group, but you don’t also ignore them.
B) You treat them respectfully as you’d treat them at workplace, being guests, customers or subcontractors. You don’t gang up on them to hit on them, make racial slurs, tell them they’re going to hell because of their religion or sexual preference, you don’t make a scene by calling them out by names from across the pub. If you’re interested in them, you go and ask them all to join your group, but you don’t single out just a few or feel insulted if the request is declined.

And this is what I expect of the FLOSS community, as we are trying to produce a professional level software and services that are on par or better than proprietary ones. We may not be working in the same company, not in the same country or share opinions on political, religious, sexual or whatever levels. But we are interested in reaching the same goal, and we need to work together to achieve it.

I also remember the “informal” parts of the conference, the beach party, football game, concert/football evening, hacking at the camping cottages, salty shower water, and first and foremost – la rambla. Almost every night I ended up eating tapas and drinking sangria (yes, I know, don’t get excited here either) and talking about (among other things) about maemo, COSS, Finland, Nokia, women in ICT and FLOSS, FLOSS in education, problems with bluetooth and GPRS, Tampere and so on. One night a thought occurred to someone’s mind… And now finally, it perhaps starts to bear fruit.

COSS joint together with some first-class Finnish companies, Finnish FLOSS communities, universities located in Tampere together with City of Tampere and other relevant partners have made a proposal to have a joint aKademy/GUADEC conference here. I couldn’t be happier about this!

see also.

After opening ceremonies, the first speaker Mikko Puhakka of SoberIT, a venture capitalist with experience of IT investing for over 10 years(?), told us about the current trends of the ICT sector and especially what intrests VC’s about OSS. The OSS, according to him, is a strange thing in the current investment climate, since it has made it possible to start new Internet service companies (web hotels, news portals, search engines, you name it) with almost no capital. That means that the people who’d really like to invest great sums of money don’t actually have that many companies to invest in, because they don’t need that much money to start the company.
Most of the innovative OSS projects have been started before the bubble broke back in 2001. Referring to that, in his last slide Puhakka made a suggestion for the community to form a national software bank, a repository for open source software, to keep software projects in safekeeping for future ICT companies, to help them build on what’s already been done instead of trying to invent the wheel all over again. Software bank would preserve innovations of dead projects.

Bob Sutor, the vice president of Standards and Open Source at IBM told us of IBM’s strategy of Open Source. IBM has given quite a few of its patents available for the OS community and I personally think it’s a great thing. His way of speech was truly American, and he was funny. I hope his attitude spreads around big proprietary software coding firms. He spoke quite a lot why IBM thinks “standards” (quotes because very few things in the ‘Net are actually real standards) are important and what action IBM is doing to get these standards more adopted in those areas that really need them most, education and health care.

Before lunch Nokias Valtteri Halla spoke about Maemo.org, the open source project that Nokia launched in May. It’s about OSS community creating software for Nokia 770, Linux / GTK based handheld Internet device. He commented Sutors notion that big companies are always surprised by the power of OSS communities, their speed and multiple points of views; When maemo was published and the codes released, people started programming software for Nokia 770 “emulating” it with their computers, creating software months before the actual hardware was released.

Lunch was great. For having only 95 cents in cash and being hungry as a wolf, green salad with herb croutons, baked veggies and ox breast were the most excellent lunch, especially since they were free. I sat next to marvelous people, with whom I had excellent conversation about communities and there seems to be a shift going on from doing things individually to doing things in a community, using software/Internet not only to do something but also to communicate, how social aspects of software are getting more and more important. I have noticed the trend but didn’t know that it already had a name, “Web2.0″. The persons I had the invigorating talk were Gerrit Visser and Teemu Arina. Gerrit even took a picture of me with my Tux WIP and put it on his Flickr page: here.

Being an Ubuntu user myself I felt really curious when Andreas Schuldei of Debian project held his presentation about “Sustainability and Revitalization of Global Developer Community”. I won’t comment it more than I’m not surprised that they are focusing on the community or that it’s on their agenda big time.

Unfortunately I had to leave the event for some pressing school work as Victor van Reijswoud of Uganda Martyrs University and East African COSS was just getting started, so I caught only the beginning of his presentation… and returned when Ashwin Navin of Bittorrent was already answering the questions… So I missed essentially two presentations that would’ve been very interesting. After that the director of Star Wreck, Timo Vuorensola spoke about the new concept of Internet movie, and how that’s going to change things around. Before, when returning from school I noticed Samuli Torssonen and after the OpenMind event had ended, changed a few words with him about pink ladyfit Star Wreck t-shirts with black print, those would be nice. Before leaving I talked with Petri Räsänen a bit, asked him for an interview and took a few photos (which I suspect are very bad ones).

After that I’ve been mostly reconstructing my web pages, yes, these, the one you’re reading now. For many years my pages have been in Finnish only, and since Gerrit seemed so disappointed when I told him I have practically nothing in English in the web and I’m increasingly active in the international Ubuntu community, now was the perfect time. I actually upgraded the whole thing to use PHP, which really is a very helpful way of keeping web pages in order. I reconstructed the file system so that updating the pages is easy with nano.

Links

Mikko Puhakka
Bob Sutor
maemo (Valtteri Halla)
Dicole (Teemu Arina)
Coworking.com (Gerrit Visser)
Andreas Schuldei
EACOSS (Victor van Reijswoud)
Bittorrent (Ashwin Navin)
Star Wreck