newly ancient

I’m excited to be here at the iPony headquarters for HabariCon ‘08. If you aren’t familar with Habaricon, it is “the annual Habari Convention, uniting the user and developer communities in friendship and collaboration.” Habari is a great new blogging platform I have recently gotten involved with. The community is great, and I really look forward to meeting some of the giants of development, like Skippy and Chris J. Davis.

This will be a fantastic and educational event which will highlight the excellence of the Habari community. I am told that the sessions will be recorded, but I will be live-blogging the sessions for those of you who didn’t make the registration deadline. Finally, there is supposed to be a major announcement in the closing keynote, which I will be sure to tell you about as soon as I find it.

Live Blog

Skippy coming on stage now; a great introduction by Skippy, who organized the conference. iPony’s facilities are great! Skippy talking about the importance of community: without a good community, no software can be successful. Etc, etc. He says this is true for everything, not just software. He has a point: every business and project needs a strong community. “People are the project.” Now he’s talking about importance of keeping community appear open, but also keeping it “pure.” Semi-permeable membrane type of situation: let in the good contributions, keep out the bad. he says it’s a balancing act. I agree, not easy to contrast the needs of the community with the needs of the software. Finally, he is thanking the organizers of Habaricon. I’d like to thank them to: this is shaping up to be a great conference. Off to grab some donuts…

Unfortunately, there was a wifi outage and I couldn’t blog the first two sessions. Suffice to say that they were fabulous. I’m writing this as I eat a cheese sandwich provided by the wonderful Everything 2.0, a very innovative startup I have recently learned about. (Their public website isn’t launched yet, so I can’t link to them)

The Cabal is The Community truly was an interesting discussion of supporting the community, while also furthering the goals of the founders. Though the ethics were questionable, some questions were very interesting. In education, this an issue which has some very real applications: students should be included in curriculum and program design, but their contributions should be suitably filtered. This session worked with the issues of contrasting openness and security/quality.

Sorry for dropping the live blog folks. I’ll be back later after the keynote and a discussion with some of the devs with more thoughts. (And the scoop on the special announcement in Keynote)

The special announcement: this was actually a joke. April Fool’s! The Habari team and I had a great time putting this on.