City of Collaboration
As I write this post, I am in the airport, leaving Porto after a long, thought-provoking week. For a few seconds, I thought Porto airport was the best in the world. Large advertisement indicate free wireless access. Filtered water is provided. I figured it would be a good place to spend the time I have to wait, which is longer than it should be as I left for the airport with Alain, whose flight was a few hours before mine. Plug in, boot the computer. No wireless. Great. At least I have water, which still makes it better than any other airports I have seen.
My trip to Porto was divided in three parts of equal length: TikiFest, WikiSym and tourism. Three days each.
TikiFest
TikiFests seem to multiply themselves. Any occasion is good to meet with the other developers and it’s always a great time. This edition did not have any particular theme from the start. A lot of us were planning to come and some were going to make it a last minute decision. Rather than booking several hotel rooms, which was hard due to other events in the city at the same time, Marc Laporte took the initiative of renting a house. The WikiHouse. It was probably the best accommodation we could think of. It had plenty of space for all of us to sleep, a yard to enjoy the sun, a dining room to work in, a living room to hold more discussions and a barbecue.
Living together changed something about the relationships. Even though most of us had met before, being together 24 hours a day got us to learn many aspects usually hidden. Among others, that Xavi is an amazing cook. In developer events, we tend to eat lots of pizza and burgers. This time, we had fresh salmon and octopus.
I can’t say so much work got done. For one, I did not reach any of my personal objectives, but no time was wasted. Most of the time was spent discussing various community aspects. Conveniently, Martin Cleaver was living with us and brought a camera. Multiple demos were filmed and hopefully, it will help remote community members who cannot travel to TikiFests to put faces on the names in IRC. Matthew did the postediting and organized TikiTV in a brilliant and lovely fashion.
The entire meeting was mostly freeform. Just like in a wiki, everyone contributed a part to the house and made it fun to live in. Most would usually go to sleep very late. Those of us from eastern Canada did not even have to change our sleeping habits to match the time zone change. Discussions took place when they had to. People working could ask questions at any time. All householding tasks would happen without anyone ever discussing it.
WikiSym
WikiSym is a special event in the sense that it gathers academics, vendors, open source project contributors and various consultants together. It really means that most discussions included people formally dressed and people wearing T-Shirts. It also mixes people from all over the world. According to the numbers I heard, just over 100 participants came from 21 different countries. The formal program is only half of the event. The rest of it is the open space where ideas can be shared and discussed. I have been torn between both for the whole duration.
The venue was terrific. I usually have serious doubts about conferences held in universities. It usually is very complicated to go from the meeting rooms to the place to get lunch. The different meeting rooms are usually spread around to accommodate the normal university schedule and most of it is usually sterile. This one was nothing like it. OK, we did get some trouble finding the meeting rooms, but the reunion room was on ground level, accessible from outside. We could hold most of the discussions sitting outside in the grass. Certainly, it removed a lot to the formal aspects. Students walking around seemed confused to see “international experts” (the event was advertised in prominent spaces) being so open.
My primary motivation to visiting WikiSym was to present my paper on multilingual collaboration. This was actually the excuse to fly to Porto. In fact, I felt like attending WikiSym again ever since it ended last year in Montreal. The presentation part went fairly well. I had a lot of people asking me additional information after the presentation, so I guess that was good. I also participated in the BabelWiki workshop on similar topics. However, I missed part of it due to an indigestion, food poisoning or anything else that caused my system to crash and prevent me from walking, talking and thinking altogether. That really was the only bad part of the whole trip. Even there, the organizers and the tiki community have been so helpful, it almost made it a good moment.
For the rest of WikiSym, I attended a few open space sessions, some tutorials and some research paper presentations. I felt that this year did not bring as many ideas as the previous one did. I have the feeling that it’s mostly because last year brought so many ideas, all of us did our homework and came to present what we came up with. Many of the discussions were about discussing the status-quo rather than searching for the next step. It’s not really a bad thing. There were many discussions about how we can better work together to share those results. Especially in the area of data analysis, multiple tools were developed with very similar objectives and capabilities over the year. It’s sad to see so many efforts being wasted.
The sub-field of application wiki seems to be the only one where significant activity is still going on in terms of technology. Most of WikiSym is about social sciences rather than software. However, application wiki as a term is so loosely defined, discussions around it are almost sterile. Some see it as a way to plug together components to display data. Some see it as a way to store semi-structured data. Both are true, but the camps are so far off, it would take a lot more than two hours to bring the discussion to a creative position. An other aspect is that both need a significant amount of work to reach. Promoters of both sides have invested a lot in getting where they are.
My feeling is that they are both right. Both using the wiki as a data store and as a mash-up front end make sense. They can both co-exist. Sure thing, if the data is not already managed by an external system, using the wiki to store it makes sense. Using components to mix and match external data and data from the wiki could create a compelling solution. Based on the new Runs Everything slogan of Tikiwiki, I guess we will go for both sides.
I will try to attend the 2009 edition in Orlando. I hope we will have the base definitions grounded by then to get better discussions.
Tourism
I had reserved the last three days of the trip for tourism. It turns out my definition of tourism is quite different from others. To me, it’s mostly about living in a different city. I spent my first day in the house. An unexpected visitor, Peter B. Meyer, joined us for a night after the conference because he couldn’t find a hotel to stay it. It turns out it created great discussions around open source economics, software licences and politics too. My original goal for that day was to wake up really late, stay in the house, and see the night life in Porto. The first one I did, not the second. On the second day, I woke up late again, and waited for amette to wake up (for some reason, he seems to live on PST timezone), then we went out for some drinks.
On the third day, it was mostly quiet. Almost everyone had left. Remaining residents were gone on a tour to visit the regions outside the city. Not quite my thing, and they were gone by the time I woke up. Additionally, I figured I had made enough of the tourist stuff with the conference program. On Tuesday night, a tour bus picked-up everyone from the university for a typical photo-taking tour around the city. Then went for Port Wine tasting, a boat ride on the river and then for a traditional meal restaurant. It was a good way to see the city, but I had enough after that. I decided to do one of my favorite activity: walk around with my backpack, containing a pen, a pad of paper and a book. I went downtown and walked around the city. Stopping for a coffee or some soft drinks whenever I felt tired or stormed by ideas. Very relaxing and a good way to appreciate the city.
One of the very important aspects of Porto is that it is built along the river and was most likely chosen as a location because it’s very easy to defend. The city contains very steep roads. Walking around can be exhausting. Luckily, there are plenty of cafés to rest in. The city looks very old and worn out when walking in the streets. Other than the orange-ish tiles on the roofs, none of the buildings seem to have a common look. Other than the obvious monuments, none of the buildings is much worth looking at in details, especially when you move away from the touristic areas. However, when seen from Gaia, the city on the other side of the river, Porto seems to be a complete whole and is truly magnificent. The whole is much greater than the sum of the parts. Could we speak of accidental design? Uncoordinated collaboration?
Airport Adventures
Quite some time has gone by…
I knew there was no way two connections could go without problems. Newark airport was a mess. First, it took around 15 minutes before the plane could dock and let us out. My connection was already short. To help the situation, the situation at the border was simply horrible. There were announcements being made, but with the noise, I couldn’t get it all. Something about their system being down. Lines were all mixed up. Just as I got close to the booth to say “nothing to declare, just in transit”, the few people in front of my line seemed to have a complex situation. Forms not filled out properly, if at all. Most of them got turned back after a few minutes. My connection was really close.
I thought I was good to go. All I had to do was change terminal, figure out the gate number and go through security. It turns out I had to pick-up my luggage, get them through the border and send them back for transfer. At least they didn’t check me. Why does it have to be so complicated?
So I ended up switching terminal, finding the gate and headed for security. Worst line-up I had ever seen. It was circling around the duty-free stores. I was certain to miss my flight. With a little hope left, I made my way through the line. Ran a little. Got to the gate at 16:25. That could have made it, but the plane had just left.
Got the ticket changed. Four marvellous hours to wait in an airport without wireless access. Best part was: my luggage never reached the plane anyway, so I would have had to wait 4 hours in Montreal to get them even if I had caught the plane.