B. Mann Consulting

It was my great pleasure to meet the three guys from ClipperZ (The image is a little blurry, but that's because I had them shout "Identity 2.0" when I took the picture :P).

We sat down for several hours to discuss Identity 2.0 and some of their thoughts on blog owner centric vs. comment maker centric systems, talking mainly about SXORE (Marco has a post with SXORE feedback) and coComment. No comments from the SXORE team on that post, although Bryan Rieger found it. Go Vancouver people!

In any case, they are thinking about portable reputation (or maybe federated reputation would be a better phrase) as an initial application that can be built on top of Identity 2.0 systems. A reputation manager (a reputation provider? store?) would support multiple identity systems for authentication, and also share reputation with other reputation managers. This would initially be based on some very simple metrics, like perhaps whether or not a comment was approved, but certainly could support multiple other values (which gets quickly into a discussion about designing karma systems, perhaps, although it would depend on the feedback loops involved). Definitely subscribe to their blog if you want to keep up with what these guys are up to.

The other exciting thing I found was that here was a new "Web 2.0" style startup company based in Italy that had a lot more in common with Vancouver or San Francisco than anything else I had seen up to that point in Italy. We discussed the difficulties and benefits of a distributed team (although they are all in Italy, they live in different towns), and the usual roundup of tools -- they tried Basecamp but ended up using Trac, their user interaction diagrams are in OmniGraffle, we discussed Campfire vs. Skype bookmarked chats, or perhaps a Jabber multi-user chatroom.

It's nice to see such interesting things happening in Europe, and I have more of an interest in cross-pollination with European companies and clients than I do in jumping down into the scrum in Silicon Valley. I'm already scheming what the next European event will be: perhaps a BarCamp Brussels? Could be organized around Euro OSCON 2006 at the end of September 2006 (the Call for Participation deadline is March 6th).

I just got back today from a long week in Amsterdam, having attended a grand total of 3 conferences: Euro OSCON, DrupalCon, and BarCamp. I met a huge group of people

I would like to thank Chris Pirillo (check out his new gada.be multi-search service) for supporting BarCamp. Chris: wish you could have been there, buddy...we could have worked on our plans for World Domination, and probably gotten pretty close.

It didn't quite turn out to be the "hackfest" that my preconceptions led me to believe. Or perhaps the hacking was more of the "hack your brain" kind. More on BarCamp and these other conferences later: one big thing I learned is that I am not very good at creating artifacts while attending conferences. I'm very much in the moment, having intense sessions with people and trying to integrate it all internally. Inserting a computer into the mix means I miss what's happening. Paper seems to work OK for notes (maybe a tablet would, too?)...now I just have to transcribe all the bits and pieces, especially what essentially turned into an interview with Ralph and Edwinn of the Jabber Software Foundation.

Well, I'm still in Amsterdam nearing the end of the week but it feels like things are just getting started. I'm actually sitting in de Brakke Grond, site of the DrupalCon, as Moshe Weitzman walks us through the simpletest framework for unit testing in Drupal.

The first OSCON in Europe is just ending. I was disappointed that we couldn't integrate more fully, but Chris Messina and I had a really long and fruitful discussion with Gina Blaber and Margi Levin of O'Reilly's conference team. The team is already looking at planning the next OSCON event in Europe, and I'm looking forward to have a really interesting set of satellite events in partnership with O'Reilly in the future.

And yeah, BarCampAmsterdam. It starts...well, it started about an hour ago, I'm just still finishing my last conference! Yes, things are busy, so busy that I didn't get a chance to bang the drum about some cool hacking stuff that I hope to see accomplished during BarCamp (there's a long story about the lack of Internet connectivity in Amsterdam as well). So, on to the hand waving, or Cool Things I'd Love to See Hackers Build at BarCamp: