“Most developers are itching to be a part of their favorite projects. You do not scale, but by giving developers tools and getting out of their way, your project can. So please remember that when issues are reported on your open source project, you should not fix them. I hope this serves you well and would love to hear about your experiences and help any way I can.”
By Wesley Beary in “Less is More published Nov 27, 2011. Hat tip Jake Dahn.

A leader will always lead by being prepared to do the work themselves, but I’m really feeling what @geemus wrote.

It is in the ethos of the WordPress community, and the company, my former employer, Matt Mullenweg formed to support it. Here is my favorite part of the Automattic Creed:

“I will never pass up an opportunity to help out a colleague, and I’ll remember the days before I knew everything.”

I’m excited by the help I’m receiving from my new colleagues at Piston Cloud and the OpenStack community.

Pistoneers are kindred spirits of Automatticians. Before joining the Piston Cloud team I noted automation being a regular theme on “Our Team“.

2. You should write your own biography, not delegate it to invisible masses on Wikipedia.

3. You should write other people’s biographies, from your point of view. Or at least tell true stories about them, which can be assembled by others into alternate views.

4. Sign your name to all your writing. Use your real name, the one on your driver’s license, tax returns, passport, draft card.

5. If you care about a subject, write a definitive piece on it that reflects your point of view,. Don’t settle for a compromise, group-think sanitized version in the form of a Wikipedia page.

Dave Winer, “Corporate media is the problem“, Jan 17th, 2010

I actually own a Google shirt and enjoy wearing it. I admire the people of Google.

While at Flock I had the tedious, but very important task of reading (and responding) to all of the emails sent to feedback@flock.com — this was one more task in my 14 hr+ day and there was a lot of spam both automated and hand written, but I digress.

Sometime in the first few months of 2006, a friend told me that the following was on their internal forums:

Change the default search to Google.

With the response from Lloyd Budd of Flock:

It takes two clicks to change… your loss.

Dang, I thought, I must have been in a really bad mood to have written such an inappropriate response. So at the time, using gmail ironically, I quickly found the discussion. Dec. 4, 2005 the feedback read:

Change the default search to Google.

Why on Earth is it Yahoo!? I’m not going to use Flock based on this alone for now.

Now, my response is still poor, but it makes a little more sense in that I was responding to a hostile email. I definitely should not have responded if I wasn’t able to respond politely.

I’m not going to share who that feedback was from, but I did email them letting them know that it hurt hearing that they had misrepresented the conversation.

Its good to know that if you ever write or say anything about Google it may end up on their internal forums, maybe not the way you said it. It’s highly searchable.

Ever since drinking some of the Clue Train kool aid back in 2005 thanks to the help of Chris Messina, Tara Hunt, and others, I have twinged every time I have heard people referred to consumers.

Well, I feel a similar reaction when I hear people referred to as “users” or “end users”. We are all users, right? Or better yet, we’re all people.

The customer really is the most important part of any software or service, so don’t let calling us “users” allow you to forget it!

There are contexts where it seems almost unavoidable to write “user”.

If it is a context to distinguish between the more savvy user of computers (see, I even don’t mind it quite as much flipped around), I tend to try and use “computer savvy people who use WordPress” and “people who use WordPress”.

Whether people that use WordPress.com or install WordPress.org or other technologies that we, Automattic contributes to and support for free, I tend to refer to these people as our customers.

Am I alone in this compulsion?

It is all very pedantic of me, but it helps me keep my head screwed on and focused on staying close to my customers, contributing to software with a good experience, and putting aside some of my snobbery.

Well, I was just writing an article about Flickr, and had written that I have been a member since 2004.

“Member” is a brilliant term!

So to all my fellow members of great software out there, I salute you and thank you for using the best software you can find and demanding even better software!

July 23rd Update: the brilliant Colin Devroe feeling better on day 2 has posted a few videos from WordCamp:

• WordCamp 07: ‘State of the Word’, of course, by Matt Mullenweg
• WordCamp 07: ‘The past, present, and future of Web publishing.’ by Dave Winer
• MeToday: July 22, 2007, a quick video, of himself feeling better

The most regular question I have been receiving from people about WordCamp 2007 (who is not here) is, “Will it be recorded?” It is!

Well, John very, very generously is recording WordCamp. It will take some time for him to edit it (integrating some of the slides), so be patient. If you leave a comment on his blog he will let you know when it is cooked.

We shared some laughs about making crack cocaine and a book, Html: Unleashed, that he did not author.

Meeting people like John is why I love an event like this. There are so many other people, but back to the camp for now.

July 23rd Update: At the end of the sessions on Saturday, John and presenter and Google Search Engine voice Matt Cutts had an intense “private” loud discussion about old school paid for links, where it sounded like John was looking for an answer why HTML Help had lost some significant Google juice at one time. My friend Mark Riley seems to have similar feelings to John on this can of worms, particular their conclusions, “Google’s ball park, Google’s rules and the rules are going to apparently hit sites who have these links.”

Last night for the first time, I saw something interesting in the left ad space on Facebook, “Petition for Peter Verin“.

I recognized the photo.

Searching the web I could find a headline from the local Victoria paper the Times Colonist “UVic’s resident ‘philosopher’ banned from campus” and a thoughtful response letter “Give Peter a warm place to sleep” from Professor Daniel Bryant in Monday’s paper.

Peter is a “Peter Verin is a professional salvager and the self-professed campus enviro-intellectual.” Although, he claims he does not reside on campus, he did like me reside there when I was at UVic (working all hours of the day and night on my Computer Science degree).

Daniel’s letter includes “By virtue of his constant presence and openness, he is surely remembered by more of our graduates than any other person they have encountered on campus.”

His letter continues “If I were on campus 24/7 and barred, as he has been for years, from entering the buildings, which is where the restrooms are, I’d tinkle on the grass too.”

The rest of the letter is well worth reading.

I have no doubt that Peter’s activities create work for many, are upsetting to many, but …

“The moral test of a [society] is how it treats those who are at the dawn of life, the children; those who are in the twilight of life, the aged; and those who are in the shadow of life, the sick and the needy, and the handicapped.” – Hubert Humphrey

Besides, he seems to be a valuable member of the community!

To overcome this reality, students need to grasp the concept of empowerment and apply it to their lives. Empowerment is very distinct from power. Power usually involves a few people who are consumed with self-interest, while empowerment consists of students acting together, as an identity group, for the common good. Empowerment can serve to liberate students from oppression.

There is a LiveJournal UVic community that has some interesting thoughts on Peter from early 2006.

I should have also searched Facebook last night (I forget about its walls), because today I found Peter Verin @ UVic, a group looking for the facts around Peter being banned, before deciding on their positions.