T + Six Months

It’s been almost six months since the end of my four month sabbatical.

I’ve recently had a number of conversations with people, some of whom thought I was off for a year (I wish!) and others who just wanted to know how things went.

Time has given me some perspective. In addition the many inquiries and again the passage of time, have required me to summarize what I was doing, what I learned and what I created in the time between August 1 and November 30.

This, then is a T + six month reflection, both as a way to help me organize my thoughts and to help the visitor who comes here after talking to me about these things.

I have a “Google Alert” for the term “open source” and some time after I finished my study time I subscribed to an RSS (Really Simple Syndication) feed at opensource.com (sponsored by Red Hat). It is clear to me from the links that I receive from both of these sources that I was just barely ahead of the curve between August and November. Awareness of “open source” is increasing by leaps and bounds. It will take some time to become part of the lingua franca, but I think the gap is decreasing exponentially.

In reporting on my sabbatical I told a story about “bicycle shorts”. In the 80’s I was training for a cross-country cycling trip. Part of the training had me riding to and from my work in downtown Calgary. I wore cycling shorts and a cycling jersey – the best outfit for cycling, with a business suit in my pack. I would ride the elevator at work with “suits” sizing me up and down. I was secretly proud and self-conscious all at the same time. A few years later I had occasion to be in a similar office elevator in which there were several other cycling uniform clad passengers. I was just ahead of the curve of riding to work in cycling attire. It was not my intention to start a trend, but it seems that I had unwittingly done so.

Same goes for “open source”. I would actually be happiest if I could say “open source” in a churchy crowd and get lots of knowing nods. But alas, I don’t. I should. Because it is my contention that “open source” is a highly ethical and faithful choice.

It emphasises sharing and common knowledge. It delights in standards and interchangeable parts. It rejoices in beauty and giftedness. Even though many purveyors of “open source” would claim no faith tradition or connection, my research suggests that there is an ethic of “doing the right thing” attached to the development of “open source”.

“Open Source” is finding its way because it is based on collaboration and sharing, a hallmark of the “digital native” – or as I like to refer to the generation: the “nothing but ‘net generation”. This is a generation that has grown up with the internet as a regular part of their experience. The internet is the largest example of mass collaboration this world has ever known, and those who have grown up with it naturally expect other parts of their lives to work in a similar way. For digital natives, free (as in speech) access to the world wide web is as natural as the right to clean water, electric power and public roadways.

Finally, I point to a connection between “open source” and faithful living that came to me prior to starting the reading and research of my sabbatical time, but which served as a backdrop to it all, and which continues to be an important point of contact between technology and theology. In 2006 a report was delivered to the 39th General Council of The United Church of Canada. “Living Faithfully in the Midst of Empire” quite rightly raised many concerns about the ways that globalization, disregard for human rights and many other global issues are affecting our ability to live as people who are faithful to the way of God. In the very same context however, we adopt the latest in technical innovation, be it smart phone or social networking framework with seemingly little regard for the “empire” that is behind such things. We unquestioningly recommend Microsoft and Apple products, and use proprietary software with expensive licensing fees without considering the ethic behind them. What do we believe about intellectual property, trademarks and copyright? What do we believe about skills and abilities (are they ours to exploit, or to share?) Do we believe that some individuals should profit greatly by keeping their products secret? Or do we think that the greater good is enhanced when we share what we’ve done with others, to make it better, to see how it works and to fix it faster? Apple and Microsoft have inordinate influence on the ways we organize our lives – leisure and work related, yet it seems that we do little to question their desire to keep things closed.

A Very Good Summary of What I Was Considering from September to November

I just posted on amazon.ca the following review of “Coding Freedom: The Ethics and Aesthetics of Hacking” by E. Gabriella Coleman. As I said in the review, I could not read it during my sabbatical because it only became available a few weeks after the sabbatical was over.

In November I completed a four month sabbatical from my regular work as a Minister with The United Church of Canada. The topic of my sabbatical was to look for the “spirit” in the Open Source Developer Community. During that time, I read a number of books all revolving around the topic in one fashion or another. I received “Coding Freedom” as soon as it was available, but a few weeks after I returned to work. In many ways, this is the book I might have wanted to write as a reflection on the things I learned. Gabriella Coleman was able to do what I might have wanted to do – embed herself in an open source community – the Debian Linux project to be precise – in order to discover what makes the people who write this software tick. I came away from this book wondering if there is some way I can go back to school and work on this topic some more at McGill – where Ms. Coleman is currently a professor. At the beginning Ms. Coleman suggests that she will do her best to meld academic rigour and readability and she does a pretty fine job of it. I was hoping to find connections that would support some of my own theories around the ethical stance and “spirituality” of people involved in the hacker (not cracker!) community and the fact that I did not, is not a critique of the author, but rather a caution for myself, that perhaps I was expecting too much, and too narrow a focus for this community which stretches around the world geographically and stretches in other ways in terms of the range of worldviews that are encompassed by it. Just the same, Gabriella Coleman, because of her deep analysis and lengthy relationship with the open source developer community is able to describe an ethic and sensibility that is both a product of the community and a drawing card for those who are part of it. Well done, a complete and deep assessment that still left me wanting more!

Reflections from T-1.5

There is about one and a half hours left in the time set aside for this sabbatical. It began on August 1, and will end at midnight tonight – November 30. It seems therefore that this is a good time to do some reflection on how it has been.

The first reason to do this is so that I can point people to this blog entry when they ask (as has already happened on several occasions) if I accomplished all that I intended to do while I was on this sabbatical.

This is the second time I wrote this blog entry. The reason I am doing it again is detailed here. I think there were aspects of the first one that were better, but there are also parts of this one that are better than the first. I just wish I had them both so that I could glue together the good parts from each of them. Oh well……

Following in point form is a summary of some of the things I hoped to accomplish during this time. I knew also, from the beginning that there would be discoveries along the way that would subtly change my direction, either permanently or for a while.

1. I was following a passion by doing this research. My life changed in a moment as a result of a Damascus Road type of event sometime around October 1971, and the areas I wanted to study during this sabbatical were in part guided by that experience.
2. I was continuing a quest that began as a result of my second, much different calling – the call to serve in pastoral ministry. That call along with the other instant conversion type of call has led to a lifelong study of the intersection of theology and technology.
3. I was also intending to dig deeper into an area of study that had its genesis in a short conversation with one of my professors at theological college. The professor later became a friend and colleague. The conversation, while brief, was typical of other conversations with him. It had very deep implications and the issues we discussed there have clearly had some lasting effects.
4. I spent some time during my undergraduate years in tantalizing proximity but not part of a community of people which was interesting and inviting. I found myself wanting to know more about these people who called themselves hackers.
5. I wanted to turn the church (and here I mean more particularly The United Church of Canada, but also “the church” on a larger scale) on to the goodness of “open source” as a theological and justice oriented response to the challenge of living in the midst of empire.

I will respond to these objectives seriatim, with a broader reflection after that.

1. I was introduced to computers in the fall of 1971 when a high school mathematics teacher took me and a few other good math students to the University of Waterloo to explore computer science as a university program option. My teacher father, having heard my enthusiasm upon my return from that awesome, eye and mind opening experience, predicted that the excitement would last for about two weeks. I am still waiting for the enthusiasm to ebb. This time of sabbatical gave me an opportunity to explore at a more intense and deeper level some of those same interests and appreciate some of the same joy and excitement that I first experienced during that Computer Science Day some forty years ago.
2. The excitement and passion I discovered during that computer science day has never really dwindled. It truly was for me a Damascus Road kind of experience – the discovery of a passion that has never ceased to interest and inspire me. My call to ministry happened over a much longer time and in a much more gradual way. It was aided by the fact that computers could go home with me. When I bought my Commodore 64 and took it home, it became possible for my interest in computers to be lived out during my leisure time at home. At the time I was spending a good deal of my discretionary time doing things in, with and for the church. When it became possible for me to take a computer home with me, it also became possible for me to consider the church as the place where I would earn a living. Ever since experiencing the call to pastoral ministry I have felt that I was on a pursuit to discover the intersection of those two callings – the call to work with technology and the call to work in theology and pastoral ministry. While I felt called to study that intersection I often felt like it was just out of grasp – probably feeling much like greyhound racing dogs trying to catch the mechanical rabbit that encourages them to run hard, I often felt like I was on a never-ending journey rather than arriving at a destination. However, only about a week or two into this time of sabbatical I came upon the sudden realization that for me the intersection of technology and theology was completely encompassed by “open source”. For me it summed up the perfect union of goodness, justice, living faithfully in the midst of empire, altruism, passion and alternative, “outside the box”, kind of thinking.
3. At the end of a guest lecture one day in I think my second year at theological college, a professor and I had an interesting discussion about the ethics of music and software sharing. I found myself supporting the status quo (of the time) which said that such activity was illegal, and more importantly immoral. I was convinced by the struggling artist argument which said that it was important for artists and software programmers to have control of their own creations – software, games, music, art, photography, videos, etc. in order to earn a living. At the same time I knew that the groups most likely to benefit from supporting the status quo were wealthy music and entertainment organizations. That conversation obviously had a lasting significance for me because I have found myself reflecting on the issues we discussed there on a regular basis ever since. That opportunity for reflection was increased during this sabbatical and I found myself having a pretty significant change of mind about many of the issues surrounding this topic – not just during the sabbatical, but more firmly held, and more clearly analysed  I am now ready to say that I think the current system of patents, copyrights, non-disclosure agreements and trademarks is in a dramatic state of flux and most likely will be superseded by a much more egalitarian and communal system. This has been brought on not just by the ease with which technology allows the sharing of the products of intellectual property, but also by the fact that we live in a much more highly connected world, a world which has generations of people who have grown up in a web-connected, highly collaborative world where peering, sharing and crowdsourcing are the norm.
4. The stated subject of this sabbatical was to seek the spirit that is part of the “open source” movement/community. I soon realized that any study of the current “open source” community would not be complete without a look into history. It does not take long to realize that at the root of the current “open source” software developer community is what was known (and in large part is still known) as the hacker community. It used to be that these communities were gathered around the computers to be found at technically oriented universities such as the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Stanford University, Berkeley University and in Canada at my Alma mater, the University of Waterloo (to name only a few). With the evolution of computers into portable, take home devices, the hacker community has become a web-enabled community.It is important to associate the word “hacker” not in the way the media has done – as a dark and sinister character – but rather as a highly capable, highly intelligent software developer. These true hackers call the other media-dubbed hackers by a much better name: crackers.

   When I was at university I would observe these young men (in very large part they are all men) huddled around a computer monitor. Some of them might have had a shower in the past week, and despite the fact that their eating and sleeping habits were far from ideal, there was a certain appeal for me. These hackers were smart, they knew the computers they were working with – software and hardware – inside out, and they were getting the computers to do things that were often akin to magic. I can remember making a somewhat conscious decision not to join them – although the attraction to do so was very great, but I think in the end I valued attending and getting marks for the courses I was signed up to take, and there were other things I wanted to do to balance my life/school/work/leisure needs. I also wasn’t sure if I had the smarts to be part of the hacker community.

   However, as I have since learned, these communities of hackers embodied in a real way, a way of living that has often been seen as utopian – namely the Acts community described in the early chapters of the book of Acts to describe the early Christian community – a community in which resources and abilities were shared in egalitarian, communal fashion so that no one had more than they needed, and no one went without. It was this aspect and the similar ethic embodied by open source developers who write software that is free (as in speech) and open without regard for monetary gain, that intrigued me. Why do they do it? What personal gain do people achieve when they give away the product of their abilities? I didn’t want to go solely on my memories of this group from my distant past, nor did I want to base my findings and conclusions on the writing and assessments of others. So, it was important for me to have face to face contact with present day hackers and developers to see if my ideas had any connection with current day members of these communities.

5. It was also important for me to seek ways of making the church aware of the “open source” movement. In The United Church of Canada we have been encouraged to consider what it means to live in the midst of empire and in that encouragement we have also been invited to think about ways to work against the empire and empires that are constantly trying to define, influence and control us and everyone else. Many helpful and useful resources have been offered in this endeavour, but it has been my experience that when it comes to two of the biggest empires in the world right now, the Apple Computer Company and Microsoft, little has been said or done to find ways to challenge this very real and ubiquitous expression of empire in our lives. I could see “open source” as a clear challenge to these empires, and that there were many people in the open source movement who were working at empowering people outside the structures of empire, in creative and hopeful ways. The big surprise – not completely unexpected, but also surprising in its breadth and depth, has been the way that the ideals and principles of the “open source” software movement have taken hold in many other areas. I began this study thinking that I was observing an “ant” when in fact it turned out to be an “elephant”. I thought that the examples of mass collaboration, egalitarian membership and benevolent leadership demonstrated by “open source” software projects such as the Linux operating system were just a small ray of hope and excitement in the world, only to discover that these principles of collaboration, sharing, and peering are part of a large and growing network of technologies, and ways of doing and being that are on the verge of transforming the world and the way it works as we know it.

As I thought about how this would all be addressed by me as a topic of study I knew it would be important to spend some time in and with the community of people that make up the “open source” community. The best way for me to do this would be to attend gatherings where large numbers of them would be present. I also thought it would be helpful for me to do a presentation, as a way of helping me to clarify and coalesce my thinking. And of course I expected that books and Google would form a significant part of my research as well. And how have I done in these regards?

I attended LinuxCon 2012 in San Diego at the end of August. I attended the Free Software and Open Source Symposium at Seneca College in Toronto at the end of October. I applied to do a presentation at this latter event and my offer was accepted. On very short notice I was also given the opportunity to do a presentation at the Banff Men’s Conference. I have at least two other presentations to do – one is scheduled for the Yellowknife Public Library at the end of February and the other one is likely to be scheduled sometime in January.

I read many books and was very satisfied with how interesting they were and at how quickly I read them. It was clear to me from the beginning because of the enjoyment and satisfaction I was deriving from the reading that I had chosen the right subject. It was one I could really sink my teeth into and one in which the reading was not a chore but a delight. I would invite you to check out the list of books I read during this time. There were some very exciting and informative ones.

I just looked at my watch and it is now T + 4 minutes! So I think with that I will put a full stop on this one. The sabbatical may be over, but I’m not done yet, however!

Stay tuned!

Blessings…

Aarrghh!

A little while ago I published a beautiful blog entry with some reflections suitable for the final day of this sabbatical. It took me one and a half hours to write. Despite saving many revisions (both automatic and manual) the entry that was published ended up having a word count of zero – and all attempts to restore the many revisions were also blank.

After consulting a web page with a myriad of possible solutions to this problem – none of which worked – it looks as if I am going to have to try and start again. Of course, it won’t be the same. It never is…and I am going to consult a few more resources to see if there is any way that I can recover the original and best version of this blog entry. If I can’t find a way to restore the old, I will try to do the best I can to recreate it.

Aaarrrrgggghhhh indeed. To say the least.

Speeding up as I approach the intersection

Ever since I changed professions from systems programmer to pastoral minister, I have always said that I did not switch because of a change of interest. I simply swapped what was my full time paid work at the time for the unpaid work I was doing. So, before ministry, church work consumed a good deal of my non-work time. Then along came personal computers and I could now take my interest in them home with me while working as an employee of the church. That sounds more crass than I intend it to be, but functionally it is what happened. I won’t go much into the way I experienced being “called” into both professions, except to say that since being called to ministry, I have really experienced the call to ministry as a confirmation of the dual call I heard in my life, and that really what I was called to do was engage with the intersection of theology and technology which was mirrored in my interest, aptitudes and abilities. 

For the first twenty some years of ministry I experienced this study of the intersection of theology and technology as a journey rather than a destination. It’s a fitting metaphor for the faith journey, so I was comfortable with it, even though there was also a bit of frustration that I could never really and tangibly grasp that intersection and work with it. 

But only a few weeks into this time of sabbatical I came upon the realization that “open source” is indeed the intersection (for me at least) of technology and theology. 

And so I’ve spent the last three months and more, dealing with the surety of that epiphany, and letting it guide my thoughts and insights. 

Now I am only a couple of weeks away from the end of this sabbatical time. I still have a good long list of books to read (and growing), and there is much. much more I want to do.

The time has resulted in writing (some), reading (much more), travel (more than I thought, less than I imagined) and some important (for me, at least!) insights and revelations.

I am raring to keep on doing this work, and I have some ideas about how that may happen. I am also raring to keep sharing what I’ve learned so far – and some of that will be done in the context of my ministry work – so I look forward to getting back to it. 

However, the predominant feeling I am dealing with right now is that as I have approached (and studied, and reflected upon) this intersection, time has speeded up. Too many things, too little time.

It’s a vastly different feeling than I had in August and September, as the weeks of sabbatical spread out before me. 

A completely different and unintended set of insights from this time has been connected to the work of pastoral ministry and time management. I should not have been surprised, because “connections”  – both expected and unexpected – are an important element of my theological framework. 

And of course, many of these insights cannot be tried unless I am doing the work! So, there’s a helpful thing to be thinking about as the first of December approaches!

The Ant and the Elephant

When I first imagined what I would be doing during this time of sabbatical, I thought that I would be exploring a small subject that was of great interest to me. I also thought that there would be some important insights to be shared with a wider audience. I was pretty convinced that there were some ethical and theological issues surrounding “open source” that should be unveiled to the faith community, and that the culture of the “open source” developer community would be instructive and of interest to people in the ways that it shared some of the culture of a faith community. In other words, I thought what I was going to learn was of interest and importance, that my research would reveal some interesting and exciting connections between what seemed to be almost mutually exclusive subject areas, but that it was like an ant in comparison to an overall perspective.

As I met with and talked with people, and as I read a growing number of books and papers, and reflected on the idea of “open source” with these same people and many others, I made two important discoveries. First, what I thought was going to be “ground-breaking” was in fact, already being studied and written about in the halls of academia. In one revealing evening I sat and typed “open source” into the search engine at the web site of Chapters Indigo (the Canadian big box and online book store) and waded my way through all four hundred plus “hits”. Much to my surprise I found a list of about fifteen books that were precisely on the topic I thought I was “inventing” with my research. I started reading some of them. The rest of them remain on my “to be read” list. Some are not published yet, and some with their advent being in the academic community are prohibitively expensive. (Thank goodness for libraries!)

I had also already read some books written for a wider audience that were pointing me to a gathering revelation. I wasn’t studying an ant. I was looking at an elephant.

 

The “open source” mindset is sweeping the world. It is a mindset that believes in mass collaboration, and some important “open source” success stories are proof that it works. First among them is the story of Linux – the open source operating system. Linux is found everywhere and the list is growing. About the only place it is not mainstream in the technology community these days is in the place where it is most likely to gain attention – the office and home desktop. But everywhere else, Linux abounds. The second example of the success of “open source” is the story of Goldcorp – the gold mining company. In what is becoming a legendary and perhaps risky business move, CEO Rob McEwen “open sourced” the Goldcorp geological data, allowing anyone with web access the opportunity to look at it, and more importantly, apply their own prospecting techniques in order to predict likely areas in the large Goldcorp property where gold might be found. The carrot was prize money for identifying successful targets and it paid off for the mining company in a very big way.

The key to all of this is a paradigm shift brought on by what I call the “nothing but ‘net” generation. This is the generation that has grown up knowing only the presence of the internet. The internet takes collaboration and the shrinking of the geography of community for granted. It allows for massive and massively dispersed communities to exist at very small cost. Linux would not have been possible in another age, but with the massive internet network, collaboration was easy.

We’ve talked about paradigm shifts in the church for a couple of decades. I first heard the words “paradigm shift” in connection with the Christian faith community, but my feeling is that this “paradigm shift” in the way that people are gathering into widely dispersed communities and in the way that collaboration is driving both business and culture, has largely gone unnoticed in the faith community. Yes, there have been references to bits and pieces of it, but for the most part when I have mentioned “open source” within the faith community, eyes have glazed over, and many people have felt I was talking about something connected with computers. Something they didn’t understand.

To give credit where credit is due, when I have taken a few minutes to try and explain how my area of interest has connections with ethics and theology, the connections have started happening, and I’ve been met with some shared excitement and interest, once I’ve done some explaining. But I still feel that these ideas I’ve been exploring and their connections with the faith community and its future, have largely been seen to be mutually exclusive.

Maybe I’ve just been naive and more is going on than I thought, but I have to trust my intuition and consider that I’m not wrong. And if I’m not wrong, then we – the church – need to get with the program! I expect we already are – but by default, not by design. And if I’m right then there is an important place for the faith community within this vast and radically connected community that is going on all around us.

The church, in my understanding, has always been about community. And as a result, I have felt in the past that the church had important insights and information to share about community. But I think in the present age, we  – the church – are being left behind. Community is happening in much more dynamic and interesting ways all around us, while we navel gaze and moan about the lack of a future for the church.

The opportunity for connection is all around us, in ways that have been unavailable in past generations. The ways that communities are forming in empathic and world changing directions are a sign of hope in what is largely a pessimistic world. Church is about hope. Church is about empathy. Church is about changing the world. We need to be there! Where are we?

I started to study an ant and found an elephant.

Raspberry Pi – Live from FSOSS 2012

I have about three different blog posts cooking in the background, but haven’t had the time to sit down and put finishing touches on any of them. However, the day for my much anticipated attendance at FSOSS 2012 has arrived.

The first three hours have in some ways been like a trip down memory lane. The first computer I was able to take home with me, and thus the computer that would lead to a change in vocations for me, was a Commodore 64. More about that later…

I am speaking at FSOSS tomorrow morning and I’ve spent some of the last three weeks getting ready for this occasion. I don’t know whether to be excited or scared. I think I know my stuff, and as long as I don’t get asked about anything too technical I should be able to answer the questions that might come up.

If the first sessions at FSOSS 2012 are any indication I should be okay. The whole first day – which is today – is pretty much devoted to the Raspberry Pi and what Seneca College has dubbed “hackputing”. I received my Pi (which seems to be the accepted nickname for these little wonders) in the summer, and at first it was not intended that this would be a nice coincidence between the topic of my sabbatical and this little SoC (System on a Chip) which is intended to re-introduce the fun of hacking again – the kind of hacking that was popular with the early eight bit computers – Apple ][, Commodore VIC-20, Commodore 64, etc.

I watched with interest and excitement as one of the faculty members at the Seneca CDOT (Centre for the Development of Open Technology) walked us through various aspects of these little teaching computers which are quickly being adapted for all kinds of helpful activities. For example, a lot of people are using the Pi as a video box to help converge a number of video sources on the television screen ie Cable TV, Youtube, social media surfing etc.

That’s what brings me back to the Commodore 64. That was probably the last time I did any serious hardware hacking. One of my crowning hardware glories was a home-built RS232 interface for my C64. The C64 did not come with a standard serial interface so there was a requirement to purchase some integrated circuits, some wire, a little case, some connectors and then do some really finicky soldering to make it work. I still remember the amazement and joy I experienced when it all worked and I was able to use my C64 to access local bulletin board systems (long before the internet!)

The Raspberry Pi brings it all back and I think will introduce a new generation of young people to the joy and wonder of working once again “down on the bare metal” which was so much lost as personal computers became more powerful and more complicated.

And as our presenter told us – this is all made possible by the existence of Open Source software, because, as he said, why would you pay $50 for a computer and then pay twice as much or more to put an operating system on it. (read: Windows!)  Linux has been successful ported to the ARM processor and shrunk sufficiently so that it fits on an SD card which can be read by the Raspberry Pi.

Once again, I am pleased that this has mostly not gone whizzing over my head. Yes, some of the linux command line stuff went by quickly and I would have to take a bit of time to figure it all out, but I can still function in this environment.

And so, especially after a lunch time conversation, I think I am mostly excited to be doing the presentation tomorrow.

Here we go!!!!

Open Source Sharing, Sharing Open Source

To a very large degree, “open source” is about sharing. There is usually a “lead” person associated with an open source software project, but one of the main points of  going “open source” is to benefit from the many extra sets of eyeballs and diverse sets of skills that can come together to create a successful project. Eric Raymond in his seminal work on the “open source” community, The Cathedral and the Bazaar says that given enough eyeballs, every bug is trivial.

What I am finding in my reading, reflecting and research however, is that there is a very large need for a different kind of sharing. Despite the fact that “open source” has increased by leaps and bounds around the world, it still seems to be making but a small dent in the general body of knowledge and interest.

From the beginning of this sabbatical I thought it would be important for two reasons, to find opportunities to tell people about what I am doing. One of the reasons would be to my benefit – as a way of helping me to organise my thoughts and put them into a presentable form. The other reason would be to help people know about “open source”.

In order to accomplish this, I looked for opportunities to do presentations at some of the events I planned to attend.

I originally had planned to attend the Ohio LinuxFest in Columbus at the end of September. At almost the halfway mark in this sabbatical I thought it would give me a good goal to work towards if my proposal to be a presenter at the conference was accepted.

I submitted something to the conference planners, but heard in early August that in part due to a large number of proposals, my suggested “talk” was not accepted.

Ultimately this turned out to be a bit of a blessing in disguise, because circumstances were such that it did not work out for me to be in Ohio at the end of September. As these circumstances became apparent I began looking for an alternative. That’s when I happened upon the FSOSS at Seneca College in Toronto at the end of October. The Free Software and Open Source Symposium fit the bill for many number of reasons. It was at a better time. It meant that I did not have to cross the Canada US border again, and I was attracted to the fact that it was a Canadian event. It also allowed for me to spend some time visiting with family around the time of the symposium. As I looked over the material available online, I decided once again to make a proposal to do a presentation, this time with the added advantage of being able to reflect on my experiences at LinuxCon in San Diego at the end of August.

Around the same time I thought it might be possible for me to do a presentation as a workshop at the Banff Men’s Conference. Sometime after that I offered to do a public talk as part of the Yellowknife Public Library program of talks and presentations. My offer to the Banff Men’s Conference organising committee was welcomed, but I was informed that their roster of workshops was complete. I was told that if I was willing I could be placed on a waiting list in case one of the other workshops was unable to go ahead.

In late September I was excited to learn that my proposal to do a presentation at FSOSS had been accepted. My offer to be part of the Yellowknife Library program was also accepted and I met with library people to come up with an angle that would fit their plans.

I was very motivated to do a good job at the FSOSS. It was in my mind the situation that was the most challenging given the community I would be addressing. And so I began spending some sleepless hours thinking of ideas and angles that would suit the promise I had made in my proposal that the talk would be both entertaining while addressing issues with a certain amount of depth.

In the meantime I took some other opportunities to challenge myself and spread the word. I noticed a direction that the EDGE program of The United Church of Canada was involved with in offering web mediated webinars to church people across the country. I offered to lead one of them by submitting a proposal.

I had pretty much ruled out the possibility that I would be doing a workshop at the Banff Men’s Conference as the weekend approached. But you can probably guess what happened. The conference began on Friday evening. On Thursday about noon, I received word that if I was ready (as I had promised to be) my presentation would be replacing one of the workshops. I said I would keep my promise and be ready and accepted the invitation.

So Thursday afternoon and evening, the drive to Banff from Fort Saskatchewan and a late night session on my computer until about 1:00 am were all occupied with thoughts, plans and presentation preparations and by Saturday morning when the workshop was to take place I was ready.

For me there is nothing like a deadline to get the creative juices flowing. Now my goal of spreading the word did not cut a very wide swath at the Men’s Conference because I believe in part due to the late notice, I had a total of five people attend the workshop, but it was well received and was very helpful to me in getting my thoughts organised,

It will be a much different audience at FSOSS, but some of what I have done will certainly be usable.

As it also happens, I met the Executive Director of EDGE at the conference. I talked to him about my project. He is a ministry colleague with a degree in Applied Math – so you can expect that there was a certain kindred spirit happening as we chatted. I told him about my offer to lead a webinar and he pretty much guaranteed that I would be given the opportunity to lead one.

So after some initial disappointment, the oportunities to share the word about “open source” are starting to build.

I’ve offered to do a workshop again next year at the Banff Men’s Conference.

Now it is nuts and bolts time for the FSOSS presentation. I am staying in Banff for an extra day with the hope and expectation that the surrounding mountains, a place where my soul finds renewal, will help me to put the majority of the work behind me.

A step back into the present (and maybe the future too!)

I am a proud graduate of St. Andrew’s Theological College in Saskatoon. My one regret might be that I missed an opportunity to be at the Vancouver School of Theology at the same time as Dr. David Lochhead. I think we would have connected, and who knows where that connection might have led.

We actually did connect – I can’t pin down the actual date – I think it must have been sometime during my time as a theolog.

Most of the time my connections with David Lochhead were online as part of the Ecunet network – of which he was a founding member. But on some all too rare occasions I had a chance to hear him speak. One of those opportunities was at an Ecunet conference in 1997 – one of the chances that Ecunet members had to meet face-to-face. It was on David’s home turf – the Vancouver School of Theology. I still remember how we all listened in rapt attention as he spoke his essay “Modem Dreams”. It is still online.

I write this today because as I was reading from among the large stack of books I am accumulating for reading and study during this sabbatical I was reminded and drawn to re-read “Theology in a Digital World”.

You might think that a small book about computers (and theology) with a 1988 date on it would be hopelessly outdated. Think again! As I re-read words (some of which have stayed with me all these twenty-four years) written in the first few years of the personal computer I could not believe how appropriate, perceptive and current they still are. There are a few technical details that no longer apply, but the book could have been written last week.

Of course this just confirms for me the brilliance and insight of David Lochhead – who left us far too early only a couple of years after I last heard him in person, telling the story of his “Modem Dreams”.

If you can find it, I highly recommend “Theology in a Digital World”. You will be amazed at how much of it still makes sense, and how much it has to say about our faith in a world of technology. You can read it in very short time – it is only ninety-five pages long.

Conversing down on the bare metal #linuxcon

The somewhat humourous, but also highly descriptive expression “Programming down on the bare metal” is a blast from my past, but it came up in a conversation I had last night, thus proving that it still has some currency in the software community. It is a catch-all kind of phrase to describe a range of things. It might mean writing software in machine code. It might mean working on the kernel of an operating system, or any of several other low level programming exercises,

If “programming on the bare metal” describes an activity, then surely having an opportunity to talk with people who do that sort of thing, it must count as “conversing down on the bare metal”, and that is one way to describe how my evening went last night,

First of all, let me apologize for not mentioning by name many of the people with whom I was in conversation. In some cases we exchanged names, but my fifty-eight year old brain is proving the most faulty in its name retention functionality.

The presentations and key-note addresses on the second day of #linuxcon did not have as much appeal to me, so I skipped attending a “talk” in some of the time slots. It also gave me a chance to have a look around at some of the booths and institute some balance to my life by allowing me a few minutes of rest.

Things got considerably better topic-wise when I boarded the bus to travel to the evening reception sponsored by Intel at the Hotel Del Coronado on Coronado Island, I was sitting by myself on a pretty full bus when a fellow attendee asked if he could sit with me. He took a look at my name tag and asked about the church connection – a perfect lead-in to explain why I am here. As is usually the case, he was quite interested. We talked about some of the issues and he asked me why I had not talked to Linus Torvalds after yesterday’s panel, I muttered some things about not wanting to impose (which were really a mask for my introversion and shyness). One of the other linux kernel panelists from Wednesday was sitting a couple of rows ahead, and it turned out my seat mate knew him personally and said he would introduce me. When we arrived at the hotel he did just that and I had the opportunity to spend a few minutes with Ted T’So. It has become quite clear to me at this conference that Ted is one of the linux superstars. As he told me, he is also very active in his Episcopalian church in the Boston area. He serves as the treasurer. We spent a few minutes talking about some of the issues I am trying to explore during my sabbatical. Like many others, Ted talked about the passion he has and the fun he receives by being a Linux kernel developer, but I would have had to spend a bit more time with him I think to reach a deeper level of connection between the motivations he has for working in open-source – at a very intense and low-level (or is that high-level) and for his involvement in a faith community. However it was good to have a chance to spend a few minutes talk with him.

I sat with a couple of other people at a table at the reception – which was held on the large lawn on the hotel property – and once again one of them saw my name tag and asked why I was here. We had a really good wide-ranging conversation. We talked about what it is like to live in the north and of course I took the opportunity that was landed in my lap to ask these people about their motivation for working in the open source community. There were lots of connections, despite the agnostic or atheistic perspective that many of the people I’ve talked with have expressed. At the very least I think some of my questions have prompted people to do some deeper reflection on just what attracts them to the open source way of doing things.

Later I chose another table and had another good conversation with a couple of RedHat employees – both of whom are developers. We talked about how we got involved in the software business and the passion and excitement that still motivates us in the area. A key point that pretty much everyone has mentioned in my conversations about the spirit of open source has been the delight in being able to contribute to the “common good”.

My final conversation of the day happened in the bus ride back to our hotel. I sat with a fellow who introduced himself and asked where I lived. When I mentioned Canada he informed me that he received his Ph.D. from the University of Waterloo in 2005. Instant connection for a stimulating conversation about the open source community – how much or how little the U of W seems to be involved, the joys of a computer science class we both took – separated by about twenty-eight years – and how some of the research done in that course had led to the recent purchase of a company by Research in Motion and how that purchase is about the only hope that RiM has to survive in the present day. We kind of agreed that it might be just a bit too late.

All in all a very affirming, stimulating and exciting evening, especially coming as it did at the end of day which did not have as much appeal to me in the more formal presentations that were offered.

Except to say that I was very interested in a grass roots tablet computer that a group has been working on that is completely open source – in comparison to the much maligned so-called fruit company and their tablet and even the Android phones and tablets, which while being based on Linux, have been said to be only about 25% open.

I was given a demo of the tablet on a hopelessly incapable piece of hardware and I am quite excited about the prospects for it – when the hardware is ready and when the software becomes more solid.