Question 237 of 365: Is the username dying?

I remember Hackers, the awkward mid-90′s movie, fondly.

It represented a do-it-yourself future in which those who understood computers could game everyone else. And, for the most part it got that right. It also figured out that the hacker culture was going to drive an open source understanding of information and responsibility. We are all in this (online communities and privacy issues) collectively and no one person should wield too much power online. The part that it didn’t get right (and maybe it didn’t really attempt to) was the idea that we would all need handles to protect our identities (and to be cool). As one character put it:

 I need a handle, man. I don't have an identity until I have a handle.

And with names like Crash Override, Acid Burn, Cereal Killer, and Lord Nikon how could you argue. Their handles, or usernames, seem to represent a time in which we couldn’t share things out in the open. It represented a time when social networks didn’t exist and all forums and chat were done in pseudo underground spaces that only those with access and interest could take part in. Grandmas (mostly) weren’t online posting pictures and blogging hadn’t happened yet. Usernames were the ways that we separated ourselves from “real life” because we could choose them. We didn’t have to worry about being ourselves because this was a world that rarely crossed over into people who were honest with one another about their true identities. The two spaces were separate and we liked them that way.

At the time of watching Hackers in 1995, my handle was The Atomic Angel. Seriously. I was convinced that it made me cooler and more respectable than just using my name to identify me. I used it on Bulletin Boards and in AOL chat. In short, I was awesome. And now, I look at what I use and it pales in comparison. I am Ben Wilkoff pretty much everywhere. Online and offline, I don’t have a single space that I am not completely me.

That is incredibly satisfying in some ways, but also a little terrifying. I don’t have to pretend to be someone I’m not and I don’t have to splinter my personality for every given account or service I join. But, I can’t get away from my own identity either. There is no hiding from my history and my mistakes. I have to take responsibility for all of it. I also don’t have the choice to leave and remove myself. Google remembers me.

The username is dying because of Facebook. We are who we are on there. We can pretend, but it is hard to pretend an entire life. It is hard to fake pictures and videos and a network of people that you communicate with. We always end up just reverting to ourselves. We are people, not handles, not usernames.

We aren’t there completely, but with things like Google Profiles, Facebook Connect/Platform and Open ID, we will have a single login to rule them all. We will be able to share our network and our connections with every new application built upon the single authentication device. And when that happens, we will no longer be setting up new identities for each new thing that comes along. It will all be tied to a single name, our own. It isn’t the one we chose, but it is the one that we must use in this new space where we can’t hide behind a fictional character or absurd nome de plume.

Hackers didn’t get it quite right. I have an identity without a handle. Sometimes, though, I’m not sure I want the identity I’ve got.

Question 187 of 365: What is our equation?

I used to believe that everything equaled out in the end. That at some point, everyone would get the same amount of opportunity or talent. I used to think that we were all special in enough ways to allow for everyone to have the same chance of success. I don’t believe that anymore. 

I once was talking to a very good friend about our test scores over the phone. He told me about how good his math scores were. I saw that they were better than mine, and in my need to make everything even out, I proclaimed that I had very good english scores. As it turned out, I did have good scores. He just had better ones. In both English (which I cared a great deal about) and in Math (which I didn’t care all that much about) he was better. I couldn’t reconcile this disparity. I kept on looking for a silver lining, a way in which his life overall was worse than mine or that I could feel superior so that this defeat would hurt less. I still haven’t found a way to make those kinds of stings any less potent.

Instead, I now believe that instead of an equation with an a person on either side of the equal sign, it is most likely a greater than or less than sign. This is a crude judgement, but it is in fact a much more accurate representation of the way in which we experience all people. Somewhere within our heads, we do an estimation of greater than or less than. We look for links from one person or idea to another, but we are not looking for them to be the same. We are looking for ways to categorize, to prioritize and to put them into a hierarchy. We can’t help but be a part of this lopsided equation every moment. 

And yet, it is hard to tell which side of the equation we are on at times or what is really being compared. I may be really good at getting my ideas across, but utterly fail in having revolutionary ideas in the first place. These things are not equal. One is greater than the other, but it depends on who is setting up the equation. 

The point is:

The greater than or less than equation is a little agreement within ourselves to treat some things and people with more respect and attention than others. And in the interest of creating a more collaborative and sharing society, I believe we owe it to one another to state our equations as loudly as we possibly can. If all bias can be boiled down to an equation with a little arrow pointing one way or the other, we can actually identify what it is that moves us and what it is that we need help with. With that in mind, here are a few equations that I believe to be true.

My children > other people’s children

Open Source > Closed Source

Community > Isolation

Publishing > Notebooks

Notebooks > Not writing/drawing/reflecting

Independent > Corporate

Corporate > Undervalued

Revision > Final Draft

Trust > Suspicion

Hope > Tradition

Change > Success

Failure >= Success

Music >= Silence

Stress > Pressure

Lo-Fi > Hi-Def

Family > Career

There are lots more, but I do wonder what would happen if we all laid out our equations on the table and started talking about them. Would any of us change the directions of the arrows? Would we be able to generate our list of the most important things in our lives, our priorities of a lifetime rather than just of the moment. I feel as though that might be important.

Question 176 of 365: When is networking just drinking with friends?

The largest technology and education conference has come to Denver. Is the one time of the year when people from all over the world get together in a single space and talk about the issues that are most important to them, whether those are of equity and access, 1:1 computing, open source software, social media, online learning, or curriculum standards. All of those conversations are going to happen this week, and it isn’t the first time they have happened, either. In fact, many of the people who are here this year were at this conference last year, and perhaps the year before. And even if they weren’t, it is highly likely that these people have met online or at another conference.

So, networking is hopeless for these people. They know each other. They have had these conversations before. The contexts are different. The setting is different too. Perhaps, even something new is created. But, the unbridled networking that is the signature of seeing new people and figuring out how they find significance in your life is not something that happens when the same people have the same conversations about the same important issues.

Instead, we just have friends sitting down for a drink with one another. And maybe that is the best thing that we can be doing right now. Maybe it has always been about finding the people that we can sit down with and share one true moment, without introductions. We need to know people before we really can see their potential as collaborators. We need to see them as consistent parts of our creative lives before we let them in to the rest of who we are and what we have to offer.

So, let’s sit down and have a drink. Let’s continue the conversations we have started. And for those new people who we have never met before, let’s start the next conversations so that in a few months or years we will be able to see those individuals as collaborators, and more than that, as friends.

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Question 134 of 365: What can Diaspora teach us?

Until this week I had only ever heard the word Diaspora to describe Jews who are living away from Israel. It had such a specific meaning that I didn’t really think about just how powerful decentralization could be as an idea that can energize people. I never thought of Diaspora as a way to create change.

This week, though, I was delighted to start seeing articles on a new open source project called Diaspora (http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/196017994/diaspora-the-personally-controlled-do-it-all-distr). It is the so-called “anti-facebook.” Now, I don’t pretend to be a Facebook Privacy scholar, and I have no illusions that quitting Facebook at the end of the month is going to change anything. However, I do find the idea of an anti-facebook compelling. I find the idea of a grassroot effort to connect people together rather than have them gather around a central hub to be inticing enough to give money to. Which is more than I can say for Facebook at this point.

Diaspora aims to be the first decentralized social network, kind of a peer to peer connecting service. But, instead of trading files, we will be communicating with all of the other “seeds” (read nodes of a the social network/friends). There will be no one who keeps track of your data except for you, and when you are offline, potentially the access to your private information would go offline too (so long as you didn’t host your Diaspora account elsewhere, just like you can host your wordpress account as well).

Diaspora, as a project, was looking for funding on Kickstarter.com and because of their unique approach to the Facebook privacy problem, they were able to get more than enough (they were looking for $10,000 and the are looking at more than 10 times that now). This is impressive considering that the project was not a whole lot more than 4 geeks who mulled the idea over while trying to create a robot (a makerbot if you want to get specific).

The real question I have is what can we learn from the upstart, Diaspora. Here is a list that I think may be helpful for remembering (especially when some new startup idea is the darling of the tech blogosphere next week).

1. Find an outcry. They found a problem that was so pronounced that you were starting to see official protests and boycotts. They didn’t really come up with a solution for the outcry. rather they came up with an alternative. They took the model that Facebook had and dissected it down to its essentials and then built the rest so that it “didn’t suck.” I feel like we don’t cater to creating an alternative to outcries very often. We really do seem to like solving problems by one upsmanship. While we can’t follow the outcry wherever it goes, figuring out just why people are up in arms is a great way to finding something that resonates with a significant portion of the population.
2. Anti is easier than pro. This is something that I keep having to tell myself when I am reduced to fanboy status. It is so much easier and more effective for creating change when you can discuss exactly what it is that we are against and have that be a part of the daily conversation. If Diaspora would have framed themselves as “a decentralized social network” and not as “the anti-facebook”, they would still be fighting for the $10,000 they were after. Anti galvanizes support, when pro simply appeals to logic. When we feel as though we have been wronged (as many people do in terms of their facebook privacy), anti is really the only option left.
3. Set an achievable goal. I am always interested to find people that have set goals for themselves and then outpace them. I am more impressed when these goals are not meager. Diaspora wanted to garner $10,000 of support before they tried to build their software and they did it many times over. This was not a small amount of money to begin with, but because they actually set a value, they had something to work toward. Often, we don’t put a value on our goals. We just see if we can reach them and if we can’t, so what? We will just lower the bar. Diaspora didn’t lower the bar. They found something that they were passionate about and then they set a goal that was impractical to begin with. It is one more reason why I believe that anything is possible with the power of social media (after techcrunch and read/write web picked them up, they received the majority of their funding).
4. Be a geek, with both words and technology. Diaspora is a good idea. It is something that someone was going to create regardless of if it happened now or a year from now. But, it isn’t immediately something that would be easy for everyone to understand. “Disributed social networking” doesn’t exactly sound like a one-button solution. But, people have latched on to it because it has been put in ways that make sense. The video on their kickstarter page is awesome and the articles on blogs and in traditional media have discussed the project so well (and so deeply) that there really isn’t much more to be explained. They were able to start from scratch and run with it because they were geeky enough to have vision, and then they made their vision into words and visual persuasion. It is my contention that you aren’t really a geek until you can tell the story of your geekdom. And, that is exactly what they have done.

Those are the lessons that I have gleaned from Diaspora, but I’m sure there are bunches more. What can you find?

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Question 130 of 365: When are we open for business?

I am a part of the first generation of file sharers, the first set of adults who felt entitled to free music and software. More than anything else, peer-to-peer networks have shaped the way I think about ownership. When .mp3 files became more numerous than word documents, something within the computer and within us shifted. The business models of a dozen industries have been rocked by this shift. Yet, it is the root of this generation that is most intriguing. It is the file sharing ethos itself that has created so much change. And, it is this generation of adults, whose expectations are so drastically different from all others before them that will continue to drive the shift in politics, business and education. Other people have done this analysis in books and such, I will spend an entire post on it.

I used to have two pieces of paper taped to my monitor, one on either side. On the left side were perpetual searches that I would run whenever I got bored. I would type these terms into Gnutella, Napster, and later Kazaa. They were all names of bands that I admired, and already owned a significant number of albums from. I would download dozens of bootlegs for each of these bands, most of which turned out to be cover songs by wannabe artists.

I think that is why I became so enamored with authenticity. I became incredibly skeptical of any band that claimed to be one of my chosen few. I tried to match the vocal stylings and lyrical patterns, but at the end of the day, I just wanted to know that those artists that I believed in, could really be believed.

That is where the business opportunity comes in for the left side of our monitors. I would have paid for access to validated files. I would have ventured my own capital whenever I was asked, if I could only see a little bit more about the people that I idolized. In a world where everything can be copied and nothing is original, the only true value is in what can be validated and contextualized within something that we already respect. It is why the iPad works and Windows CE was a bust. We see that the iPhone OS has value already and it has been validated already by millions. Windows CE was not validated in any way because of the vast numbers of devices that have run that operating system. Each one watered down the validation; each one contributed to the knock-off status of every other device.

The people that we love are even more important than the brands as well. Those that can validate their contributions will increase the value of those contributions. Those that can validate their content within new and expanding formats (like mp3 files in the late 90s), will do the best of all.

As for the right side of my screen, these were the songs that I would search for and cross off as I found them. I went through many more pieces of paper on the right side than on the left. After I downloaded Breakfast at Tiffanies, I crossed it of. After I downloaded the A Cappella version of Two Princes (by the Spin Doctors), I didn’t have to worry about that one anymore. These are songs that I probably would not have paid for, but I downloaded them and enjoyed them imensely.

There is a huge business opportunity here for those things that we absolutely do not need, but would make our experience so much better. This is the back catelogue. The nostalgia factor.

I believe that these things need to be as free as possible. We need to keep the things from our past and our collective consciousness as open as we can. The stuff on the right side of our monitors needs to be at our fingertips at all times, because it is only through these features (I am talking about applications, knowledge, creative processes, and physical objects as well as songs here) that we will be able to grab hold of those who are also willing to part with money for new works as well.

I understand that it may be a fine line between nostalgia and new, but I think it is an important one. We should not have to pay for our own legacy (stuff we have already paid for, stuff that is in our understanding of possention and ownership), but rather, we should be paying for the legacies of others (and our future nostalgia, I suppose). The things that we have already come to expect, is not where the growth lies. It is in getting people to understand that they need more, by offering the rest of it for free.

It boils down to this: If we would like to own the future of education, business, or politics, we need to offer the past for free. Curriculum and textbooks must become free, but the method and interaction of learning must become our bread and butter. The feature sets of yesterday must be open sourced, but innovation must be at a premium value. The democratic precedent must be opened up for search and analysis for the masses, but the voting process and taxation for creating a better word is where we need to fully invest.

That is where the opporunities lay. For both the perpetual search and the list that we can check off. I don’t think either is easy, but if file sharing and the culture of entitlement can teach us anything, it is this: We can’t go back to a completely closed system. Everyone is empowered now, and we must fight our way back from the brink.

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Question 108 of 365: Why do we want to be entrepreneurs?

The easy answer is that we would like to turn something out of nothing. While many of us are not in the entrepreneurial field, that is the one thing that we all quest after. It is the need to turn a problem into a solution using nothing but you mind and your ability to be more stubborn than anyone else on the issue. In the end, we would all like to make money simply by having a good idea and following it to its logical conclusion. We would like to be better than anyone else that one thing, even if we can admit that it will never quite happen like that.

I have spent much of my life running away from the fact that ideas are worth something more than just to a notebook or a blog. The entire open source aesthetic that I subscribe to is nothing more than my unwillingness to assign a value outside of a particular community of users. My penchant toward non-profit and public service is hypocritical because of the way my mind works. I am constantly seeking something that no one else knows or has figured out yet. It is (even if it is short-sighted) my greatest achievement to have people look to me for expertise that is not shared with others. The very fact that my name can be affixed to things and I can call them mine is what makes me an entrepreneur.

This is not to say that cockiness makes me an enterprising fellow. Quite the opposite. It is because I feel as though I have yet to prove my worth to those people around me that I must reach deeply into myself and produce some value from where they was none before. It is a lack of confidence in speaking, writing, and thinking that makes me want to completely change my approach and overcompensate to achieve my goals. And I believe that it is a lack of confidence that is behind all great ideas. True accomplishment is in competing with your self-doubt, and emerging triumphantly.

And I know because I used to sell super rubber bands in grade school. Flicking a rubber band was an art in those days. Whether you were twisting behind your thumb to fashion a finger gun or simply drawing it back over your nail, there was only so much aim and power that could be imparted on a single band. That is why I decided that my tripple looped super rubber bands were far superior. I would fashion them through a sophisticated knot system so that they looked like mickey mouse by the end of the transformation. They produced far better accuracy and could be shot from over triple the distance away.

I sold them for 15 cents a piece and in the few short days before the operation was shut down, business was booming. I had created something that other kids wanted, even if it was only because I capitalized on a fad (and the fact that boys liked flicking rubber bands at pretty much everything). Unfortunately, I got greedy. I brought my entire stash of rubber bands into gym class and began an ill-fated rapid fire demonstration. The gym teacher confiscated them, and I received my one and only trip to the principal’s office during grade school. After it was all done she said, “I think you can get some other rubber bands. These ones don’t really need any more of your attention.”

And that was that. I had established a perfect product-market fit, but there were external pressures on the marketplace (in the form of unfair regulatory practices) that lead to me having to close up shop. And yet, those moments never really left. I knew that having something other people truly wanted was exactly where I wanted to be for the rest of my life. While that didn’t always translate into entrepreneurship, it did make me want to become the most specialized at any given discipline until I became an integral part of the process, until I had something that other people did not.

And while this may all sound quite ambitious, I am not at all convinced that this need to be useful unique or that is tied specifically to selling “things.” Even open source programmers are trading upon favors and recognition. Even non-profits are funded based upon who they know and what they can achieve. Organizations and people that have not found a significant niche, will soon be obsolete. And that is why we are all entrepreneurs.

We are trying to parlay our skills into something that someone else will pay for. We are making ourselves and our ideas a commodities. It is just that some people (those in business, mostly) are much more outright about their intentions. Many, if not most, hide the fact that they are a commodity.  They would like to think of themselves as having a higher purpose or simply that their work does not define them. While I feel as though you can aspire to those things, I do not think that either is terribly true.

Wanting something for yourself is what being an individual is all about. It is impossible to have the self-esteem needed to get up in the morning if you didn’t want people to value you and your contributions. As for being defined by things other than work, there isn’t much evidence to support that idea. While the thing you do for a paycheck may not define who you are, the work that you do (even if you call it play) on the things that you love is what you would like to be known for. You would like to be able to do those things and have people write you a check or at least feed you and your family for them. And yet you remain shy about working toward it. Why?

What could be so significantly terrifying that would cause us to be afraid to attribute value to what we do and ask people to support that value on a regular basis? What will it take so that we can all come together and create a true knowledge exchange so that our best ideas and products and truths do not pass by without being worth something?

Perhaps if we all owned up to our entrepreneurial leanings, that would be a start. And if not that, perhaps just admit that we all sold something in elementary school. Whether it was a toy that we traded, invention or lemonade, we created an underground economy for pennies and dimes. It is not a phase we all went through. It is something that guides our decisions every day. We are all entrepreneurs. It is just that some of us don’t make any money at it.

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Question 23 of 365: Is asking for permission still important?

Is it still important to ask for permission when people tell you exactly how they want you to use their work?

Is it still important when your identity is entirely public?

Is it still important when your everyday life can just as easily be a topic at the water cooler as major world events?

Is it still important when the sincerest form of flattery is the embed code?

Asking for permission used to be something that was a common occurrence when you wanted to borrow ideas or resources from one another. It used to be standard operating procedure when you wanted to contact someone that you didn’t know; you had to ask someone who had their contact info to be introduced. In another time, stumbling into the limelight wasn’t a possibility for anyone with a video camera. In that sense, you used to have to ask permission of the distribution systems (public access TV, independent films, etc.) to become infamous for your content.

No longer is any of this the case. Asking for permission has gone way out of style. It is more important to disseminate information, remix work, make contact, and market yourself than it is to take the time to ask for permission. Permission itself is an outmoded construct. Permission implies a singular ownership. Permission requires one person to know things that others cannot without it. Permission is hierarchical. It is anti-flat world. It is against the commons. It is a falsehood in a world where you can “follow” anyone or where life streams aren’t questioned as being too invasive.

Or perhaps, it is all just an implied permission. Perhaps we are to the point where we are just giving each other permission for everything, where we find it is easier to share our work than it is to hide it. Perhaps permission has dissolved into the vast ocean of free content that exists. Perhaps the only people who are still fighting for permission are the ones who are trying to hold on to the remnants of intellectual property that have been usurped by other, more open outfits.

On the other hand, I hope I am not making the case for everything to be in the public domain. I am not communistic in my view of our lack of permission asking. Rather, I believe in attribution. I believe in purchase. I believe in obeying the wishes of content creators. But, I also believe that a society that does not ask for permission is one that forges a trust that should be sacrosanct. If we all understand what it means to build something together and to reach for better ways of learning, creating or working then we can collectively pull everyone out of poverty. We can collectively attain transparency. We can work together to be productive, profitable, and passionate.

If we don’t ask for permission, we must act in everyone’s interest.

We must be a plural society if we are to be this connected. I do not believe that this is too idealistic when we are no longer separated by 6 degrees of separation. When we literally can connect with anyone in the planet by 1 degree, everyone is our neighbor. And, most of the time, you don’t even have to ask your neighbors for help when you are in trouble. Help just comes.

Question 16 of 365: Can we Open Source our way out of a tragedy?

As I continue to hear more and more stories from Haiti in the aftermath of the worst earthquake in over two centuries, I realize that more people will inevitably die. Not from the earthquake itself, but from the staggering loss of infrastructure and the inability to acquire the basic necessities of life. This particular problem is one that is the most incomprehensible for me. The logic goes, “If I have access to the essentials, why is it so difficult for others to have that same access.” I can literally see the cups I could drink fresh water out of and the roof directly over my head right now. How is it these things are not available to all? (Clearly, this line of thinking is callous, but I believe that it is the primary reason that more isn’t done by those who have for those who do not.)

So, as I am thinking about this unspeakable tragedy, I keep on wondering what would happen to the people of Haiti if they could “make” their essentials out of the rubble, if they could literally turn waste into water. Would the mass of people who are not donating to non-profits like the one a colleague of mine set up, think twice about helping if they knew that the technologies existed for sustainable relief. I guess the second part of the question is, “Would America be more likely to give a handout,if  it knew that the handout would beget much more than a single meal, but rather a change in situation?”

While this line of thinking seems perhaps almost ludicrous, I think that the only way to build infrastructure quickly is to re-imagine what infrastructure can look like after a tragedy.

So, what if we took the Open Source Hardware projects to Haiti and had them start developing their own ready to use flashlights or DC Electric Motors out of the plastic waste left behind.

Or, if we scaled the Open Source water purification set to as many folks as possible. While you can make these systems using heavy production, the majority of the systems made are made of ceramic pottery that can be manufactured locally quite easily, even after a tragedy like the Earthquake.

Open Source housing or the SHRIMP project could be a reality for many of those who are without a home. After all, providing a way to make the same concrete structures that fell over in the first place, doesn’t really seem like a viable option.

While some people may be offended by the notion that the Open Source movement could solve the problems of natural disasters, and they may point to things like the One Laptop Per Child projects as examples of Open Source forcing other cultures to take part in a Western technologies and thinking. I believe that if Open Source is done correctly, all of the feedback from those who are requesting aid could change those very projects to fit the needs of the people left with nothing.

While Open Source doesn’t have all of the answers, neither does a few ready-to-eat meals that get on the ground 2 days too late.

Question 10 of 365: What does Open mean?

Right now there is a heated debate going on about what Open Education is and should be. Mark Weller, George Siemens, David Wiley, Jim Groom, Graham Atwell, Frances Bell, Dave Cormier, Darren Draper and Stephen Downes have all weighed in on the issue. I mention them and the discussion here not in order to fully engage in the debate that is raging, but to simply acknowledge that quite a number of people are putting a lot of time and energy into hashing out exactly what a single word should mean and whether the word is something that we should aspire to.

However, my question is not so specific as to think through only Open Education, but rather to think through the word itself. I know that many of the proponents of more radical definitions of “open” would say that Open cannot be co-opted, that it is a conscious choice that both limits and frees a person who subscribes to the ideal. It limits in the ways that profit off of what is Open is strictly forbidden, and it frees because you can truly create a network of shared work.

Coming further away from those definitions, I would like to propose that Open simply means “having the space between”.

My “Open” is about having the space between commercial and personal to do with what you need. My “Open” means having the space between schools and learning to figure out exactly how real people fit in. My “Open” means designing and working on projects that require collaboration but that do not obsess on FOSS or Free-ness. My “open” is open enough to allow spaces for distraction, toiling away on things that are private, and pride in a single contribution.

The give and the take of “Open” needs to always be there. We need to have a “closed” to combat against. We need to have someone who believes they have a better way of sharing information to make sure that Open really is in the best interests of everyone involved.

If Open means the space between, then these are the spaces I want to concentrate on. These are the spaces that I want to be a part of designing. These are the spaces that will bring about the greatest change.

Almost the same.

Whenever I see somone talk about their brand new LMS, CMS, or collaborative learning product, I tend to be very skeptical. No matter how good it is or how open the architecture is, if it doesn’t have the community built around it, it isn’t worth it. Drupal isn’t powerful because it has so much flexibility to expand into any organization, it is powerful because of the community that supports every single module that is created. Google docs isn’t powerful because of how much collaboration can happen when you share a document, it is powerful because of all of the people at Google and around the world that are using the product and thinking of new uses for it.

I don’t need to see a demo or know how well integrated with our other systems it is. I just want to know who will be there when it breaks. I want to see the wiki where I can add to the learning that I am a part of. I want to know the people in the forum. I want to believe that the learning product I am using will be there tomorrow, not because of how well the company is selling it, but because the community invests enough in it to make sure that it grows and becomes better each day.

So, while I will check out this “open source product”, I am not going to hold my breath because I don’t know the community, because my network hasn’t mentioned it (although, other networks have apparently). No product is worth a lack of community (even blackboard has a community around it, even if it does seem to be self-loathing). So, while I will be open to using something less than community-driven  if I have to, I will say to you, it is only almost the same as a well supported open resource, almost.