You might have found it odd that I did not blog leading up to Lindependence Portland.
Or not.
The fact is that I had to give two presentations at Oregon State University on the Thursday before the event, and that took a significant deal of preparation. No one recognizes more than I do the complete irony of yours truly — a first-year computer science student — giving a lecture on Open Source to graduate students in a software engineering class. Also, the presentations for Fedora in both the class and at the OSU Linux Users Group, compounded by a 19-hour train ride (sans Internet) up the coast, left me a tad beat up and not raring to blog.
However, the Portland Lindependence event arrived on Saturday, Oct. 25, at the new offices of TouchStone Technologies in Beaverton. Ken Starks, also known as the blogger known as Helios, wrote a pretty detailed blog about the event here. And, no, I didn’t really step on Ken’s foot. There’s not much I can add to this blog item, so I won’t.
But what I did want to talk about, here and in upcoming blogs, is the future of Lindependence and where we’re going from here.
First things first: As the likelihood that Portland is the last event for 2008, Lindependence’s future looks very bright as we head into 2009. We have a couple of towns already locked on the radar and it appears that we’re going to start the year in California and New Mexico, and hopefully we can balance the locations to somewhere cooler in the summer and warmer in the winter. Though ideal, that’s not really a parameter for having Lindependence events.
What’s most promising about this is that people are picking up the ball and taking responsibility for hosting their own events. Just as David Kaplan did in Portland, others are writing and saying, “So, how do I do this?” Unfortunately, David didn’t have the benefit of a manual, but those in the future will.
Someone earlier this year outlined how the Lindependence events spurs a sort of a LUG renaissance, and for the most part this person is right. I would give this person a name, except it was penned by an alias on a forum somewhere (if he or she wants to contact me, I’d be glad to give you full credit). Long gone are the secret handshakes and the special language (although the language still exists, but it’s not as mysterious as it once was), and now LUG meetings are less the geekfests they once were and more all-inclusive and more comfortable for a computer-using public that seeks digital alternatives but are not obsessed by their technology.
The bus is traveling now, picking up passengers at every stop. If you’re not on it already, get on at the next stop.
Hi Larry,
Thx, nice blog entry. I like the point about Lindependence giving new meaning to LUG meetings. That is what it is going to take for the real world digital tipping point to arrive — grassroots efforts that get institutionalized and repeated over and over again.
As Doc Searls said in his Digital Tipping Point interview, code is conversation. It is not static. It is a back-and-forth. Lindependence is one great example of that.
I know it is not maybe directly on point, but I would like to read an account of the train trip. Maybe you could blog about that a bit. It sounds rather cool. I have gone on long train trips in Europe, but not in the US. It would be interesting to know how many stops; stories of some people you met; who was traveling on the train; did you meet John Madden, you know that kind of thing. LOL.
Christian Einfeldt,
Producer, The Digital Tipping Point
Hi Larry,
You guys just keep it up.
Hope to be more active in the effort in 2009 than in the last few months.
Congrats,
amenditman