Jim Grisanzio

The queue at Kamata Station. Generally when I find myself at the front of the line waiting for a train just inches from the tracks, I pay particular attention to who stands behind me. You never know. B8Z6YT8RKKYM

A dozen international communities will be coming together in mid December for “Tokyo’s Biggest Tech Party Ever” (info here, here). It’s a charity event to benefit Room to Read. About 300 people are expected to gather in Roppongi, but I bet the number grows higher than that as the date approaches. I know a pile of OpenSolaris guys will be going, and I’ll go for sure. I can imagine that thousands of very interesting photographs and videos will emerge from this gig, so I will shoot a set of photos myself. Here are some of the communities participating:

• Asiajin
• Digital Eve Japan
• International Computer Association
• Tokyo 2.0
• Mobile Monday
• Tokyo Hacker Space
• Tokyo PC Users Group
• Tokyo OpenSolaris User Group
• Ninjava
• Tokyo Linux User Group

The international tech community in Tokyo is obviously a community of communities, and there is certainly some overlap in membership as well. But intentionally creating mega social events like this to bring multiple groups together has significant value because the more we mix as communities the more we learn from each other. To me, that’s one of the core values of BarCamp as well. You build your own community locally, you then connect that community globally, and while you are doing that you intentionally mix with other communities so you remain flush with new ideas.

Toshiba now ships OpenSolaris on the mini NB200 (Intel Atom), which goes right along with OpenSolaris on the Portégé R600 and the Tecra M10. I have the M10. I hope to get light and thin with the mini soon (it’s less than 3 pounds and under an inch thick so it fits right in your shirt pocket). This is really great news. OpenSolaris is getting more popular on these Netbooks, so the opportunity can only be huge. But I’ve been so busy lately, I totally missed this announcement. Right now Toshiba ships the OpenSolaris laptops to the US and the UK. When will they go global?

Found these two guys the other nite in Shibuya …

Multiple international communities came together for another BarCamp here in Japan last weekend, this time at the Yokohama International School about a half hour south of Tokyo. Back in May we organized a BarCamp in Tokyo, and I think we`ll do more of these events after this Yokohama effort. This BarCamp model for conference organizing is interesting and extremely efficient because it`s a flat structure and distributes tasks widely: everyone organizes, everyone participates, and the schedule is built live on site. Some OpenSolaris guys were there, and we gave out OpenSolaris t-shirts and CDs and other items. The theme for the event was 21st Century Education. Special thanks to kurisuteen for leading. Great event.

Monday was a holiday here in Japan so I went to the O`Reilly Make Conference and saw some of my Tokyo Hackerspace friends there — among thousands of other Japanese Makers. Really good time.

Make Magazine | My photos in Make blog (cool) | Make Conference News Video (Japanese)

Some street shots from Jakarta and Bandung last week …

After spending Tuesday talking with hundreds of engineering students at ITHB Bandung (and after a great lunch with the university faculty), we found a very cool Bandung OpenSolaris User Group meeting at detikinet.com, which is Indonesia’s largest news portal (meeting references here and here). The gathering was held in a dimly lit driveway under a tent. For over two hours we sat on the floor on a carpet and just talked about building developer communities using OpenSolaris.

I didn’t present any slides. We just had a free-flowing conversation. It was a warm night and the rains (read: utterly massive downpours) had stopped, so everything was nice and relaxed and quiet. I tried to stress that it’s important to build community locally first (this way you can follow your own rules) but then to connect globally so you learn from others around the world. The second point I made was that there is no secret to establishing credibility in a community. It’s a simple concept, really. Contributing. That’s it. In fact, there is no other way. Your title does not matter. Nor does your age or political associations or position in any given organization. And you geography shouldn’t matter, either. What matters most is your ability to get involved, to organize and engage new people, to build basic infrastructure and tools to facilitate participation, and then to contribute directly yourself. That’s how you build community — and the building concept pervades all levels of a community. Everyone builds. And everyone builds from within the community, not from the outside. I also told a bunch of stories about the engineers, managers, and community developers I have met along the way, the ones I respect most and from who I still learn every day. Excellent night. Then the next morning some of guys took me to a nearby volcano.

All photos on Flickr

On Tuesday we went to ITHB in Bandung, which is about two hours from Jakarta, for another university visit. We were a bit late due to some really impressive winter rain, but when we arrived the energy in the room was palpable. Great fun. Loved every minute. Can`t wait to go back. More presos on OpenSolaris from Harry Kaligis, Agus Setiawan, Lukman Prihandika, Rachmat Febrianto, Alex Budiyanto. And me.

Photos on Flickr | Presentation | Search for Indonesia OSUGs

On Monday after visiting Gunadarma University we went back to Jakarta for an OpenSolaris User Group meeting at the Sun office. Met a lot of nice guys and had some good conversations about OpenSolaris. More pics to come.

Photos on Flickr

I was in Indonesia earlier this week for some OpenSolaris university and user group events. Really cool trip. Exhausting, too. I did a lot of talking. Much more than usual. The community there is engaged and thriving, so there was a lot of talking in between the talks, too. Everyone was super friendly and quite obviously talented. It was my first trip to Indonesia, and it moved me deeply. I will go back, no question about it. I really liked it there. And I learned a lot. I shot 500 images and saved about 200, so I`ll post them across a few entries over the next few days. Indonesia should make for an interesting future for OpenSolaris in South East Asia with these guys coming along. Trust me on that one.

On Monday we started the day at Gunadarma University in Depok, which is about an hour outside Jakarta. Presenting at the event were Harry Kaligis, Alex Budiyanto, Made Wiryana, Agus Setiawan, and Rachmat Febrianto. And me. I talked about the history of OpenSolaris, some of the open development and website projects to support contributions, and how we are building a development community around the world. The other guys talked about local programs and specific technologies in the OpenSolaris distribution. After all the talks and questions/answers, we met with the school faculty to discuss how OpenSolaris can be used to help students learn software development, and we also stressed the importance of building an engineering community on campus where students can contribute both locally and globally.

Photos on Flickr | Presentation | Search for Indonesia OSUGs

Special thanks to Alex Budiyanto for driving everything. Alex is an amazing community organizer (and presenter too). More to come.

Bill Rushmore has been working on updating bugs.opensolaris.org. Go here for the new boo: http://bugs.opensolaris.org/. More updates to other website applications
coming along soon as well.

It’s excellent to see that the Sun Globalization Engineering team released a new version of the Community Translation Interface tool: Sun OpenCTI: https://translate.sun.com/opencti

Among other things, this is the tool that the OpenSolaris community used to localize Auth (which we’ll update with new languages soon as well). Also, the announcement from Ales says that he’s opened some new translation projects to get ready for the next release of the OpenSolaris distribution. So, if you want to contribute translations to OpenSolaris, check out this new version of the Community Translation Interface. Send questions to the Internationalization & Localization Community on i18n-discuss (subscribe to the list here and/or post to the Jive forum here). More info here at the CTI team blog.

Some images from the Tokyo Linux User Group technical meeting and nomikai tonight.

Many more TLUG photos here.

Check out the new diagonal crossing at Oxford Circus in London. It looks beautiful. Really nice job. They based the design on the Shibuya Crossing in Tokyo (which can be great fun if you’ve never experienced it: here and here). The first time I navigated the Shibuya intersection I thought I was going to get run over flat by waves of people weaving their way toward me from multiple directions, but it’s actually a remarkably efficient way to move masses of people. I’ve never been to London, so I don’t know what it’s like walking around the city. It’ll be interesting to see how the British like this change.