Hey nerds, let's have a meeting about the revolution. Back in the day when I first started taking this shit seriously we had some. It worked out pretty well, all things considered. Let's do it again.

Thursday, September 15th
5pm Pacific/8pm Eastern - 1 hour timebox
#revolution - freenode
(here's the upcoming.org node too)

That's in IRC for any non-nerds out there. Feel free to join in or listen. The conversation won't be highly technical, just a lot of people with tech in their blood doing the typing. This sort of meeting tends to piss off real organizers because it's so damn slow, but I've found the low-impact nature of a chatroom meeting to be conductive to thought. It helps if you know how to type.

The hand system will be in effect. Anyone know where the bot is that handles this? Help and feedback is nice.

This Is My Agenda -- What's Yours?
A lot of people are getting really busy as the things we dreamed up in the past few years are assimilated into the establishment. There's a lot of work around, and that's good. Time was this whole thing was all-volunteer. But as the sphere of people who we came up with become professionalized, maybe it's smart to keep our own council and our own heads.

What I'd like to try and do is:

1) Keep an evolving community of developers connected on extra-professional levels. It shouldn't just be about the work, and we need to make sure that as we begin working for different (and in many cases competing) groups, we don't fragment.

2) Get some opinions from the group on what the big picture issues are, and what the big picture ideas are that motivate us. Perhaps develop some consensus here. An ethic and some goals would be nice.

3) Pick some further actions to take. Some projects we drive rather than just assist on. Things that are really ours. Things that are risky, that only an informal group can pull off.

We've spent a good amount of time developing and deploying tools based on what our clients want. That's good. Responding to the market is necessary to produce widely usable products. But we shouldn't count ourselves out in terms of trying to influence things, in terms of guiding the course of progress. That's what players do, and we want to be players, don't we?

I mean, come on. The Boomers have been looking to our generation to program the damn VCR since we were 5 years old. We've got to take some initiative and show them the way.

But we've got to think big. The structural change is on and the Big D is in the mail. Truckers love wifi, and the rest of the country will soon be as (un)wired as NYC or San Fran. Opportunity is knocking. Let's get ready.

/join #revolution