Published on 10 November 2012
Last weekend I had the opportunity to go to the Barcamp in Wroclaw. A barcamp is an un-conference event, made more for audience participation than for scheduled talks. This Barcamp was organised by the Unexus Team, which means that I had the chance to hang out out with Justin Brown and Mark Bakacs, the two founders of Unexus, and also withJohan Johanssens, cofounder of Joomla, as well as the current founder of Nooku. Justin and Mark were the ones who enabled me to come; I am now on board as the new front-end developer for Unexus, which means I will be helping to develop the user experience for a social network website with a lot of potential. I’ll most likely be blogging more about that in the coming months. I wasn’t able to meet Mark’s brother Pete, our designer, but I am going to be working closely with him.
The Barcamp itself lasted a day; there were around 30 people there, and there were some pretty interesting talks. Most interesting, for me, was Johan’s talk about FOSS, Free and Open Source Software. He started out with the tagline that Open Source is not like free beer - rather, It’s free as in Freedom. Another good talk for me was Kamil Rudniki’s presentation of TimeCamp, a time-tracking productivity software that started in the past few years and already has a good client base. I’m going to be working with Kamil to integrate my own Wired/Wyrd In startup with his. Mine is more focused on task organisation and planning, while his is much more about screen-tracking, like RescueTime, and time-tracking. Together, along with tools like Trello, we should end up with a pretty solid product. Kamil gave me a ton of good links to follow up, namely:
Johan also gave some good discussion of licensing models, something I’ve been struggling with researching recently. Importantly, it seems that the license of a software only becomes applicable when you distribute the software. That only happens when the software goes from a copyright holder to a non-copyright holder. In essence, Github is distribution. I am going to have to move Wyrd In off of Github, soon, then - I’ll probably set up a git repo on my own server to deal with it.
And that was the weekend, in a nutshell. When I got back, I had a ton of fresh ideas, a good perspective on what I am doing with Unexus, and a cold. That’s alright though; it was worth it.
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