We have all shifted quickly to online platforms for many of our interactions. It is easy to see some of the challenges with this. Technical barriers. Cognitive confusion leading to “zoom fatigue”. There are also some powerful benefits online that were not as obvious before.

Work

For “knowledge workers,” most everyone is doing their work distributed, and I have noticed an equalizing aspect to it. The two dimensions that I see the most are geography differences being lessened, and more balance between those that are outgoing versus more introverted. When everyone you work with is in an equally sized video frame right in front of you, geography is only notable to the extent that it may be evening where they are and morning for you. I’ve had many team members share with me that they have never felt more connected with the members of our various offices. And perhaps more powerfully, our team members in other offices have felt like they can contribute and engage better with the rest of the teams.

This reinforces one of my beliefs about remote versus centralized teams that it is hardest to do both. Fully remote is a considerable leveler, and everyone will have to accommodate. Entirely local is the default that humans have used for millennia. The tricky part is doing both. My hope is that we can take the learnings developed during this pandemic and apply it to improvements and empathy going forward to keep these benefits in place.

Large group gatherings have also surprised me online. They work very well, as long as you keep the time short. And one of my favorite parts is that you can successfully engage in Q&A with the audience. I’ve held team all-hands meetings for decades, and I long ago decided to not open up time for Q&A because the chances of someone asking a question were near nil. The social dynamics of being that one person in a room of 250 that stands up with a question are just too challenging for most individuals to navigate. Online tools though by necessity must create a feature to do this. They have to enable it. And in doing so, they remove the barriers that inhibit people. I’ve found much more engagement than I’ve ever seen in in-person large group meetings.

mini minnebar

Last weekend was supposed to be the annual Minnebar unconference. Minnebar is one of my favorite events of the year. Over 1,000 technologists, collecting around community-led topics with about 70 sessions throughout the day. Minnestar, the non-profit behind the Minnebar, pivoted online and held mini Minnebar and I thought it was great!

The event was hosted on Crowdcast, and it was impressive. The event had a single track, versus multiple parallel sessions as it usually has. That was just fine to me, and it made me think that there could be five or six events like this throughout the year and get the same quantity of content to an even broader audience.

However, the big win to me was opening the event to a broader geography. One of the sessions I realized my brother would like. He lives three hours away and would usually never be able to attend Minnebar. But since it was online, I sent him the link, and he was on in 5 minutes. The event drew people from around the state. Minnestar has debated for years about how to reach people outside of the metro area. I know from dozens of board conversations. We considered for years bringing our events to other cities, but getting them online and opening up globally brought the program there. There was even a person from Turkey who attended Minnebar!

I also felt a lot of energy from the event. It hit me how important it was that the event happen, in some form. I needed the connection to the technology community to still be there. It was so great to see comments in the stream from friends and give a 👋 to them. It filled my day with energy to connect and so what if we couldn’t do it in person with happy hour, we still did it. It reminded me how vital these connections are, and we all must forge ahead.

A New Way to Mourn

My last observation on this topic is from an episode of the Daily called A New Way to Mourn. I highly recommend listening to this. It is a touching story with a powerful message. In short, this highlights that many funerals are being queued into the future. “We will get together to remember Bob when we can connect as a community.” There is a massive problem with this. These are essential rituals and are vital to loved ones and friends going through the mourning process. Deferring them to some unknown future date is going to cause significant problems.

This story about mourning and celebrating a departed loved one online is incredible. And again, I note the accessibility component. Some people can’t travel for various reasons and may be unable to attend a traditional funeral ceremony. Typically they would be excluded from this critical aspect of the mourning process. Hosting a visitation and funeral over Zoom opens up new avenues and accessibility for loved ones to be part of the process.

Attending (mini) Minnebar this morning, the very first online Minnebar! It is awesome to see minnestar pivoting to further its mission during the Covid-19 pandemic. 👏

Dan Lew’s opening session on “What Tech Can Do About Climate Change” was a great way to get started.

Of course very proud that SPS Commerce is a terabyte supporter! 💙

This is my first time using Crowdcast and the experience is very good. 👏

Joe Karlsson with “An Introduction To IoT (Internet of Toilets 🚽); Or How I Built an IoT Kitty Litter Box Using JavaScript”. Fun to see the interesting projects he’s doing. Predicts we will see this continuing to grow. For sure! 👍

Having Minnebar online is an interesting tradeoff. Something I could never do that I just did, was send the link to a number of friends, none in the Twin Cities, and suggest they sign on. There is a big inclusivity win with events moving online. 🤔

Kisha Delain with “Pair programming: Supporting Your Jr Devs Right”. It is so great to see #TeamSPS presenting at Minnebar! Kisha brought some great observations on what works to make pairing work well, which is one of the most critical ways that developers learn. 💻

It is interesting to me that online events tend to have a structured method for facilitating Q&A from the audience. This is one of the things that seems to work way better in online events. Asking questions in an auditorium with 500 people is almost always a bust.

… due to other commitments I had to cut out after the first three talks. I really enjoyed this Minnebar and can’t wait to see the next iterations of events from minnestar like this! They even made the playlist available if you dug the tunes! 🎶

Minnebar 14 kicking off! Looking forward to learning a ton again this year! 💙 this event, organization, and the community that makes it!

Great energy going into Session 0 at Minnebar 14! Record registrations!

We have a growing, thriving technology community in the Twin Cities and Minnebar is an integral part of that community! I’ve been lucky to be involved with this organization since the beginning and love that SPS Commerce is a terabyte sponsor!

Good Session 0 at Minnebar 14 with a wake-up call from Sharon Kennedy Vickers on the issues that come from a lack of diversity in technology, and what we can do to improve as an ecosystem!

Good Minnebar open session on Product Management with Adrienne Peirce, Shawn Heller, and Jeremy Moede. Lot of knowledge sharing!

Excited for Minnedemo 30 tonight! And always proud to have SPS Commerce as a Terabyte sponsor!

The last time I saw my friend David Hussman we met at Red Wagon Pizza and enjoyed an extended evening of pepperoni pizza and several glasses of a delicious red wine. We initially sat inside to avoid some scattered rain, but then transitioned outside to enjoy a gorgeous evening, great wine and even better conversation. Like most times that David and I got together the conversation never had a gap and flowed all over the place.

I commented to David that he seemed remarkably well. It had been well over a year since David called to let me know about his cancer diagnosis. When he called he was talking weeks and months. Here we were drinking glasses of wine and laughing well over a year later. He was sharing stories of his recent trip to Italy with his family. It sounded amazing and I could almost be fooled into thinking that David wasn’t sick. But he definitely was.

I first met David when I was CTO for MarketWatch. One of the engineers on our team knew him and figured he could help us out with some of the things we were doing. I instantly liked David’s insight, his directness and ability to see through the messy stuff and get right to the problem.

David and I were able to combine forces several times over the next 25 years. We had what I would describe as a mutual mentor relationship. One of us would often ping the other with the vague request to get some “hang time” and talk through some topic that was on our mind.

David was always understated. His work to bring agile methods to companies was exceptional, and as a thought leader and speaker his stage was global. He presented at conferences around the world and brought a tremendous amount of energy and fun to the sessions. I enjoyed every talk I ever saw David give. There are dozens of them on YouTube if you never got the chance to see him present. I was really excited when he agreed to give the Keynote at Minnebar 9.

Often times I thought it would be fun to build something with David, maybe do a project or something. Both of us were always busy with family and work things that pushed that off. I tried to get him to join my book club at one point but he deferred, citing his busy travel schedule.

The last year I was able to connect with David on a more regular basis. A terminal cancer diagnosis provides some urgency. He approached his cancer with an amazing resilience. I can’t even imagine how hard such a thing is, but from what I could tell his approach to life made the time he got at the end so much better.

David was often referred to as The Dude, in an admirable reference to The Big Lebowski. He even coined his own law, Dude’s Law, that Value = Why / How. In life David always seemed to have a good handle on Why, and he kept his How pretty damn simple. The rest worked out as best as it can.

You will be sorely missed Dude! v5.6.50

Here are some additional items I’ve indexed remembering David.

• David’s CaringBridge Journal
• Honoring David Hussman at DevJam
• Obituary in Star Tribune
• Too Soon… by Anne Steiner
• Remembering David Hussman by Dan Bennett
• Dude, Mentor, Friend by Tara Swanson
• “I Dig The Great Minds Idea” by Ray Arell
• Remembering David Hussman at Mano a Mano
• Appreciating a Friend by Casey Rosenthal
• My Heroes by Robert Galen
• The Dude abides in Southwest Journal
• Coffee with Grief by Leah Cunningham

Today I went to my 13th Minnebar — I haven’t missed one yet! For the first time ever we had a blizzard to contend with. Usually Minnebar is competing with the first great days of spring. This year, we were worried if people could get to the event because of the snow. This was also the first Minnebar for our new Maria Ploessl, our new Executive Director, to take the lead on. The event went off great, with more coordination than the last couple of years.

The sessions I went to today at Minnebar.

• Computers Are Easy; People Are Hard with Bridget Kromhout
• Propelling More Women into the Ranks of Engineering Leadership with Ashley Monseth, Rebecca McCann-Young, Ethan Sommer, Cailin Wertish, and Millicent Walsh
• Blogging for Fun…..and Profit? with Chris Moffitt
• Web 3.0: Blockchain May Provide Us the Most Human Version of the Web with Matt Bauwens
• Pragmatic intro to functional programming with David Price
• Docker 101 with Rebecca McCann-Young
• Building Sandcastles with Leah Cunningham

Here are some pictures from some of the sessions I went to.

Session 0

• Punk Rock/Computing
  • Break the rules
  • Simple, fast
• Point of view is worth 50 IQ points - Alan Kaye

Minnebar 12 on Minnebar

• Random
• History
• Ideas on future opportunity

Zen and the Art of Agility

• Nice Sps plug
• Why agile?
• Culture > Strategy
• Why not time tracking?
  • Software is not deterministic
• Where is agile right? Predictive v Adaptive v Reactive. Also, very much cost of refactoring

Blockchains are coming!

• Quick overview of bitcoin but focusing more on applications of blockchain

Introduction to Functional Reactive Programming

• Reactive overview
• Functional overview
• Good summaries and examples of approach

So you don’t hire Jr. Devs? Tell me more

• Weird discussion.
• Totally missing the mark on negative unemployment.
• Commitment dialogue. Yikes.

Privacy for Everyone

• Fine session. Pretty basic advice.

Communicating When Stuff Is Going Wrong

• How to communicate bad stuff.
• This will be final update on this incident.
• Do not communicate time to repair. Don’t agree with that for production items.

I’ve recently put some thought into how tickets are managed for Minnebar and Minnedemo. I’ve been very close to these events for a long time, and on the board for several years now, while our ticketing process has remained relatively unchanged over that long time.

The Problems

Why spend cycles thinking about the ticketing issue? I think there are some large problems with the way that tickets are managed.

Timeliness

The ticketing process encourages people to act immediately upon issuance and get tickets since they will all be taken immediately. Often people will take a ticket before they have even made sure they can attend. This timeliness requirement unfairly penalizes people that are occupied and not watching Twitter at that exact moment.

Understanding Churn

The current process reduces our ability to understand how many people have stopped going to our events. We routinely see a high number of “first-time” attendees, and along with that a high amount of churn. Is the churn because people weren’t ready the second that tickets came out, or because they don’t want to come?

Redemption

Many tickets go unused. We manage around this by predicting what percentage of tickets will be unused, but it is more art than science. The rushed nature of ticketing may decrease redemption rate as people just jump on tickets as quick as possible.

Quantify Demand

All of these events “sell out” (to the extent a free event can sell out) within minutes. This removes our ability to know the true demand for the events. If 800 tickets are picked up within 15 minutes of release, how many people wanted to go? 900? 3,000? That is anyone’s guess.

Limitations

When considering how to better manage tickets, it is important to consider some limitations.

Identity Is Unknown

There are numerous ways to manage ticket redemption that would focus on reputation. Mainly this is a means to solve redemption and put rules in place such as not being allowed a ticket if you don’t use the last three tickets.

Cannot Be Complex

We’ve entertained some options that avoid identity and reputation but encourage careful assignment of tickets. The most commonly referenced one is to use some form of a cash deposit. For example, you would pay $5, $10 or $20 to get your ticket to the event and that money would be refunded back to you when you show up at the event. This would certainly reduce the number of unused tickets but at the cost of managing a significant amount of complexity and risk.

Requirements

Before looking at the proposal let’s recap from above what our requirements are:

1. The solution must not require managing identity. You cannot know a ticket holder from one event to another.
2. The solution would ideally allow us to understand how many people would like to come to an event.
3. The solution would be able to manage preferential access for certain groups.
4. The solution would allow for improving the precision of “no shows”.

It is important to note that while “no shows” are something to consider, I believe it is a lesser problem than understanding the true demand for the events, churn and making the ticketing process more equitable.

Proposal

Taking these objectives into place, I propose the following ticketing process.

Phase 1: Get in line!

First thing, get in line. Rather than distributing tickets in groups we propose everyone get in a line (or list) to attend. This line opens up at a prescribed date and time, and anyone and everyone that wants to come to the event would then get in line. The line will close at another prescribed time, but as long as the line is open more and, more people can get in line.

This line dampens the urgency to take immediate action. Please note though that Phase 3 does reward people for getting in line early. It is valuable to the organization to get a sense of demand quickly, so getting people in line sooner is a good thing. However, no matter when you get in line you may get a ticket.

Phase 2: Priority Access

Once the line is complete and closed we then deal with priority access. There are some groups that get priority access to the events and are guaranteed a ticket:

• Volunteers: Anyone volunteering at the event.
• Community Supporters: Individuals (not companies) in the community that have donated $100 in the last 12 months.
• Sponsors: Packages get different numbers of tickets. If you are in line under one of those slots you get a ticket.
• Students: We look to encourage high school students to attend our events, and wish to give them priority access.

Once these special groups have priority access, we’ve used some of the tickets and now have a smaller line.

Phase 3: Ticketing Groups

The remaining line is now divided into groups. This is where some further math and heuristics could be applied to better manage tickets over time. For now, just assume that all these numbers are potential variables and you could optimize the solution over time.

Take the remainder of the line, let’s say there are 1,000 people still left, and for easy math put them in 5 groups of 200 people.

Each one of these groups is then ticketed. Remember that these groups are in the order they got in line, so the early people are in the front and the last person to get in line is at the end in position 1,000.

We also at this point know how many tickets were assigned to priority access groups and can make a determination about their “no show” rate. Likely those groups have a very high redemption rate, so assume most are used. The remaining tickets will be assigned to the five groups of 200 people in a decreasing percentage. All of the people in group 1 get tickets. 70% of the people in group 2 get tickets. 40% of the people in group 3 get tickets and so on until we get to something like 10% of people in group 5 getting tickets.

Over time these groups may be able to provide more accurate data on redemption, and we may know that Group 1 people redeem tickets at a higher rate than Group 5 so we can assign more tickets in Group 5 knowing more will go unused.

Additionally, it is important that any tickets that get returned before the event, when people realize they cannot come and notify us of that, should be returned to the group it was assigned to. So, if a person in Group 3 returns there ticket, it should go to another random person in Group 3. This could be managed by creating different classes or types of tickets for each group. If there are no people left in that group without a ticket, like Group 1, then flow the returned ticket to the next group in line.

Summary

This may seem complex at first, but I think the implementation could be reasonable. Eventbrite could still be used to get in line but getting a “Line Ticket”. The list of registered email addresses could then be manipulated with a small program to do the rest.

I do think that this would meet our goals of:

1. Understanding true demand for the events.
2. Allowing special access to some groups.
3. More fairly assigning tickets to the remaining people.
4. Minimizing the urgency around ticketing.
5. Optimize “no show” management over time.

Very importantly this would also help us understand people that stop coming to events. If you get in line we know you want to come, but if you don’t get in line many times in a row you are deciding our events aren’t worthwhile and we’d like to know that.

If you have suggestions or comments contact me. If you would like to help solution this that would be great too!

Minnedemo 25 was last night, and it was fabulous. I’ve gone to all but a few Minnedemo events and realize that sometimes the demos are just a bit better than other times. Last nights was a great serving of everything that Minnedemo can be. We had very polished demos with clear paths to markets alongside passion projects. We had a team that was formed only five weeks prior at a hackathon. We even had the perennial bombed demo due to technical difficulties that still gets shown the warmth of the community.

Update (Feb 22): Tech.MN posted videos of all the demos.

Talkative Chef

A group of 8 women that met at Hack the Gap built this product in just the last few weeks. They started working on this concept and showed a pretty well put together alpha of that work. The product helps you cook and bake hands-free by using voice commands with your computer. It worked well, and it was impressive to me that it was all done in the browser. As soon as they showed it, I thought this should be an Alexa skill package, but they highlighted that they were doing it in the browser to make it accessible to a wider audience. It’s not clear to me that this is a company or if it’s just a hobby project, but the concept of hands-free guides makes a lot of sense and in more than just the kitchen. The same concept could apply to repair projects in the house and having a screen to show diagrams or pictures while you talk could be helpful as well. Cool idea, well executed, great demo and great to see an all-female team building this, and it coming from a hackathon.

VennPT

Interesting take on preparing physical therapy programs. They showed a platform that allowed a PT specialist to design a program and then assign it to their patients. Very similar in concept to what you would have a personal trainer do by building workouts and assigning them. Two unique features that hit me in the demo:

1. The ability to record on your mobile a brand new video and create a unique exercise just for this one person. This is probably a big deal with physical therapy where you might create a specific activity for someone and to be able just to record and produce it right away seems compelling.
2. Capability to export the assigned PT program using a text template into an EMR system makes sense for the therapist. I would imagine that is a significant time saving for them.

Inkit

This demo reminded me a bit of Twilio. Twilio took something old, plain old telephone service, and make it accessible via API’s and the cloud. Inkit feels similar in taking something old, direct mail, and making it accessible in the way that modern digital marketers think of the world. Makes sense to me but strikes me as a market with a lot of competition. Well done product and demo.

EnduraData

I was looking forward to this demo because it was the most technical of the bunch. EnduraData has software that moves large volumes of sensitive data between multiple locations and does it better, faster. You can buy expensive devices to do this, but their software delivers the same benefit. Unfortunately, to do the demo, they had a virtual machine in another country set up and were going to shuffle data around, and the WiFi in the room failed them. They were going to try showing a video as a backup, but that couldn’t work either. I was excited that this was the only demo of the night that was running Ubuntu, but bummed we didn’t get to see it.

Newt One

Newt One is a non-violent game concept where the characters only have a positive impact on the game environment. The concept was cool, the art and music were very nice, and it looked fun to play. We don’t get a lot of game demos at Minnedemo, so this was fun to see.

Trout Spotr

Trout Spotr stole the show and is one of those passion projects that I love to see at Minnedemo. The presenter started by saying “I built a website for my Dad.” and then went on to show how he used open data, various software packages and created a stunning website that allows you to find trout streams that are on public land. The visuals were well done using D3 and mashing up a lot of other web technology. The presenter also had a ton of energy and excitement. Great demo!

Player’s Health

Players Health has an interesting product that allows youth sports programs to deal with injury information in a much more sophisticated way. This demo opened the door to a problem that seems significant but underserved and showed a service that provides a lot of value to parents, coaches and even creates a data set that can be used to improve the youth sports world. I was impressed by the quality of the demo and that it appears to be serving a real need around injury management.

Proud to have SPS Commerce sponsoring @minnedemo 15! t.co/76ojdUIim…

Nice to see @hotlou demoing @unbenchable at @minnedemo 15!

Very impressive UI on Dash demo. Super polished.

Minnedemo 15 was great! t.co/5uAiuDgfo…

View from the balcony of Minnedemo January 2011!

My buddy Ira grabbed a photo of me with my spiffy MacBook Air at Minnedemo January 2011.

The next Minnedemo is now scheduled for May 7, 2009 at 6:00pm. It is free (as always), but registration is required so get signed up. There are 324 open tickets left at this point.

I’m a big fan of Minnedemo and find it a great place to connect with people and hear about some of the products and cool projects everyone is working on. Hope to see you there!

It seems the best way to stay updated on Minnedemo dates and news is via the Minnebar Twitter account.

The next Minnedemo is now scheduled for February 6, 2009 at 7:00pm. It is free (as always), but registration is required so go there and get signed up. There are about 260 open tickets left at this point.

Even though it is free that doesn’t mean you can leave your wallet at home. Intermedia Arts is the host for Minnedemo and they have fallen on some difficult times. There will be an opportunity to donate Intermedia Arts (read more about them) and I think the Minnedemo/Minnebar community should show its support with some donations.

I really enjoyed the last Minnedemo (at the same venue). It is a great chance to connect with a great group of local developers, entrepreneurs and a wide variety of other people – each of them very interesting!

Hope to see you there!

Update - January 25th

I didn’t do a good enough job looking through my calendar. It turns out we are going to be heading out of town on the morning on February 6th for a ski weekend up north. I’m going to miss this Minnedemo. Bummer. Hope everyone else has a great time!

I’m doing my Power WordPress presentation at Minnebar today. I decided to do the presentation today without any slides but instead give everyone handouts with the relevant tips & tricks. To share the wealth here are links to the PDF files for the three sections I’m covering, Performance, Plugin Review and SEO Basics.

Minnebar is approaching this weekend, May 10th! I’m really excited and I just couldn’t stand to not be presenting this year so I decided to put my name up and do a session on Power WordPress usage. I plan to hit on must-have plugins that can save you a ton of time as well as some great SEO tactics for driving more traffic to your site. It should be a lot of fun!

I also hope to get some feedback and talk a bit about doing a WordCamp in the fall.

Does anyone know where the reference to Mo’ started? Like, we got our mo’ in the second half. Our products really selling, we’ve got mo’. Hiring is a breeze because we have mo’! If your not following here mo’ is momentum. After leaving Minnedemo 3 a couple weeks ago, it was clear that the Minneapolis technology community is building mo’.

I’m a bit late in writing about Minnedemo 2. Graeme Thickens did a thorough job in his post. Minnedemo continued it’s template of 15-minute demo’s from a variety of people working on interesting things. Notable this time was the CrashPlan demo from Matthew Dornquast at Code42. I’ve seen CrashPlan several times and have followed it’s progression from the sidelines. The product has really expanded and I think that Code42’s recent additions focused on businesses (using the E word, enterprises) is really smart and smartly built. Fanchatter also had a cool demo, although I’d tweak the product here and there. I don’t think they are going to hit that uber-viral point as is. There were also demos from SOTAcomm, Wonderfile, Pokeware and Adaptive Avenue. I missed much of the last half chatting with people I ran into at Minnedemo.

There were approximately 300 people at Minnedemo and it was great to see so many familiar faces. Having at O’Garas Garage was great to accommodate the size of the crowd, but people need to be a bit more polite to the speakers. Shhhh…

I was surprised to hear an announcement of a Christmas Edition (December 6th! Mark your calendar!) of Minnedemo coming in just a couple of months. Yeah! See you all there!

See Minnedemo 2.

On my way to Minnedemo!

Open WiFi at O’Gara’s! Yeah!

Crashplan demo at Minnedemo!

FanChatter demo.

Leaving Minnedemo. Great night!

I’ve been using OpenID for a couple of weeks now, and I’m really impressed. I created an OpenID identity on MyOpenID a few months ago, but there was nothing to use it with so it just sat. In these few months though, there has been a lot of progress! Recently David Hansson was blogging about OpenID (excuse the Google cache link, David’s site is having issues) which peaked my interest again (I asked him about it in the interview with him at Minnebar –fast forward to 44:13 minutes). There are now a decent number of web properties that are using OpenID to manage authentication. What is OpenID?

I’m not going to write this when others have done it so well. Excerpt from ReadWriteWeb:

OpenID is an open, decentralized, free framework for user-centric digital identity. It is aimed at solving the problem of Web single sign-on. How does the problem of web single sign-on affect you? Well, if you struggle with keeping track of different usernames and passwords at different websites where you have an account, OpenID can help you. With OpenID you will be assigned a standard username (typically a URL or an i-name, similar to an email address) that you can use on all sites that support OpenID.

There is a wealth of information at the OpenID “How it works” page as well. If you insist on not wanting to read anything (and you likely wouldn’t have made it this far in this post if that were the case), Simon Willison did a nice screencast on using OpenID that is worth watching.

Where is the momentum?

OpenID is getting a surprising amount of support. There are now over one hundred sites, including some fairly large ones, that allow OpenID authentication. The list is growing daily with sites like Digg announcing they will be using OpenID. Microsoft is working to make OpenID and CardSpace work together. AOL has adopted OpenID and every AOL account now has OpenID capability (all 63 million of them!). Sun has announced support of OpenID. Mozilla has also announced that Firefox 3.0 will support OpenID. I’m a bit mystified at Google’s complete silence on this topic.

That is a lot of activity, and much more momentum than was ever enjoyed by passed failed attempts at single-sign-on on the web like Microsoft Passport (now Windows LiveID). The fact that OpenID is decentralized, free and open-source gives it a very good chance at making it.

Cool OpenID Stuff

Once you have an OpenID account using OpenID-enabled sites is a breeze. Here is my OpenID. I can go to any OpenID-enabled site and type in http://thingles.myopenid.com/ and I’m in. I could even make that my own website URL, but I haven’t found a need. Passwords become a thing of the past.

Having a centralized identity also opens up new capabilities. Jyte is a website that makes little sense without OpenID. Jyte is like Everybody Votes for Wii built on OpenID using the Web. See my Jyte page. What makes Jyte compelling is that identity is shared across OpenID sites. So, if I gave permission, another website could query Jyte, using my OpenID URI, and retrieve my information from Jyte to personalize my experience at the new site. Very cool! (And a little scary.)

ClaimID is another interesting idea around identity management. It uses the centralized identity of OpenID to allow you to claim ownership of URL’s. See my ClaimID page. It combines OpenID federation, with the MicroID (get the Wordpress plugin!) microformat (a topic worthy of another post) to allow you to verify ownership of URL’s and centralize this in one federated OpenID-enabled identity.

Hopes

I hope that OpenID continues to get adoption. Identity management is a big problem on the web, and everyone has a myriad of passwords. Additionally, it gets really annoying to have to retype your name, email, address, etc. OpenID has a great framework for selectively controlling the distribution of that information. It removes so much of the friction from both signing up for a new service, and returning to use it in the future.

I’m rather late doing my writeup on Minnebar 2007. I guess the advantage of being so late is that I get to reference all the great write-ups that other people have done about Minnebar 2007. Let me start by highlighting that Ben Edwards, Luke Francl and Dan Grigsby did an absolutely amazing, fantastic supercalifragilistic job of putting together Minnebar. It was simply stunning guys – and you’ve set an incredible bar to try to exceed next year.

Here is the only thing that is hard about Minnebar. Both this year and last year it happened to coincide with one of the first, really nice weekends of spring. It’s hard being a Minnesotan and foregoing one of those great days to hang out inside. However, you are handsomely rewarded for the tradeoff. I didn’t see a lot of the people I had invited. You all missed out!

This year was simply great. The attendance was nearly triple last year. There were so many people that I knew in attendance that I ended up not going to that many sessions. In addition to the folks I knew, there were a lot of new faces to meet. I didn’t do any formal presenting this year, but I did get asked to lead the Q&A session with David Heinemeier Hansson, the creator of Ruby on Rails. It was a fun time, David is a really cool guy and I liked much of what he had to say. Tim Elliott got a recording of the session, with David’s permission, and I’m putting a copy of that here for archival purposes, with permission from Tim. (How Creative Commons of us all.)

I also want to give a big thanks to the guys from ip:House who provided the free WiFi service for the event. It was simply stunning in quality and capability, and not a single hitch the whole day. Great job guys!

I’m already looking forward to the next Minnedemo, and the next Minnebar in 2008!

Spring is here, and along with it is the 2nd annual Minnebar “unconference”. Reserve the date now and block out April 21st on your calendar. Yes it’s a Saturday, and it’s going to be a nice day in early spring, but it’s a great time and you’ll learn a lot and meet some great people. Go to the site and sign up on the wikipage now.

If you are curious, Minnebar is the close relative of Minnedemo. Minnedemo is focused on demo’s and occurs twice a year, just for an evening. The most recent one was the Holiday Minnedemo. Minnebar is a complete conference and is focused on topics, taking a full day.

Minneapolis is becoming a much cooler place to be a techie geek, startup business sort of guy. Thanks to the hard work of a very small group of people last year Minneapolis had it’s first ever minnebar. MinneBar is a BarCamp event, also known as an “unconference”. The idea is simple, a bunch of people of like interests (in this case all things geek) convene on one spot and self-organize into a worthwhile conference. It’s like wiki meets conference.

Anyway, the 2nd edition of the more frequent and shorter minnedemo has been scheduled for December 11th at Acadia Cafe.

Minnedemo is different than minnebar in that it’s shorter, somewhat more social, and features short demos rather than longer form presentations. I missed the first one due to a business trip, but I’m definitely going to be at the 2nd edition!

Check it out, sign up, and meet some great people. Plus, Road Sign Math is a sponsor. :-)