Maybe I Will Try This Twitter Thing

T-shirts never expire.

That is all.

After Much Deliberation

This kitten with no name is now known as Scarlett:



My kitten is still awesome, still named Ripley and still named after Sigourney Weaver's character from Alien and Aliens.



So. Cute.

And Now For Something Completely Different

Meet Ripley and the yet-to-be-named-other-kitten. Ripley is the Tortie and YTBNOK is the Torbie. They came to live with us on Sunday.

This Tops The Economist

So, last year I was reading The Economist and noticed that Vijay Vaitheeswaran credited the organizers of Science Foo Camp as having been a source of inspiration for his article Something new under the sun. Seeing something I've worked hard to make happen in the pages of The Economist was.... Well, let's just say thrilled is not the word. I'm not sure ecstatic cuts it either. Sadly, the note doesn't appear in the online edition, but I can bust out hard copy for you anytime you'd like.

Then Paul Biondich of the OpenMRS project was kind enough to send along this article and this podcast from the BBC, the latter of which mentions Summer of Code as key source of developers for the project.

Dude. The BBC. Just when you thought nothing could top The Economist.

Nothing to Fear

I guess this is growing up.

It's better to be home, but it was good to be away. One of the lovely side effects of business travel to a far away place is ample hours for reading. I absolutely went to town. Two and a half books on marketing (two not deeply satisfying, but many useful bits all around), Marguerite of Navarre's The Heptameron and 1984. I'd been wanting to read both for years. I'll pause here to allow time for all of you to gasp about the fact that I had yet to read 1984. I'd also never read Kurt Vonnegut's Galapagos until a month and a half ago, and Cat's Cradle before that, but no Vonnegut before or since. I've decided that my paltry knowledge of literature that is not early American and British through Virginia Wolfe can no longer go unattended, so instead of staying up late on IRC I've been pulling the greats off the shelf. I digress.

1984 was, as most will no doubt agree, an amazing novel. I started reading it at 20:00 and went to sleep at 3:00 the next morning. I'd seen the film when I was younger and just skipped the novel for years, for no good particularly good reasons. Something to do with Aldous Huxley, audio books and being generally freaked out by John Hurt. Long story, I'll tell you over a beer.

I had not counted on the excruciating longness of my layovers in Heathrow and Cape Town. When the travel agent tells you that two seven hour layovers are going to lower your flight costs by over 10,000 USD, you accept that the journey was already going to suck, so how bad can a layover here and there be? There's always the chance to pick up the British edition of The Economist, a Hello Magazine, some crisps for Ben and to eat something that's actually health at giraffe in Terminal 1. I slept on the planes for most of my flights, save five hours on the way home, so my time in airports was spent book in hand. Nights in Durban were largely spent reading to the roar of the Indian Ocean, accompanied by massive lightning storms more than half the time. Spectacular.

So, 1984. You've all already read it. Probably. The "do it to Julia, not to me" that's been blazing somewhere in the back of my brain for the last 20 odd years finally makes sense. Finely crafted work, that. Not a lot of other surprises, though.

Now that I've had some time to mull it over, the same thing comes back to me over and over again. The power of fear. A good friend of mine said it best: you're afraid of what will happen if you say something, so it is easier to say nothing at all. Or to do nothing.

I didn't do much while I was in Durban, and spent 99% of my time in the vicinity of tourist-strip-central-by-the-beach. So many people reminded me not to go anywhere by myself, to be on my guard and all that. I felt ridiculous being herded about the entry sidewalks and into taxis. I resisted clothes shopping since it would prove to be some intense affair where I'd need to have someone from the hotel come with me to make sure that I'd be all right at the shopping mall. (Maybe if I'd thought it through, I'd have seen it as an opportunity to inject some funds into the local economy for provision of excellent service, but I'm just not into being waited on in that way.)

I pride myself on not being the average tourist. When I visited Copenhagen to speak at Danish Linux Forum 2007, I touched down and there were riots in the city proper. I got the story later from my local anthropological expert and will be pleased to tell anyone who cares to listen the tales of woe of Copenhagen's squatting anarchists. Gotta love the Danes. Great shawarma and pubs, too. I left a 5 real note in one of them that I intend to visit again one day.

The riots continued throughout the conference, dying down and then reappearing elsewhere. The students I hung out with wanted to know if I was afraid to walk back downtown from the university given that there were riots and we might run into them. I told them they could no doubt be avoided and started walking. The next day the anthropologist asked if I was afraid to visit Christiana. I wasn't. We went. I got the t-shirt.

Plus, as can likely be deduced from above, I have also successfully navigated the wilds of Brasil and returned unscathed. Everyone told me to be worried about going there, too. My hosts wouldn't let me go downtown when a festival was on, but I wonder if that had more to do with dangerous fleshy bits on display than dangerous people in the crowds. They assured me it was the latter, and it would have offended them to ask about the former, so I didn't.

I still can't believe I got an escort to the convenience store a block and a half from the hotel by a security guard, one who jokingly and freely admitted that "only God could keep [me] safe." I also anticipated everything he said about when to cross the street to get away from parked cars with people in them, when he felt my pace should speed up or slow, when to cross the street. I know how to not behave like a target.

I confirmed with various locals over various breakfasts: you're a tourist, you're a target. How this is different than anywhere else, I remain unsure. Ben's wallet was nearly stolen while we were in Rome.

The only reason I accepted the escort and all the other fuss is my voice, which immediately betrays me away as a foreigner, likely American. And minimum wage is 225 USD per month, assuming you're employed.

When I went to the beach, I went with two friends (which is probably just a sane thing to do anyway for happiness reasons), Ellen Ball and the aforementioned James Arbaugh. Just as we got back to the hotel, he mentioned that people had warned him about how dangerous it was in South Africa. He smiled thinly, but not unkindly, and said, "I live in Haiti, how bad can it really be?"

Indeed.

How bad can it really be? I know people in South Africa are poor, some of them painfully so. 25% of them have HIV. Desperation is the mother of many inventions, not all of them benign or benevolent.

But here's the thing. I was never actually afraid. Maybe that's just utter naivete on my part. The worst thing that happened to me when I went out for dinner, all alone into the big scary world, was having to overpay for cab fare. I didn't walk, though, even though I'd done it the night before with a group and I certainly had the energy to do it again. So maybe I was afraid. I suppose, in this instance, there's something to be said for the beauty of calling it not fear but pragmatism. Healthy levels of caution. A prudent choice.

I think I felt more rubbed raw by all the warnings than I felt worried that something terrible would happen. Then again, these warning always grate. The well intentioned who mentioned that I might be kidnapped in Brasil. (I wasn't.) I've always wanted to go to Haiti. No one supports this idea. My friend, ex-Army, told me he wouldn't go with me because he'd "been there with a gun and couldn't protect [himself]."

But James said I could visit and all I can think is "this is my chance to finally do this." Even though I have seen signs in US airports for as long as I can remember that state that the Federal Aviation Administration or some such administrative body has determined Port au Prince Airport, Haiti to be unsound in particular technical jargon. But people fly into and out of there and apparently they don't all die. I'm told I should be terrified to go to this place. That's just it, I'm not.

I spent last week with a whole bunch of young, idealistic hackers and informatics professionals. These folks are the real deal: living in Africa (or Haiti), caring for the health needs of the poorest of the poor. Some would call this the lord's work. They're not from Africa and are varying degrees of pale, or deeply sunburned. They seem to do just fine. What am I supposed to be afraid of?

Then again, it seems imprudent to risk my life by going to the poorest country on planet Earth. I'm getting married in six months. Ben doesn't want me to go to Haiti (and most would argue rightfully so). I think that there's a time and a place for everything, and it's called college. (Or just after.) That time for me has passed. Now I'm thinking about being somebody's Mom. In a few years.

Speaking of growing up and the importance of family and all that...

Cousin, you emailed me and I lost your mail. Please resend it. I would really love to talk to you.

I'm going to go read some more Vonnegut. Any author suggestions folks?

Notes from South Africa, Volume 2

My keynote this morning went absolutely fantastically; I couldn't be more pleased. I had about 100 people in the audience - 25% of the conference attendees - and afterwards I had multiple people grab me in the hallway to tell me how much they enjoyed it and how useful the material was. Woo-hoo! Today is a very good day.

It's also the last day of the OpenMRS Implementers Meeting and HISA 2008, and I'll be heading home tomorrow morning. The whole crew from Regenstrief is heading out tonight, but I think some of the Partners in Health folks will be sticking around, so I'm looking forward to a beer or two with them. I'm even kinda sorta caught up on email, so next week shouldn't prove to be too insane.

Luggage still has not arrived. I am somehow not surprised given that a plane overran the runway at Durban airport on Wednesday. That fact combined with my having begun my journey on United pretty much leaves me suspecting that I may not see that suitcase for several more days, and there's a part of me that wonders if it's gone forever. I sure hope not - my favorite jeans and, in fact, most of my decent wardrobe was in there.

I didn't go buy clothes, though. The hotel staff offered to drive me into town several times, but I really own enough clothing and everything I bought when my luggage went missing in Brasil is still sitting in closet, unworn since my return. I'm too sentimental to it off to the Goodwill. Just seems like a waste, even at a 7 Rand / 1 US Dollar exchange rate. I may decide that was a supremely bad call when Ben comes to pick me up at SFO and I'm wearing the same outfit I was wearing a week ago. I am so looking forward to a change of clothes.

I ventured down to the beach briefly and splashed about a bit in the ocean. The recent storms have really made the waves huge and all the freighters I saw far out on the horizon on Monday night have moved in much closer to shore. The lights out on the water in the evenings have been a truly beautiful sight, and watching these multi-ton ships get tossed around so easily is quite the reminder of the awesome power of nature. Note that I didn't notice the warning sign letting people know that "shark nats" had been taken down due to the weather until I was on my way back from the beach. Ahem.

I have some more random observations about my experiences in Durban, but as I've managed to spend the vast majority of my time in the hotel, with a brief jaunt to the beach, the casino down the way about 3 km and the convenience store a block and a half away, I naturally feel like they're not quite representative. Oh yes, and the drive through town to get here.

When I arrived in Durban I'd missed my connecting flight from Johannesburg (Jo'burg if you're a native), so the driver that had been arranged for me was no longer waiting. I tried calling a few folks but had no luck getting through, and I really don't believe the helpful pre-recorded operator lady who told me repeatedly "the number you have dialed does not exist." The number most certainly exists. I was reading it. Whether or not I dialed it properly, who can say, but I tried every permutation I could think of and no luck.

Failing that, I wandered out to the curb wondering what the heck to do, since I'd been warned that hopping into a taxi when you're a tourist, not so much. I finally asked an older lady who was also waiting curbside what she suggested, and she directed me to the shared shuttle service and said it was safe enough. She then told me to just stay away from the blacks. Um. Wow. She seemed so sweet and gentle. Yuck. Generation gap, I hope, not that that's anything like an excuse. Her advice on transportation, though, proved quite good; I just wish she had been able to deliver it without the accompanying bile.

I cruised into Durban with two gentlemen heading to the hotels by the beach and two women heading back to their apartment complexes downtown. I'd been expecting much more evidence of poverty, but if the areas we drove through are any indication it's not that bad in Durban. Sure, every single apartment complex - and there are a lot of them, all clustered together and with romantic names like Sahara Sands - has heavy metal security doors on it and the lower floors have bars on the windows, but that's hardly worse than anything I've seen in the "wrong" neighborhoods in San Jose. There were the usual stores selling hopelessly unfashionable furniture. Not a single electronics/Fry's/Best Buy type store in sight. In fact, not much of anything but housing in sight, some building proudly advertising the security services they offered to their residents with huge signs outside.

Within a few blocks the neighborhood got considerably, though the bars remained on many windows and doorways. There were suddenly upscale department stores with huge perfume displays right inside the doors. All the department stores had names I didn't recognize and but I haven't found someone to ask if they're locally owned or part of a huge (multi)national conglomerate. The streets seemed much cleaner, too, though I have to say that there are more rubbish bins around this area than I've seen in any American city. Then again I am in a tourist area at the moment.

American brands don't seem to have really penetrated this market, with the notable exception of the three KFCs I saw downtown on my drive in from the airport. There was also a Nando's downtown and in the food court of the casino, though I haven't made my way there yet. Maybe tonight. Nando's is not to be missed, wherever you might find it.

If I was looking for an answer to the where the poverty problem comes from, I figured it out pretty quickly after talking to one of the door attendants at the hotel, which is supposed to be quite posh if you believe their website. Not that I've ever seen a website claim that their property is any way suboptimal, but this place just doesn't seem all that posh, rooms-wise. There are, however, two pools on the pool deck level, one of which overlooks the ocean. Location, location, location.

I digress. I asked Dennis, said doorman, how the place treated the staff, since I'd seen more than one upbraiding that didn't seem warranted. (Isn't that supposed to happen away from the customers, anyway?) He said the hotel wasn't great, but it wasn't bad. His take home after an 8 hour day is 96 Rand. Holy. Crap. That means that this gentleman has to work more than an hour to purchase one fo the hotel's 14 Rand Caffiene Free Tabs. No doubt things are less expensive away from the hotel, but holy. crap. I wonder how much of the staff's ability just to live is based on tips. Apparently minimum wage in South Africa is 1800 Rand per month, which everyone acknowledges is not enough to live on, and unemployment is a real problem.

According to all the magazines that have been left around the hotel, a major part of the South African economy is tourism. I'm sure it is, but, erm, I had to have a security guard walk me the block and half to the ATM at the convenience store because the front desk wouldn't let me go unescorted. I really didn't feel afraid at any time, but I'm also not necessarily chomping at the bit to return here as a tourist either following that experience. Apparently one of my colleagues at the conference was forbidden to leave the hotel by the Manager on Duty, even though she just wanted to take a brief walk to get some air. Hrm.

The food here has been amazing, even moreso since it was conference food. If I'm remembering the conversation I had with my hosts correctly, South Africa has the largest Indian population outside of India, and we've been treated to out of this world chicken curries and briyani and naan and these amazing chutneys all week. Samosas to just die for, with spicy sauces that are actually spicy. Truly sumptuous fare. Hence no need yet for Nando's, but with close of conference the free cuisine extravaganza has concluded.

I am so happy I came to this conference. It's amazing to see the idealism I so often associate with Open Source made manifest in such an obvious way. Every single person I've spent time with this week is dedicated to bettering things for the poorest of the poor, or as one gentlemen put it so well, "the currency of our transactions is the number of lives we save." I am so inspired, and I am so incredibly thrilled that they felt my thoughts on community building were useful and would be helpful to them long after they returned home.

Today is a very good day. Now I'm going to make it even better by hitting the Nando's.

Notes from South Africa

I'm currently in South Africa at the HISA 2008 Conference, where I'm helping to facilitate the OpenMRS Developers Track. I'll also be giving a keynote on Friday morning on Creating Sustainable Collaborative Communities: Lessons Learned from Google Summer of Code™. I'm incredibly excited to be here for many reasons: first solo keynote, first OpenMRS Developers Meeting I've attended, first time in Africa, and my first time getting to deeply engage with the Open Source community working in the bioinformatics and health care space. I'm also thrilled because the talk I'm giving will be the first time I'll be exploring some of the collective wisdom I've gleaned from working with over 175 projects with a wider audience; it feels like a great way to give back to the community, particularly since this community is focused on providing adequate patient care for those with HIV in the developing world.

This afternoon the Dev Track is purely open space, so I've had a few minutes to catch up on email and to update the old blog. July is usually the busiest month for the Open Source Team and preparing for this conference, OSCON, and the GHOP Awards Ceremony, all while onboarding a new hire for my team has kept me quite busy. There's the usual care and feeding of Summer of Code, too, but we have a great bunch of students this year, as usual, and things have been pretty smooth if hectic. It's how we roll....

I've been in town since Monday afternoon and it's been quite the experience thus far. I'd like to thank Chris Seebregts and Carl Fourie from the Program Committee for inviting me to present here, as well as the OpenMRS team for the honor of helping them come together and get things done. It's only day two of the conference, and things are really popping. With an endless supply of coffee and snacks and so many passionate people working together on common problems, the buzz in here is just incredible. There are still at least 50 people in here even though the main conference sessions closed down an hour ago, all of them hacking away, whiteboard prototyping, sharing ideas and excitement. The projects here - OpenMRS, Partners in Health, OASIS (no, not the standards body; they're looking for a new name :), Mirth, Baobab, inSTEDD - have decided to use this time to work on project interoperabilty challenges, and the few Google stickers I brought with me have made great prizes for some of our ice breaker sessions. The OpenMRS guys are running a parallel bug squash for their 1.3 Release Candidate. We've even got a documentary filmmaker here observing the track and interviewing individual developers and teams about their processes. The Dev Track room is definitely the place to be.

So that's up to the minute HISA 2008. Here are some general thoughts on my time thus far in South Africa.

The good

Well, all of the above really. It's always nice to see Paul, Shaun, Ben, Brian, Darius and Justin. The thing that really sticks out in my mind so far, though, is how little ego seems to be a driver in this particular set of Open Source communities. I'd immediately noticed that aspect about the OpenMRS folks their approach resonates throughout this room. There's little if any acknowledgement of rank and nary a sniff of my code is bigger than your code. Very enjoyable, collegiate vibe. Also, and it might be just that it's an informatics conference rather than the usual Open Source conference, but there are many women here, several of them coders. Very refreshing.

I've had the chance to sit down with a lot of folks and help them brainstorm about their ideas. Shared a coffee with Dykki Settle of the Capacity Project and kicked around ideas for how to build developer communities in Africa by targeting students. The work their group is doing to create software that allows Health Ministries better manage their health care worker deployments is an interesting parallel to the work done by all the health care hackers I usually hang out with, who are focused on deploying patient care systems at the clinic level. The Capacity Project has already released all their code as Open Source; they're already on their 3.0 release. I've also spent some quality time with James Arbaugh of the Albert Schweitzer Hospital in Haiti, learning more about their OpenMRS installation. James is a bug filing machine. Tomorrow he'll speak, along with OpenMRS implementers from Kenya, Rwanda, Tanzania and Uganda. There are folks here from places like the WHO and the Rockefeller Foundation - definitely not your typical Open Source conference - and they're also totally down to earth, hanging out and having beers.

The bad

Either United or South African Airways lost one of my bags, which was of course the bag that had 99% of my clothing. The gift of an OpenMRS shirt has helped ease the pain, but if my suitcase doesn't turn up tomorrow I'm going to have to break down and go buy some clothes. It's been rainy and rather dreary for the past two days, too. I'm taking comfort in the fact that I don't need to miss my swimsuit since there's no chance to visit the beach in this weather, even though it's less than 1 km away. I have an awesome view of it from my hotel room window, and I've fallen asleep to sound of the Indian Ocean and the rain every night. So it's hardly that bad.

Speaking of rain and the suboptimal, every time I travel I'm reminded of how sheltered Americans are regarding the rest of the world. I turned on the TV shortly after arrival and was greeted by in-depth coverage of the current flooding in Iowa, though I'm quite confident that I've never seen such a mention on CNN about South Africa being the 30th driest country in the world. Fortunately, the government provided a handy sign that I spied on my way from Durban International Airport, so I can certainly count this trip as educational. I've been reading a book on brand marketing recently and the authors remarked on the changes brought to the American life by increased travel, particularly to Europe. I hope that this trend continues and my country becomes more self-aware, world-aware and cosmopolitan.

The amazing

I've heard a lot from the OpenMRS folks about their installation in Eldoret, Kenya, but I just learned from Ben that they've recently seen a 100% success rate in their efforts to prevent HIV transmission from mother to child during pregnancy. That's right, provided a mother does not subsequently breast feed her infant, there is a 100% chance her baby will be born HIV negative. These folks don't rest on their laurels, though; Paul is quick to point out that mission #2 is to make sure these children don't become orphans.

Wow. I am so happy that I can spend a week with these folks helping them achieve these goals together. I've seen a lot of talk about analyzing Summer of Code as a model for incentivizing student developers and several folks have posed the question if students can be motivated by social justice and social welfare causes instead of cash. I certainly can't see why not; I'm absolutely awed by the passion of every person in this room for what they do. That being said, human beings have been analyzing what the essence of love and passion is and how they are created between two human beings for as long at least as long as we have written records, and I think we're no closer to finding the answer about what makes a person passionate about a cause than we are to understanding how we come together with our life partners. Passion, it would seem, must be inspired, but certainly it has to find fertile ground or the most inspiring cause won't motivate and the greatest of rhetoric will fail to sway.

We've got a full slate the rest of the week and I head back on Saturday. If I have enough time I'll be posting updates from the Dev Track and the feedback I receive on my talk.

Now if only I'd thought about building enough time into this trip to go on safari and finally get the chance to see a giraffe up close and personal. That's definitely on the list for my next visit to New Zealand. Sure it's a zoo, but you actually get to feed the giraffes. Awesome.