It's funny to receive enquiries about my well-being when my blogging gets light. I'm OK, people! I know I've recently sent out some abstract-worded mails about various things which might reflect some bad vibes on my side, but really, as usual, it's all in the eye of the beholder. Oh yes, I'm a grumpy old man, but that ain't real news for anyone who knows me.

I have been doing some new stuff lately, but I am also still trying to sort out the mess left behind when neglecting normal life for some weeks. So pardon me for my silence, and thank you for your polite enquiries.

Edd's emotional post of today left me with a strong resonating "Yes".

I was trying to write up some report of the GetTogether, and then I got struck by some weird thought. I really received way too much "thank you" mails, on- and offlist, and people showed up to me just before leaving, shaking hands and patting my back - which was fun and embarrassing at the same time. If you have so much fun organizing such a thing, that's a reward on its own. Seeing happy people makes one happy.

When carefully reading (now that I have time again) comments, reports, and various other sorts of outcome of the past few days of community buzz, something struck me, though. Some people, if not most, apparently were just happy to be part of all this, and enjoyed meeting peers F2F big time. While the GT is all about people, I strongly believe it's the "we"-effect which creates the buzz, in a sense that people feel part of something, some larger-than-life thing. So it feels good seeing people state happily they felt part of something good.

I had this discussion with Gianugo however during the last night about "why does someone contributes to open source", and the two basic reasons that remained where "altruism" and "ego boost". I strongly believe that it's always a combination of both, and you have two brands of them: 70/30 vs 30/70 (%). One hopes somehow that most people reside in the 70/30 category, and wouldn't feel ashamed to admit that they are regarded as "open source superstars" because there's a community around them, playing the willful victim and audience. A bit like an actor which needs his stage (and audience) to fully become what he is. So, there's 30/70 peeps as well. In an ideal Darwinistic environment, you'll have both and they will need to live with each other.

That's one of the reasons why the concept of credits is so important in the open source community world. The 70/30 peeps like being rewarded by the 30/70 peeps, and one of the currencies used in such transactions is the "credit". Even if the 30/70'ers can do a better job at advocating something (they have more passion, because of the ego thing), I feel a bit saddened to see some 70/30'ers (and their work) now silently being ignored, by lack of credits. Or even worse, by ignoring their work, or their part of the job. Instead, the 30/70'er presents himself as being in the center of what happened.

There's so much nuances one can put in email conversations, but the aspect of things not being mentioned now sometimes learns me more about how people care about things, than things effectively being mentioned. Oh well, time to hit bed, I assume.

OK - I must admit I haven't been blogging much about the GetTogether today, basically bacause I was kind of absorbed with other things (like fighting with the venue about a coffee break they forgot), and also because I was the victim of a new way to attend conferences. As people will find out, we have been creating notes as we went along, using some cool new tools, like SubEthaEdit, IRC and the Wiki. Inspired by our collaboration-tools-Meister Bertrand, many of us were listening to speeches like in this screenshot.

You see real-life participants, and digital attendees chatting on IRC, Bertrand, Jeremy, Stefano and Rogier working on a summary of the WebDAV talk, while stuff is being put on the Wiki as the talk is progressing. I must say it add some particular sense to the day, which was special already.

My blogging has been light, since I needed to go and fetch stuff for tomorrow, the big day. I had the pleasant company of Pier and Massimo to do this. We now have handouts, t-shirts, a piano (?) and some hundreds meters of power extension cords. Pier learned me some Japanese, and I explained about the lack of vowels in Dutch. It took me a while, since vowel sounds pretty bad with a Dutch accent. :-)

8:20AM on Monday morning, and Marc and I just got WiFi and the network running. So I guess we're all set for the Hackathon day. Given the belated hour yesterday night, some peeps will have small eyes for sure.

We're 34 now, plenty of familiar faces and some new ones as well. On the picture, there's Stefano explaining the Real Blocks stuff. Pier is walking around taking pictures, as plenty of others are doing. Marc, Bertrand and Christian start to ask questions and picking Stefano's thoughts.