(This is a repost of my entry "Be sure to wear a flower in your hair" to the South African Tech Leader technology group blog.  My next post, What is a geek?, has just been posted there, if you want to read it before a week or two from now when I'll repost it here.)

It’s really hard to summarise the experience of a first visit to San Francisco, assuming you’re at least somewhat a technology geek. San Francisco (and by that, one generally means the San Francisco Bay Area) is modern technology’s birthplace and still its hometown.

Xerox PARC (as in Palo Alto Research Centre) either created or popularised implementations of modern computing aspects such as the mouse, laser printers, Ethernet, GUI/WIMP interfaces, Object-Oriented Programming with the Smalltalk programming language, and the Integrated Development Environment. The Bay Area is home to the headquarters of technology giants such as Apple, Cisco, eBay, Google, Oracle, Sun Microsystems, and Yahoo!, as well as upstarts like Facebook, Mint.com, and SugarCRM. (And SynthaSite, of course.)

At times during my visit the technology industry seemed entirely pervasive — whether it was randomly walking past three people in the street arguing the merits of various memory allocation techniques (I kid you not) or hearing that one of your colleagues just moved into the apartment the CEO of a popular social media startup just moved out of. It is hard not to let your imagination loose with the idea of what can be achieved here, especially after seeing over 3000 developers, a large portion of them probably local to the area and most certainly at least as geeky as I am, at Google’s I/O conference. (I posted quite extensively about my Google I/O trip on my personal blog, if you want to check it out.)

If I sound a bit in love, it’s because I am. I challenge anyone in our industry to somehow not be a little in love with the vibe and pace and sense of belonging you will find in San Francisco. But this isn’t really about technology in San Francisco — it’s about it in South Africa.

Romance novels suggest that sometimes you need to discover (or be reminded of) what is out there to realise quite what you have, that while you find that there’s a lot of prettiness out there, you will also discover that there have been and always will be many and unassailable reasons for you being with the one you’re with.

I needed that a bit with South Africa. I’ve always wanted to be here for the long run, but it has been hard not to get worn down little by little over the past few years by the scarcity of interesting highly-skilled work and the similar scarcity of ambition in South African technology companies. Now, I have an updated and more accurate idea of what is out there, and while South Africa does fair poorly in some comparisons, there are other, more important, aspects to take into consideration. And those mean that leaving it to find some technology heaven elsewhere sounds like a bad swap.

And it’s not like you have to be in San Francisco to wear a flower in your hair — you can experience and help create your own slice of the San Franciscan vibe wherever you are. All it really takes is creating or finding a workplace you can be passionate about using technologies you’re passionate about with people who share that passion (am I saying “passion” enough?), and finding and building a community of similarly technology obsessed people who can help you, and who you can help, and to make you feel like you’re not alone (and who you can make dinner conversation with without resorting to the weather).

I lucked out on the first one — at SynthaSite I have an ambitious company that knows how to treat their employees well, great colleagues, and challenging work — and a pantry full of snacks, lunches materialising daily at my desk, games consoles, and 40-inch TVs. And there are at least a few similarly-enlightened workplaces around, and more can be created.

I already know a number of geeks who’d give a good argument on the merits of various memory allocation techniques. It takes work, but through efforts like GeekDinner and StarCamp, we come to know more, and different, people and benefit from that meeting as they introduce us to new perspectives and, hopefully, shake our preconceptions. And not only come to know people, but also come to know more about our trade through presentations and less formal conversations sparked by an interest that perhaps we didn’t know we had before others introduced the topic.

While it is easy to moan about the lacks we have here, it seems that by our attitudes and our actions we can create an ever-increasing slice of that seemingly far-away vibe. As we kick off planning for the next StarCamp in Cape Town, and a national web technology conference, I’m hoping we will find positive attitudes and actions in finding co-organisers, presenters, sponsors, and venues.

One of my favourite South African open source enterprises is translate.org.za - which, amongst other great things, is behind two good pieces of (Python) software - Translate Toolkit (a library of converters between different translation formats) and Pootle (a web app for people to do translations through).

Those two pieces of software are potential targets for those entering Google Summer of Code 2008 - they're one of 175 organisations/projects chosen out of 500 applications.  And looking at the high-quality project ideas page they put together, you can see why their application was successful.

The translate.org.za people are also looking to hire a Python developer in Pretoria - I doubt there are all that many opportunities to work full-time on an open source project in South Africa (let alone in Python), so hopefully they'll find a good match.

This makes South Africa being represented as both student and mentoring organisation in Google Summer of Code (and, I'm guessing, there'll be a mentor from translate.org.za this year too), as well as a finalist in the Google Highly Open Participation Contest all in the past year and a bit...

How cool is this - a South African (Capetonian, at that) student, Federico Lorenzi, placed in the top 10 of the first Google Highly Open Participation Contest.  Federico has good taste - he likes FreeBSD and Python - and worked on the MoinMoin wiki project for the contest.

The Google Highly Open Participation Contest is a way to introduce pre-university students to the world of open source, and to reward the contributions made by these students.  The winners get flown over to Google's Mountain View headquarters for a prize-giving.

In conjunction with Charl van Niekerk's Google Summer of Code participation, the fact that South Africa has a wealth of technical talent is probably reaching many more ears.  (I'm sure Google isn't surprised - I know a few South Africans doing good work there.)

One of the interesting upcoming challenges at SynthaSite is the migration of parts of the company to San Francisco, while leaving what is currently the bulk of (and, interestingly, the newest additions to) the company behind.

But most of those challenges are around "soft" issues like effective communication and retention of culture, and while I hope to be able to figure out important lessons around that in future, now I mostly want to express my surprise at how little the technology - hardware, software, and network - stands in the way of this move.

When the move was first discussed (admittedly only days after I arrived), I was told I'd probably need to go over to San Francisco for a few weeks to help the rest of the team set up.  And, well, that sounded about right.  As a company that develops software as one of its main functions, and as a company that needs accurate business information for business development, "customers" (ie, people who sign up for free to create their own web sites), and "sales leads" (ie, people who we want to sign up for free to create their own web sites), and as a company that has particular needs in terms of informing and satisfying investors, we need a lot of tools.

Tools for project management, issue management, support, team collaboration, revision control, building, testing, deploying, scheduling, mail, company information and documentation, and plain old file sharing.  And that's just the stuff I use on a daily basis.  Business also has and needs tools.

However, it seems that that estimate of a few weeks was way off.  Being able to work effectively from an office in San Francisco and being able to work effectively from your home in Cape Town and being able to work effectively from wherever you find yourself aren't particularly different. 

Because we've had people who've had to travel a lot, and because we have people who would rather work from home and actually see their kids (whether human or canine) every once in a while, we're almost entirely ready for this change - almost all of our tools are already not in our Cape Town office.

So, while I might like a chance to see the new offices and catch a conference (The Python community conference, PyCon, is in Chicago roughly around the time we'll be setting up offices, after all), there's not much I need beyond a IP-over-KVM system and one (or, at a stretch, two) servers for things that need to be in the office (like a file and backup server), and I can do the whole thing from Cape Town.

This situation is just a fortuitous coincidence - the attitude towards tools at SynthaSite has always seemed refreshing and enlightened.  If it's needed, get it.  If it can be externally managed, do that.  I get the sense that the few tools that aren't externally managed are being eyed carefully every once in a while for potential replacement or a move to a managed solution (much like what we did with our support system).

(Of course, to those from outside South Africa, this may come across as absurd or just obvious.  Having been stuck with poor connectivity in the past, it's never seemed reasonable to rely on external, especially international, services.  And still being stuck with pretty poor connectivity, we can't reasonably host tools in South Africa for our international team mates.)

I was happy to hear that Translate.org.za has, very deservedly, won an award given by the Pan South African Language Board - for their contribution to multilingualism.

It's too easy for people - especially developers - to judge the state of South Africa's contribution to the Free Software movement in terms of code - projects such as OpenLab, Chisimba, and KnowledgeTree made primarily by South African (and African) developers.  However, Translate.org.za is probably better known than all of these.

Not that Translate.org.za hasn't delivered code - Pootle is one of the two main translation tools used for Free Software projects, and is the one that itself is Free Sofware.  (I keep on meaning to download the latest code and see what I can help out on.  I'm useless, I know.)

I first heard about Translate.org.za from its founder, Dwayne Bailey, while he was first starting work on it while managing the Cape Town office of South African Linux go-to guys Obsidian.  Since then, I've been bumping into Dwayne every few months around South Africa and other bits of Africa (at least Uganda and Namibia, and possibly Kenya too) when he's been doing advocacy and education around localisation, translation, and related topics.  Of course, he's been a lot further afield than that.

Anyway, for all my jadedness about the Free Software situation in South African and Africa, this reminded me about Translate.org.za and that good things are still happening.

A long long time ago (probably only a few weeks back, knowing my memory), Ian Gilfillan approached me about an awards program for South African students who are involved in FOSS projects.  Earlier this week, he officially announced the FOSS Awards.

I think it's a great idea - I'm a big believer in creating local heroes around FOSS.  We don't need international speakers to come tell us things - we have Dwayne Bailey, AJ Venter, Jonathan Carter, Karl Fischer, OpenLab, translate.org.za, Impi, and KnowledgeTree.  And many more people locally who've contributed to or started their own projects, and run their own companies.  The missing part is recognising these heroes and getting them in contact with each other, and the FOSS Awards is a good way to do that for students.

While there are probably hundreds of people employed as Linux systems administrators, and hundreds more people using Linux at home for fun, in Cape Town alone, our Linux User Group, CLUG, isn't growing along with these numbers.  It should, though.  It provides two talks a month, on weekday nights, by some of the best people to talk about them, on both beginner and advanced topics, on programming to administration.  And it also has a dinner afterwards for people to meet and learn more about each other and help each other.  CLUG meets on the second and last Tuesday every month, with roughly 20 people attending the talks and about 10 people going to the dinner afterwards.

Growing the pool is making new connections, bringing new people into the community, providing new people to learn from and new opportunities for work or play.  It isn't necessarily about bringing new people into the field (but it is a by-product) so much as it is about making everyone in the field more aware of each other.

Every single post on the entire My Digital Life mass blog site is not a technology post.  In fact, at the moment, I'd say less than 5% are.  Please remove your silly blanket membership in "Technology" on Amatomu simply because you are on the Intarwebs.

The Management

While Amatomu has been pretty good at regularly releasing small improvements to their aggregator, Afrigator has gone for a big bang, releasing their new version with new features today.

Afrigator quite cleverly also created an additional channel for community participation, having started a mailing list for people to hear about their new version beforehand, and to discuss it afterwards.  Amatomu suddenly feels like a corporate in comparison (although we know otherwise).

Of interest to me is OpenID login support and a "private" aggregator of the feeds you particularly are interested in.

But, nothing dramatically exciting yet - Amatomu still leads in terms of the information they provide and the visualisation thereof.

After a somewhat depressing Digital Freedom Expo, it was great to see the energy that Heather Ford and her colleagues (Hi Kerryn! Daniella!) at iCommons had and evoked at the Bring 'n Braai.

One of the greatest thing about the event is that I had multiple distinct groups of friends attending.  I was not just my "open source conference attendees anonymous" friends, or just my "CLUG" friends, but also the friends interested in technology that just don't normally do events, and even more impressively, friends that aren't even particularly interested in the technology itself, but were attracted by the implications of Creative Commons as a movement and on their own lives.  (Oh, and there were those blogging geeks who'll attend anything to get a few hits by writing a reportback.  Weirdos.)

If I've become very disillusioned about the attitudes of those involved in Free and Open Source Software in South Africa, Creative Commons seems to offer something that has applicability and value to a broad part of the population, and the key message of Read Write culture is one that differs from the continuing focus by many stakeholders in Free and Open Source Software in South Africa on the use of such software, and no provision or support or education or recognition for the creation of such software locally.

So, thanks Heather and Kerryn and Daniella and everyone else from iCommons, and also to Dave for MCing, for relief from the apathy I've been feeling for the past six months, and I hope that this event leads to more creators and creation of content, and thus to more reason to come together to savour the output of our creators and their belief in sharing, re-using, and remixing.