Every now and then, I try to build a group of people to talk about specific topics but it quickly dies because of inactivity. Although I really saw the value in having such a community, I just didn’t know how to build one. Even if one person keeps pumping in content, how do you actually get the community to interact with each other?

It is the same kind of problem being faced by, say StartupBuzz.org which, I am guessing, wants to be the Hacker News of India. There are indeed topics that apply only to startups in India, from “Startup Morning”, to India’s first in-taxi magazine. Such interesting events and ideas are worthy of discussion.

There is value in such a community, but again, how to build it? StartupDunia has already put its thoughts on the subject but the question still remains.

Here are some of my thoughts.

Does it require credibility?

• Hacker News has Paul Graham and YCombinator behind it.
• ProBlogger Forums have ProBlogger’s Darren Rowse behind it.
• And the most recent example of StackOverflow.com that has Joel Spolsky and Jeff Atwood behind it.

So the question is whether there each community should be backed by up by a credible person who has a reasonable authority on the subject?

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In one of my previous thoughts, I had mentioned about a website called “Stack Overflow” in passing.

I’m surprised that many people do not know or use this resource and community. Just a brief search over there would answer so many questions that programmers have.

For example, there is a suggestion on my skribit page:

“how to give back to the open source community”?

And this question has 20 votes!

I wonder why this question to me, then I remembered this suggestion popped up soon after I wrote “Why use Creative Commons license?” where I had written “The book was intended to be a contribution back to the open source community. We constantly keep taking and taking – whether it is using Linux, Vim, Firefox, or countless other software, so it felt great to be useful to the community in return.”

I guess I had it coming.

First of all, I would say that the best place to actually learn such a topic would be another book (I bet you saw that one coming!) called Producing Open Source Software by Karl Fogel (which is itself an open source book) to understand how an open source project works right from the technical infrastructure to the social and political infrastructure, how to communicate, and so on. And finally, the chapter on Volunteers explains the different kinds of volunteers that are helpful to an open source project which indirectly means that those who are interested can participate in the projects in one of those roles => You’re giving back to the open source community!

But perhaps there are better suggestions in this discussion on Stack Overflow when somebody asked, duh, How to get involved in an open source project?

Someone also posted another skribit suggestion asking:

hi, can u give me a link on examples with python or projects in python book i am a beginner

Guess what? I already answered that in a discussion at Stack Overflow.

The answer is that there are two projects – the “Programming Language Examples Alike Cookbook” project and the Rosetta Code project which lists vast numbers of example programs in multiple programming languages.

Again, the person could have found this answer already by a simple search on the Stack Overflow website.

For some of the programming queries I had, I didn’t know whom to ask. There used to be an internal algorithms-discuss mailing list when I was at Yahoo!, but whom do I turn to now? The answer again was “Stack Overflow” (which at that time was yet to be launched, so I was waiting in anticipation):

How to convert floats to human-readable fractions?

Let’s say we have 0.33, we need to output “1/3″. If we have “0.4″, we need to output “2/5″.

The idea is to make it human-readable to make the user understand “x parts out of y” as a better way of understanding data.

I know that percentages is a good substitute but I was wondering if there was a simple way to do this?

And someone nicknamed “Epsilon” pointed to me to a brilliantly simple algorithm by David Eppstein which exactly answers this question.

# Usage: ./frap <fraction> <maximum denominator>

$ ./frap 0.33 10
1/3, error = -3.333333e-03
3/10, error = 3.000000e-02

$ ./frap 0.2342 100
11/47, error = 1.574468e-04
15/64, error = -1.750000e-04

Isn’t that amazing? Both the algorithm and the community at Stack Overflow.

If you want to know why Stack Overflow works so well, there is a discussion on that, at Stack Overflow you might want to read

Today is the first day of foss.in/2008, and on this occasion, I’m happy to announce the first public release of my Creative-Commons licensed book on the Vim 7 editor.

This book is meant for both beginners and advanced users.

For beginners, it walks you through the first steps to learning about modes, discusses about typing skills to be effective and moves on to the editing basics.

This book will definitely appeal more to people who are Vim users already because it helps add a huge number of tricks to their arsenal, whether it is more efficient editing, personal information management, coding your own plugins or making Vim a programmers’ editor.

I hope that fellow Vimmers will find these notes useful. Even though it is in a book format, the writing style is more like a tutorial and is informal, which should be familiar to readers of my Python book.

Both books are under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 license, so you’re free to download it, email it, share it and improve it. In fact, the book is on a wiki, so you can just click on ‘Edit’ in the left sidebar of any chapter to improve the book in a matter of seconds. When in doubt, please use the ‘Discussion’ link to add your suggestions and comments.

For those who prefer reading books they can hold in their hand, please consider purchasing a printed copy of the book. This will also help support the continued development of the book.

For those PHP gurus familiar with GeSHi syntax highlighting, I would greatly appreciate any help in improving my vim syntax highlighting source, especially in handling Vim-style comments, etc. Please mail me if you can help.

This book has been in the works for several years, so I’m glad to see it finally in good enough shape for releasing it. Although I haven’t done as many rewrites as I would have been satisfied with, I decided it was better to <insert cliché of “Release Early, Release Often.”>

I dedicate this release to foss.in and GTD principles.

There have been two recent changes on my website – the redesigned theme and the book-as-a-wiki. They are related developments. The reason I needed a new theme for my website was because I wanted a blog and a wiki integrated into the same website with a seamless theme.

If you visit the blog and the wiki, you will not immediately notice any difference except for the sidebar. This is intentional so that there isn’t a abrupt transition between the two software. After all, the content is more important than how it is being displayed.

But why a wiki?

Ever since I read about Tantek’s personal wiki, I have been fascinated with the idea. Having a wiki of my own to post anything seemed useful. As Tantek said:

“It’s also a place I’ve kept notes or documents that I expect to keep current / update in place, as opposed to blog posts, which are more like snapshots of thoughts in time.”

LifeHack also has a good introduction to personal wikis.

The advantage is that anything that can be benefited by many eyeballs can be put up on the wiki. For one, I can send it to people and get their feedback and improvements. Second, people can always stumble on to it via google or yahoo and they can contribute as well.

And then, there’s always all the goodness of MediaWiki such as versioning, ability to undo and rollback edits, good anti-spam features and even generate PDFs, thanks to PediaPress.

All these advantages of the wiki led me to recreate my book into the wiki, and it is already achieving great results. How else would a 20-year old student who lives in the Amazon work on a Brazilian Portuguese translation of a Python book and collaborate with others?

All the content is under a Creative Commons license so that the information belongs to everyone.

I’ll be slowly adding my tidbits, notes and link collections on different topics to the wiki. Of course, they will be always in a state of work-in-progress. Many things can go in there – right from trekking howtos (I get quite a few emails on that, surprisingly) to some entrepreneurship resources in the Indian context, and so on.

However, it’s important to keep in mind is to NOT add to the information overload, but to simplify things and cut the crap out.

You are welcome to add your suggestions and comments on the wiki using the discussion pages.

It all started on Monday last week when Lakshman tweeted if anybody was game for a weekend trip. Ashwin tweeted back saying yes.

Later they asked me over email. My reply was “Why Ooty!?”. They replied saying “It doesn’t matter. We’re going for the drive.” Two days later, we three were driving to Ooty on bikes at night.

My descriptions below are in twitter style as an ode to how the trip happened. ( But of course, my usual writing style will resume after this post )

We started off at 8 at night. First stop was some lip-smacking food at Kamat Lokaruchi:

9.10 pm : We’re on the way! 3 twitterers on bikes.

9.25 pm : Getting out of Bangalore is the toughest thing.

9.30 pm : @scorpion032 says 2020 will also be the year of the linux desktop.

10.32 pm : @cruisemaniac and @scorpion032 are tweeting away…

1.40 am : Taking a break.

2.33 am : Admiring the mysore palace…

3.16 am : Sleep getting to me… But we’re taking breaks and having fun. In Nanjangud.

3.20 am : Another break.

3.34 am : Listening to My Sacrifice at 330 am at 70 kmph on bike with the wind in your hair is something to be experienced.

4.10 am : We find a freakin’ coffee day in the middle of nowhere. Waiting for capuccino.

6.15 am : Mudumulai forest.

6.20 am : Animals! Elephant, deer, peacock, mongoose, eagle, woodpecker, … All right there next to us… Thank heavens the elephant didn’t think we were pesky…

6.45 am : Exiting Mudumulai forest.

My favorite photo from this trip (notice the clouds and the bike):

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One fine day, I was running by myself. It was a few weeks before Barcamp Bangalore 5. I got an idea that I should talk about a non-techie topic at Barcamp since I’ve been giving tech talks for the past few years and I wanted a change of pace. I brainstormed many ideas on the reason for the talk, what to say and how to explain, etc. all during that one run.

Unfortunately I couldn’t attend BCB5. But I stored the notes in a safe place. And when BCB6 was announced, I wanted to be sure to talk this time around.

A few weeks back, Ramjee called me and asked whether we can talk about running. I smiled and thought to myself “Great minds think alike”. Or at least “Runners think alike”.

So I made a ppt and we landed at Barcamp on Saturday morning. We had never discussed the presentation. And we were going to give a session on it. Truly unconference style.

Note: The slides below have been modified to make it useful for a web audience. It has a lot more text now.

| Download

Barcamp crowds are very inquisitive and so we didn’t actually go past half the slides, which is actually a good thing. Instead, we discussed a wide range of things about running right from finding good places to run to trouble with dogs.

In spite of the delays causing us to start at 12:45 (which means almost lunch time) the discussion went on till 1:45 and 90% of the 30-40 odd crowd were present till the end. When we went to grab what was left of lunch, lot of people asked us questions including how to avoid knee pain (tip: it’s the shoes). Since questions are always a good sign, I think it was a successful discussion.

We both still consider ourselves amateurs at running but at the end of the day its an activity we like and Barcamp is a perfect platform to talk about our passions.

Oh, and if you’re still not a believer, I’ll end with a quote:

Games require skill. Running requires endurance, character, pride, physical strength, and mental toughness. Running is a test, not a game. A test of faith, belief, will, and trust in ones self. So hardcore that it needs a category all to itself to define the pain. When game players criticize, it’s because they aren’t willing to understand, not because they’re stronger. Running is more than a sport; it’s a lifestyle. If you have to ask us why we run, you’ll never understand, so just accept.

– Jessica Propst

Update: SlideShare decided to make it a Barcamp spotlight presentation:

The online slides has had 1274 views and 116 downloads as of this writing (2008-05-04 Sun 10:04 PM).

My latest “power song” is the flagship song of the Colourblind band. Who are these guys? I have no idea. From what I read on their website, they were/are a couple of rockers who got their album recorded with Sony Music India in 1999. Not sure how many copies they actually sold. They had got great reviews by newspapers but apparently still didn’t get support from their recording company:

We sold 10,000 copies in 2 weeks. Regardless of that Sony didn’t put out more copies in the market and published only 500 CDs.

Nine years later, we have the ubiquitous www giving opportunities for everyone to spread their music. For example Kal-Jug by Azad Zeeshan to some awesome fusion flute by Bapu Padmanabha on Muziboo and many more bands featured in the RadioVerve channels.

Unfortunately, you get to hear these songs only online inside a browser. Why is this a problem? Because I listen to most of my music on my iPod during commute, runs or walks.

This is why I really wish Muziboo/RadioVerve/etc. would consider producing an Indian “amateur” music album. A while back, Niara and myself were discussing that the potential is really big considering the online virality (do a couple of youtube videos or at least put some of the mp3s online) all the way to marketing at the national level in cahoots with a big production house. Imagine how many college bands would want to be featured.

Oh heck, you could even do a reality show on TV to select the bands whose songs get to be in the album! (well, okay, maybe this one is a stretch)

On the other hand, I sorely wish there was an indie iTunes store in India where I could purchase these songs. Or perhaps even a Sell-a-Band for an Indian audience.

For now, I’m waiting for MusicYogi.com to deliver my copy of The Raghu Dixit Project’s new album. Can’t wait to listen to ‘Mysore Se Aayi Re’ on my iPod.

Tim O’Reilly’s definition of Web 2.0 makes it clear that “crowdsourcing” is one of the defining features of Web 2.0, not only RIAs:

“The service automatically gets better the more people use it.”

Crowdsourcing is about taking it to the next step where people ‘contribute’ something to the ’system’.

There are many people and companies trying to make crowdsourcing work in different areas. For example, at Kluster, the participants get to design a product, etc. and the participants who back the winning idea get to share the reward. What is interesting is the story behind Kluster:

Kaufman came up with the idea for Kluster at his last startup, Mophie, which makes iPod accessories and was recently sold to mStation for an undisclosed sum. One of Mophie’s hit products is the Bevy, an all-in-one iPod Shuffle case, bottle opener, cord-wrap, and keychain. The company designed it at last year’s MacWorld conference in 72 hours with input from 30,000 customers using software that was a precursor to Kluster. According to Kaufman, Mophie sold hundreds of thousands of the $15 cases.

And from the June 2006 Wired magazine article:

Melcarek (a registered user at InnoCentive.com) solved a problem that stumped the in-house researchers at Colgate-Palmolive. The giant packaged goods company needed a way to inject fluoride powder into a toothpaste tube without it dispersing into the surrounding air. Melcarek knew he had a solution by the time he’d finished reading the challenge: Impart an electric charge to the powder while grounding the tube. The positively charged fluoride particles would be attracted to the tube without any significant dispersion.

“It was really a very simple solution,” says Melcarek. Why hadn’t Colgate thought of it? “They’re probably test tube guys without any training in physics.” Melcarek earned $25,000 for his efforts. Paying Colgate-Palmolive’s R&D staff to produce the same solution could have cost several times that amount – if they even solved it at all.

More examples are:

• Dell Idea Storm where customers vote for what products they want Dell to do next – this is how Dell’s recent introduction of Linux laptops happened.
• Get Satisfaction which is “people-powered customer service”
• Intel asking the crowd on what is the next Google
• MicroPledge and co fund os where people pledge their money for software ideas they like, once a good amount is reached, someone takes up that pledge and works on it. If he/she completes it successfully, they get the money and the crowd gets the software they want. This is the crowdsourced version of a bounty.
• Sell-a-Band where people pledge their money on bands they like. Sufficient money implies the band gets to record an album with that money. If the album sells, the crowd, the band and the SellaBand website share the profit.
• Kiva for microfinance loans to entrepreneurs in developing countries.
• Wesabe for personal finance.
• CrowdSpirit for electronics.
• Threadless for T-shirts.
• Everywhere Mag for a travel magazine.
• Crowdsourcing.com is crowdsourcing a book on crowdsourcing. Say that fast thrice.
• We can also include Youtube under the entertainment category.
• And many many more.

Heck, we even have an O’Reilly book on ‘Programming Collective Intelligence’ (which has been sitting on my to-read list for too long).

The biggest and best example, of course, is Wikipedia, one of the top 10 largest websites in the world.

The article that blew my mind (and got me wondering about crowdsourcing in the first place) is the Wikipedia page on British crown succession (via IndiaUncut) - this page lists 1388+ people who are in the succession line for the crown!

But I wonder, why did Wikipedia work? Or rather, what makes people contribute to Wikipedia?

The best research on this topic that I found was the article What Motivates Wikipedians? in the CACM monthly magazine:

I wonder if the companies mentioned above are specifically tapping into some of these motivations.

The article goes on to explain the relative importance of these motivations in their survey. I was seriously surprised at how high Ideology and Values rank here! If you get a chance, do read the whole article, it’s a good piece of research.

Another interesting research was the paper Becoming Wikipedian: transformation of participation in a collaborative online encyclopedia which traces how a casual visitor starts reading Wikipedia and goes on to become a member of the community, and how the social structure and technological aspects enable this.

I think I’m now beginning to understand what Jimmy Wales (founder of Wikipedia) said when he was asked the same question:

Love. It isn’t very popular in technical circles to say a lot of mushy stuff about love, but frankly it’s a very very important part of what holds our project together.

I have always viewed the mission of Wikipedia to be much bigger than just creating a killer website. We’re doing that of course, and having a lot of fun doing it, but a big part of what motivates us is our larger mission to affect the world in a positive way.

…

Imagine a world in which every single person on the planet is given free access to the sum of all human knowledge. That’s what we’re doing.

Although this reasoning may apply to Wikipedia which is an encyclopedia and information-centric, I wonder whether the same applies to the other examples above. For example, consider Threadless.com for T-shirt designs… what are the motivations for people in that community? And how much does the website’s social and technological structure play a role? What are the magic ingredients that make a crowdsourcing website become successful?

Maybe I should crowdsource this question. Hmmm.

Maybe it is not different from any other kind of website which becomes successful but I think crowdsourcing websites are distinct from content websites like SmashingMagazine.com or e-commerce websites like Amazon/eBay, etc.

Now, the next question is has anybody successfully crowdsourced anything in an India-specific way?

Update on 2008 May 13: ReadWriteWeb has a similar list.

Today, I attended the Kannada Wikipedia Meet after reading a mention of it in today’s edition of the Deccan Herald.

Unfortunately, I was late and missed the keynote speech by U R Ananthamurthy. When I came in, Professor G Venkatasubbiah had just started talking about ‘Kannada on Encyclopedia’.

The professor explained about the importance of an encyclopedia and how a world-editable encyclopedia such as Wikipedia is invaluable. he quoted the example of an assistant advocate general who was a close confidante of JFK, but he was incorrectly referred to as being “suspected of being involved in the assassination of JFK” in one of the leading encyclopedias. This person was aghast on reading that and it took nearly a decade to finally get it corrected, and the best part is that nobody knew who actually wrote the original sentence. Such kind of problems can be avoided using Wikipedia.

He compared how he bought an English encyclopedia in 1971 which was 30-volume set of books compared to the easy access of a free Wikipedia which is online and easily searchable. The remarkable thing about the collaborative effort behind Wikipedia is that each person knows a little bit of everything, and when you combine knowledge of a few people, everybody benefits. It reminded me of George Bernard Shaw’s words – “If you have an apple and I have an apple and we exchange these apples then you and I will still each have one apple. But if you have an idea and I have an idea and we exchange these ideas, then each of us will have two ideas.”

He talked about phonetics, about evolution of Kannada language, the importance of using “standard language” in the wikipedia, about scientific knowledge in Kannada, how the English technical terms “do not pollute Kannada, only enrich it”.

He talked about how Alankar, a poet of yore, explained the virtues a good poem – it should be good to hear, it should have a good consequence, and the common man must understand it. He exhorted the Kannada Wikipedia community to strive for these aspects.

Next was a humorous talk was by Nagesh Hegde on writing about science and technology in kannada. He started off by explaining the richness of science knowledge in Kannada. For example, Dr. Shivram Karanth (who called himself ‘the science postman’) wrote about carbon dating in one of his Kannada novels.

Mr. Hegde then joked that bluetooth and other technologies were not coming in through “kannaDa da kiTaki” but through Windows of English. He explained that it was not always right to convert the terminology to Kannada. For example, antenna being explained as “juTTu” is just silly.

There are various terminologies associated with each field – from the words a coconut tree climber uses to describe parts of the tree, to doctors who have nearly 2500 special words to describe parts of the heart. Though such terminologies may not be needed for the common man. Just talking about the topics that appear in channels such as BBC or CNN who have stories explaining technology to the common man in plain English, and explaining it in Kannada in similar nature should be of enormous benefit. Maybe one day people might look up words they do not understand in the Kannada wikipedia and learn all about it.

It is important to explain people using an approach they would understand. He cited the example of an article in one of the science magazines which talked about the story of Prometheus:

Zeus had Prometheus carried to Mount Caucasus, where an eagle by the name of Ethon (offspring of the monsters Typhon and Echidna) would eat out his liver; it would grow back each day and the eagle would eat it again. This punishment was to last 30,000 years.

The article quoted this mythological story to explain that it is actually true that the liver can regrow and gave more details about it.

Similarly, an article on quantum physics explained electrons jumping levels by comparing it to pigeons jumping on tree branches because they get excited.

It is important to explain such scientific articles in ways that the common man can understand, but it is equally important to have correct meaning, and the article should not give false analogies that could lead to misunderstandings.

The next talk was on Unicode by Hari Prasad Nadig and Sunil Jaiprakash. They explained what Wikipedia is, explained how to use Baraha on Windows, how to enable the Unicode option in it, how to write in Kannada, and the ways of using different keyboard layouts, about installing Kannada fonts on Linux and about installing SCIM to be able to write in Kannada on Linux.

This was followed by a talk on how wikis work by Ramakrishna Reddy. He explained the special nature of wikis such as linking content to the contributor and how it gives the user the power to contribute, about democratic decision making, and about feeding the naturally curious (by way of an interlinked wiki).

This was followed by a talk on how to use the MediaWiki software by Hari Prasad Nadig. He explained the concept of logging in vs anonymous editing, the wiki syntax, how to create an offline copy to run on your own computer, the concept of revisions to see the contributions and changes by each user, using the toolbar provided above the edit box, etc.

The talks gave a broad overview to the audience on the importance of the Kannada Wikipedia, how to get started with Kannada on computers, the concept of a wiki, and how people can contribute themselves. Unfortunately, the latter talks got too technical in nature, and did not have any flow. It would have been probably better if they had got a newbie from the audience to follow their instructions to go about editing the Wikipedia. This might have convinced the 100+ non-technical audience that it is actually easy to contribute. Nevertheless, the conference was useful for persons who did not know about these topics before, which was the main intent.

Note : The Kannada Wikipedia is located at http://kn.wikipedia.org

TWiki must be one of the most underestimated tools out there. We use it quite extensively at Yahoo!.

What is TWiki? Officially, it is a “Enterprise Collaboration Platform” (yawn). What that means is that it is a wiki software that is meant to be used for intranet information.

I’ve used it minimally so far mainly because it looks ugly, but I see that the official latest version has improved by leaps and bounds. I have started to use it quite extensively.

Some of the things I like:

• Reasonably clean formatting rules – This factor can never be emphasized enough. TWiki’s rules are heck of a lot better than other wiki syntaxes I’ve come across (including MediaWiki’s).

• Help section is to the point.

• The list of plugins just makes me go wow.

• Good configurability and things like doc graphics and TwikiVariables

• Discussions are integrated into the pages like the page on StructuredWiki (our older version still doesn’t )

• Plugins, again – syntax highlighting, tracking actions embedded in meeting notes, bugzilla integration, and even headlines from RSS feeds and embedding PDFs

There’s a presentation that gives a good introduction to TWiki.

Aside: I wonder what tools other companies/organizations use.