Berkeley talk, Chandler, Barcamp, Citizen Josh

I have been hunkered down getting my life (and a mountain of notes and research) in order. Here’s a grab-bag of items:

• On Wednesday I spent the afternoon at UC/Berkeley at the kind invitation of Bill Allison, and talked with a thoughtful, interested group of faculty, administrators and IT people about Dreaming in Code and the wider topic of software’s innate difficulties. Berkeley, along with a number of other institutions, is about to kick off an ambitious project to build a new platform for much of its underlying digital infrastructure. Chandler, whose slow progress Dreaming in Code chronicled, has a university tie-in as well, and these folks are smart and foresightful enough to want to try to understand what pitfalls they might be facing.

  Too often, groups embark on big new software ventures as if they are the first pioneers ever to walk down their particular path, when in fact most of the field is full of well-worn roads (and the roads usually lead into one or another ditch). So hats off to my Berkeley neighbors for wanting to study an at least partial map of the terrain.

• Speaking of Chandler, the folks at OSAF are closing in on a major release, called Preview, later this month. I’ll be writing more about it here as it unfolds.

• Barcamp Block: This marks the second anniversary of Barcamp, a self-organizing conference for geeks, startup companies and related phenomena. It’s down in Palo Alto this coming weekend, it looks like great fun and interesting people, and I’m planning to be there, at least for the first day.

• Also here in Berkeley, my friend Josh Kornbluth‘s great show “Citizen Josh” (I wrote about it when it opened) is settling in for a three-week run over at Berkeley Rep. Worth seeing if you missed it across the Bay when it played the Magic Theater earlier this year.

[tags]uc berkeley, chandler, barcamp, josh kornbluth[/tags]