The Google calendar event for the Toronto Activity Club (TACKY) calendar.

For anyone who’s interested, I’ll be there at 7:30pm!

Earth Hour at the OSC

I’d like to share some of the notes from his talk, as I have a feeling I’ll be going back to them in a few years when I’m an open source superstar.

Listening to People

When you have an open source project, your developers aren’t your work friends and users aren’t people you can call.  Thus there have to be very well defined and implemented listening channels.  Examples of which are (from lowest fidelity to highest):  crash reports, form-based feedback, bug-trackers, wiki’s, forums, IRC. All are important.

Ideas on voting:  in open source projects, voting (“+1!”) works as a great pacifier. It can be used to measure impact, severity, and interest, but should not steer what is of primary importance (or really used to make any important decisions on things).

Designing by/for People

Despite the fears and chaos, design-by-community has rarely steered Mozilla wrong.  Though it may be chaotic, the community has very strong and hierarchical leadership. Through effective leadership, good design ideas rise to the top.  More on that later.

Design-by-community is very different from, say, what Apple does.  Apple has one persona: Steve Jobs.  That’s great as long as Steve doesn’t miss any ideas (which he will), and if he doesn’t love things that aren’t all that super-great (Cover Flow).  Apple doesn’t have a succession plan for Steve.

Gave great example of the development of the UI features involving closing tabs in Firefox. Ultimately he admitted that Google Chrome got it right, Mozilla got 80% of the way there, as per normal :-)

Organising the Chaos

Expect chaos in open source.  Managing chaos begins with managing the design, rather than the code itself.   In any design decisions, opposite camps form very quickly – especially spurred on by half-finished designs being released as Alpha products.

To manage this chaos, you have to infuse some order.  First point of order is having a public and well defined road-map or a cheat-sheet of where the product is going.  Then build the product in layers, and introduce every major change as an Add-On first.  Educate contributors about “why” things are happening.

Discussions should be supported by research and data (possible cross-over with academia here, especially for people looking for small M.Sc. projects).

Disagreements ultimately end in negotiation, but never forget BATNA .. what’s the worst that will happen (typically “Screw you guys, I’m going to Opera”).  No you won’t.  And if you really disagree with the design change, write an add-on to correct it (yey!).

Leadership and Playtime

You need to identify and elevate in importance people who are “good” contributors – reward them with ownership of small modules in their expertise domain. Form small teams with well defined scopes of responsibility.  The leadership of these teams can be concentrated around these good contributors.

The modules of code are led and owned in a heirarchical manner. Ultimately, someone is the sole owner of the whole thing.  In the case of Mozilla, it’s Mike Connor (youtube) from Toronto, who is kinda hilarious.

Give your contributors complete and absolute freedom to explore the system.  They will reward you with neat things like add-ons to inject random stanzas of poetry into web pages, and localised versions of your product.

Localisation as more than Translation

This came out of the discussion portion, but he spent a great deal of time discussion on the localisation challenges involved with marketing Firefox in China.  He wrote extensively about it on his blog.

The bottom line is that localisation has to be more than translation: it involves studying the interaction of the people with the product, and changing the design of the browser.  Not the technical core of the browser – you should be able to adjust all necessary behaviours and design via add-ons. Discussed how Maxthon benefitted by being included on a very popular pirate build of Windows.

Lesson here is that customisation via add-on’s is ultimately key to solving many design problems.

I first ran into DJ Wristpect (blog), aka Shez Mehra, partying on a random Thursday in Guelph.  Guelph is about 45 mins north-west of anywhere near Toronto, but has one of the busiest party scenes in Ontario due to the University in town.  Guelph is traditionally rich in musical talent, with notable exports such as The Constantines, Royal City, Gentleman Reg, and the kids who run (ran?) Kazoo.  Toronto music faithful will have some familiarity with most of these acts.  And anyone who gives a shit about the state of Toronto’s DJ community will have also heard Wristpect and the great work he’s been doing with Little Brother(!), Just Blaze(!!), and AZ(!!!).   More recently he’s been doing great things on tour, such as parties with DJ AM and MSTRKRFT.

Rock the Bells

The highlight of Shez’ career for me0 has been the Bridging the Gap series of mixtapes – bridging Toronto hip hop with artists from the U.S., specifically North Carolina, New York, and Chicago. These are all available for download on his blog. If you’re only going to grab one tape, check out the HipHopDX co-branded Rock the Bells mixtape, which is party music at its finest.  If you’re going to grab two, check out the aforementioned collaboration with N.C.‘s Little Brother.

Bridging the Gap Vol. 3

Now, as far as reaching for collaborations with American hip-hop superstars, nobody has reached harder than Drake (myspace).  I don’t know how much money that kid and his faithful invested in the relationship with Lil’ Wayne: if you’re putting out tracks with the Greatest Rapper Alive and running with Young Money, the pressure is definitely on. Once again, the recent mixtape is very strong, well reviewed, and available for free download (see a pattern emerging yet?)

(This video is for Lindz .. you the fucking best)

My favourite Drake collaboration is actually with Alabama’s Rich Boy (put some d’s on that myspace) – the track Must Hate Money, which I remember from last summer.

So Far Gone Mixtape

It’s good to see these two get together sometimes. “I Run T.O.!”

More to come.

Toronto’s urban population, be it black, white, asian, or whatever, is financially better off and generally more educated than the similar demographic in the U.S., so why is that  not giving us an advantage?  Maybe I just answered my own question – but I seriously doubt that the ability to make good hip hop is tied to poverty and the lack of a high school education.   On this tangent, Famous (myspace) has a track 4th Biggest City, released early last year.  The theme is:  we’re in the fourth biggest city in North America, VideoFact gives you $40k, and the CRTC will make sure your song gets played at least 30% of the time on any urban station; carpe diem.

There is always the one notable exception:  Kardinal Ofishall.   Sure, there are K-Os and Shad-K, both of whom have the university crowds buzzing, but Kardi kills it for the city.  He is the epitome of Toronto hip-hop ambassadorship.  He rose far above that framework that Choclair, Saukrates, and the rest of the Northern Touch crew laid out.  Bakardi Slang might as well have been an advertisement for a newer, more bloodclot English language that Plies could slur, but the album died a bad label death when MCA folded.  He put out Not 4 Sale, a pretty pop-friendly album (stream it here), for which he caught some heat from people who care – but someone has to blaze the trail of Toronto to the main-stream, nes pas?

But here I’m trying to focus on the non-Kardi Toronto hip-hop world, which feels much smaller and harder to know.

To me, recently, Famous and Luu Breeze have been the standout MCs who  have the chance to take a stand in the mainstream.  Maybe not in the profound hip-hop megastardom way, but rekindle hope amongst listeners: the way Black Milk (myspace) and others brought new light to post-Eminem Detroit, or P.O.S. (myspace) gave hope to black kids in Minneapolis who want onto Rhymesayers.

In Ain’t No Use Famous discusses the shortcomings of being the rapper he is, as he’s trying to play catchup with the influence of those who told him to tuck his pants to his socks, obey his thirst, and wear white T’s.

This kid Luu Breeze (myspace) has an album dropping soon, so I’ve been told by every conceivable media tidbit about him.  The mixtape was sleek, you can download it here.  Charge It to the Game is obviously going to be the single, is a banger, but after two high profile videos, I’m not impressed with L&G Films.  A Yatch? At least be excited to be on a boat.

More to come.

The housing situation, at least in the summer of 2008, is such that every attractive three bedroom Craigslist ad yields twelve or thirteen couples showing up for viewings.  That kind of competition makes you feel like there’s not a lot of hope of finding a reasonable place, especially if you want to be anywhere near a subway station.  Potential renters pull out all of the stops too: offer to pay more, bring co-signers, aren’t very tactful with follow-up calls, agree to legally troubling leases, and so on.   I know that if I hadn’t been on the phone daily with my future landlord, we wouldn’t have the place we have now.

Lansdowne between Dupont and Bloor is our new home.  $1100, two bedrooms, a parking spot, a ten minute walk to the subway. The neighbourhood feels real.  Straight-up real.  The day I showed up to view the place there were three little black kids and their Portugese friends playing some stick-ball hockey(?) in the middle of the street. One of their grandma’s was yelling in the background. A hot-boy has hanging out on the corner. Older mediterranean men in the hats and beige shirts sitting on steps, discussing.  An old west-indian man gave me a smiling “waddup” nod as I pulled up on my motorcycle. Summer in the city; feels like a Joell Ortiz song.  A pleasant, overweight, half-asleep Italian man showed me the apartment.  Welcome to your new home, I thought.

Bloordale?

There is lots of rental available in this neighbourhood.  It’s considered part of Dovercourt, but has its own identity as Bloordale (closer to Lansdowne), and Bloorcourt (closer to Dufferin). On Lansdowne, closer to Dupont, there has obviously been a lot of development in the last ten years.  Many lofts and townhouses stand in recovered TTC brownfields, all of it somewhat affordable (~$1200 for two bedrooms), quite new, and in good shape.  Some of the nicer lofts are unfortunately seperated from the rest of the community.  I have a feeling the appeal of a gated community exists initially, particularly if the surrounding neighbourhood is a bit rough.  But with time, the gated community becomes the eye-sore – the un-cooperative neighbour.

Mural on Bloor St.

I can’t speak much to the situation on Bloor Street.  I’ve read some bad press about the Coffee Time by Lansdowne station.  But I’ve also read about the community projects that emerged as a response to the communities struggles. An article in Eye Weekly proclaims that the hipsters are coming: and with them, art, coffee, and community events. That author of the article bemoans the appearance of the artsy, community types, and (ultimately) enthusiastic condo developers as they are contributors to gentrification ie. destruction of the real-ness.  But apparently there is hope:

This isn’t Queen Street West — yet. And maybe it won’t be. Whatever befalls it, right now Bloorcourt Village is maximally compelling, fulfilling as it does a crucial promise of Toronto about how we can live together in great, varied neighbourhoods, without forcing the migration of the poorest people.

Dance Class at the BIG festival

Sounds good. In the mean time, the websites of these community groups inspire positive feelings towards my new home:

• Bloor Improvement Group is a “dynamic volunteer coalition in Toronto, advancing the economic, physical, cultural and social life of the targeted local Bloor Street by creating opportunities and events that improve and celebrate the area.”  The organise the “Big on Bloor” street festival that began in 2008.
• Dig In seems like a group I should get in touch with. Dig In “initiates inclusive community and cultural plans and actions that will contribute to sustaining a neighbourhood that is GREEN; CLEAN; SAFE; CIVIL by fostering improvements in the areas of its social, environment, cultural, economic and physical make up.” They have a blog; it’s not super-active, but it’s always nice to put some faces to a name.
• Michael’s Bloor-Lansdowne Blog – A wonderful neighbourhood-focused blog, fairly active, and a great place to get a taste of local community events, art, and the like.

I’m starting to look forward to all of this.  As much as I love being in Guelph, I feel like I’ve outgrown my university community … time to move on.