YashLabs

Last Thusday, I got to meet three most interesting people in a surprising experiment.

The Basement Tapes and Open Source Cinema

Brett Gaylor, a vlogger and documentary film-maker is currently creating Basement Tapes, a movie about Free Culture.

From Robin’s blog:

Basement Tapes looks at the corporate control of music through the vision of “Free Culture” advocate Lawrence Lessig, who challenges the record industry to look beyond outdated copyright laws and allow for a free and vital public domain. At the centre of the copyright war are “mash-ups” – clever hybrid songs that people can create themselves and share online – and director Brett Gaylor plans to make the world’s first “mash-up” documentary in Basement Tapes, a veritable Open Source of global collaboration.

Part of the final movie cut will include other people’s remixes of some clips contributed online by Brett. For the website hosting this project, opensourcecinema.org, Brett has chosen the Drupal CMS, and in effect has transposed the open participatory culture of the Open-Source software community into the film-making one.

In order to customize Drupal to better serve his purpose of lowering the barrier of entry to would-be collaborators, Brett (and Sylvain?) had the recursive idea of hosting an impromptu Mashpit as announced on Sylvain’s blog.

As I have been seeped for years in everything open-source, having been in the managing committee of the LUG of my native land, I decided to go cover the event. I had talked to Robin at the recent DemoCampMontreal1 and the recent Montreal Linux User Group, and he definitely knows his way around Drupal, and so I was expecting this event to be an example of cross-functional collaboration within the un-conferency type of Montreal Tech community.

EyeSteel Film

I reached the EyeSteel Film building on Saint-Laurent and met Brett and Sylvain Carle for the first time. I quizzed Brett about his project and his requirements and also got to speak with Sylvain. Brett showed me some printed page views he had designed with pics of Jimmy Wales and Lawrence Lessig. Brett also wanted to make the video submit form for remixers as simple as possible, and that entailed hiding many of the default form entries. Brett and Sylvain were ready to go with their Macs in the main room. I hadn’t brought my laptop, not intending to code anything but I did have my digital camera.

Mac + Drupal + PHP hacking

Not seeing anybody else coming for Mashpit #0, I dived into Mac + Drupal + PHP land right after Brett found me a free computer in another room and set up TextWrangler so that I could work directly through FTP. I told Brett that it would be best to install Drupal locally with a web service but he was at east with the way he proposed, and so off I went blindly jumping into the unknown.

Brett seemed surprised that I’d even turn up not knowing any of the people there. That’s the whole point of open collaboration, I replied.

Based on what Brett had told me – namely that the application would crash if the corresponding lines were commented out – I had to proceed carefully. Commenting lines did hide the form entries but we needed to keep the default values for the video dimensions somewhere.

Not knowing PHP, I took some time not getting anywhere but recognizing hashes of arrays or vice versa, until Sylvain dropped by and pointed out to me that I should look at $output.

I tried also getting a gist of the Drupal architecture, but it was difficult initially. Later on, I realized that I was looking at a Drupal module which itself had some extensions or plugins. And it all worked through a system of Drupal hooks.

BeerCamp?

Sylvain dropped by again for a Sleeman – ah, that’s where the BeerCamp name came from. We talked about his experience in Silicon Valley, and also about the bubble burst. Sylvain and I agree that these are all parts of a market cycle. He added that the market is catching up momentum in SV and maybe with a delay of about 6 months around here. Sylvain firmly believes, like Austin, in the potential of Montreal, especially if one wants to achieve a certain balance between work and extra-work activities. He talked about lifestyle investors or entrepreneurs and I believe it’s the same phenomenon I witnessed in Mauritius – people seemingly more interested in the sun, beach etc… lifestyle rather than in really boosting the economy.

This said, lifestyle or not, I believe any investment or entrepreneurial activity contributes to the global dynamics at a higher level and can be viewed positively too. It’s just you have to be careful who you are doing business with.

Back in the main room, Hugh McGuire of Librivox fame had arrived and he asked me how I was faring. Sylvain showed me how Searchlight worked on the Mac, and also told me about CampFire that he was using this very night to keep in touch with various people relative to the Mashpit. He told me that Robin was online but wouldn’t come.

Ah, there we go, I could ask Robin for help through CampFire! And being the knowledgeable guy that he is in Drupal, I’d be successful in no time. Problem half-solved!

Why mixing Pizzas and remote Open Collaboration is not good strategy

We jumped onto some hot pizzas and conversations revolved around Revolution OS, Eric Stallman and Linus Torvalds. I tried to explain how I thought Stallman was correct in asking that Linux actually be viewed GNU/Linux and that his values for Free Software are important, but got nowhere. Instead, I should probably just have pointed out the articles I wrote about GNU/Linux, Free and Open-Source Software. En français.

So in the meantime, we headed back in the room I was working in together with Ryan who does editing on the movie, pizzas in hand, and Brett showed us an unedited extract of the movie about DJ Girltalk. It was much fun, especially since Girltalk demoes his mashup abilities very loudly while his girlfriend is trying to sleep, occasionally opening an eye.

I headed back into the Mac, tried to email Robin on the MLUG and then hit CampFire. Robin told me to have a look a the Drupal API documentation which I did. But I made a strategic mistake – I mentioned we had just eaten pizzas, and Poof! Robin disappeared into oblivion, his stomach urging him to desist online collaboration for a probably well-deserved bite.

Positive Thinking around CampFire

So in CampFire I expressed that my PHP-hacking abilities (which are non-existent to begin with) were inversely proportional to my Sleeman consumption.

Near the end of the night, Brett dropped by the room and typed a few choice lines in my window of CampFire, impersonating me, like “I feel depressed”, and I added “feels like death here”, to which Hugh, ever the positive guy according to Brett, replied “That’s normal right before a breakthrough.”

Various ethanol-induced torpors and powers

Brett said “Er, let’s try finding ‘hide forms’ in Google”.

Which he did, while I was thinking that this would never work since he didn’t even mention Drupal. How many ways of hiding forms can you have in this age of plethoric form-based applications? Is plethoric even a word? Can you say that in English?

“See, here type = ‘hidden’ let’s try that” he said while reading the first entry which was relative to XHTML.

“Er…I don’t know if there’s a one-to-one mapping between Drupal’s ‘type’ and XHTML’s.” I said, but hoping it would. Questions, questions, questions, way too many questions.

And it did work! DOUBLE HIGH-FIVE!!!

“It takes a non-coder to beat a coder” said Brett or something to that effect.

I agree, a former coder with alcohol is no match for a non-coder with alcohol. That’s the beauty of impromptu Mashpits and open collaboration.

And so we headed off to the main room to celebrate with some more alcohol. After all, good actions need self-reinforcements, don’t they?

Sylvain demoed his startup Project Wuntoo which was quite fascinating, and Hugh took a snapshot of me with his Mac notebook and showed me a small app that would send it directly to Flickr. Oh no, that’s exactly what I tease my friends about with my Digital Camera – that the shot is already uploaded straight to Flickr or the clip to YouTube when they ask for a delete!

In my habitual meta-way of photographing the photographer and filming the filmmaker, I had done some clips of Brett. I do this because self-referentiality is important for AI, but more about this in a later post.

It was a great moment of cheerful collaborative history.

We thanked Brett and headed home but not before strolling on part of Mont-Royal together and chatting. It was great to meet them and to learn about Drupal some more as well as Brett’s exciting project.