spoof vi.

To capture, alter, and retransmit a communication stream in a way that misleads the recipient. As used by hackers, refers especially to altering TCP/IP packet source addresses or other packet-header data in order to masquerade as a trusted machine. This term has become very widespread and is borderline techspeak. <http://www.catb.org/~esr/jargon/html/entry/spoof.html>

Both terms came to mind often in the last several weeks while I've on the road, going from one event to another, witnessing a variety of distances between what's real and what only looks that way. Here's an event-by-event rundown of what I learned:

April 22-25, San Jose: O'Reilly Emerging Technology Conference (ETCon) <http://conferences.oreillynet.com/etcon/>

The show got off to a surreal start when Andrew Orlowski trolled a piece in The Register <http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/4/30367.html> that called the agenda "surreal" and compared the lineup to a "Scientology cult". And that was just the first in a stinging string of provocations. Tim O'Reilly took the bait <http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/wlg/3100>,calling Andrew "...a gossip columnist, not a real journalist".

It made me wonder about what we mean by "real journalism". Lots of journalists spoof, commit satire, and even troll for kicks. (I think Andrew was doing all three.) Near as I can tell, the only thing that truly defines a journalist is that, literally, they write in a journal. Ethics are a matter of trust and context. No offense to the Register, but we trust what's said there somewhat less than we trust what's said by a straight-ahead story in the New York Times. Then again, the Times wouldn't give a yawn to about 95% of what The Register covers.

Ethics was the biggest question in a several-hour Journalism BoF (Birds of a Feather) session on the second evening at ETCon. <http://conferences.oreillynet.com/cs/et2003/view/e_sess/3756> As a panelist, I wasn't in a position to take notes, but others did:

• <http://www.darryl.com/>
• <http://epeus.blogspot.com/2003_04_01_epeus_archive.html#200214878>
• <http://homepage.mac.com/kevinmarks/JournalismBoF.txt>

In retrospect, little of the coverage feels very real to me, and I was there. Yet the sum of it somehow comes closer than any one account. The standout quote was from Tim, who defended drawing a line on who gets to attend the conference free on a press pass and who doesn't. "It costs us money for every person who comes in, and we get scammed." According to Tim, one in four of the attendees was there on a press pass.

The preceding BoF <http://conferences.oreillynet.com/cs/et2003/view/e_sess/4390> convened the first meeting of the Social Software Alliance <http://www.socialtext.net/ssa/index.cgi>. "Social Software" is the latest buzzterm for a topic that has been kicking around in various forms through the entire history of UNIX, which began long before computing got personal. The startup SocialText (disclaimer: I'm on its advisory board) provided a conference wiki that has since proved quite handy for remembering what happened at the event, and what really mattered.

"Compared to war, all other forms of human endeavor shrink to insignificance," General Patton famously said. This fact was manifest at the Warblogging panel <http://conferences.oreillynet.com/cs/et2003/view/e_sess/4381>, which the wiki reduced to a single picture of Stuart Hughes, the panelist patched in by phone from the rehab center in the U.K. where he is learning to get along without his right foot, which had been blown off in Northern Iraq in the early days of the war. <http://www.socialtext.net/etech/index.cgi?warblogging> I was on that panel, too, and I can tell you nothing spoke louder than Stuart's missing foot.

April 22-23, New York: WatchIT recording session <http://www.watchit.com>

For two days in Long Island I played a talking head for WatchIT, a company that sells highly annotated videos to customers in information technology departments. The company, which has been putting together a major series of lectures on Linux, gave me a chance to say 4500 words you won't read in the Wall Street Journal or hear on the usual business radio and TV shows.

Essentially I delivered a video-friendly version of a large piece I wrote for the July issue of Linux Journal (which will come out by late June). In the course of researching and writing that piece, I came to a number of conclusions I'm sure you won't read anywhere else -- all dealing with "realness". In highly condensed form, here they are:

1. The computer industry is undergoing a shift in market power from supply to demand, putting IT professionals in a much stronger position in their vendor relationships -- often to the degree than they don't need vendors at all.
2. One reason is cheap hardware. IT professionals want equally cheap and durable software, and they're finding it with Linux and the LAMP suite (Linux, Apache, MySQL, Perl, Python, PHP, PostgreSQL).
3. Each of the components of the LAMP suite are projects, not products. The mainstream media don't yet know the difference, but the technologists using them do.
4. As vendors and vendor goods become more optional, IT departments are turning into DIY -- Do IT Yourself -- shops.
5. The Linux Phenomenon is hard to understand from the outside, because it's what happens when the demand side of the market starts supplying itself.
6. This is why comparing Linux -- a demand-side project -- to a supply-side product like Windows, is inherently misleading.
7. Basically, Linux is one way smart companies help make themselves smarter.
8. As the demand side gets smarter, so do the supply sides of the markets they drive.
9. IBM and Oracle are two standout examples of suppliers who are hip to the smart stuff happening on the demand sides of their markets -- largely because it's happening inside their companies as well, and they embrace rather than resist it.
10. The software industry is maturing in to something very much like the construction industry, which also has architects, designers, builders, tools, platforms, frameworks, a hearty DIY tradition, project-based work and open source know how.

By the way, my next WatchIT talk will be on Linux clusters in IBM data center environments. Your input is welcome.

April 30-May 1, New York: Burning Questions <http://harvardbusinessonline.hbsp.harvard.edu/b02/en/conferences/conf_detail.jhtml>

I spent most of the next two days doing two things. One was attending Harvard Business School's Burning Questions conference. The other was marveling at the abundance of free public wireless Internet access in New York. Sadly, the latter did not penetrate the former. But the connectivity was hardly missed, since I was the only attendee who bothered to whip out a laptop and take notes. Since BQ was a dress-up affair (raising to four the number of consecutive days I was required to wear a coat and tie) at the very upscale Metropolitan Club (across 5th Avenue from the Plaza Hotel), laptops seemed as inconguous as work boots. But the conference did a great job of making itself interesting, and I had a job to do.

Values were a huge topic at the event. Two exemplars on one panel were Harry Kraemer, CEO of Baxter International, and Dawn Lapore, who sits on the boards of Charles Schwab, eBay and Wal-Mart. My notes from what Kraemer said:

1. There is no conflict between values and anything else.
2. If you see a conflict, you’ll make the wrong decision.
3. Every decision looks at trade-offs. If everyone knows balance is okay, the company will be better off.
4. You don't have employees. You have team members.
5. Making things simple takes time.
6. Beware of people who have trouble fitting through doorways because they think it's all about them.
7. Do well by doing good.
8. Make sure every employee everywhere has the ability to raise questions anywhere.

Sound a little like open source development?

Here are my notes from Dawn Lapore:

1. Schwab "cut at the top first" when it came time for layoffs.
2. Top execs did voluntary time off without pay.
3. They set up a $10 million fund for laid-off employees.
4. You can't legislate morals (much of the inethical stuff Enron did was technically legal).
5. We need the same disclosures in finance as we have in medicine (lives are at stake).
6. Actions speak louder.
7. Schwab's top question: How do you make it so everybody in the company benefits?
8. Governance is about preventing bad unintended consequences.

A lot of this may sound like the kind of slick homilies that require equal and opposite satire of the Despair.com school. <http://www.despair.com> Digression: Despair's Penguin poster <http://www.despair.com/limitations.html> is titled Limitations ("Until you spread your wings, you'll have no idea how far you can walk".) But you know real when you hear it, and these people had it.

By contrast, the burning questions about "corporate governance", occasioned by recent legislation I had never heard of before, were handled by Deloitte Touche executives who clearly saw how increased regulation required increased dependence on consultancies with freshly enlarged corporate governance divisions. These guys provided no clarity whatsoever. At least not to me.

My favorite session was the last one, which dealt with "decision-making". Significantly, it featured Max Bazerman <http://www.people.hbs.edu/mbazerman/>, who is working on a book titled "Predictable Surprises". Among other things he delivered news that the Gore Commission report on terrorism originally included many predictors (e.g. beware of guys from Arabia taking flying lessons) of 9/11 that were excluded from the final draft <http://www.airportnet.org/depts/regulatory/goreini.htm> for political reasons. (The original draft is on his site somewhere.)

After his talk I approached Max with an offer to provide fodder for Linux-based predictable surprises in the software industry. He said he's be glad to have them.