Around the clock

The first aspect of the Free Software culture I immediately got into contact with was the timezone mess. As soon as I got accepted it was very clear what had to be done: “i need to meet up with my mentors”.

I’m in Campinas, ~100km from São Paulo, Brazil, so UTC-3:00. Angrez is in Bangalore, India, UTC+5:30. Aaron is in Seattle, USA, UTC-8:00. When Angrez gets to work early in the morning it’s past midnight for me and it catches Aaron right after a full day’s work. And still it’s the best time for us to meet online.

It’s a bit difficult then to say things like “so should we meet at five?” without having to do some annoying math in your head (I find the simplest math to be the toughest). Good thing that in these cases good-ol’ Google Calendar comes in to the rescue! I’ve set up a shared calendar where I enter the meeting times and everyone sees it conveniently in their own timezone. The simple stuff. :-)

This asynchronous nature of things sheds some light on why the free software communities make the most use (and the most development) of communication and collaboration tools based mainly in text: source code control (I’ve heard that deep conversations go on in SVN commit messages), issue tracking, mailing lists, IRC, IMs, blogs, etc.

At my current work, nobody in my team (including myself) has any experience with projects different from single-programmer course assignments, thesis-related mockup programs and the like. And we work on a big project. And although we have available to us lots of those communication/collaboration tools (the whole IBM proprietary suite), we only make very basic use of reserved checkout/checkin features (we’re dead scared of merges!), we do releases by copying code, we check out thirty files, do lots of different things and commit at the end of the day. Heck, we don’t even comment commits.

For now that’s one very immediate benefit I’ve taken from starting to get my feet wet on the free software world. I’ve become quite interested in these version control, issue tracking things and now I’m studying the documentation for that bloody suite, searching around for tips on best practices (stupid stuff like comment the freaking commit – better yet with a single short descriptive line followed by meatier description -, only commit consistent states to the trunk – we don’t actually use branches yet, I’m just practicing the lingo-, one feature per commit, etc.) and, of course, I’ve been nagging the hell out of my colleagues =)

Is BorrowMe dead?

The website’s still up, I can still log in, but I haven’t heard anything from it in a very long while. The last entry in their beta blog is from August! Have they flopped? Been acquired?

That would be the only way for them to survive, I think. Getting bought by MySpace, Facebook or some other big social network. Building a big network on your own these days isn’t so easy anymore, and they could have their idea implemented as another feature in an already-existing social site.

Now did the fact that it was such a purpose-focused network help it not grow? There are some pretty large network built around specific interests, like photos, video, even comic books. Why not stuff-sharing?

Borrowing from strangers

Reading my feeds this morning, I learned through Library Stuff about BorrowMe, a great idea I really hope takes off.

Imagine something like an eBay where, instead of selling and buying, people could lend, borrow or give things away.

Books, videos, tools, appliances, electronics or any other type of stuff people buy, use once and never again, could be put to be shared and would, besides bringing people together, reduce a lot of wasteful buying.

I don’t know the details of the system, but with a good reputation system, rules for lending and getting back (like in libraries) and search based on location, there’s some real potential there.

They’re not out yet, but I hope to hear more from them. I’d be very much willing to localize their site for Brazilian users.

If their only idea was to make booksharing easier, it would already be a great thing, especially in a country where books are still too expensive for most to buy. I’m sure the books themselves would be also much happier to be passed around instead of bought, read once and put to collect dust in a shelf.