The last year has had a lot of things happen to it in my life. I took on a lot of new responsibilities at my old job at Creative Commons, MediaGoblin development ran in full swing, we kicked off Liberated Pixel Cup, I left my job at Creative Commons, we left DeKalb and moved to Madison, Morgan started her PhD program... but the largest, most overwhelmingly huge thing that happened in my life this year was the MediaGoblin campaign.

I've never done anything that felt so huge, so life changing, that used so many of my skills and all of my energy, that felt so draining and yet felt so gratifying all at once.

The campaign was a huge success, and I've wanted to write about it for some time. But even after the campaign ended, it didn't really end; I've still been busy wrapping it up. And it's also something that felt so huge that I have a hard time putting it all down. So this will be my attempt. There will be no tl;dr... knowing of the success of the campaign is the best tl;dr you will get, so if that's what you care about, you can stop reading now (you probably already read that anyway). If you wanted to know way, way more about behind the scenes than you might have ever wanted to, here we go.

The first thing that needed to happen for the MediaGoblin campaign to happen was that I needed to quit my job. There's a bit more to it than sending in a notice saying I was quitting; I knew that I thought MediaGoblin was my most important work and that I wanted to focus on it, but how? I was looking to see if there were some jobs that might allow me to contribute to free software in some way for most of the week but then allow me one or two days (preferably two) to focus on MediaGoblin work. There were some possibilities, but in the end I decided that I would not really get as much MediaGoblin work as I would like done in that manner, and the jobs that were willing to let me do that were (understandably) somewhat cautious in the amount of time they could promise me. At that time I was feeling flustered that I wasn't giving MediaGoblin enough time, and that every time I stepped back, even though we had a lot of contributors, contributions were falling off and the community would go very silent. I wanted to be as active as possible, and so I decided I wanted to try to do it fulltime.

Of course, I also had to talk to Morgan; this was a decision that would affect both of us, and she was starting her program at the university and that was probably going to be expensive (more expensive than we anticipated even; it turned out funding was not available this last semester so we paid for it out of pocket). However, we had been saving for a possible life change like this. Morgan agreed: we had enough money at hand, I seemed to have some contracting opportunities if I needed to fall back on them, we had some backup savings, and if I could find a way to cover enough for us to live on for the next year, I should do it. And there was a cost of not doing this: I was at a strange position in my life where I could actually pursue my life dreams and possibly make them happen. What would happen if I didn't do so?

And so I quit my job. I turned in my notice at work, agreed to work part time for a few months and then as a contractor afterwards.

Morgan and I left our apartment in DeKalb. There were two weeks between our old apartment and our new apartment. We put our things in storage, and went on a trip: first to Boston for a week, then to New York.

In Boston Morgan and I stayed at the house of friend and MediaGoblin co-conspirator Deb Nicholson. Morgan took the time to visit museums and explore Boston; it was her first trip ever there. Meanwhile, I visited with free-softwareish friends and talked about free-software-ish things. I also spent a lot of time crashing the FSF office and doing MediaGoblin work from there. Deb's partner asked me when I was going to stop working and start vacationing and have a good time. I didn't know what he meant... I couldn't have been having a better time.

The most important day of that trip was when Deb, Will Kahn-Greene (another MediaGoblin co-conspirator) and I met at the FSF offices to plan out the campaign. We talked a bit and laid out some general structure to how the campaign would work. Then it was time to answer one of the big questions: were we going to do the campaign through the FSF or through KickStarter? (John Sullivan already expressed interest in us doing it through the FSF if we were interested in doing so.) We left for a coffee shop to discuss it and finish outlining the structure of the campaign. Well, if you read my previous blogpost, you already know the results: we went with the FSF.

Of course, we still needed to agree that we were going through the FSF. We went back to the FSF offices, explained to John that we were interested in going through the FSF but there were certain features we needed during the campaign that it didn't appear the FSF had infrastructure-wise. We laid them out one for one, and John took notes on a pad of paper. "Yes, I think we can do this."

Finally, it felt like the campaign was really real. I was excited.

Morgan and I finished up our week in Boston, said goodbye to Deb and her (now-husband) Ernie for being such awesome hosts, and left for a week where I'd actually do some real vacationing (only a little bit of coding, honest) in New York, visited with a number of friends in the area and had a great time, and finally flew home to move our stuff between DeKalb and Madison.

We moved into our new apartment. I walked around Madison and fell in love. For a couple of days, I just straightened things out, settled in, and mostly felt fairly relaxed, the most relaxed I had felt in a long time.

But... time to stop relaxing. Time to start the campaign for real. Before the launch date, we had a mile-long list of TODO tasks, and a very short time to get going on them. I got to work.

There was a lot to do before the campaign even started. We commissioned MediaGoblin's regular artist Jef van Schendel to do a special campaign page for the MediaGoblin site. The FSF did work to update their infrastructure for our requests. Deb, Will and I hammered out the plan for the pitch video, finalized the rewards plans (I did quite a few calculations to make sure the rewards wouldn't cost so much as to not make the campaign worth it), and then came the really huge task: the pitch video itself. Work started in late August. The plan was that this would all go live on September 1st. That gave us less than a month and a half to wrap it up and get it going.

Here is the exact outline of tasks that we planned out:

Aug 23-25:

• Timeline nailed down
• Chris's local reference script pieced together
• Agree on amount to pay schendje
• Talk with schendje about pay and timeline

• Work with the FSF to find out everything about what the theming is
• Storyboard finished (mid-week)
• Animation tests done
• Ideally, animatic done
• Chris Webber should find out and get to Deb (& Carl) what the aspect ratios / formats best are
• Coordinate any work for audio and video recording with other people
• Deb and Chris work out draft phrasing and page layoutish content

• final storyboard signed off on (start of week)
• Reward decisions researched
• As much non-"face recording" work as can be done for the video as
• Deb and I should have videos of ourselves recorded
• Deb should get video of herself recorded to me
• Voiceovers done or mostly so
• Animations done
• Background music, if using, should be looked for

• Writing for pitch page done
• FSF should have things working
• Writing for fundraising page done
• Theming should be done
• Donation progress bar should be working
• Video mostly edited
• Talking to reporters? (or is this next week?)

• Final video edits
• Video transcoded and put in place
• Final tests and etc

This was a lot to do in not a lot of time (my org-mode tree for the "Crowdfunding campaign" task is 3300 lines of text long, though that includes post-campaign tasks also, and for the most part I did not take breaks over this month and a half of work), and one thing I knew from seeing the success and failure of other campaigns was that things had to look good. And more important than anything else, the campaign video pitch had to be stellar. We could be cynical about this: we are catering to a certain amount of flashy visuals and shallowness. I remember watching the Ouya campaign and thinking "they haven't put any useful substance in this video" and thus feeling very suspicious of it (I guess it looks like they're making real stuff so maybe I should stop being so wary). But what really made that campaign raise so much money? Was it proof that they had the architectural ability to produce a console that was really useful? I really didn't think that video had much substance in it; it was mostly flashiness. But it also was the right kind of flashiness for the audience it was going for, and it raised the money it needed to raise.

Looks aren't everything though either, and I didn't want to make something vaporous. Will pointed to Joey Hess's git-annex assistant campaign video which is kind of awesomely the opposite of the Ouya video: it explains clearly what it wants to do but doesn't look flashy and shiny at all. (It probably helps that everyone knows who the heck Joey Hess is.) And there are also some nicer examples that fall in the middle... Tube is by people I trust and made a kick-ass video that was visually appealing, felt like it matched the film they were producing, and also explained what they were doing clearly. That's the kind of video I was more interested in making.

But I'm not a film-maker, and it was hard to know if this was something I could really do. A few years ago I read an interesting book titled Animating With Blender which I thought was more useful for its instructions on how to organize a film than how to actually use Blender itself. It really illuminated how to make a film from start to finish for me.

So the approach we took was very structured, and I took it in steps:

• I wrote an outline of the script I imagined. At this stage, it was harder to get feedback I discovered, not really enough info to convey the script I had in mind.
• I turned it into an actual script with spoken lines and textual descriptions of what would be appearing on the screen shot for shot. This was a lot easier to get feedback on; Deb, Will and I talked about it, but I especially had a lot of back and forth emails with Deb while we ironed out exactly what the lines would be.
• With a clear script, I then produced a story reel with test audio (which I mistakenly called an animatic... it isn't.) Many of the things shown in here were just images that I thought were "close enough" to conveying the thing at the moment which I had around. There were also the node animations; I spent some time in this period carefully deciding what the aesthetics of those two short animated scenes would be.
• I searched around to find some appropriate music; I tried a bunch of pieces including some folksy acoustic ones and jokingly showed Will one with a bit of overly-epic chiptune music that I liked. Will actually said that this was the right call and I should go with it, saying something along the lines of "It should be epic and over the top! This isn't Prairie Home Companion, we aren't sitting around eating corn cobs. This is the fight for the future of the internet!" I went with that one after all.
• I worked on the render tests of the nodes and the police scanner. Until I got these tests done, I was still afraid that the animations were something I wouldn't be able to pull off.
• Deb and I started doing voice and video recordings. This was a bit tough, and in retrospect we should have used some time together to visit a professional's house and get said recordings. As it was, we both recorded separately on crappy microphones and not ideal camera equipment. I spent a ton of time cleaning up audio in audacity, re-recording stuff myself, and pestering Deb with requests of things to re-record. (I am sure I was annoying about this, not to mention that she was in the middle of planning her wedding! Thanks for being patient, Deb.) I think more than anything, I underestimated how important it was to get this part down right, and I spent a lot of time being afraid that our crappy setups would ruin the video and everyone would dismiss it and not donate it because they could hear audio crackle. (I was probably more afraid of this than was rational.)
• I wrote some python scripts to be able to allow me to create the animated node graph quickly with adjustments.
• I did the actual animation of the node graph things. There were some hiccups, my police graph rig was hacky, but I have to say, this was the most fun thing for me for the entire campaign.
• I made a ton of screenshots of MediaGoblin.
• I made a number of video recordings of me doing certain small things like scrolling through identi.ca or starting up a MediaGoblin process. I did more takes of these than is probably rational.
• I asked Joar Wandborg to make videos of himself eating and upload them to MediaGoblin. If you re-watch the video you'll know what part I mean.
• I knocked out the drawings that appear in the video.
• I abused my friendship with my friend Bassam Kurdali and asked him for more Blender tips than is fair or reasonable.
• I did the video editing of the whole shebang in Blender's video editor. I might have had more anxiety about the audio quality part, but I had more actual frustration over this than anything else. It wasn't the actual placing the timing or strips of things... it was putting videos on the sequence editor and battling encoding issues for literally days on end.
• I cut up the audio that we were using and put it in place and made the credits.
• And of course, I did the final render. My computer smoldered for a good 9 hours, and the campaign video was complete.

When you work on something like that for that long, it's hard to not mostly just focus on all the mistakes you made. But honestly, I am damned proud of that campaign video. I think it sent all the right messages clearly, I think it looks awesome, and I think it was the right length. I feel good about it.

There was quite a bit more to do also and we ended up being a bit farther behind than I expected by a week and a half. Still, we got all that done in only a little over a month and a half.

Finally, everything was ready: the video, the campaign page text, the rewards decisions, the little icons that went with the rewards (done by my friend Alex Camelio), the FSF donations page... it was time to launch.

We launched!

The campaign launch was exciting. We put out a blogpost, the FSF put out notices to their own campaign, a lot of people spread the message on various channels, and money started to come in. At this point I was relieved that things had finally set off; I thought I might have a chance to finally relax in comparison to all the pre-campaign work I had done.

Well, I was very wrong there. :)

Before I get into what happened, Will put together an analytics script. It's interesting to look at:

Initially things went easily: the people who were most likely to donate jumped onto donate. I remember going out to lunch with a MediaGoblin donor who turned out to be from Madison; over the course of lunch, the campaign went up $600. But it didn't stay easy.

What I discovered is what anyone who's had to do fundraising already knows: it's a real slog. You have to keep up momentum, and for a large part, that means getting out messaging every day. We had a lot of advantages: Deb knows a lot of people in the tech media, we had the FSF as a connection, we had a solid video and good branding, we had an awesome feature (3d media support!) land mid-campaign, and so on.

The details are kind of boring and I'm not going to go into them, but what I learned the hard way is two things:

• There's a point where fundraising slows down. You can see that on the graph already.
• If you step away from messaging, things basically grind to a halt.
• It's really hard to keep messaging interesting for a whole month, though.

There was a week where I went to the Federated Social Web Summit and also flew in to help CC with interviews for a position it was hiring for. I thought it was really important to go, and it turned out to be a useful thing to blog about after. But during that week, money basically stopped coming in altogether because I also dropped off of messaging. It probably would have slowed anyway, but it was hard to not be gripped by anxiety by everything just totally grinding to a halt fundraising wise. There's a certain part during fundraising where your feeling of self worth is proportional to how fast the fundraising level is climbing, so in times like that, it can be hard.

Luckily, one major thing happened for us: the FSF helped secure a 10k matching grant. (You might see a huge spike on the graph; that's the 10k grant coming in.) As important as the 10k grant itself was, when things were slow, it gave us an extra thing to rally around. I'm very grateful to the FSF that they helped us line this up; I don't even know where I'd begin to start such a thing myself.

Anyway, a ton of anxiety later, the campaign did wrap up. We shot for 60k and it was clear we weren't going to make it. But we also set the campaign a bit higher than we needed it to be. I told Deb and Will that "if we could just make 40k, I'd feel like it was a success". As the time came closer I wrote John saying that I was considering doing something crazy like lowering our final goal to 40k, since I was afraid nobody would donate at the end if it didn't look like we'd get close to our real goal (maybe they'd think it was Kickstarter-style and would think "well, they won't make it anyway"). John advised me that the end of these things tend to be tough but sit tight. So I did.

We made 43k and I felt pretty awesome about it. We declared the campaign a huge success, and meant it.

The campaign is over, but that doesn't mean the work is over. There's been about a month of work after the end of the campaign spent working on trying to finish the rewards of donors to the campaign. I've actually enjoyed it; one thing about the campaign that I really like is that it's allowed me to mix in excuses to make good use of my artwork. (You may have noticed that the MediaGoblin project itself is sneakily set up to make use of my favorite skills in different ways.) But of course, the purpose of the campaign wasn't to fund rewards, it was to fund me working on MediaGoblin for a year. (Or, well at one point we thought there was the possibility that maybe we'd shoot so far over the campaign that we could pay multiple people... clearly that didn't happen :)) Thankfully, that's almost all done. I've finished all the artwork and Morgan has helped a whole lot on ordering things and vectorizing the mascot for the shirt and so on.

Last week was the first time I finally felt like I spent a full, solid week on MediaGoblin doing code reviews, coding, and a bit of administrative work.

It felt awesome.

I think it was worth it. I think it's also common to think about a campaign like this as "you set up the thing, then the money rolls in". Well, I don't know if that was true for other campaigns. It certainly wasn't true for ours. It was a lot of work.

After all the costs of the campaign are removed, the "income" from the campaign will be a bit less than $35000 (I will be making the files related to the finances of the campaign public). Keep in mind also that the campaign started in September, so since I'm promising to work on MediaGoblin full time for all of 2013, that's not just a year, that's nearly 1 1/3 years (so that's closer to $26000/year if it were really a salary). That's not a huge salary for a programmer. It's both significantly less than half of what I made at CC, and less than what I made at my first time job as a datacenter monkey, and both of those had benefits. We're paying for our own insurance as-is. We can make it through 2013, but partway through the year I will also need to figure out how to fund things going forward.

But it's also enough... not on its own, but as said, we have some savings, and I have some contracting that I can do. And it's actually also pretty good; sure, we didn't meet our goal, but there are other awesome projects like Tube, git-annex-assistant, and OpenPhoto, and actually if you look at those you realize we did pretty damned well.

And it's afforded a rare opportunity: to do exactly what I want and believe in for a year. And that's something that I wouldn't have been able to justify otherwise.

And so... I'm looking forward to this next year!

Addendum: One thing I forgot to mention in all this is that during the middle of the MediaGoblin campaign, I got a lot of help from the community itself as they stepped up to take care of the codebase when I was in campaign-madness-mode. (Not to mention all the community help in promoting the campaign, or even in making MediaGoblin into anything at all!) So thanks, all. :)

Depression is a background but ever-present part of my life. Most people who know me closely know this, but probably most people who know me for the type of work and projects I do do not. I'm not against people knowing, but it isn't something I really talk about because it seems like something that's mostly personal and thus isn't really something that there's reason to talk about.

But recently that's changed; by now, weirdly almost everyone on the internet knows about Aaron Swartz's suicide. I say weirdly because... well I never knew Aaron personally, we never spoke, and he was not my friend. But there was a large overlap in our lives in more ways than I can probably count (affiliation with Creative Commons, various kinds of informational freedom activism, programming language preferences, et cetera), and while I did not know him, many of my friends did. News of Aaron's death did affect me personally, partly for empathy for friends, partly for sadness at losing someone who's kind of a kindred spirit, partly because I lost one of my closest friends to suicide over a year ago, and partly because my own depression is a regular background issue for me. Aaron Swartz's death was not quite like losing a friend to me because he wasn't a friend, but for the reasons above and many others not listed, it did stir up a strong emotional reaction in me. But there has been enough written about Aaron Swartz, his suicide, and a whole crock of issues that have been stirred about it by a good very many people who are far more qualified than I am to write about such things. So I assumed I had nothing to say on the subject that was worth reading. And strictly on the subject of Aaron Swartz, I really don't.

But there was a well written post by Evan Prodromou titled "On hackers and suicide" which echoed a lot of my own thoughts recently, and he seemed to be calling for others to join the conversation, and I feel like I do have quite a bit of thoughts on it, so I should maybe write them down while the moment seems clear.

The first thing I guess to be said has already been said: I have depression, it is a part of my life, and probably will be for the rest of my life. I have been depressed for a long time, since my preteen or early teen years at least. I remember strongly the first times I started thinking about how I might be able to kill myself with a dirty knife on the kitchen counter or a (unlikely to work) strategy of sticking my head under a running faucet and holding it there until I drowned. I haven't had a serious suicide attempt but suicide is something I think of often, almost or maybe even daily. There was only once where I nearly did it... I had been fighting to keep my small college Barat open from being closed by the larger university DePaul which had bought it, had been engaged in a long campaign to keep it open, it closed, and I felt like my world was simply over, there was nothing left for me to do. I went out into the woods to slit my wrists with a pocketknife. When I got into the woods I realized I didn't have the knife on me anyways so I just walked back and felt mostly tired and defeated for awhile. And so I'm still alive to this day, I suppose, due to my absent-mindedness. But aside from that time, depression wavers between being mostly something I know is there but isn't very present to being something in the back of my mind to something tearing at and lacerating my thoughts.

I really don't see how this is something that will change. I remember being in college and thinking that if I could somehow carve out a life for myself where I was doing important work that I believed in, if I was doing things I wanted to do, I wouldn't have reason to be depressed. And I had a hard time understanding why people who I admired so greatly, who did so much, could really continue to be depressed. It didn't seem logical. But here I am... I think I have actually carved out as much of a "I am doing important, ethical work that I believe in and that I enjoy as is actually possible at all ever" situation as I will ever be able to... and depression, somehow, has not gone away.

Why? To look at it logically, it doesn't make sense. It's very troubling: I have surrounded myself with a lot of people I really admire who are doing great work, things that I think are important world-changing things, people I couldn't possibly put an ounce more admiration into, and somehow the majority of them seem to have depression also. Not only that, but there's a way higher correlation between the number of people who seem to be doing good things and who I care about and the number of people who have deep, serious depression issues. And most of my community is the free software community. Why do hackers (and I mean that more broadly than programmers, include any participant in these kinds of spaces) seem to have so much trouble with depression?

It's hard to know without being highly self-reflective (and indeed, I've already been more self-reflective in this post than maybe you ever wished to know), so I'm not going to shy away from being self-reflective. Yes, I'm projecting my own life onto you. But I think there are some reasons why I and and other people like me seem to struggle regularly from depression. And here are some of them.

First of all, a lot of hackers and smart people generally I think tend to have had troubled childhoods. There's a nature versus nurture type question that's really not easy to split apart at all that's one of those "do nerds have socially difficult lives because they're nerds or are they nerds because they have socially difficult lives?" I think the answer is probably that it's a mutually compounding thing, but there's a certain personality type that's already very smart but which is having a difficult life that draws them to certain types of intellectual activities as escapism. I didn't have many friends as a kid, I was picked on in school, and that's all very standard narrative for nerds. Sometimes when I read about other nerds, I hear about them having an easy time in school academically, but that wasn't true for me because I had such a strong case of ADD; I nearly failed out of the first two years of high school due to a combination of difficulty keeping my attention under control and because I had absolutely no friends in school (I had friends outside of school, and yes, of course they were nerds), and probably the only thing that saved me was being transferred to a wonderful alternative school called Kradwell where I learned to keep my ADD under control and nobody made fun of you for being a freak because everyone was a freak. And I had some complicated family issues and many other things. And computers were an escape. Computers don't judge you, they don't make fun of you, they don't pressure you for taking too long to figure out a problem, they're just there and they have a world full of interesting problems that you can solve, and if you take the time, you can become good at solving them. (I don't believe I am a "born hacker" in the sense that I have naturally good computer skills... I am just very stubborn and have basically forced my way through with stubborn interest.)

And the more people I talk to, the more that I find that many other people have been like me. Not everyone of course, and this may be changing for the better: increased outreach efforts are reaching groups of people who might not fit all the "hacker prototypes", and that's a good thing. But for a lot of people I know, this is a common pattern. So many hackers are depressed before they are ever hackers, and they don't become hackers because they're depressed, but there's patterns that mean that this is a common thing.

Compounding this is that people who work on free software issues tend to be working on it for ethical reasons. And working on something for ethical reasons is, I think, one of the most important things that you can do with your life. The world does not move forward if we don't have people working on things for ethical reasons. But this can also be emotionally wearing: you're working on these things because you care deeply about them. Becoming personally invested in something, believing in something, takes a lot of emotional resources. It can be very rewarding when things are going well. But you're also up against a lot, and that can also be very wearing. Not to mention that there's a lot of guilt... you will probably not do things 100% right 100% of the time. I remember telling someone when I told someone that I was using a proprietary driver on one of my computers (otherwise, 3d acceleration would not work, and I am a 3d artist): "I do have this proprietary driver installed, but at least I have the dignity to feel terrible about it." (Yes, I do try to get around this also by running a completely free system to the fullest extent I can... though that can be wearing in its own way to try to do.)

This gets even harder if you're not just a user, but a hacker who is trying to build new, challenging things. When you do build things, when they're going well, there's nothing like it. But things can go badly too, and it's very easy to take things personally. I remember when I heard about the suicide of Ilya, one of Diaspora's founders, that frightened me. If I really did leave to do MediaGoblin fulltime (which I now have), what would I do to myself if things did not succeed? (Or even they may not be failing... I don't think Diaspora was failing, but it's easy to feel like they are when you're building something you care about and suffering from depression simultaneously.) Would I be able to handle the feelings of failure emotionally? Worrying that I could not was something that I struggled with when deciding whether this was something I should do (ultimately, I decided it was too important to not do it, not to mention the depression of not doing it would be even worse). But it's still something I've thought and worried about.

And it's very easy to take things people say personally. A number of years ago I used to join in the chorus of "X project sucks! This sucks!" and generally snarking on a lot of things that I thought sucked. My perspective on that has changed. For one thing, as a teenager on slashdot, making comments about a project "sucking" didn't seem like it could be hurting anyone partly because I thought that if I was tossing insults around, I was tossing insults at giants, and such words would just bounce off them like pebbles on their impossibly thick skin. The irony of this is that I thought that these people were like powerful, immortal coders, and thus impervious to any damage I could toss around, so why not vent a little? But now I run a project myself, and I know many of these developers who at one point seemed like mythical figures walking high above my head, and I know the truth: they aren't magical. They were never magical. They are just people. And that means they're just as vulnerable too. And those words can hurt.

Furthermore, snark is fun and easy way to look awesome. It's hard to build things, but it's easy to be an armchair pundit, throwing insults around. And it's not just the armchair pundits either; there's some kind of disturbing trend where plenty of people celebrate the past-time of attacking each other, and this is even encouraged by some of our most high profile community members. Every couple of weeks Linus Torvalds switches desktops and thrashes the other desktop system and everyone throws a party, except for the people who are currently working on that project. I don't know what they do; if I was working on their project, I'd probably go lie down on my bed for a few hours with the lights off and not move for a while.

Early on in announcing MediaGoblin, a friend of mine told me that it was mentioned on a podcast, and that the comments on this podcast said that it'd never work because the name was stupid and it was a GNU project and GNU projects never happen, or some sort of thing like that. My friend said I should really listen to it so I could hear what they were saying. Well, I was never able to listen to the podcast. I probably will some day, but I am afraid to open the file. When my friend told me that, I felt so terrible that I wondered whether or not I should even bother working on anything anymore, especially not MediaGoblin. I'll tell you an embarrassing truth: someone made fun of my project name and I cried about it. Isn't that the dumbest thing you've ever heard? It's like the kind of thing some dumb, dorky kid would do that everyone would make fun of them for on the playground. Except oh wait, I did it, and I'm an adult. (And I guess I was that dumb, dorky kid on the playground anyway.)

But what am I saying? We should never criticize each others' projects? We should just be really fucking, eggshell-steppingly nice all the time? Well, that kind of level of niceness sounds kind of exhausting. And of course, criticism isn't just good, it's critical. We need it to improve things. But I guess, just realize that it's real human beings who are running those projects. They're probably more vulnerable than you know. Would you say the same things you're saying about this project to the face of someone you know? Sometimes we say things on the internet that we would never say in real life. That sometimes makes it a bit easier to shake things off... but not always, and often not really. The person who's reading your comments might be the person who runs that project, and they probably run it because they care and believe in it. And they have feelings.

At PyCon a few years ago my friend Ian Bicking gave a wonderful and whimsical talk called simply Topics of Interest (or maybe it was his DjangoCon keynote, I don't really remember, it was at one of those talks; I'm intentionally not watching so I can rephrase it in the way that it struck me, even if that's wrong). At the time, everyone seemed to be bitching about the state of Python's packaging, and picking on the people who were working on it (I am guilty of this). I remember something that Ian said really hit me, which was something along the lines of: "When people work on hard problems, that's really difficult to do right, and it's easy to pick on those people for doing things wrong. But if you make fun of people who work on hard problems, then they go away. And then nobody works on those problems." I was really struck by that.

It's also true that in the optimal world, where everything is going well, chronic depression doesn't just go away anyway. It's always there, though a life that is going well is one where dealing depression is much easier. Even when it doesn't make sense though, even when you've carved out the ideal world for yourself, once you've burned the paths in your mind where depression and suicide can become their own escapes, it's very easy to fall back on them. Sometimes little things can trigger them. Sometimes a general buildup of anxiety. Sometimes it's hard to know why. But it's easy to fall back on those paths. It's hard not to.

That said, having chronic depression as something that doesn't go away isn't the same as "well, you have depression, it doesn't go away, so there's not really anything to do." I think people really are affected by what's happening in their life. I think that Aaron Swartz's suicide wasn't just "he had depression, so ultimately he'd eventually take his life anyway". If I had been bullied to the extent that Aaron had I think that I would not have been able to take it either. That could drive anyone to depression... and even worse, anyone with depression, I think it would throw them over the edge. So it's not just a simple thing of "it's depression's fault" or "it's the situation's fault". Depression might not go away, but there are things we can do about it.

But what? I've talked a lot about my own depression here. I hope nobody misreads this as a "feel bad for me" post. I don't want you to feel bad for me, I'm actually doing pretty well right now. But now you know a bit more also. And I've talked about depression, or I've tried to, in the sense of causes. As for solutions, or even action items... that's a much, much harder thing to talk about. I don't know if there are solutions; that sounds too much like a problem that can be wrapped up cleanly. There are things that we can do, I think, and but it's a lot harder to identify them. But here's a short list of things that I think are actionable:

• Be welcoming of people. If there's someone trying to get involved in a project, that's an intimidating thing. If you're in some sort of position of leadership, remember that it's up to you to set the stage for a welcoming, friendly community. Support people who are being kind, try to help along people who are new, and try to help people who are acting inappropriately to improve the way they communicate to be considerate.
• Don't participate in a culture of bullying. It's okay, even good, to share criticisms. But try your best to be constructive. It's easy and fun to be a snarky douchebag, but remember, there's someone on the other end of the internet, and they have a face, and they have feelings. Be nice to them. Be considerate. Give criticism, but give it constructively. And don't give bullying or antagonism your support, either.
• Remember that activism is important, but hard and emotionally draining. We absolutely, positively need people to act ethically, even when the ethical solution isn't the "better" solution. But remember also that when we're asking people to try to stand up for what's right, that often means going against the grain of society, and that can be very wearing and require a lot of patience. So be patient to people also.
• Be supportive of each other, and seek support when you need it. Remember: if you're depressed, you aren't alone. There are plenty of hackers out there who are depressed, just like you. And that means don't be afraid to find other people who are like you can be a support structure, and help other people when they need their support. A lot of what is really needed for people who are depressed is to have a friend to talk to about their problems. But of course, there's also only so much that people can do as friends: sometimes professional help is really needed. (And as Evan said in his forementioned post, making suicide prevention resources widely available is I think an important step in helping reduce risk.)
• Remember that you're doing something important, and feel good about that. One problem I've discovered about myself is that I tend to not evaluate myself based on the things I do, but on the things I don't do. I think that's a common pattern, and both a source of drive for people to do better, but also the source of a lot of burnout. Remember that you're trying to do good, and feel good about what you've done and are doing. It's okay to feel good about yourself and what you do! And that means something else too: don't give up on yourself. The world isn't better off without you in it. It wasn't better off without Aaron in it either. If you need help, get help. The world is hard, and that means partly that it needs people in it to do important things to make it better. Do good, and value yourself for it.

Beyond that, I don't know. It's a hard situation to figure out how to improve, but I think it's important that we recognize and talk about this. I'm certainly interested in what others have to say.

You may have read it on the MediaGoblin blog already, but the MediaGoblin crowdfunding campaign was a huge success!

I have more I want to say on this subject, but for now I just wanted to echo Joey Hess's blogpost of similar name. And it's a solid fact now: from now till the end of 2013 I've basically been hired by people who believe in all of the ideas we were selling in the MediaGoblin campaign: that the internet needs decentralized and federated media publishing, that MediaGoblin is the platform to do it, and that we're a really fun project that can make this all happen.

The campaign has been an interesting experience, and I certainly intend to write more about it. I've never done everything else that used all of my skills so thoroughly... but I guess what I mean by that is coming up in another post very shortly. For now, I'm just basking in the awesome that we sold the world on a dream and I've essentially been hired by that same world to build it. How often do people get to spec out their dreams and live them?

Now I'd better get back to working on things! Got quite a lot to get done so we can bring this dream we're promising to life! Not to mention shipping out... and making!... all those rewards we promised. :)

As those who have read my previous entries know, I quit my job of three years as senior software engineer at Creative Commons to pursue the free software project I've been running, MediaGoblin. I'd explain a bit further what MediaGoblin is but actually there's no reason to: we're in the middle of running a fundraising campaign, and we put a video together that explains everything wonderfully already. So what you really ought to do is click through to:

Go ahead visit the above link! Check out the campaign! Watch the video! Donate! Excitedly link the campaign to your friends! Then come back here. I'll still be around.

Okay, back? Awesome. So the campaign has gone live and is going well. It's been a major portion of my life the last couple of months. For the one and a half months leading up to the campaign, it was my life. And it still is. I stressed out about it all the way leading up to the campaign launch and I am, in fact, still stressing out about it now. But it's a good kind of stress. We're getting a lot of positive reactions from people, and I feel great about that. I really do believe that MediaGoblin is the most important thing I've ever worked on in my life, and so having this be a success is important to me. And having it be important to other people... well that's important to me, too.

There's a couple of things that people have been asking me about related to the campaign. People seem fairly curious about the process of making the video and ramping up the campaign, and especially I keep getting asked, "Why did you go through the Free Software Foundation? Why not Kickstarter?" Those are both really good questions, so I'll take a shot at answering them.

Why the Free Software Foundation? Why not Kickstarter?

Kinda long, so here's a tl;dr:

• We don't dislike Kickstarter
• FSF offered for us to do the donation campaign through them; didn't have all the features we wanted, but were willing to implement them
• We decided to go with them because they threw their weight behind our campaign, because of their integrity, and because of our aligned ideals.

Let's go with this one first, because people seem so curious about it. What I'll first say was that this wasn't a decision we rushed into. A couple of months ago, I was in Boston and meeting with MediaGoblin co-conspirators Will Kahn-Greene and Deb Nicholson about this. We were hanging out at and around the FSF offices. At that point, we knew we were launching a campaign, but didn't know the details. And this was a major point of discussion: do we go with Kickstarter, or we go with the Free Software Foundation? We did know was that John Sullivan had expressed interest in us doing things through the Free Software Foundation, and so that was an option.

We chose the Free Software Foundation over Kickstarter for various reasons. The reason we didn't go with Kickstarter isn't that we dislike Kickstarter, or thought that it would be particularly bad for us. I actually think that Kickstarter is doing a good job in paving a way forward for projects to be funded in ways that frees them to focus on what they need to; if I have a major complaint, it's that I wish people would mostly hold projects to the standard that if they're donating to them, they shouldn't be locking down their stuff. If the public is funding you, doesn't it make sense that you are in a sense beholden to the public? I wish people would hold things they donate to to a standard where they encourage projects to adopt free licenses. But anyway, that's more of a wish that I wish we'd see more free software and free culture benefitting from Kickstarter like systems than something against Kickstarter. And Kickstarter was fairly tempting for various reasons: they've done a good job of proving themselves. We know their stuff works, it's fairly expected how stuff would run, and it's something people recognize and feel comfortable giving money to. My friend Aeva said, "When I see something on Kickstarter, I have a temptation to just throw money at it." So not choosing Kickstarter would mean leaving a lot of that behind.

So why did we choose the Free Software Foundation? There was reason to be cautious about it: we knew what to expect if we went with Kickstarter. While I have a lot of trust in the Free Software Foundation, we couldn't be sure how things would work out running a campaign like this because they simply hadn't done such a thing before. We had done something similar with the FSF with Liberated Pixel Cup, but it wasn't on this scale. When we met with John, we listed a series of things that we'd still need: we needed the ability for the system to offer rewards (such as the 3d model, t-shirt, etc options we have now), we needed the ability to theme the campaign page, we needed to be able to email people who donated with updates as the campaign progressed, we needed the form to work this way and that, we needed a progress bar that updated automatically each time someone donated, and so on. The FSF didn't have a way set up to do these things yet, and we wanted to go live with the campaign in a month and a half. Would the FSF be able to do it on time? Would the FSF want to do it? John said that he thought so, and yes. This was a direction that they were interested in going in, both for themselves and likely for future projects, so it was a good opportunity for them to push their systems in that direction.

At that point, we decided to go with the FSF. First of all, the fact that this was a new thing but that the FSF was interested in pushing in this direction means there'd be a certain kind of guinea-pig uncertainty, but it also meant something else: the FSF had a lot of faith in MediaGoblin and were willing to throw their weight behind it. That meant a lot, and also meant something strategically: there's a lot of projects swimming around on Kickstarter and etc right now, and it would be easy to get lost in that pool. The fact that the FSF was willing to back us meant that we'd stand out in a certain way, at least to a certain audience. And we could benefit from their connections and experience.

There's another aspect to it too: the FSF is a nonprofit. I'm not sure whether this is resonating with donors or not, but at least to me, it's significant: the FSF is an organization that has a mission and integrity. By going through the FSF, we are also beholden to that mission and integrity. The FSF wasn't going to just toss all the money raised by this project over to us: we had to show that we were doing the work to advance the project to get it. To me, that seems like a feature, at least one that's donor-facing (though I'm not sure whether or not people are picking up on that). You can have whatever opinion you want about the FSF, but one thing is indisputable, maybe even above any other org I know of: they stick with their principles. And I hope that message that the FSF was backing us passed on to people. And to some people, it seemed to. (I guess also, if you go through a nonprofit, donations are tax-deductable. Some people seem to appreciate that.) The FSF is also taking an "administrative cut", just as Kickstarter would, of the money raised. I think it's also significant that the organization that gets that cut be one who's working to advance things that I believe in.

There were some other benefits too: we had a lot more control over our site design by doing things on our own (and MediaGoblin's usual graphic designer, Jef van Schendel, was commissioned to do the design of the campaign site, and did an awesome job). But... I think the being endorsed by an organization with that kind of trust and integrity was the most important thing. And I'll also admit that there is an element of personal interest here: is it possible for a nonprofit to reproduce the same kind of experience that Kickstarter has? Because that's significant to me. And one thing that would come out of this is that the FSF would be using free software to run the campaign also. The thing is mostly run by CiviCRM, so unlike Kickstarter, advancements gained in running it could benefit the software and other people running such software. And if we could prove that this works, that would be good.

That said, even after we made that decision, even though I have a strong amount of trust in the FSF, the proof of the pudding is in the eating, and I couldn't be anything but nervous about things until the campaign actually went live. I'm happy to say that things did work out and we had a successful launch. People seem very responsive to our campaign, and the FSF's stuff is working great. And the FSF really has thrown themselves behind the campaign. I've been working with both people from the FSF systems team and especially John Sullivan and Zak Rogoff, one of the new campaigns team members (who's really been a pleasure to work with so far). They really have been trying hard to make this a success, and I'm really pleased with it.

We've had a good start, but we've still got a long way to go. But one thing's for sure, the campaign is only going to be a success if people like you pitch in and spread the word about the campaign. So please help... and spread the word!

And I guess that blogpost was long enough, so the "making of the campaign" will have to be a part two!

I'm long overdue for another life update. I guess the last update I gave was in June with a supplemental post to update that I was leaving CC to focus on MediaGoblin. So, 4 months. That doesn't seem like a long time when I put it in month-numbers. In my mind though, it feels like a universe away. So many changes have happened in my life at once that it feels impossible to record them in one entry. Which I guess is why I intended to blog earlier to avoid this situation, but of course, I didn't do such a thing. Oh well, "life update" blogposts are fairly self-indulgent; interesting mostly as a record to myself and to keep the scattered few family and friends who have passing interest informed.

I don't think I can really intelligently list everything off, but let's start with bullet points and see where we go from there.

• First of all, I wrapped up my work at Creative Commons. Well, kind of. I'm still somewhat involved as a contractor (details on that still being worked out though, so even that is vague), but anyway, there certainly was a significant "wrapping up" phase that happened during that exiting period of two months, during which a lot of the other things I'll be talking about happened consecutively. Largely I did a lot of work to try to put the tech team in as best of a place as I could and push forward various agendas I care about very much so personally forward (CC 4.0 stuff especially). There was also a lot of Liberated Pixel Cup wrapup stuff, but that actually kind of deserves its own entry, so I guess I'll list that next.

• Liberated Pixel Cup's contest submissions on both art and code wrapped up and we got tons of amazing results. Way more than we anticipated, and way more than we prepared for. We did end up wrapping up the art judging but very much so significantly after when I would have liked to seen it wrapped up. Part of this was because of how overwhelmed we were by so many high quality entries, and thus a lot of judges fell through (not their fault necessarily given we didn't prepare them, didn't know to prepare them, for the volume of stuff). Another part of it was because Bart and I, the main organizers of the project, both had several large disruptions to our project; him with some family medical emergencies, me with being "homeless" for two weeks (more on that below) and settling into a new place and launching a major campaign all at once. The code side of things still needs to be judged, and I'll be returning some focus to organizing that shortly. Anyway, failure on our part at all largely comes in another way from a large amount of success, so that's a weird situation of pride and guilt that I'm feeling right now. It's good to have one of my major dreams come true and proven right, anyway.

• Kind of a weird off-note but right before the move I made a major change to my mail setup. For years I had been using a terrible pop + fetchmail + local spamasssassin + gnus setup that I had cobbled together before I understand how any of those things worked from mailing lists and wiki pages and all sorts of cargo to build cults from. Problem: I could only check mail from my desktop, and when traveling, I always had the stress-inducing process of having to ssh into my desktop from wherever and open up gnus. I finally decided I was tired of that, and in a long and painful process that I really should have documented but didn't, I moved my mail over from gnus and nnml with some hacky elisp over to offlineimap and the incredible mu4e. mu4e is a real pleasure... I even added a small extension called mu4e-uqueue to make iterating through my mail a bit easier. Definitely happy with the change.

• So yes, about the move. First, about leaving, which I have more to say about than probably makes sense. A couple of years ago we had the misfortune of moving to DeKalb/Deklabbs and a couple of months ago we had the good fortune to finally move out. DeKalb wasn't so bad for Morgan (and she had given me the option to live someplace closer to Chicago or in far west Chicago, but I didn't want her to have such a long commute) mostly because she had a community there. But I didn't... I was mostly friendless and depressed, which isn't good when you work from home. I had such a lack of community and sense of connection (excepting a university LUG that I attended sporadically) that I realized there were only a few things I would feel at all like I missed in DeKalb: the food co-op, the coffee shop, and most especially the restaurant Pita Pete's, which I ate at almost every other day (and I made sure the exact last thing we did before driving out of town for the final time was to get one last delicious seitan wrap). Going out to eat was in some ways one of the few connections I had to other people living in that town, so we did it quite a bit. On the last day there I was in a "finally, I'm getting the fuck out of this town" kind of mood. I went to the coffee shop, got a final coffee, and the woman behind the counter asked me if I'd come back. I said I didn't think so, I didn't think I'd miss anything, except maybe this place a little bit and Pita Pete's, but not really that much anyway. She told me that I should come back and visit, they'd miss me (not really sure that's just one of those things you say or not) and I asked her if she was still there as a college student (largely because I had the "so, when are you gonna get the fuck out of this town too?" type attitude on the mind) and she said she used to be, but she stayed around because she loved DeKalb. So, something about that moment felt significant, that there really wasn't an intrinsic terribleness to the area... it was really just a lack of connection to anything on my part.

• So enough whining about a place I don't even have to live at anymore... we had someplace new and exciting to move to... Madison! But before we could do that we had a two week space of non-residence between our leases. Technically, we were without a home, so were "homeless" in one sense, but that seems degrading to people who are actually homeless, since our situation was the opposite of any sort of hardship. (Whatever, I'm rambling. Whatever to that too, this whole post is a big ramble.) Quite the opposite: we decided to do something we really haven't done much as a couple and do some vacation traveling.

  We had a two part-trip, first in Boston, then in New York. In Boston Morgan and I stayed with our good friend Deb Nicholson. For Morgan, this was pure vacation. For me, it was kind of a "work-cation"; I spent a lot of time hanging out at the FSF and meeting with various free softwareish people (a few highlights were meeting friends Mo and Ray of Fedora hackingness for lunch and Bassam Kurdali and Fateh Slavitskaya of Tube for dinner, as well as hanging out with a lot of friends from the FSF). Will Kahn-Greene also came down and Will, Deb and I gathered to discuss the MediaGoblin campaign, how we'd go about it, and whether we'd go a Kickstarter type route or do things through the FSF (whom had mentioned they would likely be interested in doing such a thing). After laying out a long list of requirements that the FSF would have to add for our campaign to work with them, we all agreed on that route forward.

  At some point, Deb's partner Ernie asked me when I was going to stop working and start vacationing. Actually, hanging out with free software people, and even doing the MediaGoblin stuff while lurking at the FSF offices, had me in a better mood than I had been in ages. Guess that's how I roll.

  Nonetheless, we also did some wonderful hanging out and seeing some touristy things with Deb, who as always, is a great host and excellent friend. Anyway, Boston was great times.

• In-between Boston and New York, we thought we'd try to play it cheap by going to a smaller town in-between and just relaxing and reading and keeping things simple. So we MegaBus'ed it to Hartford.

  When I told people in Boston that we'd be having a few days in Hartford, we got a lot of "Oh god, why would you do that?" and stories about Hartford's insurance industry lobbying to kill all taxes, thus completely not investing in any infrastructure, and better hope you won't be stabbed, blah blah. I figured these were exaggerations from township rivalry. It couldn't be any more boring than DeKalb, anyway. I was wrong. I won't go into details, but Hartford kind of feels like one huge ghetto. Sad city Hartford indeed. Anyway, we took the fastest trip out of there we could, which meant buying extra bus tickets and spending the extra money I didn't want to spend in New York, but there you go.

• New York was great though. I didn't really do any work, so that was real vacation for me. Some high points were museums, walking around Central Park, weird but delightful films, live puppetry, and meeting MediaGoblin contributors Aaron Williamson and Sam Kleinman. But maybe most of all I really enjoyed hanging out with Karen Sandler and her husband. The original plans to record my interview on Free as in Freedom while I was in-person didn't work out, but on the up side we got lunch on Karen's rooftop, which is had a crazy amazing view, and unsurprisingly really great conversation.

  Oh, and we didn't bring back bedbugs. Which is great, given that's a huge phobia of mine, and we were staying in New York.

• We moved to Madison. Madison is, I will say, completely and totally amazing. For some reason I was afraid of moving to another college town after DeKalb, but there is simply no resemblance between towns here. Madison has a great tech community, amazing food, lots of interesting things going on and people, and so on. Also, we live between two lakes and are three houses away from the town's amazing Willy Street Food Co-op.

  If you ever plan on stopping through Madison, maybe consider contacting me... we have crash-space, and an extra desk for people to work from.

  Anyway, Madison is amazing. I'm very happy with the move.

• Some bad news on Morgan's health. I won't go into details, but some things we thought were fixed weren't. Lots of stress.

• Last Saturday my mom got married. I really like the guy she married, and the wedding was beautiful. Plus, I didn't screw up my part in the ceremony too badly. Morgan and I danced for five hours straight at the reception having a wonderful time and regretting it the next day.

• Most significantly of all though is the MediaGoblin campaign. This will get a post of its own shortly (hopefully we launch this week) but what I will say now is that I've been working insanely hard on it. The video, the website (with commissioned help from Jef van Schendel), etc are all coming together well, and things are mostly coordinated with the FSF.

  In the meanwhile, I am really fried. I have put as much of myself as is possible into the campaign over the last month and a half, pretty much working as much around the clock as my body and mind will let me. I guess I can't complain though if I am living the dream?

  Or hopefully at least I will be! It really depends on how the fundraiser comes out. Really hoping for the best. As said, I've poured myself into it... and I think at least that the results are really good and I've tried my damndest.

  I'm feeling quite confident that this campaign is the right thing at the right time in many different ways, but most especially in the "more socially important than ever" type way. Here's hoping everything goes right. You'll certainly hear about it here when things launch, which is fairly imminent.

So those are the things on my mind these days. More news about the campaign comin' up shortly.

I'm extremely pleased to say that I was recorded on the Free as in Freedom show and that episode is now out; you can listen to the episode here.

In many ways this feels like a real honor. A few years ago when I had just joined at Creative Commons I listened to Mike Linksvayer speak as a guest on the show (it was called the Software Freedom Law Show back then, but it's mostly the same thing) and I remembered thinking that that was the height of coolness. Which, for one thing, I'm sure Mike will roll his eyes at that if he reads this blogpost, and for another, shows just how incredibly off my sense of what's cool is. (You know there's something wrong with you when the height of your week is when a new episode of an autogenerated fake news podcast comes out.)

Anyway, maybe because of that, it was both a real honor to be on the show, and also cause for me to be extremely nervous. I wasn't really nervous before the recording, and wasn't really during or immediately afterwards. But later after the recording happened I kept dwelling on a few things I knew I could have answered better: I gave a totally derpy answer as to why I got involved in free software partly because I was trying to troll Bradley Kuhn for not reading one of my blogposts (why I got involved in free software, and the question of how to get people involved in free software today, which I have strong opinions on, are posts maybe I'll make in the future). Also, my copyleft comic came up and Bradley basically suggested that I describe it and I totally avoided doing so, namely because I'm embarassed that it has the word "freetarded" in it (I think the word that's based on is a harmful and terrible one, but the comic text is partly based on some actual conversations I've had, and the comic isn't funny when rewritten any other way, as straw-man'ish as it is). And I finally also realized what my friend Asheesh meant when I complimented him on an interview he was on and he said something like "I'm actually somewhat surprised when people find the things I say interesting, because I've been thinking them in my head so long that I just assume they sound really obvious." (Not anywhere near an exact quote.) Also, we had just moved, and I felt kind of tired, and I was worried that that may have spilled through.

But I gave it a listen today, and I feel like the episode goes really well from start to finish. Not too derpy after all. But obviously you should give it a listen and judge for yourself.

Also, my life has been jam-packed lately. I'm not sure I've ever had such an intense number of things happen in a couple of months as I have recently, and I'd like to write some of it down before I forget to it. But as I mentioned in the podcast, I am neck deep preparing for the MediaGoblin crowdfunding campaign because I am trying to figure out how to be able to pay for myself to focus on MediaGoblin. So, a big "life update" post is due soon. But probably not until this crazy month is over!

Morgan and I went and saw the film Brave recently. I thought it was good, maybe worth a second seeing even. It was certainly pretty. And after twelve (twelve!) films in a row by Pixar where the primary character was male (don't give me the "The Incredibles" had the mom and daughter characters either... those were main characters, but there was a decidedly "primary character" and that person was not a woman), it was probably the right film to make. It takes a stand of sorts: women can be heroes too, should be free to make their own decisions and set their own life directions, and manages to say all this cleanly without feeling at all like it beat you over the head. So I'm glad films like this are being made, and given Pixar's long period of negligence, it was probably the right film for them to finally make.

That said, here's my worry: so, great, Pixar made a film that's good, and largely about how you can be a woman and a hero. Now that we've established that, will we have other films about women heroes with that pretext established? I'm worried that either we won't see any ("hey, we hit our films about women quota anyway, right?"), or there will be a long and dry spell of no films where a woman is the primary character, and then we get another one that steps out and reminds us, "Oh hey yeah, by the way, women can be awesome heroes too! Don't forget about that!"

What I'm trying to say here is: why aren't there more films where women just are heroes? Can we get to the point where the pretext that women can be heroes is established and they just... are?

This isn't the first time I've mentioned this; in fact when I first saw the trailer for Brave, I made similar comments:

"Sintel beat them to it though. I also feel like the way Sintel did it was best: a female character who just was awesome, without even a gender battle backdrop. (Challenging patriarchy is good, but a state where female leads are just awesome from the get-go and we're not even questioning that is better.)"

Deb pointed out that the character of Sintel is maybe not the best example as to possibly being a bit too "shaped for dudes to look at" in that "it would be kind of radical for a pudgy, awkward girl to be chosen in a fantasy story every so often". That said, I was glad that a free culture film beat out Pixar/Dreamworks/etc in putting out a film where the primary character was a woman, and that she was just awesome and had an interesting story and adventure without needing to justify it.

It's not that these films don't get made, even in the animated world; I can think of a few examples: Spirited Away, and The Triplets of Belleville (probably my favorite film ever, with a great amount of adventure and a very non-traditional "hero" of sorts in the grandmother (tangentially the word "hero" is not really great in this article, I really mean "primary character" or "character of focus", but those sound a bit belabored to say)). And on the free culture end of things, Tube is not out yet, but will succeed I think here. But anyway, these films seem sparse.

So I'd like to see more films, especially animated films, that don't fit the lame "princess"/"damsel in distress" archetype but that have strong female characters. And there may yet still be a role for films like Brave (or Mulan in the 1990s) that try assert clearly that women can be awesome. But I hope that's not an unfortunate trope that gets developed... do we really want to teach our young girls "You can be anything you want, as long as it's a woman who proves that you can be anyone you want as a woman?" What I'm hoping, basically, is that more films really and truly accept the premise that these films are trying to put down. Can we get to the point where we've simply agreed on this, and have a large number of films that simply have characters doing awesome things, those characters are women, and we've accepted that as just being normal? Because I think that would really be a progressive message for future generations.

Or, you know, we could decide this film hit our "say that women can be awesome" quota, and go back to making films where the primary characters are always dudes.

(Note: this started out as a longer post about the history and rationale of the Liberated Pixel Cup under a subheading called "where games go, technology follows". But I found that this section got so long it merited its own post, so I decided to break it out.)

I've heard it stated before that "games aren't important" or aren't a priority by multiple people in free software (I'm not sure I've heard the same in free culture communities). Most notably, I've heard this said by Bradley Kuhn, for example in this blogpost:

You might be wondering, "Ok, so if it's pure entertainment software, is it acceptable for it to be proprietary?". I have often said: if all published and deployed software in the world were guaranteed Free Software except for video games, I wouldn't work on the cause of software freedom anymore. Ultimately, I am not particularly concerned about the control structures in our culture that exist for pure entertainment. [...]

Bradley is someone I couldn't admire more for his devotion to free software, so don't misinterpret this statement; if anything the fact that I agree so much in general with Bradley is why this exception bothers me so greatly. But it does bother me: I think games are important for cultural and software freedom issues, and I feel that ignoring them is something we do in the movement at our own risk. (By the way, Bradley has asked me to further explain my position on why free software games matter, so that's partly why I'm writing this... I'm not just picking on him.)

There are several reasons for this, but the first and foremost of these are that where games go, the rest of technology follows. I mean this both in the sense that games are an indicator (of both the exciting opportunities and dangers of) where technology will go.

Here's an example: DRM (Digital Restrictions Management) is an issue of great concern for both free software and free culture people alike. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, if you bought a proprietary game for your MS-DOS running PC, Commodore 64 computer, or et cetera, you may remember the rise of copy protection software coming with games. Many of these early copy protection methods were even fairly silly: many games would have a screen which would ask you to ask you to enter a word from a page, paragraph, and word number within that paragraph from the instruction manual before it would start the game. The phenomenon of demoscene culture, including a large amount of beautiful artwork and music, came largely out of breaking early forms of DRM copy protection... for all sorts of software of course, but most especially games.

Even now, we see DRM is coming to GNU/Linux operating systems through Steam, a games distribution platform (and disturbingly enough for many free software operating system users who worry about DRM, much of the reaction is celebration). And the rise of the "app store" model came with the rise of mobile computing as game platforms. (I realize that in this post I don't have any hard evidence associating the rise of app stores or DRM with games, but observationally at least I've found this to be true, and it appears that games make up the largest category of "app store" downloads.) I think we will see these trends continue to get worse, and games will continue to lead the way.

Not all "indicators of the future" are necessarily foretelling of things that are bad. One of the smartest things I think Mozilla ever invested money and time into was Browser Quest (which was released shortly after Liberated Pixel Cup was announced with a very similar style... we didn't know about it, but welcomed its release). Browser Quest was a great example that hey, this HTML5 stuff is actually happening, and here's a tangible thing you can see to prove that (not to mention it put Mozilla at the forefront of many minds as an innovator in that space).

Aside from being an indicator of the future, people want games. I spent a good portion of the 2000s surviving off of a sparse diet of kobo-deluxe, tuxracer, supertux, and nethack. This managed to be enough for me (well, kind of... okay, not really), but it isn't enough for everyone. There's another bit to this: sure, you don't actually need games to have a working system. But "you also don't really need to live to live" either: you could go through life with the most minimal forms of food, clothing, shelter but absolutely no culture, and you'd still be living in a literal sense... but it would be a fairly miserable life. Likewise, people want entertainment, and video games are the most computer-centric of all forms of entertainment on a computer. If we don't provide them, people will move elsewhere. So I'd actually argue that an operating system that does not provide games is actually an incomplete system. (Actually, I'm not the only one who thinks this; RMS wrote in an essay that "a complete system needs games too".)

There's one more major reason why free software/culture games matter, and it's definitely a major point of thinking behind the Liberated Pixel Cup: games are a great motivation to get people to start hacking and authoring things. Almost every hacker my age that I know cites video games as a source of inspiration to get into programming. (Speaking personally, the first major programming I ever did was extending a [proprietary!] game. It's fair enough to say that I wouldn't be a programmer today if it weren't for an interest in game programming, and that is true of several of my friends as well.) But if that is true, why then do we have so few finished and polished free software games? Answering that question actually deserves of a post of its own (and indeed, solving that riddle is a good portion of the motive behind Liberated Pixel Cup), but it's enough to say for now that we are missing opportunities of encouraging future hackers by not making free software a welcoming playground for game development.

So, games are significant for a couple of reasons: they point to the general future direction of technology, good or bad, so we should pay attention to them. Furthermore we should make sure we are providing and building games, if for no other reason than to make the future we want viable (I still think that a system that doesn't address games, as I've outlined above, is an incomplete system, and one that most people ultimately will not use... or, you know, we could just sit aside and let the games continue to push the DRM'ed app store model along and watch our digital freedoms erode). But if none of the above reasons were insufficient, games are something people get excited about building. And helping people get excited about hacking and making things should be reason enough!

Still no comments working on my blog; but feel free to discuss on identi.ca (or ostatus federated equivalent).

I said in my last update that I was partly clearing my life update news queue because I had something much bigger to announce. So here it is:

I just gave my notice at Creative Commons... I'm leaving so I can spend a greater amount of time focusing on my pet project, MediaGoblin.

This should be a pretty smooth and gradual transition if all goes as planned... I care deeply about the success of CC and the tech team, so we've agreed on me staying part-time to ease the transition of the team and to help wrap up the projects I've been working on. So I feel good about that. One thing is for sure: working at Creative Commons these last three years as a software engineer has been a rewarding, fulfilling, and unique life opportunity, and I'm glad to have had it. I'm glad that I'll be leaving in a way that I can feel good about both for myself and for Creative Commons.

I've never had a project that I've cared about as deeply as MediaGoblin before, nor one that I thought was as important socially as MediaGoblin is. So I am planning to shift focus so I can more carefully help the project along. MediaGoblin is also much more than just my project; we have a lot of contributors who have invested much time and energy into it. Yet, at the same time, I've observed that every time I step away from the project it seems to grind to a halt, and whenever that happens I get depressed. For the last year, I've dumped 100% of my weekend, vacation, holiday time into MediaGoblin. I need a way to be able to spend even more time on MediaGoblin than I already am while avoiding burnout.

You might be wondering: how am I going to fund this? I have some ideas, and will be working on it, but in the meanwhile I don't have anything concretely set up. I have the part time CC work, and I have some possible contracting opportunities lined up, but I'd also like to make MediaGoblin development funding sustainable.

It'll be an interesting and exciting year ahead. There are a lot of transitions going on in my life, including the move to Madison, but I think this is the most interesting and exciting one for me.

On to the next chapter!

There's a ton of things going on in my life right now. A ton of things! Enough that it's been hard to do any blogging lately because I've been just so damned busy. And in the next few days there are some new things to announce as well, so I thought this would be a good opportunity to dequeue a bit before I make any further announcements.

MediaGoblin

First, let's start with MediaGoblin. We've passed our one year anniversary, and I feel we have an impressive set of things to look back on. Already we've surpassed my wildest expectations in a large set of ways: we have not only images support, but also video and audio support. We have OpenStreetMap support. We did a huge overhaul switching from MongoDB to SQL(Alchemy). (Okay, maybe that's not an interesting accomplishment generally, but it was a huge undertaking.) On the horizon are several other things, including plugin support, theming support, and hopefully federation stuff. If you're interested in such things, consider subscribing to the MediaGoblin news feed.

There's been a number of good articles about MediaGoblin recently, but here are two really good ones:

• MediaGoblin interview with me on OpenSource.com
• MediaGoblin's One Year Anniversary: What's Next? (another interview with me)

We've a bunch of cool things, and a really awesome community. We have somewhere around 50 people who have contributed to the project over the last year. I think that's really impressive for a new project.

And that's actually been one of the big themes of the last year: discovering I actually do have some fairly good leadership skills. Up until now I've mostly assumed I'm way too disorganized and distractable of a person to be a good leader. But I feel like the last year has proven me wrong. In fact, I feel that my long history of learning techniques to deal with my ADD in a sense has helped: I know how to write out plans for things in orgmode, break them into small tasks, and execute them. Fears of me not being capable to stay focused when working from home actually helped me learn to have very rigorous work habits. And having those traits has helped a lot.

Anyway, the MediaGoblin community is an amazing group of people, and I'm so happy to be working on the project. A little over a year ago I said:

We're still kind of running on hopes and dreams here, and hopefully those hopes and dreams can become true. It'll be a lot of hard work, but I think we can do it. At the very least, we need to try!

That statement is still true to some extent, but we're running on more than just hopes and dreams at this point. We have some real sites running the software (but we could use some more) and more importantly we have more than just an idea of a codebase, we have something very solid. It's been a thrilling year, and I'm looking forward to the next one.

Work at Creative Commons (generally)

This year at Creative Commons has been an interesting one, and somewhat of a mixed one. About a year ago there were some changes in the org and a number of people I care about have left. This includes my former boss, Nathan Yergler, and more slowly the stepping back of Mike Linksvayer, among others. Both of these people especially have been both friends and mentors, and it has been sad to see them go.

On the other side, the last year has been interesting in some other ways. Especially, I've been glad to see some other great people join, including Greg Grossmeier and my good friend Lunpa. These are both people I greatly admire, and over the last year I've seen them do some great things.

There has been another interesting thing too: in the void since Nathan Yergler left, I became the somehow official and yet unofficial tech team manager/representative. So, in addition to MediaGoblin, here is another space where I've learned quite a bit about leadership, including the fact that I seem to be decently competent at doing it. While I have done some programming work over the last year (particularly around simplifying CC's er... complex... translation tooling), I have more and more spent time on representation and planning. This was an unexpected shift for me, but one I'm glad I've had the opportunity to do. I feel I've had a lot of growth over the last year, especially in the areas of planning and "workplace diplomacy". I think that's one of the big lessons I've learned this year: the best way to think of yourself in a leadership position is that of a diplomat. There are usually a lot of things people want out of a situation... it's your job to identify what makes sense and to negotiate things, be a buffer, and help people do good. I wouldn't say I've been a perfect manager in this position, but I think overall things have been good, and I'm proud of the results I have had in the er... quasi-position.

Interactive chooser mockup by Lunpa, not me.

Some other interesting things have happened over the last year as well. Part of these things are the projects that we are rolling out. One thing is a new, interactive chooser. We also have a legalcode errata tool ready to go, we just need sign-off on some information. Anyway, there have been other things too, but I'm particularly proud of the work the tech team has done, especially Lunpa, on this work. And it has been great to watch and help with... even though that help has been partly from a different, more manager-y perspective than I am used to.

Another interesting thing that has happened is that I've been more involved with license and legalcode work, especially in the 4.0 license process. But things actually started with the work to declare CC0 and GPL to be compatible and CC0 to be acceptable for free software usage (sadly, but possibly for the best, we submitted for OSI approval then later withdrew for reasons having to do with patents, equitable estoppel, and really long mailing list threads that you can read if you care to). I have been involved in several things, including trying to raise the visibility of complexities involving games, 3d printing, and functional content. There were a lot of points explained through that, but the most interesting bit is perhaps the issue of what happens in complex examples where functional and creative works are combined in particular and complex ways, and the former uses the GPL and the latter uses CC BY-SA, and there's an unintended incompatibility of copyleft licenses. This has lead to discussions between Creative Commons, the Free Software Foundation, and the Software Freedom Law Center about possible compatibility with CC BY[-SA] 4.0 and the GPL. Nothing is resolved at this time, but I am thrilled that this conversation is moving forward. I often comment that one semi-official role of the CC Tech Team is to be a bridge back to free and open source software, and this is probably an even more clear and direct example than most.

Anyway, as is probably evident above, it has been a mixed year, but a very interesting one that I'm glad to have been part of. And anyway, there's one more thing I haven't discussed in the above...

Liberated Pixel Cup

Liberated Pixel Cup! This project is in some ways simultaneously the most "unnecessary" appearing of projects I've worked on recently, especially at CC, and yet I think it is actually maybe one of the most important.

I guess I ought to say what Liberated Pixel Cup is. In a sense, visiting the site should probably tell you most anything you need to know, but here's a repeat of the tagline:

Liberated Pixel Cup is a two-part competition: make a bunch of awesome free culture licensed artwork, and then program a bunch of free software games that use it.

Liberated Pixel Cup brings together some powerful allies: Creative Commons, Mozilla, OpenGameArt, the Free Software Foundation, and you.

In a sense, merely bringing together these organizations on a common purpose feels like a huge victory for me: they're organizations that really agree on a lot of things but simply don't seem to speak to each other much. But even more significantly it brings together several movements in a tangible way: games are by necessity an overlap of culture and functionality, and in this way free software and free culture are directly intertwined.

The art portion of the contest is now under-way, but there was a "pre-contest" part of the game in which we ended up working out a style guide and set of base assets. I really encourage you to check out the style guide, assets, and mini "demo game":

Anyway, Liberated Pixel Cup is kind of my baby (well, I guess so is MediaGoblin) and it's great to see it moving along so well. The art contest has kicked off and we're already seeing some awesome entries.

I have a lot more to say on Liberated Pixel Cup as to the what and why, but I think this blogpost is already getting a bit wrong, so you can read this interview with me about Liberated Pixel Cup on opensource.com instead. Hopefully I'll get to writing that a bit more soon. The rationale might not be 100% self-evident, but I'm hoping the awesomeness of things even so far is. :)

Moving and my relationship

Another thing going on in my life is actually really more about my spouse, Morgan. I'm happy to say that she finished her Masters program here at NIU and we'll soon be moving from teh Deklabbs to Madison (where Morgan will work on her PHD) in mid-August.

Not much to say on that other than that I'm very proud of Morgan. We also hit our three year anniversary recently, so that's awesome.

Other things

There are a few other things going on in life. I want to wrap up this blogpost so here's a quick rundown:

• I volunteered at PyCon on the video team again this year.
• I gave a bunch of MediaGoblin talks and ran a sprint and will be presenting at OSCON as well.
• Tube successfully met and beat out its kickstarter fundraising campaign! Okay... I'm not really involved in this anymore, but I'm proud of Bassam, Fateh, and crew. Before starting on MediaGoblin I was volunteering on some python scripting on this though, and there's a small shout-out to my scripting work in Bassam's Libre Graphics Meeting talk (webm version here). That's not trying to claim any sort of credit; my participation in Tube has honestly been minimal, but I'm proud to see it move forward.
• Interestingly enough I've been mentioned in the last couple of FaiF episodes; specifically my field guide to copyleft blogpost in Fontana's talk, and vaguely in the interview with Deb Nicholson of OIN (who is actually a MediaGoblin co-conspirator, and a great speaker, so you should listen to that episode), but mostly indicating that I'll be on in a future episode there. So, I guess that will happen.

I think there's more, but honestly I'm totally exhausted typing this all out, so I think that'll have to be it. But life over the last year has been a lot of things, but boring is not one of them. And the next year looks like it will be even more interesting, as you'll hear in the next couple of days... so keep your eye here.