ASIS&T '09 Plenary Session I: Tim Bray encourages innovation

I nventor, author, entrepreneur and open source supporter and developer Tim Bray encouraged several hundred people to go out and invent the next great things for the web. The Sun Microsystems Distinguished Engineer and director of web technologies made his remarks at the opening plenary session of the 2009 ASIS&TAnnual Meeting. Bray based his talk on the “trivium,” the foundation of medieval education, which combines logic, rhetoric and grammar. His talk discussed each of these aspects in turn. Bray considered logic first. Computer science people claim to represent the applied branch of logic and technology, he said. He highlighted Ravelry [1], an online community of knitters and crocheters. Users can talk with others, organize their projects and post pictures of their stashes. The site boasts as many as 3.6-million views per day, with 900 new users every day. This successful site features a rapidly growing, highly functional community. And it all came from a single developer, Casey Forbes, done with open source. He and his wife Jessica started designing the site in January 2007. There was immediate strong reaction to their site. They got a few users and listened to them and provided what they wanted. He quoted Casey: “I could talk for ages about how awesome and valuable the beta process was. We learned so much during the first year. I would do it all over again in a heartbeat – start with something that works, get people in it and build it together.” Bray noted there were no IT experts, architecture studies or similar resources. It’s important to understand the subject matter you want to communicate and understand what people want to do with it. He encouraged everyone in the session to “just do it.” He added, “If you have an idea, don’t launch a project planning process; just try doing it. You probably can.” The Ravelry site is based on Ruby on Rails [2]. Ruby is a computer programming language from Japan. Bray said he would “unhesitatingly recommend” you purchase Programming Ruby 1.9 [3] if you’re interested. Rails is a web framework designed to work with Ruby. It works on the DRY principle: “Don’t repeat yourself.” Every application lives in only one place. The idea is to get you up and running quickly. Bray also recommended Agile Web Development with Rails [4]. Both books will make you think you can create your own website on a particular topic, he said. Other useful software includes Django [5], based on the Python software. There’s also PHP [6], the framework that proved to the world that a smart person can put up a website quickly without having to spend a lot of time on IT infrastructure. Drupal [7] is another open source content management system. WordPress [8] is the most popular blogging software. Other options include Facebook [9] and Wikipedia [10]. There are a lot of very good and interesting technologies around right now that will enable you to put something up without having to pay anyone or ask permissions. Just do it, Bray said.