Last night, I attended an event at Harvard about the Knight News Challenge, put on by Hacks/Hackers Boston and the Knight Foundation. The room was full of people who are interested in applying for the News Challenge grant program. I was there to talk about our Knight project, OpenBlock, specifically, and about open source and the News Challenge more generally.

During the cocktail hour, I got to talking to the ever-present Jenny 8. Lee — Jenny is former NYT reporter, News Challenge reviewer, and one of the main organizers of Hacks/Hackers (not to mention the owner of one of the best personal urls I’ve seen: j8.ly). For those that don’t know it, Hacks/Hackers is a fast growing meetup group that is working to bridge the gap between Hacks (journalists) and Hackers (hackers). I believe Hacks/Hackers now has chapters in 10 cities.

I remarked on how well Hacks/Hackers seemed to be doing; not only are they spawning chapters at a quick pace, they are also putting on all sorts of cool events — from the open-source-a-thon a few weeks ago in NYC, to a series of “Great Urban Hacks” in NYC and SF, to the Hyper-local hackathon that we’re co-sponsoring w/ OpenBlock at MIT later this month.

What is so cool about Hacks/Hackers is that it is growing open-source style. New communities come online at the will of the participants in those communities, with the loose support of Hacks/Hackers central. It is an open source initiative – a template is being drawn by the earlier cities, and the model is being replicated and adapted elsewhere. For example, Hacks/Hackers NYC’s Chrys Wu spent 45 minutes on the phone with us yesterday giving us tips for the OpenBlock hackathon.

There are other organizations and initiatives that are growing in similar ways – through the combination of a good idea, an open format, and enthusiastic participants. Jenny called this “The DIY Empire,” which is kind of an awesome way to put it [update: Jenny informs me that Molly Crabapple is the one who coined the term]. I really do see it as a movement. Here are some of my favorite examples:

• The biggest and most established is certainly the BarCamp movement. Not much to say about that that hasn’t already been said.
• CityCamp is a BarCamp vertical focusing on city tech and gov 2.0. CityCamp’s main organizer, Kevin Curry, refers to CityCamp as an “open source brand” and is putting significant organizing work into taking it World-wide.
• Another great one is the Awesome Foundation – a micro-foundation that funds “forwarding the interest of awesome in the universe” by pooling $100 contributions from a group of 10 trustees to make $1000 monthly grants. (I regret not jumping at the chance to become trustee of Awesome NYC earlier this year)
• And lastly, there’s DIYcity, which brought together communities of civic hackers working on projects across multiple cities. While that hasn’t sustained the same amount of long-term traction as the others, it is clearly the same model, and had a lot of interest early on.

Of course there are others that I’m not thinking about right now, but these four get the basic idea across. One of the most impressive things about these DIY initiatives is how little they cost and how fast they move — Hacks/Hackers, BarCamp, CityCamp, and Awesome are all growing at a furious rate and at an amazingly low cost. There is something magical there about the combination of a loose federation backed by a strong core idea and local shoe leather.

I opened my talk at last week’s Times Open event with this little video plugging Phone Idol. It got a few laughs, which was the point, but unfortunately no new songs sung just yet. Derek Gottfrid from NYT made the great suggestion that I print up some stickers and put them up in bar bathrooms. I think that is a great idea and I’m probably going to do it.

Go sing!

I love seeing people write to their future selves. Here’s a note I came across in my very own inbox today, no doubt jotted down on my iPhone while I was half-drunk at a party.

Drake.
Neon Indian
Groove shark – friends playlist
Darius. Radius radius
Brother

“Radius radius” is my favorite part. I can’t wait to discover what it means, after I do a little googling.

At OpenPlans, we’ve hired two new Project/Product managers within the last month. I couldn’t be happier with the hires, and they are already doing great work. Jeff Maki is handling our work with public transit agencies (like the OpenTripPlanner and our shiny new real-time bus tracking project with MTA, building on the fabulous OneBusAway package). Frank Hebbert will be handing our work on participatory planning, including our new project with NYC DOT.

Jeff and Frank are both pros at what they do — Jeff has been managing big consumer-facing tech projects (including his recent work on the FreshDirect iPhone app), and Frank has a deep background in GIS & planning (he comes to us by way of our friends at RPA), and a proven record organizing communities around planning issues.

So as they’re both getting started, I’ve been thinking about what to give them as background reading, to get ramped up into our work environment. In the end, I’ve decided to keep it simple, and go with two books that have really made an impact on me, and that give a good sense of our perspective as an organization:

Getting Real, by 37Signals. This book is like the bible to me — I’ve been a 37Signals fan for a long time, and this book really helped me form my attitude towards project and product management.

Producing Open Source Software, by Karl Fogel. We are not just a product or service company, but also an “open” company. With that comes many confusing and complicated situations — even seemingly straightforward questions like “how do we promote ourselves on our product sites” are different when you’re an open company. Karl’s book is a great primer on the social dynamics of open source community management. We’ve also been fortunate enough to be hosting Karl in our office (while he works for O’Reilly Media on Code for America and Civic Commons) for the past few months, and frequently find ourselves tapping him on the shoulder for some sage advice.

So that’s it — all the reading you need to do if you want to come work on our team. And if you’re interested, you should also go read Traffic. And The Four Steps to the Epiphany.

Most of the action is happening on my Tumblog these days. For some reason I can’t stop posting there, and I can’t start here…