One of the toughest things I’ve encountered, as I attend meetings, speak on panels, do interviews, and go to conferences, is that you never quite know what the tone of the room will be like until you get there. In other words, there are always a ton of different approaches you can take to a conversation, in terms of what you talk about and how you say it. And I never seem to really know what the right one is until after it’s already happened.

I’m thinking about it today because this afternoon I did a short interview with Rick Karr (from PBS’s Blueprint for America, among other things) about open transit data and real-time bus & train information in NYC, for an upcoming episode of the Engadget Show. Of course, now that the interview’s over, I’m thinking of all the witty things I could have said but didn’t. But more importantly, thinking back, I wish I had thought harder about the audience and intention of the interview a bit more before going on air. (Hat tip to Nick for suggesting exactly this a few days ago, but apparently it wasn’t quite enough.)

We talk a lot about open data, and open transit data in particular. By and large, our audience consists of transit geeks, policy wonks, or bureaucrats (I mean all of those as terms of endearment); in each case, we dive into the policy and technical details of opening transit data. That’s the mode I’ve been in: white papers, RFIs, formal letters, panel talks, etc. Today’s interview was really for the consumer electronics crowd, and probably deserved a more gadgety/fun tone and emphasis than what I lead with.

Anyway, I’m looking forward to seeing how it turns out, and meanwhile I’ll continue on my quest to suss out the tone of the room before I get there…

// image courtesy of Best Online Stuff. No relevance to this post, except that it was on the first page of google image results for “tone of the room“.

Wait... strike that -- reverse it.

There's so much I want to do, it really, really hurts. Here's a (partial) list of what I'd like to do in 2010. Of course, this is wildly unrealistic, and my next step should probably be writing a "stop doing" list. So, without further adieu:

• Spend more time learning the piano, with my dear friend Paul Sheftel. (need a functioning keyboard in our house to make that happen)
• Read the Bible (already begun -- thanks Kindle for iPhone)
• Develop a mapping app using the OpenGeo suite.
• Switch from my macbook to a netbook running linux.
  

For an upcoming project at TOPP, we’re talking about setting up an optional scope contract [PDF] — where we specify the time, cost and quality, but leave the actual scope of work open. This approach has many advantages, which I’ll just quote from Beck & Cleal’s document:

• Customers can change their minds
• Suppliers aren’t encouraged to sacrifice quality as soon as something goes wrong
• Customers’ and suppliers’ interests are contractually aligned
• The knowledge that both parties gain during the project can influence the finished product.

In my experience so far, it has been much easier to set up agreements like this in the private + nonprofit sectors than in the public sector. Typically, public sector contracts must begin with detailed requirements (beginning with an RFP then a final scope of work), to ensure that the requesting agency doesn’t get screwed over. The problem with this approach, of course, is that you don’t always know what you need at the beginning of a project, or to rephrase, that’s when you know exactly the least about what you’ll be making.

So my question for you, internet, is have you had experience making optional scope contracts work in the public sector?

// thanks Nate for turning me on to this idea at last year’s Nonprofit DevSummit

For a little side project, I’m using jPlayer, a nice jQuery-based audio player. I wanted to skin the buttons a to suit my project, and while jPlayer does support jQuery ThemeRoller skins, I liked the basic look and feel of the standard jPlayer controls. So, I just traced the default sprites in Illustrator in order to recolor them. For other jPlayer developers, you can download the source SVG here, and tweak away.

Today, Theo took his first ever bite of solid food. I get all welled up looking at pictures of him while I’m at work.