Hooters of Bogota

I just concluded my talk at ACIS, north side of Bogota, Colombia last night where I have been this January month. As usual I always divert from my planned talking slides. In fact I completely forgotten about the slides.

The loss of persistence memory started when I showed the Latino audience my translated talking brief from the ACIS website.

I was thinking of always going interactive, where instead of Talk1.0 (just broadcasting to death your audience) I will make it Talk2.0 which is asking questions first and make it viral from there.

So I pointed to my 3 point agenda of "How to become an Open Source Guru in 3 easy steps". Starting with step 1: Publish or Perish. I asked the crowd, 'Are not these steps easy? Would you be able to carry them out?'. One participant raised his hand and said that publishing is very difficult as they do not know what to publish.

I then kicked into my EgoBragAboutKarma2.0 mode and showed them how that very noon after lunch I published in my Facebook my walk-around Bogota central park. With the caption on how talking about Open Source leads to talking about Chicas3.0.

So publishing is easy if you just do it on instinct rather than worrying about whether what you going to commit to the Web is controversial, inappropriate, indecent or irrelevant. Hell, people love audacious originally yours content. That is what makes the Web so, so viral. And you be running out of time if you linger.

The concept of always "Under Construction" and "Release Early, Update Often" is born the day the Web could be touched by your home computer. Web2.0 means it is interactive. And you as a human is an interactive being. One-way broadcasting has go on far too long until you have become an absolute zombie, perfect consumer down-loader, taking in every scripted line. That is boring and mundane. Your creativity has perished with it.

Your natural self of wanting to tell the world how good or bad you feel, or how close you come to arriving that morning is a schizophrenic journey of innocent guilt caught in hapless deprived childhood. Today, the Web in all its glory is waiting for you to push the highly over-sensitized 'Send' button.

So what if most of your friends gasped in displeasure. So what if no one even reads it. A tell-tale sign in this blog that has go on quite a number of years with almost no feedback comment. Hmm, well it may take some more patience. And some Hooters of Bogota may know how to help the low urge to touch back. (After the talk last night, I wanted to treat the folks for a meal and they couldn't find a good place except there in fun, fun Bogota.)

Another answer given by the audience why humans today fear about taking the red pill of getting into this dangerous, I mean, exciting life of Open Source is the 'comfort zone'. I disrupted that point of view by citing scenarios where no one, no matter in which developed nation or with a highly skilled job is safe. I quoted my experience the month before in Paris, where a French developer confessed to me that he is about to be laid off from a comfortably paid job.

Bogota is still quite conservative on the merit of publishing early and updating often. But slowly, surely, with me visiting them now and then from now on, I think I am able to get the message across to them.