COMMON - The Saga Continues

Before we say anything else this week, a quick "Thank You" to the many, many people who responded to last week's blog both directly and by private e-mail. We knew the subject matter would inevitably prove somewhat controversial, but were still surprised by the reaction, both here in the blog and elsewhere.

That said, we think there are a couple of points/comments that we would like to make related to the past week's goings-on.

Before we do that, however, we would like to celebrate the good news today that a new branch of COMMON and an associated YiPs (Young i Professionals) group have been launched in South Africa. Back after a 14 year absence! After a long respite, the i and Power Systems community there seems to have decided that there's a need for an organization to unite and serve them. Best of luck to the newly re-born COMMON organization in Africa.

Now on to the comments:

1. Just to be absolutely clear. This isn't--and never was--just about money. As we stated in last week's post, the financial issue merely forced us to re-evaluate our involvement. We had been unhappy with the direction that COMMON has been taking for some long time. Like many other volunteers, we had tried to influence that direction from within the organization, but we haven't seen significant change in direction. We have been asked for input by the Board of Directors of COMMON and will be attempting to formulate our thoughts over the next few days to respond to that request, but we thought it would be good to hear a few more ideas from our readers first.

2. We're not the only speakers and volunteers affected by this. We personally know of others who will not be attending for similar reasons. While on the surface finances may be the issue, many have indicated to us via private e-mails that they have similar concerns to our own.

3. COMMON needs to reflect the needs and wants of its members. The current voting system really doesn't allow that to happen. Somehow, both the needs of the organizations that send the attendees and the attendees themselves need to have a far greater say in what happens at the board level. Right now the number of people who actually vote in the board elections is very very small. And this will likely continue to be the case because the vote attaches to the company who pays the membership. That company gets one vote, even if they send 20 or 30 people to the conference. We on the other hand, who never get to attend sessions or really participate as "real" members, get two votes! Why? Because it is cheaper for us to buy two individual memberships than a corporate membership and as a result we get twice as much voting power. That doesn't make any sense.

4. In the "old" days when COMMON didn't have a full-time professional staff running the organization, it made sense to only roll-off a limited number of board members each year. It aided in continuity. These days, however, there's staff to provide that continuity. And the limited number of changes that occur on the board each year just seems to make it harder to steer the ship with new blood. It also serves to discourage good people from standing for the board. We've talked to many excellent candidates who ultimately decided not to run because they felt that they couldn't have a significant impact as a lone voice. Heaven forbid we have "political parties" standing for electio, but if a larger group of people were elected to the board each time it would at least make it possible for a group of like-minded people to run with a specific agenda.

5. Last, but not least, we feel COMMON should decide on and focus on its raison d'être. In our mind it has focused on survival for far too long. It has been doing anything and everything to earn the dollars to keep it running without asking "Why" or even "If" it should continue to exist. Without knowing the answers to those questions everything else is irrelevant. In this day of instant answers via internet lists, world-wide internet Webcasts, Facebook and other social-networking sites each and every group needs to ask these questions.

What is the need? Is having a relatively large annual conference and a smaller event each year the primary mission? Are there other things an organization of the i faithful may be doing? Yes, we said "i faithful" since that's the community we are a part of and feel we can speak to. The COMMON organization has decided to embrace the Power Systems community as a whole. Does that dilute its support of i or does it strengthen it? Shouldn't there be a place for an organization devoted to i? Questions such as these are ones we're struggling with and think should be explored.

Au Revoir, COMMON

Before we begin, we should mention that the words "au revoir" in the title are used in their literal sense of "until we meet again," and not in the high-school French sense of "goodbye." As you read this, hopefully the reason for that distinction will become apparent to you.

COMMON's 50th anniversary meeting will be held in Orlando this coming May, but despite having volunteered as speakers and in other capacities at every conference since 1988, this time we won't be there.

There are many reasons for this, one of them of course being financial, but in the end the financial aspects were secondary, merely the catalyst that caused us to re-examine our involvement with the organization. We first wrote about the planned changes at COMMON back in May of this year and have been wrestling with the situation ever since.

Had it not been for the need to examine our participation from a financial perspective, we would probably have continued on autopilot, delivering sessions along with our other volunteer duties, as we've done every time a COMMON conference rolled around. Being forced to think about whether we could afford to do that next year also caused us to think about why we were doing it in the first place and whether the time, money and energy we've been donating to COMMON represent the best way for us to help the community.

This weekend we found ourselves at the moment of truth, wrestling with the decision to either accept or decline our sessions that had been selected for the spring conference. We concluded that we still wanted to support the idea of COMMON, but increasingly it became apparent that the COMMON we wanted to support was an idealized organization that existed only in our minds. We had hoped the old COMMON could return and we worked with many other volunteers to make that a reality, but for whatever reasons COMMON's direction seems to be set. For the time being we'll remain members of COMMON and hope that things will change.

This doesn't mean we'll be giving up working with and for the IBM i community. We plan instead to take the time, energy and money we would have spent participating in the Orlando COMMON conference and steer it toward other IBM i community efforts. We haven't made any final decisions on that, but we're looking at our options.

For example, there are many wonderful local IBM i User Groups that still work hard for members and are struggling because they don't have cash reserves to carry them through the rough economic times like these. Because we support their efforts, we've always given User Groups a discount off of our standard rates. As a first step in our new approach, we've further reduced our rates for LUGs that we've worked with regularly over the years. Obviously, we can't afford to spend all of our time doing work for little or no pay, but we do now have a few days we won't be donating to COMMON.

We'll also be working more with the Young i Professionals. Now there's an energetic group that's doing really useful things for the community! And you can stop giggling--we know we don't qualify as "young," but we're both proud to be considered honorary members of the group and intend to do more with it in the future. We also hope to do more in terms of providing online resources through our own Web site and through System i Developer.

We also intend to put some of the cash that a trip to COMMON in 2010 would have cost us to work supporting the iManifest efforts here in North America. This is one of the efforts we had hoped COMMON might use its influence and position to support, so it seems an appropriate alternative use for the money.

We can't tell you how sad it makes us to be writing this. We firmly believe in the concept of User Groups, and feel that a national-level user group has a major role to play. We hope things may change and if so, we look forward to returning some day in the future to an organization more like the COMMON that exists in our minds.

To the many, many friends we have made at COMMON over the years: THANK YOU. Hopefully we'll find ways to meet and work together again in the future.

Dear Margaret

Today's piece is dedicated to all our fellow travelers--some of this will probably sound achingly familiar to you!

Sunday: Dear Margaret,

Thank you for your note welcoming us to the hotel and for preparing our room so nicely. We will indeed try to do our part to save the environment and will follow your detailed advice on how to hang our towels.

We do however have just one small issue. In your enthusiasm to clean up the room this morning you also removed several bottles of water. In future could you please leave any full or part-full bottles in the room?

We also clearly did not understand your instructions regarding the towels as all of them were changed today even though we left them on the rack as instructed.
 
Monday: Dear Margaret,

Thank you for not removing the full bottles of water. We would however have been even happier had you removed the empty ones, particularly those that we had placed in the waste basket.

One small favor. Could you please resist the temptation to change the station on the radio?  We know we should have checked, but being woken by Def Leppard on FM 99.7, "Your Heavy Metal Heaven," at 100+ dB was not quite what we had in mind when we set the alarm clock expecting to be woken by NPR News.


Tuesday: Dear Margaret,

We appreciate the extra soap you left today, but think that three bath bars, plus the one already in use, is probably more than we will need during our stay.  We would however like some additional shampoo because we are almost out of that.

Also, sorry we obviously weren't clear. It wasn't your choice of radio station we were having a problem with, indeed being woken by Mariachi music is nowhere near as shattering an experience as Heavy Metal, but we would prefer it if you could just leave the radio alone.

Perhaps it was a different staff member who cleaned our room today as we see we are back to losing our partial bottles of water.  Not to worry, we have decided to keep them in the safe so that won't be a problem in future.


Wednesday: To Whom it May Concern,

Shampoo is the yellowy stuff in transparent bottles.  Soap is the white stuff in a paper wrapper. We appreciate the extra bar of soap, but we still need some shampoo please. And the conditioner is getting low ...

Could you please clarify the process regarding hanging up towels because all of ours were replaced again today, so we obviously haven't got it quite right yet.


Thursday: To Whomever ...

Thanks for the shampoo. Unfortunately, you failed to notice that we were out of conditioner and lotion. But don't worry--we're leaving today so it really doesn't matter that much to us. We'll try again next time.



P.S. Everything in this note has happened to us, just not all in one trip. It was, however, our experiences last week in Las Vegas that prompted this blog entry, and indeed accounted for a number of the incidents recounted above.

We are Not Alone

This week, we're at another gathering of the i faithful, this time in Vegas for DevCon. In a lively discussion session this afternoon, several interesting topics arose.

First up was the topic of education of a new generation of IBM i developers. From the panel, we discussed the great things that the IBM Academic Initiative is doing to help schools enlighten students about what IBM i can do. The panel members also challenged the audience members to do their part by providing internships or indeed by hiring the younger generation when they graduate.

Even though these youngsters have no practical experience, what they do have is knowledge, enthusiasm and a willingness to learn how to apply what they have learned in school. While students who have participated in schools that offer IBM i curriculum specifically may have a lot to offer, don't shortchange a bright young candidate who can easily be taught IBM i and/or RPG. We raised the point that as long as you introduce these youngsters to the latest form of RPG (i.e., Subprocesure and /Free-form) most, no matter if their background is Java, PHP or .Net, will readily embrace the language. Indeed those with a leaning towards business programming may end up preferring it. This is another of our "soapbox" beliefs, and it was good to find that others on the panel shared our feelings on the subject.

One attendee shared that her company had helped to get an IBM i curriculum started in a nearby local community college and challenged others to consider doing the same. Sometimes, it may take simply letting your local school know that there are jobs waiting for those who graduate with those skills. Interestingly a great many community and junior colleges actually run their administration system on IBM i, and yet few teach it.  Do they fear students will hack into their grades and fees, perhaps?

It was exciting to hear about what some of the attendees are doing with their applications, applying many of the skills and techniques we've been spending the last several years teaching and encouraging--modularizing and modernizing their applications, adding new front ends, or making their code available as Web services. Some of the stories are truly inspiring. One woman is a single-person development shop, yet she has managed to successfully implement modularized code with subprocedures and service programs while keeping up with users' ever-challenging demands. Some young developers among the attendees have done some amazingly creative things while combining RPG and PHP; in one case, at least, in spite of the active discouragement on the part of his apparently short-sighted management. Fortunately, his end users were sufficiently thrilled with the results that his innovative work continues.

Anyone who says this platform is old or boring just hasn't been around the inspired developers we have seen in the last few weeks. This platform may have been around a long time compared to others, but from the looks of the things modern IBM i developers are doing today, we're just getting warmed up.

Memories...

Last week was one full of memories in ways we hadn't fully anticipated. We spent a little more than a week at the Hotel Sofitel in Minneapolis. Sofitel is a French-based chain and the French and European influence is obvious, even when transplanted into the heartland of America. We met several staff members from the hotel who came from Europe, including the executive chef, who prepared food that made us feel like we were back in Europe all over again.

We haven't spent a huge amount of time in France, but we have spent quite a lot of time in Belgium (right next door and therefore with many shared influences), which has become one of our favorite places in the world. One of our favorite dishes (among many, many favorites) is Croque Monsieur--a glorious meal whose basic description (a French version of a grilled ham and cheese sandwich) just can't begin to do it justice. Served, as are many meals in even the finest restaurants in Belgium, with frites (french fries), we each had that particular dish a minimum of four times. The croissants, brioche and pain au chocolat (chocolate-filled croissant-like pastry) for breakfast brought back memories of our breakfasts at the IBM education center in La Hulpe near Brussels. 

We were among a minority of the North American IBMers who loved the education center in La Hulpe. The center itself was rather sparsely furnished, to say the least, having small single beds in bedrooms that by American hotel standards were closet-sized. For years the rooms typically did not have TV or indeed many other amenities. So all the more reason to be out of your room as much as possible, wandering around the grounds and the adjoining forest and the lovely chateau next door to IBM, or gathering with friends and colleagues in La Cave, the IBM bar (sounds strange, doesn't it?). 

At La Hulpe, we always worked very hard, typically participating in ITSO Technical Forum events that often included sessions and labs on bleeding-edge technology that rarely seemed to want to behave as the instructors had planned. Maybe it's just the workaholic in both of us, but the hard work combined with abundant food and Belgian beer made us look forward to visiting La Hulpe time and time again. And this past week, preparing for and running our RPG & DB2 Summit event, we experienced that same mixture of hard work combined with fabulous food and beer (we did have some Belgian beer, but also enjoyed Summit, from a local Minneapolis brewery) and we found ourselves reminiscing of times gone by around 15 or so years ago.

One more thing that made last week's event feel like old times in La Hulpe was the fact that our keynote speaker was Ian Jarman.  Ian spent several years of his own IBM career in the ITSO and therefore was often among those colleagues with whom we shared the La Hulpe experience.

Leaping back into the present for a moment, Ian's keynote session featured coverage of four primary features of the 7.1 announcements that are about to be made. For us the most exciting were the DB2- and RPG-related announcements, which included a major RPG-related statement of direction for a new RPG Open I/O feature that will allow developers to build device handlers that will allow a wide variety of devices to interact with RPG programs using the old familiar op-code--Read, Write, ExFmt, etc. The power of this capability will become more obvious as ISVs and other clever developers begin to see what their imaginations lead them to create. We'll be releasing more information on this interesting development as and when details become available.

Last week was fun, exhausting and very fulfilling, just as the ITSO forum events were. The attendees and exhibitors were fabulous, it's so much fun to be surrounded by like-minded people all seeking to exploit their systems to the fullest.  And just like we did all those years ago we're both now trying to recover, both by trying to catch up on lost sleep (at least there was no jet lag in Minneapolis!) and trying to lose the extra pounds the French food added to our waistlines. Who would have thought that Belgium memories could come so close to being relived in Minneapolis! Thanks to the Sofitel and to over 100 energetic IBM i enthusiasts at the Summit, it was much like old times.