Modified by Henrik Ingo from
original picture by "Just Taken Pics'" @ Flickr. CC-BY

I haven't written much on this blog related to my work. There's a simple reason: Apart from some welcome exceptions, my work at Sesca is not at all related to Open Source. And even when it is, we are not supposed to talk about our work much in public. Also, as a manager my work is rather boring sometimes, not something I'd want to write about.

All of this is about to change though. On Monday I will start working as a Sales Engineer (or some call it "pre-sales consultant") for MySQL! Here's a list of things I'm looking forward to:

I didn't blog about it, but I'm sure you read it in all the other blogs, that the band Radiohead did a revolutionary thing in October of 2007. They released their new album for download on the Internet. Fans were able to pay a price they could determine themselves. This is great news for those of us who believe the old and stagnated recording industry has got it all wrong. We need people like the Radiohead guys to prove them wrong.

Dear friends. I'm proud to announce that on December 11th I could witness the miracle of birth and becoming a father to a healthy 3850 gram boy. Already on his birthday he had hair long enough to make a small pony tail - thus completing a line of three generations of ponytails for the Ingo men! Some days after his birth we also shot this picture, with the infamous ThinkGeek.com t-shirts.

In the part about business models, Open Life contains a chapter titled Glass House, a totally transparent company (fictitious). As the title already gives away, it is my fictitious vision - a utopia, if you will - of a radically open business model, where even the tendering process and financials of the company would be publicly available.

The New Inspirer reports on a business model not at all like that, but this was really inspiring to read:

Entrepreneur Sanne Roemen never makes an invoice. She lets her clients decide what they want to pay her. And how they want to pay her. Sanne, who consults on how companies can apply web 2.0 principles in their business, knows by experience by now that clients generally pay her three times as much as she would have offered before the job was done. The side-effect of clients paying less than expected therefore isn't too much of a problem. 2I can't determine for the client what the value of my services is. That's something which is different for everybody".

The server that among many other things was hosting the avoinelama.fi domain crashed last Saturday. My main private email is henrik.ingo [at] avoinelama.fi, so for many days I did not receive any mails.

First day of the Peer production seminar in Nottingham university is over (though I'm posting this the next morning). I have to say it exceeded my expectations, so I'm really glad I was able to attend. There are several characters with a strong Free Software background here mingling with academics who are sociologists or whatnot. It creates a good mix of people on the one hand being able to give very concrete examples of how Free Software projects do stuff and on the other hand the academic minded people being very intelligent about analysing and generalising the concepts in action.

Andreas Wittel and Michael Bauwens introduced the day. Michael clearly has been thinking about this stuff for a long time, most things that we end up talking about he is already aware of and can immediately give very detailed insigths to them.

Heyhey... after a year of hard office work, it's like the good old times again: my blog seems to contain mostly notes of various conferences I've been to :-) (By the way, I also had an interesting trip to Dublin last week, maybe I'll write about that later.)

On Wednesday night I'm off to Notthingam, where I'm attending a seminar titled "The political economy of peer production" organised by the Nottingham Trent University. Excited as I am I became a bit grandiose and chose as my subject the introduction of a system of direct democracy. In other words, I've been thinking I should replace all the current democratic governments we have.

Wow what a week it was. I attended the Open Mind conference and it took me a couple of days to recover even so I could just blog about it! There is no way to blog about everything that happened, so I guess this will be more like a long list of namedropping :-)

(But, unlike me, Zak Greant seems to possess a brain that can produce typing and listening at the same time so go to his blog for more detailed commentary on the conference. My collague and friend Paul Sladen also wrote on LWN about the COSS.fi summer of coders.)