Thanks to some discussion at the Emerging Tech Conference the OLPC project is all over the net today. Negroponte is good at casting a wide net, both for support and for interest in projects like these. I'm happy to say that a lot of the software development, with a lot of help from other companies and people involved in the project, is happening just a few cubes over. I'm pretty excited about what they are doing from a design standpoint. It's going to be very different and interesting. Seth is very much in his element with the medialab crew and they are developing some great ideas.

I sat on a panel at the conference, along with r0ml (that's Robert Lefkowitz for normal people) and the effervescent Miguel de Icaza. The title was Open Source goes "Mainstream". r0ml talked about "buying" open source in an enterprise, Miguel talked about bringing an open source culture to a proprietary software company and I talked about dealing with large communities in the Mozilla Project. We were given 10 minutes each and I managed to keep in those limits - I even think I stayed on topic! Anyway, I'm putting the slides up here. (Sorry, you need openoffice.org 2 to read them.) The most interesting slide is the last one which takes a stab at describing the relationships between the various communities that the Mozilla Project has to serve. Companies, customers, individuals and users.

Zimbra is a small company that you've probably never heard of. But they recently launched as open source their collaboration server which handles email and calendaring and an excellent web based front end to it. They've got a good team down there and they have done a great job of going from scratch to something that works in a pretty short period of time. This is largely because they have been able to leverage a lot of open source programs that are out there. If you look at the Setting up a Zimbra development environment entry on their weblog it's a lot of the familiar players: mysql, openldap, postfix and others.

If you can get past the "AJAX will save the world" hype on the flash demo, it's a nice application. But I don't think that they do a good job of selling it on the features that really matter to a lot of admins; It's got a really easy to use interface that integrates well with existing enironments, has some great administrative policies that relate to what you can do with documents that people send you and fails to relate some of the really subtle but important features of the searching capabilities. Basically, there's more under the hood than just selling it as "just another web-front end to your mail and calendar." And the particular way that they punted on building a full collaboration server with workflow is interesting: the backend is extensible so you can integrate workflow from other systems into the the UI, but you don't have to build it into their system directly. Some good ideas in there.

An interesting technical note: if you go and look at the source for the application there's almost no HTML. All of the content is empty and is built up entirely using JavaScript and CSS. This is one of the few examples I've seen of an app that is an actual JavaScript application. The interface is built up entirely using JS after the page has loaded and calls to build the interface are done through your standard AJAX-style calls. From a technology standpoint - which I still can't help but appreciate - it's very elegant.