Another cool person we met in Atlanta was Chris Johnson of ifPeople. He's got a team in Argentina and is involved in all sorts of progressive and open source projects.

From Chris Johnson.:

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Christopher Johnson is the cofounder and CEO of ifPeople. ifPeople (Innovation for People) empowers leaders to improve the impacts and performance of their enterprises through innovative solutions in management, collaboration, and technology. Christopher combines a passion for problem solving, a systems perspective and multi-disciplinary knowledge in order to turn today's challenges to creating a more just, sustainable world into opportunities. Over the last seven years, he has served as a leader in several initiatives to improve the social, environmental, and economic impact of communities, social ventures, corporations, international initiatives, and civil society organizations on six continents. At ifPeople he leads a team of technology professionals that leverage Free Software tools to craft enterprise solutions. He is also a leader in combining systems thinking tools and Open Source technologies for facilitating collaboration and network management. Christopher led the development of the ResponsibleIT framework, an innovative approach by ifPeople that defines socially and environmentally responsible guidelines for IT companies. Christopher has been awarded numerous international research fellowships, publishes and speaks internationally, and is active in educational, professional, and community organizations.

UNQUOTE

While in Atlanta for XML 2005, Kris and I met Courtney Miller of FloatLeft at the cozy Euclid Avenue Yacht Club in the Little Five Points district. What can I say? Like most Drupal developers and designers, she's smart and gets it. No wonder the revamped NetSquared site she helped design and code rocks!

Atlanta, home of the XML 2005 conference,  seems to be a bunch of spread out centres connected by highways. For example R Thomas Deluxe Grill and Daddy D'z where we ate are not within walking distance of our downtown hotel yet they are considered central. A very different urban vibe than Vancouver where a lot more restaurants are walkable from downtown!

So far I've met Joe Gregorio, Kurt Cagle and others (like Sharon Adler the IBM'er who was the program manager of GML back in 1984 when I used it to write co-op work reports at Bell Northern Research) at XML Conference 2005 in Atlanta. Can't wait to meet more! Love to meet you! Meet me at the Bryght Booth, booth #14 or call me at 604 729 7924 and we can meet in Atlanta!

E is for Emacs, S is for Syntext's Serna (using their free trial license for XML Conference presenter), P is for PowerBook, D is for DocBook. These were the tools I used last week to write my RSS Remixing Past Present and Future paper for XML Conference 2005.

It totally reminded me of my student days back in the 1980s at Bell Northern Research in Ottawa. Except that back then I used Xedit instead of Emacs, a mainframe running IBM's CM/VMS operating system and IBM's Script GML instead of DocBook.

Progress! The 21st century tech allows me to share my paper on the internet AND print it out and it's in colour!

Serna was not intuitive to me. Of course I probably am atypical (or so I think!). Since I know emacs like the back of my hand, it was much faster to hand-code my XML with emacs than Serna. But Serna was a great validator and displayed the final paper very nicely and I bet if I actually took the time to learn it, it would be much faster than using emacs even for old salty dogs like myself!