hi,

I'm producing an open source film about open source. It's called the Digital Tipping Point. You can find it at digitaltippingpoint.com. We have about 300 hours (!!) of footage for a 90 minute documentary on the cultural implications of the global shift to open source software. The goal of our film is to brand open source software for Joe Sixpack, or more likely, Joe Chardonnay (PBS viewers). The theme of the film is that the Internet could usher in a new renaissance at best, or could be relegated to network TV on steroids in a more dark scenario. We hope to convince Joe Chardonnay that it is important for people to understand open source software, how it plugs into the open Internet, and the creative explosion that is going to happen as the digital divide is closed and more people come on line.

So I just heard about this lounge meeting from Phil Shapiro, and I thought that I would offer to play a rough, 9 minute clip of raw footage with the Mayor of Munich; the Munich councilwoman who started the open source migration there; a British geek and businessman who has a very interesting quote of Bill Gates about his monopoly; and Gilberto Gil, the international rock star who became the Culture Minister of Brazil. It's raw footage with subtitles, but if you are interested in seeing it, I will be glad to bring it over and play it. We would all have to huddle around a notebook, unless you have some kind of bigger screen to play it on, but that might be okay.

In addition to the folks mentioned above, some of the folks who we interviewed are: Tim Witham, the head of OSDL; Richard Stallman; Nat Friedman; Miguel de Icaza; Maddog; Stormy Peters; Jack Messman; Michael Robertson; Peter Harvey, the Green Rep to the Scottish Parliament for Glasgow; Luis Vazquez, the Minister of Education, Science, and Technology for the State of Extremadura, Spain; Brian Behlendorf, and a bunch of other people like that.

If you are interested, you can reach me at einfeldt@gmail.com. I will probably at least just show up to say hi. Thanks either way.

We'll be happy to talk to you. :)

There will be quite a number of core Plone developers present, and it would be interesting to see what you are working on.

But I'd be very interested to see your film... you say it's an open source film, do you intend to license it under a free license, such as Creative Commons BY-SA? I'd be interested to talk to you about it. Email my username @ gnu dot org :)

I wouldn't much call myself a plone developer. I've been using this lovely system to develop my school's website. I'd have lots of questions, but not too many skills to offer the collective at the moment. Do you expect the content of your meetings to be pitched above such relative newbies?

While it is almost certain that there will occasionally (often?) be technical content at these meetings that will be over your head, the first meeting is really just about introductions and figuring out what it is that this group is trying to accomplish. You should definitely join us so you can help direct those efforts, to make sure that your needs get met as well as those of the developers. Also, there are many ways you can help Plone and yourself that do not require highly technical skills, and this is the perfect venue through which you can get plugged in to these opportunities.