Melançon Enterprises • a multidivision multinational since 1980

Except for all the people he knows and what he's actually done, Henri Poole's thoughts could be mine exactly:

I'm honestly amazed that we still do not have better tools to facilate dialogue. In early 2000, I met a wonderful guy, Chmouel Boudjnah , at a GNU/Linux conference in Canada, and he shared with me a common dilema amoungst active linux kernal hackers (hacker is not meant here as a "bad" person - in the free software community, hackers are just clever people ). He explained that he was subscribed to several mailing lists, and he received between 1000-1500 messages per day. I asked him how he could possibly sort through that much mail, and he explained that he had written a bit of code that scored each message as it arrived. I asked him what kind of rules he used, and he said that messages with certain key words got one score, messages from certain individuals or domains got another score, messages from proprietary mail programs were discarded....etc. He had basically written some code that filtered and prioritized his messages. He is a very bright programmer and he could change the scoring process at any time. I was impressed. But everyone is not a programmer and these tools would be valuable for everyone.

A few weeks later, I was back in the SF bay area, and I went for a hike on Mount Tam with Howard Rheingold, and I asked about the current state of affairs for tools for online dialogue. He informed me that there were some closed systems (proprietary as well) that had promise, but not much. Being a strong advocate of Free Software and firm believer that code is law...I wasn't too excited about closed system whereby people wouldn't have freedoms to control their tools. Around that time, I took was recruited to join MandrakeSoft SA in Paris France. I met some extremely talented and ethical people in the Mandrake community. That was a wild ride.. . One thing I learned there was the importance of community in the technology infrastructure space. The entire business was built upon cooperation with customers and idealisic contributors from around the world.

One of the challenges was getting funds to those organizations and volunteers who provided so much value. In January 2001, after speaking at a conference in Amsterdam, I discussed some of these related problems over lunch with Richard Stallman. A strong advocate for creating only free software, RMS admitted that money could certainly help get more & better free software for the commons. Programmers need to eat...and writing free code for money is a steep hill for many of us. After leaving Mandrake in May of 2001, I decided to see what could be done to solve some of these problems.

The common dilemma amongst active people of thousands of messages a day: PWGD's part of the solution is democratically moderated mass communication.

In the second part, which Affero targets more directly, this seems a great match for PowerToGNU and PowerToDrupal and similar ideas.

Affero seems like they could use some help getting their message out. A perfect partner for PWGD (and license for PWGD to use).