When the photographer's in a hurry he won't catch the best moment...  ;°)

Wizards of OS 4

PSYC presented a booth and a chat at the WOS4 conference, whose effectiveness was however disturbed by the Deutsche Telekom's continuous efforts at not providing internet connectivity (We later heard a rumour, that they have a political interest in not supporting grassroot ISP services as promoted by WOS and the http://www.freifunk.net initiative, but huh let's call this just a rumour).

We however experienced a lot of public interest. Our booth didn't attract too many people in fact, but the ones who did tended to get stuck for hours listening to what we psycers have been creating over the years, and what opportunities it brings to the Internet and open-source communities. We now realize that our approach to SPAM defiance could indeed be the step that SMTP never can make. Also with our approach to Social Networking in a decentralized way, we create a chance to bring the users, who find so much usefulness in the services provided by the centralistic, back into the open source, where privacy concerns can actually be implemented.

Booth discussions reached the point of convincing Detlef Borchers to let lynX hold a quick presentation of PSYC at the Open API Workshop. And I guess we can proudly say we withstood the Q & A with an extremely competent questioner, Harald Alvestrand, IETF legend and currently Google employee. Interestingly, although we were trying to stay within the framework discussion of privacy and social aspects of technology, and of course how the PSYC protocol can be seen as a truly open API to the things it does, like manage a web of trust of friends, the questions went into all kinds of details of PSYC such as conference control and features of the two clients PsycZilla and psycion.

All of the people present at that workshop except for one cared to take a copy of the PSYC white paper back home after that.

Our presence at the WOS arose out of a very spontaneous initiative by cven of the WOS team who suggested we should do something at the WOS. Thank you, it turned out to be a great plan, and I hope we can follow up with a paper presentation (or something like that) at WOS5!