After many years away from participating regularly on the internet via a blog or two I have to thank Lee Wilkins, who got me hooked on Twitter when it first launched, for the evenutal catalyst that has brought me back. 

While Twitter is great for real time communications - especially for sharing tips and ideas, following trending topics and discovering members of our virtual community(ies) - there are many times, both there and on StatusNet, that I felt the urge to express considerably more than 140 characters.  Elsewhere, I found myself sharing my opinion via comments on other peoples' blogs and forums when perhaps it was better I put finger to key and expressed things in a personal blog post.

In September of 2009 I decided to get myself a virtual private server (VPS) in order to host various tools and start publishing content again.  Of course this would also become my personal soapbox.  I attended the Drupal conference in Paris at the same time as I was sure that Drupal would be my tool of choice, sad though I was that Rainbow Portal, an earlier project I was a contributor to, had not had the momentum to keep up with, let alone compete against, this brilliant product forged by a passionate and talented open source community.  During the conference an old itch re-emerged that I'd been scratching since the days of Rainbow Portal that could be summed up as co-opetitive business practices in and across open source projects and communities, or lack thereof.

The theme of co-opetition will be a common thread here that I hope will help many open source projects, contributors and beneficiaries to consider and embrace in order to enhance the reputation and experience of open source solutions amongst commercial end-users: our present and future clients.

Another area of deep interest for me is what we can call "going open" i.e. moving from proprietary to open source solutions, though my focus is on enterprise solutions i.e. software for business.  I've got very personal experiences of this having begun my IT career immersed in proprietary technologies as a developer and solution architect, been a CIO at a company that marketed proprietary technologies, helped found a proprietary software company and co-developed their proprietary software.  Today, I would not say I'm a purist or religious about open source - I'm pragmatic and respect that at the very least for many businesses there is a need to integrate with legacy proprietary software however, I strive to work only with open source solutions wherever and whenever possible and I'm passionate about this as you'll discover.