Open source passion?

Yes folks, it's true. Passion is the latest open source technology. Apparently at the Apple WWDC conference, Nat Torkington talked about using tutorial signups for OSCON (O'Reilly's Open Source convention in August) as an indicator of what's hot in open source. He listed the top ten tutorial sign-ups:

1. Learning Ajax
2. Perl Best Practices
3. Ruby on Rails: Enjoying the Ride of Programming
4. Perl Best Object Oriented Practices
5. Scalable Internet Architectures
6. Creating Passionate Users
7. XUL: The Future of User-interfaces on the Web
8. Introduction to Ruby
9. Subversion
10. PHP Security

So it's official. Right up there with Ajax, Perl, and Ruby... you have passion. While I'm thrilled to see the interest in the passionate users tutorial, it's awfully funny to think of passion as an open source technology. The values of open source software have a lot to contribute to the non-open-source world, but I think the phrase "open source" has been badly misppropriated in a bunch of contexts. Just what exactly does "open source marketing" mean? ; )

[Update: turns out that there's a pretty good answer to that question at the modern marketing blog, which references the ChangeThis manifesto on open source marketing. Thanks Jason!]

But what I am delighted (and shocked) by is the new interest geeks have in these non-traditional topics. Things that have more to do with quality of life than quality of code.

One of the big hits of ETech was the whole 43folders / Getting Things Done stuff. I had no less than five people show me their version of hipster PDA, unsolicited.

And as I mentioned when I got back from ETech, the most heavily-attended tutorial was the one on Creating Passionate Users. And they definitely weren't comin' to see me.

I don't want to read too much into this, but what the hell--I will anyway. I think it means that after years of being enamored solely with the technology itself, and the various methodologies and approaches to crafting it, the geek world is starting to look at the larger sphere around the use of the technology. In other words, not just the content but the context in which technology is created and used. That means caring about the quality of our lives, as developers, as well as the quality of our user's lives and the role we play in that.

And I don't want to get too excited about what that means, but what the hell--I will anyway. I think something important is happening, and it can only be good. Maybe we've finally stopped saying our secret stock option prayers at night ("Please oh please God bring back the bubble and this time I won't piss it away I promise...") and decided to focus on what we have, and what we can do to make things better. The whole idea of Getting Things Done is about being able to spend more time in flow, the very thing we believe leads to passionate users. You want to spend more time in flow at work, and you want to help your users spend more time in flow. More flow = happier life, at least according to the leading flow authority, Dr. Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi.

To any of you who are coming to OSCON and will be at the passionate users tutorial, please come say hello! I think it's wonderful that so many software developers care enough to pass up, say, a PHP security tutorial in favor of creating passionate users. And that we're all secure enough in our... geekhood to even be talking about such a soft topic at such a hard-core tech conference.

Of course there's the less optimistic part of me that wonders if the popularity of the passionate users tutorial is because they think it means... something else. Like, how to start, say, an open source porn site... ; )