Ryan MacMillan

We’re having a few friends over this evening for drinks and food. Everyone brings a laptop, and shares with everyone else whatever it is they’re geeking over at the moment. Could be work-related, could be World of Warcraft, could be music, could be a video on YouTube.

Plan is to drink a little, have something to eat, chat about what’s interesting to us. Beyond that, we don’t really mind how it works.

The whole idea is based on our recognition that when we - and most of the people we know get into a room with a drink and a laptop - we end up saying things like “oh - but you must have seen X”, “have you tried Y yet?”, or “I prefer Z”, all the time tapping away at our laptops, and not making a whole load of eye contact.

This is an experiment to see if we can harness that behaviour in some positive way.

Anyway, it’s round at my place tonight. Normally, I’d be preparing food right now (I have an obsession with hors d’oeuvres and canapés) but - sadly - the pressures of running a start-up prevent me. Leo has offered to help (although he’s thinking about soup, which makes me fear for my carpets). I’m thinking about buying in pizza.

Leo says that buying in food is like proprietary code, whereas making your own is more open source.

Of course, he’s wrong. Food and restaurants are one of those examples Eric Raymond gives of how open source businesses work. Most proper restaurants work to recipes in the public domain (and many chefs publish books these days). A few franchises may have supposedly “secret” recipes, but - on the whole, it’s open source, not “special sauce.”

When I worked as a chef, I was astonished at first to find a few people worked a thing called a stage (that’s a long “a”, to make it sound French.) What this means is that they work unpaid in the kitchen - purely for the purpose of learning new techniques and recipes; extending their repertoire.

That’s what we’re looking for this evening. People who aren’t afraid to share ideas, because they realise that IP costs nothing to share.

So, I reckon pizza is good. Fine, it’s going to be nice pizza, and I’ll cut it small.

Is there a better plan? Can someone make suggestions? Bear in mind the following things: carpet, laptops, no tables.