There are lots of reasons I haven’t been blogging much lately. And lots of excuses. Definitely one of them is that I have been traveling a lot more.
I thought last year when I had my first intercontinental business trip was remarkable. I’m just a kid from a small town in Oregon, so getting to travel to Dublin for an OpenStack PTG was mind blowing. I got to see a real castle and eat local foods. And got stuck in a record snowstorm. #Snowpenstack
But since then I’ve been to Denver twice for PTGs, did a 2 week Agile training and cloud team gathering in Nuremberg, and have made several trips with my family. And in another week I’ll be in Nuremberg again.
I didn’t imagine myself being a world traveler when I was growing up, but I do like it.
What prompted this post is that recently one of the OpenStack PTLs and a long time contributor posted to the openstack-discuss mail list that he would not be traveling to Shanghai for the next conference. He made a bigger deal about it than necessary, and you could argue some of it was motivated by driving traffic to his blog. [UPDATE: I reread this and it sounded much more accusatory and harsh than I intended. Chris is not that kind of guy. Sorry about that.] (He included a link in his email. Just Google for “Chris Dent remote maintainer”) You could also see it was politically motivated, as he listed out his environmental concerns with air travel and social concerns with China.
While Chris raised some valid concerns, I don’t totally agree with his conclusion. I have some ill-formed opinions about politicizing weather science and fear mongering, so I won’t go on about that. And I agree with his points about the conferences being exclusive parties. But I believe that there are still good reasons to travel.
If a country is misbehaving or worse, abusing its citizens, I think cutting it off from the rest of the world is going to make things worse, not better. I tend to take the attitude of Rick Steves that travel can be a political act. Yes, ther can be many negative things about tourism. But the simple fact that getting someone out of their small corner of the world so they can recognize there are other people in other countries is huge. Not everyone can be the head of a country, but if you get to know the people in a country (or many countries) it will influence your view and that spreads out to people around you and influences your voting. And when the people are engineers you are sharing code with, it makes your interaction with them so much more effective.
So if my presentations are accepted to the Shanghai summit are accepted, I will try to go. Of course I will be cautious about what I pack. But if I can help influence some engineers in China that Americans are not all just big jerks that should be taken advantage of, then I will try.
It’s not that I was trying to drive traffic to my blog, I’m not really interested in that (and if I was, it didn’t work). Rather that the link provides more information that expands on the reasons for my decision to not go.
Those reasons are not as relevant to the main topic of the message, so I didn’t want to include to much about them in the message, but I did want to provide an opportunity for people who wanted more information to be able to find it easy. That’s what makes hypertext so great.
As you say, my reasons are definitely politically motivated, and the primary reasons are environmental, and I don’t believe that to be a problem. As someone who is a PTL and has been a TC member I think it is important to make it obvious to people in the community that they have the power to make a choice on whether they travel or not, whatever reasons they may have. Several people have thanked me for that, glad that someone is pointing out the opportunity.
And finally, I’m glad you are trying to go, and I’m glad that people like you will be there: I completely agree that being together in person is one of the best ways to bridge the gaps between cultures, remove misconceptions, and create ideas for better ways.
Thanks for the comment. I thought I was just talking to myself (no traffic to my blog. :P). And I’m glad we can come to different conclusions and talk about it.