One of the things we have been developing at cog motive is a toolbox of open-source applications that are stable and require little overhead for installation and maintenance. Our foci have always been non-profits, artists and other creative individuals. We want people to have a full presence on the web without having to learn all the wacky configuration stuff for themselves.

WordPress has been both an example and a standard to which we hold other software projects. Automattic has put a lot of effort into fostering a community and creating a great publishing platform. I know this because I am a member of said community, and I use that platform to invite others into it.

Laconi.ca is WP’s little brother (micro-blogging, get it?). I see a lot of potential, and fortunately everyone working on it does as well. At the hackfest they had a long list of projects that need work, but it was well categorized and seems likes it can be tackled.

Ken went got the basis for an RPM working, which in turn allows them to put laconi.ca on EC2 (and to eventually merge it into official repositories for Fedora et al.). Evan worked on the web-installer, looking to the simplicity of the WordPress installer as the goal.

For my part, I want to start touching base with communities and organizations that could use laconi.ca for their own purposes. I am going to pimp laconi.ca, here and abroad, and I am planning on sharing some of my ideas on specific uses that I am going to build.

If you are interested in using laconi.ca right now, the big instance is over at identi.ca (@maiki is my crib over yonder). If you have any questions or concerns, please get in touch with me, I both want to answer the ones I can, and hear the ones I can’t.

I want to hear people’s stories. ^_^

Seriously, though, this is a big thing. We want people to come out and let us help them install, upgrade, and/or configure WordPress. With 2.7 out, upgrade parties will likely become less and less of an occurrence, since you can do all kinds of neat things from the dashboard… like upgrading.

The details are at http://upcoming.yahoo.com/event/1478578/.

If you want to get your WordPress on, regardless of your level of knowledge (and we need people from all levels), you should come to this. ^_^

At Berkeley Coworking, rocking the party with Brian Tanaka. Not really, he is on the phone and we are sharing a table that (literally) rocks back and forth based on who exerts more weight. So, it is really a constant struggle to… leverage.

New Zealand rocks the party!