steve purkiss

As you may have previously heard, whenever you look into learning a new programming language it is customary to create a program which outputs “Hello, World!”. For me, starting a blog is very much like learning a new programming language - I had to work out which tools I wanted to use, how to use them and what to use them for.

So this is my “Hello, World!” but instead of a small computer program, it’s a fairly long post about who I am, where I came from, where I am going, and what I stand for. It could be short but then you’d miss bits, and like a computer, it doesn’t function properly if you don’t have all the pieces. Also like a computer I could have added more bits, but I’ve kept to the essentials…

I’m a hacker

As you may have already guessed, my name is Steve Purkiss (more accurately Stephen Purkiss) and I’m a hacker. No, I’m not going to steal money from your bank account, I’m primarily a hacker of Free/Libre Open Source Software. I only realized this fact a few years ago after being made redundant in the crash after the Dot-com bubble from a London-based CMS (Content Management System) software house. I was the seventh person to join the company and we went up to 60 before back down to zero. Our clients included Volkswagen, Umbro.com, USL Soccer, B&Q, and the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, so I gained lots of valuable experience. They were internet pioneers at the time, but IMHO did a few things wrong, like burning through $5m funding by doing things like hiring sales people on £60k basics (double my full salary) even though I sold more than they did…

Although most of my work in the software house was on the consultancy and marketing side, my training, qualifications  and most of my previous experience was as an applications programmer. I have tinkered around with software since the age of ten when my parents bought me a BBC ‘B’ computer - my friends used to want to play games whenever they came round but I was always eager to show them the program I’d typed into my computer from the latest issue of ‘Input’ magazine. Surprisingly enough, I wasn’t the most popular kid at school

It did help me after school though, as my first job was in a local computer store. I quickly tired of the limited opportunities though, so decided to start up on my own supporting local businesses with I.T. I enjoyed this, but it was fairly mundane and as I’d always been into programming I decided to train professionally as a programmer and entered the industry, working initially on IBM AS/400s using the RPG relational database programming language. This was a very old and laborious to program, so, after seeing all my friends go to university and basically have lots of fun, I decided to try it out myself and went to university where I studied Computing with Management. My dot-com job was the first job I had after leaving university, and after that I decided to become a freelance web developer.

Rolling my own CMS

Through a friend-of-a-friend I found my first client and built my first website. They were a a small company and buying an expensive CMS to manage their website was out of the question, so I decided to write one of my own. The software house I worked for previously used the Java programming language and although I have a certificate and experience in Java, it wasn’t really suitable for a small website so I decided to use PHP instead.

At the time PHP was beginning to become very popular amongst web developers because, well, it was easy. Business people with an idea, some spare time and a willingness to dive in and learn a little could get something up and running very quickly. It was also capable of being very professional, and on top of this it was free and open, and worked on any hardware platform you choose to use. This meant it cost nothing to download and start using, and if it didn’t have a particular function you needed, you could, if you want to, add it. This fact alone is the main reason why PHP is now the most widely-used programming language for web sites and web applications.

Reinventing the wheel

I had learned from my work at the software house that all people want to do on the internet can fall into three function categories - manage content, communicate/collaborate, and perform commerce transactions. I realized I must have been reinventing the wheel when I wrote my own CMS and I discovered a number of Free/Libre Open Source CMSs. Since those days back in 2001, I have used a number of these systems for developing sites for clients, however for the last couple of years I’ve been developing sites using the Drupal CMS. It has professional code, a large number of installations, and most importantly a strong and vibrant community. This last point is essential because in the world of Free/Libre Open Source Software, if you don’t have a strong community, it’s hard to get support, updates are infrequent, and often a project sinks.

Networking (without cables)

As a newly redundant person and with the cost of living in London being exorbitant, I decided to move back to my father’s house in a village near Chelmsford in Essex - a commuter town roughly 30 miles from the center of London (and the site of Marconi’s first factory).

Although close to London, it’s an entirely different world. The village did not have any broadband connectivity and at the time BT, the incumbent provider of telecommunications in the UK, required 250 people to register interest in broadband before they would install it. I discovered a number of local groups who had tried without success to get this number signed up, so helped bring them all together, printed lots of leaflets up and went knocking door-to-door and managed to get some coverage in the local newspaper. Soon after we had broadband and I could start to build up a business locally - dial-up was just too slow to do anything on.

Being in the middle of nowhere I found it hard to make any connections with business people, and support was either non-existent or non-helpful so I decided to look online and found a site for small businesses called BeyondBricks, funded by the DTI. They had discussion forums, and people often asked about what software there was to do X and Y. Many replies were from people trying to sell them proprietary software - software which cost money to buy (well, license for your use), and if you wanted anything changed the only people who could change it were the suppliers - this is known as Vendor lock-in.

With my experience of Free/Libre Open Source Software, I decided I could help these business owners and budding entrepreneurs. Whenever anyone asked about software, I would do a search on the internet and find them something which could help them, for free. I soon became a respected source of knowledge and help, and after the funding for BeyondBricks ended and the site was taken over by Ecademy, this grew exponentially. I soon had hundreds of connections, was known as ‘the Open Source guy’, and amassed a large number of wonderful testimonials from those I’d helped. Funnily enough, I didn’t make many friends from those who were peddling the proprietary software though…

‘The Box’

Unfortunately, whilst helping lots of people find free software was very satisfying, it didn’t make me any money and the only paid work I found was developing websites, which had its own share of problems. Hundreds of people claimed to be website developers, and there was increasing competition from offshore suppliers. I found it hard not only to find work, but also to be paid what I believe my work was worth. I was also getting tired of building everyone else’s dreams and wanted to build my own dream. But what was my dream? I certainly had a passion for helping people find out more about Free/Libre Open Source Software, but how could I turn this into a sustainable business?

One thing I’d missed about working on my own, from home, was frequent face-to-face interaction with others. What I wanted was somewhere I could go whenever I felt like it to meet other like-minded people and make more connections. I also wanted somewhere which wasn’t my house where I could hold meetings with clients. I also thought this would be a great place to show off Free/Libre Open Source Software.

The problem with free software at the moment is no-one sees it with their eyes. Sure, it’s online, but go down your local computer store and you won’t see any - all the software there is in boxes. This could be a place where they could see it in real life. I could make money from training, hiring out meeting and conference rooms, and from reselling open source-related hardware and services.

I could even set up multimedia rooms so people could easily make a podcast. Focusing on technology people, artists, musicians at the core mixing with general business people, a lot could be created in these spaces. I could also provide hosting and distribution, thus cutting out the middle-men and broadcasters who are getting even more rights under new laws when they are not even the creators. This would give the power back to the creators. The possibilities seemed endless. I was excited, it all began to fit together!

I didn’t know about the coworking movement, and at the time there were only a few places set up and none were anything to do with free software, just freelancers working together in one place. I decided this was my dream and the more I thought about it, the more I realized what benefit these places would be to people all over the world. If we connected these spaces through a website there would be interaction and connections going on between them, and this would be very powerful indeed. With the software being free, this was a low-cost and scalable business model - I was getting even more excited!

Chelmsford was not a great place to start it up as not only is the property more expensive to rent than in central London where there would be more opportunity, any form of help was non-existent. I also held the view that the UK as a whole doesn’t have a positive view towards entrepreneurs and my opportunity would be greater over the other side of the pond in the ‘Land of Opportunity’. I’d heard that one of my contacts was off to present at a meeting in Toronto, Canada, so decided to take a trip over there to test the water.

The first night I was in Toronto I met up with a few friends-of-friends and talked to a few people about my idea, and the reaction was so far removed from what I had received back in the UK it was obvious to me that this was the place to be - people were more open to ideas, and I liked it. One of the people I met that night, upon hearing my idea, commented “It’s like you’ve got the box”, and that’s when I decided to codename this project ‘The Box’. It worked on so many levels…

Fostering Connections

As well as helping others make successful businesses, I am interested in finding out more about what makes me tick. One business contact was just starting up providing a service which helps you discover your ‘Core Process’. He had used it in many corporations and decided to give a few consultations away free. We conversed over email and after answering a few questions about my previous life successes and interests, I managed to boil down to two words ‘Fostering’ and ‘Connections’. I foster connections, both technological and human.

I decided to foster connections whilst I was out in Toronto, and even managed to hook up with John Terpstra, co-founder of the Samba project which enables files and printers to be shared across networks between the proprietary Microsoft platforms and the open platforms such as Linux. I was intrigued about a very intelligent man who had spent his life re-engineering a proprietary platform just so people using different systems could communicate with each other.

I wondered what he could have done if this wasn’t needed, and felt kind of sad that he’d seemingly missed out on opportunities for building possibly greater stuff. But I soon found out that I was wrong to think like this as after a few hours with him telling me stories of power throughout the centuries - Kings, Queens, societies, right and wrong, I realized that there was much in this world that I didn’t know about but was excited to be part of, and excited that I could be part of helping it grow and for true freedom to be made a step closer. I for one didn’t realize that Free Software, Free Society.

I soon had a team of people who were all excited about the prospect of building our first box, the only thing missing was the cash to do it - an age old problem I’m sure everyone is all too-well versed with. I took the opportunity while I was close to go to the Free Software Foundation’s AGM in Boston to learn more about them and to hopefully get some good feedback on my project concept. I had an awesome time there and met some great people, including the founder of the Creative Commons, Lawrence Lessig, who thought my project was ‘Very interesting indeed!’.

Lost Connections

I had existing clients back in England, and although we rarely met face-to-face when I was there, I hadn’t planned on losing them just because I happened to be in a different country - I think they thought I’d disappeared off the face of the Earth, even though I was always online and in contact. I’d managed to find a few clients for my UK-based business in Toronto, but not enough to sustain me. I’d also by that point fallen ‘in love’ with a young lady I’d met out there who had just come out of a bad relationship so wasn’t working, and things became very stressful - too stressful being so far away from home.

Lost

This next phase of my life I’m not going to go into much detail about for a number of reasons. Although I realize it does have an effect on my future, what happened is not nice for anyone to go through, and I don’t feel it would add any value to dredge it all up again - it took me a long time to recover from. I do want to briefly discuss it though so you can at least have some understanding as to what I went though. I discovered that the girl I was with was bi-polar and had been off her meds for three years. From what I’ve discovered, she’s had a hell of a life, and I wouldn’t wish it upon anyone. I never knew what it was before, and through experience, I’ve discovered that it’s an area of the medical world which is very lacking in a number of areas, and very scary for all involved.

Not being financially stable and unable to get a job myself as a foreigner, the stress made the situation even worse. At the time, her parents had almost given up on her for one reason or another, and I was seemingly her only friend in the world. I take friendships very seriously, and anyone who knows me well enough will attest to this. I wanted to help in any way I could, and although it’s debatable whether that is a right way to think or not, I don’t regret what I did. She is still alive today, and at the time that was not a given for someone in her condition.

Escape

I had moved from Toronto to Kingston, Ontario to be with her when she came out of one of her visits to the psychiatric ward as her parents did not want her to stay with them, and I felt like being out of the city would be best. I made some connections, and before long was offered a number of places where I could start ‘The Box’. For one reason or another all eventually didn’t work out, and we were back in the stressful situation.

We did have a ray of light though when we made some good connections with the local Sun Microsystems reseller who was on the board of a local project called ‘Think Kingston’. They wanted to bring the community together and thought my concept would do just this, and felt that after building one in the center of Kingston, one in each of the six surrounding districts would be the way to go. Again what was missing though was funding - they wanted it, but none in particular would put up the cash. We thought of ideas like contacting university alumni for donations, but I didn’t stay long enough to find out if that would have worked out. I was organizing meetings with local successful entrepreneurs but it became hard as every time I wanted to go out of the house to a meeting I was accused of infidelity, and even when asking in the local library about food costs a scene was made on allegations of me trying to chat up the librarian when all I was trying to was find out about their suppliers.

I couldn’t take any more of the violence in the relationship - I’d already sustained a broken hand in Toronto and now have one knuckle missing, and have many bite scars to boot. Although she’d come off her meds again a couple of times, she was now back on them and I felt that I could not do any more to help and that me being there was not a help. She was back in the medical system and her parents were fairly nearby and were at least communicating with her by then. When I sustained more injuries, during one of my long night walks after being chucked out of the house again I decided enough was enough, I had to get out and back on with my life - it just wasn’t working here and I was likely to die myself soon if I didn’t get out.

Luckily one of my good friends offered to pay for my flight home, and without any luggage I was the security guard’s favorite possible terrorist. They seemed upset when they didn’t find any explosives on me, but I was just happy to be back on my way home, out of a nightmare situation I didn’t know existed anywhere on this planet.

Regaining Consciousness

I was back in England, and in recovery mode. I wasn’t sure what to do next, but it was obvious that it would take time to build business up again. I’d racked up an enormous (well, to me anyway) credit card and loan debt of £40k and decided for the sake of my own mental well-being that bankruptcy was the only way out, so I went bankrupt. That was nine months ago, and from what I’ve heard, I’m going to be released from bankruptcy soon (they said late December and I’ve been chasing them up but nothing yet).

The day after I was bankrupt, a friend-of-a-friend told me they had a small empty shop opposite the bus station and next to the train station here in Chelmsford I could use for my project. I was in shock. Chelmsford is the busiest through station in the UK, and many commuting into Chelmsford. This was perfect, so I thought. I even thought up a cool name  - ‘fresh connection’. I wanted to sell healthy snacks to commuters as a way to help pay the bills. I used to be very heavy at 19.5 stone (273lb/124kg) and was down to 12.5 stone. I was 46″ pants, now 34″, and mostly because I had a probably intolerance to wheat and dairy products. Exercise helped too…

It was not to be though, as a few weeks in after doing a lot of work with planning, finding suppliers, sorting out utilities, etc. I discovered the owner had been offered £25k for the lease and decided to sell. I don’t blame him, I would’ve taken the cash too, but it was slightly annoying to say the least. Still, what’s meant to be is meant to be.

Reaching for the Stars

The same good friend who’d paid for my flight home contacted me and said he had a good idea for a business networking website and wanted my help building it. I’d quite frankly had enough of trying to build a box by now, so slipped back into my website building habits, but this time I had a share of ownership of the business for my efforts, and it would be a good way to help pay him back for helping me out of a sticky situation.

We spent six months working on the business model and building the site, which included a flight over to Atlanta for a few weeks last Summer. We didn’t get out much, but I love to travel so was great seeing another place in the world, and work on something exciting to boot. This project was exciting because site members could become shareholders. For all my efforts on business networking sites before, I didn’t have much to show for helping grow their business, and it seemed the more I gave them, the more they controlled me. This would be different, and with my open source values, it would be even more different - the first network to be owned by the members who could also mold its direction.

We launched on 1 October 2007, and you can see the results at projectstars.com. It’s a place where people like myself can go and blog collaboratively about their professional experience so that they can be found more easily by potential clients, partners, and/or employers. We got off to a good start, utilizing our respective business networks to gain more members, but quickly realized that we were in a crowded market space where, although we were different in valuable ways, people could not necessarily see the difference at first.

We spent the last part of last year promoting the site, attending various startup demo conferences and geeky get-togethers, but by Christmas the funds had run out and we were nowhere near where we needed to be in order to get any kind of paid sponsorship or investment. We did however give out our first batch of shares, and are in contact with people who can help up get our message out there better - I’ve realized through the process that I’m way too techie to make things simple enough for non-techies to understand at a glance. So all is not lost, and people are joining up and joining in, it’s just going to take a lot longer than we originally thought. We’re very happy with the site though, and it’s certainly a good site for me to show off and be proud of - it’s still the only business network out there which is open source and gives shares to members.

New Year, New Beginnings

I decided to take a break over the holiday period, and for the first week or so I did nothing but watch movies. Having spent every waking moment on the project for the last nine months, it was good to disconnect. I soon became bored though, and got back online and started catching up with what was going on. Through meeting such industry luminaries as Robert Scoble and Dave Winer at the Geek Dinner in London just before Christmas, I had a whole new circle of ‘friends’ to follow, and was soon adding people to my Twitter micro-blogging feed and adding their blog RSS feeds to my Google Reader.

I also learned through an old work colleague from the dot-com period about a new video discussion forum service called  Seesmic. It’s in ‘Alpha’ pre-release and owner Loïc Le Meur is seemingly treating invites like you treat the queue outside an empty club, so I was reluctant to join at first, but succumbed when drunk once and my colleague said he had some invites. On New Year’s Ever I posted for the first time, and have visited it since on a daily basis - it’s surely addictive, and I’ve had some fun on it. But with my knowledge now about Free/Libre Open Source Software and sharing the shares of your business with the people who help to build it for you, I realize I have to take a step back and not continually help to build the businesses of others without making sure I am helping myself first.

Breaking the cycle

So, after a long journey we find ourselves at the present day, the here and now. I’m without work but I am older and I feel a little bit wiser. I know I don’t work well in office environments, I know I have a hard time making a living from building websites, but I know I have a dream and that I am a creator and I need to have a supportive, multi-disciplinary team around me in order to realize my creations. I’m still going to work on the projectstars project, but I’m also going to work on mine too, as well as looking for an income from them or other opportunities, I just don’t want to fall into the old traps I’ve already fallen into before.

With money from Christmas I’ve bought myself a bicycle (my last was stolen when trying to set up the shop in Chelmsford last year) and I need to get fit again - I’ve put on weight and I know healthy body helps a healthy mind. I can’t afford the gym and swimming at the moment (which I love to do), but will get back to it in time.

Moving forward by working together

My first blog has been hard to write, but certainly helps to get it off my chest. I haven’t even talked about the two major car accidents I’ve had - one when I was 13 and sustained ‘brain bruising’, and one when I was 16 and broke my leg, but this blog was about who I am and why I am here. I have a number of domain names I realize are my creations, and I’m going to be setting them up over the next few weeks so that instead of trying to build them all myself and failing, I’m going to open them up for all to join in - how it should be. A provisional list of these is as follows - do please comment or get in touch if any interest you:

purkiss.com - this is the ‘hub’ site where I will blog about my progress, comment on the world as I see it, and update on new creations as they happen

gnuworldorder.info - it is possible to live in a world of free software and help to build a free society, this site will help to bring together links and a community to enable that to happen. I think if we’re ever going to populate other planets then barriers to innovation should be broken down, and copyright, patents, etc. are all barriers to innovation. They were brought out in an entirely different world than the one we live in today - time to get real and realize that.

freedomfridays.info - people are creatures of habit, and I’m going to set up themed days if I ever manage to build boxes. Fridays is where we would let groups in who couldn’t afford to join - schools, mencap, etc.

freethru.info - not something I’ve talked about here yet, but there are globalists and they want to reduce the population of the world to 500 million from the current 6 billion. This would be a good idea if it didn’t involve mass killing and if the globalists weren’t completely insane. This is a site where you could find freedom through just knowing the information.

gnumedia.info - Creative Commons is great, but in countries where there aren’t even copyright laws, Creative Commons introduces copyright to them. After conversing with an expert in the public domain, I believe there should be access to free media, and this is where you could discuss it and find some

open4.org - open for organizations, open for dot organizations - this was my original website. It’s been through a few incarnations - first an open source information site and supplier directory, but again I gave it away free so couldn’t sustain it. Now it’s a place where you can blog collaboratively and get 100% of the ad revenue. The idea came to me in a flash when I thought about how much information I’ve found out about Linux and free software from helpful forums but the posters don’t earn from their posts - they might do if they posted here. Although I’ve not done much on it, it does make a little bit of money for me (ok, only $85 last year, but more than it cost to host), and as a business model it’s proved itself, it just needs scaling. One idea is that it would be good for groups, but I think it would be hard to get people to move from Yahoo or Google, even though they don’t get ad revenue from those suppliers. Just been asked by one member if I could link his blog in, not sure what to do with the site yet.

linux-solution.com - a nice SEO domain which could be a re-incarnation of my linux supplier directory. Still not sure people would pay for it, but might be a quick way to revenue if done in the right way

newgnus.info - maybe for newbies new to the free software field

gnu4u.info - gnu2u.info - free software programs/news

unit101.info - actually a building I was looking at for the box project, but I think it would be cool as an ‘initiation’ like place for people who haven’t ‘woken up’ yet. Like a place in the virtual world SecondLife, this could provide a place to learn what is really going on in the world around you, not just the version of reality the large corporations like to tell you this world is all about.

flo.at.it - after promoting projectstars.com we realized people were interested more in the share giveaway than the site itself so we were thinking up on ideas how to maximize this opportunity. We thought a digg-like site but where the members were the owners would work, but after our experience we think they wouldn’t necessarily ‘get it’ or change, so something new is needed. I think that it would be good for floating ideas on - we found the process of marketing your startup costly, hard to do, and very elitist in the way that the press will seemingly only report on you if you’re ‘cool enough’ or one of their friends - example was at the Mashup Demo where 16 projects presented and hardly any reported on, even though the reporter was there all the way through. I thought it was their job to report, not to look cool - how wrong I was. So, this could a site to help startups ‘float’ their ideas, a bit like a few other sites out there, but unbiased, with community features, and better.

That’s it for now, if you’ve got this far then I applaud you - I promise future posts won’t be quite as long, but y’know, had to get it out there…