The easiest way to get in touch with me on any non-urgent matter is via email. Please send email to <bkuhn@ebb.org>. If you don't get a response within a week, I don't mind if you resend. I get thousands of spam messages a day and I am not on top of looking for false positives.
I only read and respond to email once per day, usually in the early morning of the US/Eastern time zone. If you are trying to reach me on a matter that needs urgent attention in the next 24 hours, please phone my office or find me on IRC (see below). Also, note that I sometimes don't read email at all on weekends.
I realized that my only-check-email-once-per-day policy is strange in the modern era. It was original inspired as a “mild version” of Donald Knuth's email policy. I later read this study, which is one among many that shows the interpretive nature of email is bad for efficiency.
I like it if you use GNU Privacy Guard when you send me email. Below is my GnuPG public key (note that I use the same key for three different addresses: <bkuhn@ebb.org>, <bkuhn@gnu.org> and <bkuhn@softwarefreedom.org>).
Please do not sign my key unless you have done a fingerprint exchange in person with me.
You can download an ASCII-armored version of the following public key:
pub 1024D/DB41B387 1999-12-09 uid Bradley M. Kuhn (bkuhn99) <bkuhn@ebb.org> uid Bradley M. Kuhn <bkuhn@gnu.org> uid Bradley M. Kuhn <bkuhn@softwarefreedom.org>
My public key is also on every keyserver I have ever heard of. I used to prefer M. Drew Streib's key server, but that has been down for a while. (Historical note: Drew, AFAIK, started the tradition of analyzing the global keyring. His analysis once showed my key as the 29th most strongly connected public key in the world (as of April 2002). In the years since, I simply didn't have time for much GPG-key-signing. I am thus now ranked only 226th (as of April 2008).)
I have recently completely caught up on key signing. If you were waiting for me to sign you key, I should have done so at this point, or at least sent you mail requesting next steps.
If you need to send me postal mail, you can send it to:
Bradley M. Kuhn
c/o The Software Freedom Conservancy
1995 Broadway, Fl 17
New York, NY 10023-5882
USA
I didn't used to like the telephone, but I came to realize that its use is really inevitable, and is often much quicker, more precise, and less impersonal than a long email exchange. (I also feel better now using the phone, since I use Asterisk and Twinkle, so that at least the last mile of all my phone calls are encrypted and controlled with Free Software.) I generally think geeks should reconsider their constant insistence on communicating primarily via email. I've learned from the mistake of preferring email to telephone, and hope others will, too.
I'm happy to talk to you, but I prefer my phone calls to be scheduled. If you'd like to have a phone conversation, please email me and we can coordinate a mutually agreeable time. If you need to phone me urgently, it shouldn't be too difficult to determine my telephone number.
I would be happy to meet people in person. Humans have evolved for more than 200,000 years to interact this way, and therefore, it's likely this will (and should) always remain the canonical form of communication. For this reason, I never prefer any form of virtual contact over face-to-face communication. If you would like to meet me in person, please send me email to coordinate a meeting. I am often at many conferences relating to Free Software, so you can often meet me at them.
My preferred online chat system is IRC, and I can also be found most days on the Freenode IRC network. I am not particularly a fan of any non-IRC online chat system, but I am nevertheless usually available on various chat networks. I urge you to use a Free Software client (such as Pidgin) for those networks. Determining my usernames on these networks is left as an exercise to the reader.
Bradley M. Kuhn <bkuhn@ebb.org>