Open Source Society

One of the themes of this blog is how the principles behind open source can be applied to other domains. Here's someone with the same idea:

Just say the words quietly to yourself: open…source….society…. A society where the inner workings of the government, the economy, every aspect of everyday life, are placed under the spotlight for every citizen to see, examine, and have an impact on.

These are my goals: to present ways you can improve your own life and the lives of your friends and family through the benefits of the open source movement; to present ways you can give back to the movement through your own ideas, labor, or financial support; to present ways you can have a positive impact on other aspects of your life completely unrelated to technology through the use of an open source philosophy; to create a movement hellbent on remaking the world into a more cooperative, friendly, honest, and above all equitable place to live, work, and play.

A Question of Open Chemistry

I've written about open science and open notebook science before, but here's an excellent round-up of open chemistry:

The next generation of professional chemists are far more likely to be in tune with web-based chemistry, treating blogs and social networking sites as professional tools in the same manner as email. For Open Chemistry advocates, the inevitable passage of time may be enough to usher in their revolution.

(Via Open Access News.)

A Question of Standards

Andy Updegrove's Standards Blog is one of my favourites, because he clearly knows what he is talking about, and this means his analyses in the area of standards are highly insightful. But here's an interesting move:

In my case, this blog is the tool that I control that can project my voice the farthest. And unlike so many media channels today, its audience is not self-selected to be conservative or liberal politically. What this tells me is that I have the opportunity, and perhaps the responsibility, to use this platform when appropriate not to tell people what to think, but to raise questions that need to be thought about, and perhaps encourage others to do the same as well.

Accordingly, this is the first in a series of pieces that you can expect to appear on Mondays on an irregular basis, each introduced with the name "The Monday Witness." The topics will vary, but the common theme will be to highlight instances of action and inaction in the world today that violate widely held standards of human decency.

I think this is absolutely right: as blogs grow in importance and stature, they become an important new way of communicating with people that cut across traditional - and usually unhelpful - political lines. This doesn't mean that all bloggers should immediately starting ranting on random subjects close to their heart (besides, I already do that...), but it does open up interesting possibilities for engaging in a wider discourse.

Trivial Defamation

One of the unanswered questions is to what extent web sites/blogs need to worry about defamatory postings made by their users. Here's a little legal sanity from the UK:

In a move sure to please football fans arguing the toss on bulletin boards all over the UK, a High Court judge has ruled that lively banter of a “strictly defamatory” nature can still be so trivial that The Man can’t always force board owners into revealing poster’s identities.

God bless pragmatism.

Business Week Goes Open Source, Apparently

Or so it says:

We're introducing this type of open source aggregation into the new magazine, with blog items, quotes, and content from unusual, global sources surrounding stories, sometimes enhancing them, sometimes disagreeing with them. It's a conversation, not a lecture.

We shall see.

New York Times Sees the Light and Opens Up

The New York Times will stop charging for access to parts of its Web site, effective at midnight Tuesday night.

The move comes two years to the day after The Times began the subscription program, TimesSelect, which has charged $49.95 a year, or $7.95 a month, for online access to the work of its columnists and to the newspaper’s archives. TimesSelect has been free to print subscribers to The Times and to some students and educators.

...

What changed, The Times said, was that many more readers started coming to the site from search engines and links on other sites instead of coming directly to NYTimes.com. These indirect readers, unable to get access to articles behind the pay wall and less likely to pay subscription fees than the more loyal direct users, were seen as opportunities for more page views and increased advertising revenue.

A nice vindication for the "make money by giving it away" approach, and testimony to the power of the Web 2.0 world, driven as it by search engines and user-generated content. (Via Boing Boing.)

Blogging Open Stack Integration

One of the great but rather submerged stories in the open source world is stack integration. With the exception of the LAMP stack, free software solutions have been rather fragmented, with little inter-project coordination. One important development in this space is the creation of the Open Solutions Alliance, whose main task is ensuring better cooperation between disparate products.

I wrote about this recently, and I notice that the OSA blog is quite active at the moment. It's a good place to find out what exactly is happening in this important but neglected area.

After Flickr, It Gets Quickr

Not, alas, open source as far as I can tell:

IBM Lotus Quickr is team collaboration software that helps you share content, collaborate and work faster online with your teams -- inside or outside firewall.

Interesting not just for its adoption of Web 2.0 technologies, but its anointing of the Flickr naming meme. (Via Bob Sutor's Open Blog.)

World Bank 2.0

Signs of the times:

As explained on BuzzMonitor's "about page" -- "Like many organizations, we started listening to blogs and other forms of social media by subscribing to a blog search engine RSS feed but quickly understood it was not enough. The World Bank is a global institution and we needed to listen in multiple languages, across multiple platforms. We needed something that would aggregate all this content, help us make sense of it and allow us to collaborate around it."

The World Bank contracted with the software firm Development Seed to build the new program, with additional input from the World Resources Institute. Development Seed relied on the popular open-source content management system Drupal for its core code. Last week the bank announced that version 1.0 of BuzzMonitor was available for free download to all comers, and suggested that it was particularly applicable to nonprofit organizations interested in monitoring what the Web was saying about them.

Dell Tries Harder

Interesting:

Now's not the time to mince words, so let me just say it... we blew it.

Blooming Science Blogs

It is rather ironic that science, which is a paradigmatic example of openness in action, should be a relative laggard when it comes to getting formally behind open science. So it's good to see a couple of new blogs on the subject, as noted by Bill Hooker.

Better blooming late than never.

Making All the Right Connections

This is a tiny footnote to the larger story of the imminent IPRED2 vote, but I think in its own way it's a fine parable about the power of connected people, and of the larger connection that is the Internet.

Although I follow matters concerning European legislation affecting the digital world, and particularly those involving intellectual monopolies, pretty closely, I'd missed exactly when this IPRED2 stuff was about to break.

Luckily, I have a feed from the Open Rights Group, who ran this story warning us about the upcoming vote. As a result, I wrote first this post, and then this one, making pleas for people to write to their MEPs asking them to support amendments to the IPRED2 proposal, or to vote against it completely.

Nothing special in that, you might say. Except that Simon Phipps kindly mentioned me as one of his sources for a post on the subject, also urging people to write to their MEPs. And this, in its turn, was picked up by James Governor.

But the story does not end there. As James relates, within half-an-hour of firing off some emails, he had received a reply - a positive one too - and was impressed. I, too, am deeply impressed by the three replies I have received so far, two positive, and one effectively abstaining.

What this shows is the real power of blogs to get a message out, and to make a difference. More importantly, perhaps, it also shows that emailing MEPs does actually get a response, sometimes rapidly. I find both facts heartening; it gives me hope for the political process and for the possibility that technology can help ordinary citizens engage with it more directly.

The Supreme Blog?

Who knew that there was a blog about the US Supreme Court? And it seems that there are some interesting things happening there in the field of patents:

the Supreme Court has taken three patent cases just this Term, the most in modern history (at least to my recollection). In an era when the Court's docket has been steadily declining, as I have highlighted in previous posts, what do you think explains the Supreme Court's sudden interest in patent cases, an area over which it has no special subject matter expertise? One obvious explanation is that the Court is trying to rein in what it might view as a rogue Federal Circuit, but I believe that there might be something more there.

(Via Against Monopoly.)

The Blog is the New Resume

Pretty much . (Via ContentBlogger.)

The Death of TV?

Well, not quite, alas, but certainly an interesting shift:

We think we know that the professional news media, especially newspapers, are obsolete, that the future is all about (excuse the expression) you—media created by amateurs. But such PowerPoint distillation tends to overlook the fact that mainstream media are not all simply shriveling and dying but in some instances actually evolving. And in evolution, there are always fascinating transitional iterations along the way. Such as newspapers’ suddenly proliferating forays into online video. (And now magazines: Time Inc. just announced a new “studio” to develop Web video.)

Whereas the YouTube paradigm is amateurs doing interesting things with cameras, the newspapers’ Web videos are professional journalists operating like amateurs in the best old-fashioned sense.

What seems to be happening here is that blogs are eating newspapers' lunch, so the newspapers are eating TV's lunch. Sounds fair to me. (Via PaidContent.)

Getting Snappy About Snap

Here's someone who hates the Snap pop-up preview feature, as used on this blog. If it weren't easy to turn off (just click on Options and choose Bubble Opt Out), I'd agree, but given that it's effectively optional, is it a problem?

Views, anyone?

WTF is WTF?

Dave Sifry has always been one of the do-ers in the world of computing. And as someone who has been at the heart of open source for over a decade, he can be counted on to be plugged into hot trends.

His latest wheeze, Where's The Fire? or WTF? - a play on the acronym WTF? - ought, by rights, to be really sizzling, and not just because of it's name:

On January 31, 2007 Technorati released a new feature to help people to get explanations on things they see popping up in the blogosphere.

...

You can also write a WTF on any topic that someone would search for, and provide information and resources to them about that topic or subject. So, you might want to write a WTF about yourself or your friends names, or your company (or maybe even your competition!)

If you think that you've got a better explanation than the one that shows up on top of Technorati search results for a term, no worries, just go and write your own, and get your friends to vote for it. WTF uses a special time weighted voting system that means that the most popular recent WTFs will show up on top of the page.

As this indicates, WTF? hopes to tap into the power of both Digg and Wikipedia: user-generated, explanatory content that is voted up or down by peer review. At the moment there's not much there, and it seems to me that there's a crucial piece missing from the WTF idea.

The "blurb", as the basic unit of WTF is called, resides on Technorati's servers, not the blurber's: this means that blurb authors receive no compensation other than "glory". Unless there is some Technorati-juice being dispensed in the form of built-in links to the blurber's blog (and not just ones added gratuitously), I fear that most of the better bloggers will just say: "WTF?".

iHavenosenseofhumour

Catch it while you can.

Open Healthcare

A new one to me:

1: What is “Open Healthcare”?

The nature of the Internet as a means of disseminating health media is changing. The first wave of online technology enabled organizations to extend their topdown, “command and control” communication methods to a new channel. But a new wave of open publishing technology now enables any individual, with or without professional training, to communicate with global audiences to share health-related information and opinions.

This communication occurs through multiple formats, including blogs, podcasts, wikis, message boards, videocasts, collaboration, community and review sites, as well as other forms of social media and peer-to-peer services. This grassroots media continues explosive growth with or without permission or endorsement from established healthcare institutions. Healthcare is entering a “New Era”, foretold by the Cluetrain Manifesto (http://cluetrain.com/), which greatly inspired this “open healthcare” movement.

(Via James Governor's Monkchips.)

Can ICANN Open Up?

I've been fairly hard on ICANN on this blog - hard but fair, given it's pretty appalling track record in terms of openness. But lo! two glimmers of light on the horizon. ICANN has suddenly got intelligent, and appointed the fine UK hack Kieren McCarthy as General Manager, Public Participation (sounds so grand). It also seems to have sprouted a blog. Here's hoping.