Programs, Participation and People

One of the central themes of this blog is how the ideas at the heart of free software - collaborative, participatory, distributed development - are gradually seeping out into other areas, with dramatic effects. Mostly I write about the obvious examples - open access, open content, open genomics etc. - but occasionally I slip in instances popping up in areas that seem to have little to do with software and yet are obviously still highly germane.

An example is this report called People and Participation. It comes from the dubiously-named "Involve", which sounds like a front for some bunch of religious nutters, but as a page entitled "Connectivity" makes clear, it has some interesting ideas that, er, plug straight into the technological origins of these movements:

The 21st century is delivering endless opportunities to connect with one another wherever we are. The new technology that fills our pockets allows us 24/7 contact with friends, family and work; it is also central to Digital Britain, the second stage of the digital revolution that could transform the lives of everyone in the UK. But this new culture of connection is not limited to bluetooth and WiFi, connectivity also underpins the enabling state, the Government vision of a modern social contract.

(Via P2P Foundation.)

A Tale of Two Opens

There are many kinds of opens. For example, open minds and open wounds.

RSS Feeds: Please Note

It seems that the old feed at

http://opendotdotdot.blogspot.com/atom.xml

is broken (I don't know whether this is a temporary glitch with the beta of the new Blogger or a permanent change). In any case, the following URL seems to work

http://opendotdotdot.blogspot.com/feeds/posts/full

Apologies for the inconvenience.

Update: As I rather suspected it might, the original address is now working again, so it was probably some problem at Google. The other address also seems to work, so you can take your choice. The bottom line is, whichever one you've subscribed to, you should be OK.

The Politics of Blogging, the Blogging of Politics

I normally try to avoid posting about politics, since it tends to bring out the worst in bloggers on both sides of the political spectrum. But I'll make an exception for this, since I think it makes an important point about politics in the age of blogs:

Labour is a party that won and held power by mastering mainstream media, and as Mr Dale puts it "Blogs are a spin doctor's worst nightmare come true". That's bad news for the current ruling elite.

And good news for us proles.

Open Source Food

There's a fascinating story on WorldChanging examining the current outbreak of the potentially lethal bacterium E. coli O157:H7 in the US spinach industry. Interestingly:

A curious yet widespread claim is that, because some of the spinach so far identified as contaminated came from organic farms, organic farming is unsafe. It's a curious claim, because scientists understand pretty well where the O157:H7 is coming from: the bellies of factory-farmed cows. Their manure, as it turns out, is now crawling with the critters.

The piece then goes on to suggest:

But I think there's something bigger coming, which is a move towards not just buying local food, but knowing the backstory of the food we buy.

...

Here, the backstory is what happened to our food before we bought it. Who raised it? Where was it grown, and on what kind of land? Did the farmer use fertilizers and pesticides, or integrated pest management? Antibiotics or free-range grazing? Was the soil conserved, or is it eroding? How did it reach us, and how was the money we spent on it split up?

Another way of putting it is that food should be open source, not the current "black box" that has to be taken on trust - with sometimes fatal consequences.

Crushing the Hype

I have animadverted before upon the fact that I find TechCrunch - for all its undoubted virtues - just a little too breathless in its excitement over Web 2.0 startups. So a wry smile did play upon my lips when I came across the aptly-named Techcrush:

Techcrush will review the progress of web 2.0 startups 6 and 12 months after they debuted. Did their apps turn out to be a success or a failure?

No points for guessing which way most of them will turn out. (Via Alex Bosworth.)

Virtual Water

If you thirst for new ideas, try this:

Virtual water is the amount of water that is embedded in food or other products needed for its production. For example, to produce one kilogram of wheat we need about 1,000 litres of water, i.e. the virtual water of this kilogram of wheat is 1,000 litres. For meat, we need about five to ten times more.

The per capita consumption of virtual water contained in our diets varies according to the type of diets, from 1m3/day for a survival diet, to 2.6m3/day for a vegetarian diet and over 5m3 for a USA style meat based diet.

(Via WorldChanging.)

Selling, the Open Source Way

In one of my random wanders, I came across this neat encapsulation of a key advantage that open source companies enjoy:

I sat in on a sales visit yesterday, and they were wowed by our demo and presentation. In fact, the results are getting so predictable with prospective customers that it’s almost boring - we show them the stuff, and they show us the money. Before coming to Hyperic, I had never seen sales calls this easy.

It's almost a truism that open source software sells itself; the knock-on consequence is that you don't really need salespeople, which in turn means more money for developers and support.

Of Kerala and Communism

Kerala is probably best-known for its democratically-elected communist government, but its decision to go for GNU/Linux instead of Windows in its schools is probably now a close second. A few weeks back, Richard Stallman was explaining his role in the decision, and now here's a piece in Business Week that has some figures (alas, only made-up ones by analysts) about the broader Indian market. (With thanks to James Tyrrell for the link.)

Random Catch-ups: Semapedia and SWiK

Neither of these is new, but I've not mentioned them before, and I should have done.

Semapedia:

Semapedia.org is a non-profit, community-driven project founded September 2005. Our goal is to connect the virtual and physical world by bringing the right information from the internet to the relevant place in physical space.

...

To accomplish this, we invite you to create and distribute Semapedia-Tags which are in fact cellphone-readable physical hyperlinks to the free online encyclopedia Wikipedia (or any of Wikipedias' sisterprojects such as Wikibooks, Wikinews, and Wikiquote). You can create such Tags easily yourself by choosing and pasting a Wikipedia URL into our creation-form. Pressing the button will generate a custom PDF file to download and be printed. Once created, you put the Tags up at their according physical location. Others can now use their cellphone to 'click' your Tag and access the information you provided them.

SWiK:

*SWiK.net is a project to help people collaboratively document open-source software*

SWiK is visited by over 10,000 people daily, it’s a place to make notes and publish articles on software development and open source projects, tag projects to help organize the world of open source, or just browse around and find interesting stuff.

I particularly like the Zeitgeist page as a snapshot of what's hot.

Happy OneWebDay

Thanks, Tim.

Opening Up Open Source

We know it works, and we know why it works, but somebody would like to know exactly how and why it works:

A group of UC Davis researchers has just received a three-year, $750,000 grant from the National Science Foundation to study how open source software such as the Apache Web server is built.

...

The researchers will focus on the Apache Web server, the PostgreSQL database and the Python scripting language. They will collect information from the message boards, bug reports and e-mail discussions to understand how design teams organize themselves and interact.

Am I the only one who finds it slightly ironic that $750,000 is being spent to write some papers about something that is written for nothing? (Via LXer.)

Open Prosthetics

Here's a fascinating project: Open Prosthetics. It's exactly what it says, free designs for prosthetics, although the exact licensing isn't entirely clear (anyone?). The back-story is told in Wired. (Via BoingBoing.)

Of Google and China

An interesting coupling of Google with China - but not for the usual reasons.

Dr. Kai-Fu Lee, the head of Google in China said:

Open source software affords Google the flexibility it needs to be able to respond to market demands. Since Google can redesign its software anytime, it can follow market changes quickly.

Open source also gives Google better control over sensitive business information. "If we buy software from other companies, they can tell how many servers we have from how many we pay. Now, that's only our own business," Lee said.

Meanwhile, Ni Guangnan, an academician at the Chinese Academy of Engineering, spoke of

"taking our fate into our own hands." Ni says that China is promoting open source as part of its strategy of being an innovative country, for national information security, and to solve the software pirate problem. He estimates China's open source industry will boom in upcoming years.

Open Content Meets YouTube

Yale has jumped on the open courseware bandwagon - with a twist:

Yale University is producing digital videos of selected undergraduate courses that it will make available for free on the Internet through a grant from the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation.

Happily, this is rather more than just open courseware for the YouTube generation:

The project will create multidimensional packages—including full transcripts in several languages, syllabi, and other course materials—for seven courses and design a web interface for these materials, to be launched in the fall of 2007.

(Via LXer.)

OpenOffice.org Gets Them - and It

Good - if belated - news on the OOo front:

First, OpenOffice.org shall get Firefox-like extensions capabilities by the 2.0.4. This release should be ready somewhere between the coming week and the end of the month. What this means is that besides the fact that OpenOffice.org could include extensions before, now the way to develop, include, select and manage them will be made easy. Aside the traditionnal .zip and unopkg extensions packages, a new and definitive extension format, .oxt, shall be used across the extensions that can be developed using a breadth of languages ranging from StarBasic to Java. New wizards and configuration tools shall be added for the benefit of our endusers.

Second, and I think that although we have no clear roadmap for this yet (besides, our version naming scheme is going to change once again ), OpenOffice.org and StarOffice shall include the Mozilla Foundation's Thunderbird and Sunbird (calendaring application) in the future. Besides the inclusion of those two softs inside the office suite, connectors to Sun Calendar Server and Microsoft Exchange will also be developed accordingly.

Great, but why not Lightning instead, and then we'd be in complete harmony? (Via Slashdot.)

Munich Lives!

As I noted before, Munich's much-bruited migration to open source has not been entirely wrinkle-free; but the good news (well, for the free world at least), is that things seem to be moving at last, and definitively:

After a city-wide test and pilot phase, the [GNU/]Linux team of the IT Department gave the start signal on Tuesday for the first official version of the future workplace system.

The Commons: The Film

Now, here's an interesting idea: a film about the idea of the commons:

Our idea is to make the film a kind of celebration of the commons and remix culture by making a hybrid film that uses public domain images and sounds to create animated sequences, archival sequences featuring Spooky as a Zelig-like character, archival sequences in which Spooky interacts with the people in the footage, and mashups.

And to blog about it in the process:

My wife says I'm crazy to publicly blog my process of writing my next film. Too much pressure? No one should see the sausage making of the creative process?

I think it is a worthwhile exercise. It is a routine, to get the writing going. An appointment with whomever reads this. It is a leap of faith, believing in the value of the internet as commons. It is novel...sort of.

(Via OnTheCommons.)

Open vs. Free vs. Creative

The philosophical schism between open source and free software is well known, but there's another interesting split emerging between free software and the Creative Commons movement. This isn't exactly new, but as the open content movement begins to gain momentum, it's an issue that people are starting to worry about.

If you want a good introduction to the basics of the dispute, Intellectual Property Watch has a useful report from the recent Wizards of OS 4 conference, where these tensions were exposed.

OS VC Round-up

It's clear that serious venture capital is starting to flow into open source start-ups, but sometimes it's hard to stay on top of how much and to whom. Here's a handy round-up of who's got what recently.

Not So Lonely

Geek that I am, the only thing that really interests me about Lonelygirl15 is the technology behind the follow-on Web site:

On a shoestring budget themselves, the trio supports the Web site with open-source technologies like MySQL databases. "Our entire backend that supports the Web site is free because we use WordPress," Beckett said. "Five years ago, you would have had to buy UNIX boxes and build a custom content management system."

That is, a LAMP stack like just about every other Web 2.0 startup - not so lonely. In this respect, it feeds off the same forces that made the original videos possible:

The Lonelygirl15 episodes cost virtually nothing to create. All are shot with a $130 Web camera. The sound is recorded from the internal microphone. Two desk lamps provide the lighting. Beckett's laptop is the computer required to record the segment.

No wonder Hollywood is in trouble.

Why Linus is the Boss, er, Captain

Because he talks the talk:

She's good to go, hoist anchor!

Here's some real booty for all you land-lubbers.

There's not too many changes, with t'bulk of the patch bein' defconfig updates, but the shortlog at the aft of this here email describes the details if you care, you scurvy dogs.

Header cleanups, various one-liners, and random other fixes.

Linus "but you can call me Cap'n"

(Via Tuxmachines.org and ZDNet Australia.)

Thinking and Working Out Loud

Antony Mayfield, on the "other" Open blog, has the following wise words to say about blogging:

A large part of my job is about keeping up my knowledge of what is happening in media, technology and marketing. It's not enough to read all that's out there I need to make sure I have digested, understood and it put it context for myself. When I blog that's exactly what I'm doing.

My thoughts exactly. In fact, I'd go further: blogging has become my notebook and general repository of digital bits and bobs. Whenever I find something of interest (to me), I usually bung it up; I hope that it will be of interest to others, but that's really secondary. A blog is as much a very practical tool for my everyday work as an exercise in itself.

Of Sewing and Suing

Thank god for the Embroidery Software Protection Coalition, protecting us against the awful scourge of "outright vicious" nannies who are not "nice".

Not My Idea of FON

FON is such an obviously clever and right-on idea that I have struggled to articulate exactly why it is I have been reluctant to write about it. After all, the basic plan is brilliant:

FON is the largest WiFi community in the world. Our members share their wireless Internet access at home and, in return, enjoy free WiFi wherever they find another Fonero’s Access Point.

It all started as a simple idea. Why should you pay for Internet access on the go when you have already paid for it at home? Exactly, you shouldn’t. So we decided to help create a community of people who get more out of their connection through sharing.

We call members of the FON Community Foneros. It’s simple to become a Fonero. You just need to buy La Fonera, which enables you to securely and fairly share your home broadband connection with other Foneros.

Then when you’re away from home and you need Internet access, just log on to a FON Access Point, and you can use the Internet for free. You don’t need to take your router with you – you just need to remember your Fonero login and password.

But it then rises close to genius by making the following distinction:

# Most of us are Linuses. That means that we share our WiFi at home and in return get free WiFi wherever we find a FON Access Point.

# Aliens are people who don’t share their WiFi yet. We charge them just €/$ 3 for a Day Pass to access the FON Community.

# Bills are in business and so want to make some money from their WiFi. Instead of free roaming, they get a 50% share of the money that Aliens pay to access the Community through their FON Access Point.

And now, you can get La Fonera - a WiFi access point that joins you to the FON network - for just a few Euros.

So what's my problem? Maybe it's this:

Interestingly this video was shot with a Nokia N80 (disclosure I am on Nokia's Internet Board) and sent over wifi to a Fonera (disclosure I am the CEO of Fon) which automatically posted the clip in VPOD (disclosure I am an investor in Vpod.tv) which is then linked to my blog which is in Moveable Type (disclosure, two good friends of mine Loic Le Meur and Joichi Ito who are partners in Six Apart well known bloggers and members of the Japan and French Fon boards).

Disclosure: this makes me sick. (Via GigaOM.)