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1 month ago
It's no secret that I advocate Open Data, Open Content and Open Source, so it shouldn't be surprising that I'm trying to assist in getting the word out on this conference. Open equates to more raw material (data) to innovate with, to massage, to interpret and translate. In a world where businesses regularly get exclusive access to data from governments, open data means the potential for decreased cost for services while increasing the potential for more useful services. It also means that decisions based on data are more transparent - something of importance for Open Government.
'Open', despite its friendly connotations, almost always gets resistance. Why? It threatens business models based on strangling information - information that citizens of countries pay for becomes resold to them with claimed value added. Would that there were more information out in the open, available for people to legally use without complication. Civil Society in developed nations has been making inroads for some time in these areas but it has been an uphill battle - an uphill battle which continues to grow momentum.
Why am I helping get the word out? I like Open and I know some of the organizers, having had the pleasure of working with them in the past related to other conferences and initiatives. I regret being unable to participate more actively since I am no longer in Trinidad and Tobago; it would have been fun to participate in the code sprint. I may even post some hints on the Developing Caribbean Facebook Page about tools that can be used - and, if I do have some time, I may also hint at useful ways of using the data. Of course, this will be out in the open so everyone has a fair shake if they find merits in the hints.
The ConferenceOn the 26th and 27th of January, 2012, The Caribbean Open Data: "Developing The Caribbean Conference" will be taking place at locations in Jamaica, Republica Dominicana and Trinidad and Tobago (locations available through the links for each country).
There's a code sprint, in each country, for available data that has been sourced months prior with each nation addressing certain key areas. In Trinidad and Tobago, as an example, this information includes fisheries information: fish types, market prices, catch & net data, methods, landing sites, etc. There's a lot more data but I haven't had the time to look into what else is available - it's all held in Junar repositories The licensing for the data is the ODC Public Public Domain Dedication and License (PDDL). The works of the code sprinters will be made available under the AGPLv3 GNU License.
Sponsors? Oh, yes, they have sponsors. Companies that support open data and open source initiatives are implicitly giving back to the communities in which they exist - and should be supported.
Personal PerspectiveI'm really glad that the conference is happening. It's long overdue and, sadly, it didn't come from the circles that I was involved in over the years despite almost a decade of 'talking about it'. There's a reason that this clip of 'Life of Brian' is so dear to me.
Back in 2004, I got invited to a conference in St. Lucia regarding Culture and ICT. It was the very first CARDICIS, dealing with the cultural and linguistic problems that artificially separate countries in the Caribbean with the very same lines inherited from the colonies of Europe. At first I thought my invitation a mistake but as we began to work on things to do, the issues of Open Content and Open Source came up. These concepts, while fairly new at the time, fit quite well with the need to be able to translate documents (copyright implicitly forbids translation) as well as develop and extend software platforms that allowed information to filter across the myelin sheaths of the Caribbean, where the nerves once ran to brains in Europe were failing the region once Independence was gained and the brains became local governments. Or so local governments have been accused. The very neural pathways that assisted the management of colonies directly from Europe have and continue to work against the Caribbean in this regard - not the Caribbean of the drinks with umbrellas but the Caribbean of the galvanized roof.
The CARDICIS conference had plenty of action items revolving around Open Content, Open Source and how things should be done - argued over in many languages through student translators. Nothing of substance came of it. CARDICIS II and CARDICIS III, despite the effort of some of us, netted us a similar lack of results. During the same period, two Open Source conferences were done - one in Trinidad and Tobago, another in St. Lucia. There were hard working and dedicated people involved at all levels in these things, and there were some who seemed meerly intent on simply finding their next bit of funding. The former I stayed close with; the latter fell to the side as their funding took them in different directions- and, I fully expect, the same lack of results.
Meanwhile, around the world, Lawrence Lessig's 'Free Culture'. The world was beginning to change; the Caribbean less so. As the plight of Africa took precedence for funding the Caribbean ICT community effectively went to ground. Mailing lists that were once full of activism became broadcast areas for government agencies and NGOs to brag to themselves about what they were doing, bragging of how much money was being spent and producing little in the way of results. I expect this remains to this day but I cannot say; I am far removed from such things. 'Jaded' might be a descriptive word; the feeling runs deeper still - yet there is always hope.
This conference demonstrates that hope, and it promises to make progress that much more concrete in a region that needs it in ways that can be shared by all of mankind through proper licensing.
A hat tip to all my friends who are involved, and a hat tip to those who have worked toward this directly and indirectly over the years.
Tags:
Caribbean
open data
open source
Trinidad and Tobago
Open Government
open content
Tobago
Lawrence Lessig
Dominican Republic
Jamaica
copyright
1 month ago
KnowProSE LLC will be on strike against SOPA/PIPA
Information and resources are available at SOPAStrike.com.
Tags: SOPA PIPA Black Wednesday freedom Censorship1 month ago
It seems everything is getting polarized these days and the open source CMS arena is not much different. "Dear Drupal: Season's Greetings. Love, Smashing Wordpress" communicated a message that should be important between open source projects ("Hey! We're on the same side!") but didn't get as much traction as it probably should have. When we're in our code caves we have a tendency to go with what we know. The comfort zone begins to define our solutions when the inception of any true Open Source CMS was found outside a comfort zone. This is necessary frrom an economic standpoint; people are getting paid to build and maintain internet and intranet sites with these projects - and who signs the check should have the control.
As someone who has worked with Drupal since 2003, I've reached stage 4 with it: Playfulness. Sure, I'm not a well known Drupaler, but I've been around and I know my way around the back end better than most. I can toss Drupal on shared servers, servers and now the cloud. There's a wealth of information available from the Drupal community regarding doing everything with it, and should I have more money than time I can always head to a Drupal Camp somewhere. Frankly, there's little Drupal can't do. I even run it on my local machine for handling some documents - something I pioneered on an intranet back with Drupal 5 for a company in Trinidad and Tobago.
But that doesn't mean it is always the best choice. Because I can do something with Drupal doesn't necessarily mean that I should do it with Drupal. In some ways, Drupal is a liability to itself - as any other project is.
A few recent posts in the blogosphere highlight this; it's no secret I've been getting my Wordpress knowledge up to speed (OpenDepth.com will be running Wordpress within the next few months) and so I've been following the Wordpress community as well as the Drupal community. The post, "Wordpress Has Left The Building", has caused quite a stir in the Wordpress community. The best response to it from within the Wordpress community seems to have been, "Missing The Point of Wordpress Entirely". And this morning I read something of worth from within the Drupal community regarding the same post: "A Cautionary Tale for the Drupal Community."
The hard reality is that if you're working with just one CMS, you're limiting your solutions. Sure, as I wrote above, I can do just about anything with Drupal. With enough time, energy and money I can do anything that needs to be done - but we're not in an economy where everyone has gobs of money to throw at something. In the same economy, there is increasing need for shorter development times (time to market) and decreased recurring costs. Make no mistake, there is an economy around these open source projects that, if failed, hurts the project itself.
As an example: Drupal can do a simple blog presence quite easily, but over a period of time there is a history of breaking backward compatibility that effectively translates to planned obsolesence to users. A person or small company doesn't have as much to spend as the larger companies and so the updates deemed necessary for Drupal may not be those deemed necessary by the user. Wordpress wins here, at least at the time of this writing, though it has its own flaws. Conversely, if it's a mega-site with all manner of functionality required, Drupal is typically the better choice - again, at least at the time of this writing. I'm also looking into Node.js)
The needs of the market are dynamic. The open source projects tend to accomodate that as best they can in their plans, but they cannot and should not be used as definitions for what the client needs - that flies in the face of what open source truly is great at: Options. Solution providers, such as myself, have to look at the options and advise the client accordingly as well as develop and maintain the sites. That means not being a fanboy of any particular technology. We have to be familiar with as many as we can. They're just tools, and as attractive as it is to use a sledgehammer for everything it's not always the right tool.
Specialization, after all, is for insects.
Tags: CMS open source WordPress drupal Content management specialization fanboyz1 month ago
I've been toying with Google+, even having created a Google+ Page for KnowProSE LLC, but there's some things that Google+ simply doesn't seem to be doing right - and maybe they will in the future.
First, and foremost, the method for adding people is wonky at best. Much of the social networking done pre-Google+ on other social networks doesn't seem to be leveraged well. The networks built on Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn don't seem to be reflected well on Google+. I'd have thought that maybe some brilliant engineers would have leveraged the APIs from at least Facebook and Twitter to connect the accounts as, for example, Klout does. And the process of adding people to circles, while well intentioned, suffers from being - at least in my experience - unpredictable in who Google+ picks. It's not that Facebook is better in this regard, but Facebook at least shows some of the common friends as a reason for suggesting people.
Next comes the issue of people who work for companies that use Google's services and thus have a work account and a personal account, assuring that people have to constantly switch accounts to post things on personal or work related Google+ presences.
Last, but not least, the workflow for interacting with Google+ is akin to stuttering when compared to others social networks - but it is made easier with this browser agnostic Google+ Bookmarklet. You likely didn't know it existed unless you did a search specifically for it (as I just did). But integration with third party applications such as HootSuite, allowing people to share across networks so that cross-pollenation is possible, is missing still. Despite Mashable's misleading title, Google+ Pages Can Now Be Managed With Third-Party Apps, Google+ pages cannot yet - they are planned to. Bad Mashable. Fix your headline.
Does it mean that Google+ will not improve? Of course not. But in speaking with other social media pros, Google+ has yet to become the river that other social networks are. Google+ grew at an astounding rate not because of popularity as much as leveraging a pre-existing customer-base, but that doesn't mean it's being used as much or that it's as usable as other social networks. In trying to add new features, Google+ is missing some of the most for usability so far.
This is all pretty hard on Google, I know - but it's fair and meant constructively. I've no problem with Yet Another Social Network, it's another flavor added to the mix. More taste testing, though, seems to be necessary.
Tags:
ux
Google
facebook
Twitter
LinkedIn
social network
Klout
social media
1 month ago
Image by Getty Images via @daylife
Last week, at Walmart no less, I was staring at a Kindle Fire
. I had just returned the iPad2 to my former employer and, as I had intended before they leased the iPad2, I was in the market for a Kindle Fire. As I stood there, a gentleman perhaps my age or older (you're in trouble when you can no longer tell) was looking at all the tablets on display. He assiduously started with the iPad2 on the left and worked his way all over to the Kindle Fire on the right, asking the Walmart employee fairly solid questions about each one. It became apparent that he had done some research and was making a decision. As he pondered the Kindle Fire with the low price, a gentleman fitted into an Army Reserve shirt started pressing him back to the iPad2.
He, of course, swore by the iPad2 and thought it was the greatest thing since MREs. To a large extent, he was right but it was clear that he had a dedicated use case. Despite my interest in cheap movies, I stepped in on the side of the Kindle Fire. For every application that he called out for the iPad2, I was able to call out an equivalent on the Android 1. My Army friend's familiarity with the iPad2 was really what it was boiling down to, and then I tossed up the browser that Amazon uses uses the cloud itself to process things and thus speeding the browser on the Kindle Fire - at a lower price. He stared at me, and I balanced that with the fact that Congress had been looking into the browser itself as related to privacy.
It was clear that I had my new Army buddy in uncharted water, and he was nice enough to respect that. We agreed that it was basically about user experience - and the iPad2, hands down, still has a better user experience than most tablets. (Having had a Kindle Fire for about a week now, you can expect a post coming on that as well) However, I pointed out that Apple's app store was sometimes used to block competitors - and that when one looked at the stores available from Apple and Amazon, Amazon was the clear winner. Amazon, frankly, has more stuff and if you're intent on buying stuff, Amazon was an orgasm of consumption.
At this point, we started talking about a lot of different things, agreeing to disagree on platforms - he religiously defended the iPad2 while I was trying to be balanced between the two.
Remember that guy who we were both trying to help? Yeah. He left in the middle of all of this, not buying either one. And this too lead to a discussion related to applications, incompatibilities between platforms and how we really, really wished that manufacturers didn't try to divide people so much in the interest of making money. Granted, divide and conquer is a great mechanism but if you're going to sell products of connecting people, you probably shouldn't keep them so separated.
Which is better? It depends on how you define 'better'. If better is more bang for the buck, get a Kindle Fire. If better is trying to impress your friends, or getting something for someone who really sucks at technology and you can afford an iPad2, get an iPad2.
For a rundown of the specs, Amazon actually has a great comparison between the Kindle Fire and the iPad2. But it is Amazon's comparison, to be fair.
And remember when you purchase it, next year whatever you buy will be obsolete.
1There's another post on Open Source marketing that will stem from that.
Tags:
Kindle Fire
iPad2
tablet
Amazon Kindle
Amazon
iPad
Android
user experience
