I care about… – Page 24

Open source rating system readied

Carnegie Mellon has sponsored a system for rating open source projects in a standardized way: “After nearly six months of tweaking and collecting feedback from users, the Business Readiness Rating has been refined to the point where its evaluation categories are now final.” More.

WTF

Now here’s something you don’t see everyday. Scoble reports that Microsoft has opened Port 25… apparently an open source software lab. Marketing shenanigans or the real deal? You decide!
…

Apparently the result of Scoble’s influence on Microsoft’s culturepor the slumbering giant is final waking up. Jim Allchin wasn’t kidding about “hearing us” (the open source community that is) as evidenced by Bill Hiff‘s explanation of this new site:

So why is it called Port 25? Some background on port numbers first. SMTP is short for Simple Mail Transfer Protocol and is the protocol for sending email messages between servers or from a mail client to a mail server. On a server, the port for SMTP is 25. When you open a port on a server, such as to allow for SMTP traffic, it is commonly referred to as â€˜listeningâ€™ on the port. Port 25, therefore, is a metaphor for how we are opening the communication lines to for a discussion around Open Source Software and Microsoft. Cute, huh?

It’s like an open source feedback loop for Microsoft? Fer rizzle? Shucks man, that’s so… neat!

So …if Microsoft can open up, why can’t our government go more open source? Why are there leaks? When was the last time an open source project dealt with a leak? Exactly.

Now imagine if the government published something like this on whitehouse.gov:

What will you find here? This will be the place we not only blog, but also where we put analysis from our OSS labs and also where we discuss and show other parts of [the government] that we think are just plain cool or interesting. I think what youâ€™ll see here over time is how a bunch of open source guys inside [the government] think, as well as people and technologies inside [DC] that we think other folks like us would find interesting as well.

So, there will be much more to discuss, debate and learn from together â€“ but for now, port 25 is open.

It’s kind of like bringing in a bunch of minority party folks together to create a “work tank” of sorts (thanks Lane) to keep the majority party in check, seeing as how there’s no one in government doing that now.

WineCamp planning report

A number of us met up last night to discuss our plans for WineCamp. With less than 60 days to go, we haven’t got much time to get everything in place. But we have a crack-team of folks who are dedicated to making this a reality.

Let me say something about what I’m hoping to see result from this event: connections. It’s not everyday that you get geeks and technologists rounded up in some foreign land with non-profits and NGO-types. It’s designed that way on purpose. Hey, get people out of their natural surroundings — remove the wifi, the laptops, the power (yes, really) — and some interesting interactions are sure to emerge. Especially when you’ve got a good dose of mountain air and an supple supply of wine flowing.
And those connections? Hopefully lasting ones. Hopefully collaboration will spring up. Ideally a few sustaining solutions will be thunk up.

So last night we spec’d out the schedule for the event, what we need to make it happen, how much we’re going to charge for the event (free isn’t really an option if we’re providing food so we’re a small fee for the weekend) and what else need to be done.

And there’s lots.

But listen, here’s the thing so you understand where this is coming from. The goal of the weekend is to start conversations. To bring together folks from two fields who desparately need each other (open source and non-profits) but haven’t had a neutral ground in which to talk freely or constructively.

Here’s how it’ll work, since I’ve been lazy about writing this up:

Friday night, people arrive in Calaveras. People make their way to the Ferriere Vineyard and set up camp from 6-9pm. Something like that. Accommodations in local hotels will be available for those not wanting to brave the wide open eastern California spring air. We’re just not gunna book it for you — that’ll be up to those who want to stay in hotels. Ok, so meanwhile people break out the acoustics and bongos around the campfire, have a chill serenade until folks mosey off to sleep.

Day 2, Saturday morning. Cowboy brunch with all the fixin’s… griddle pancakes, maple syrup, coffee, bacon (for meat eaters).. the whole works. We take this to sometime around 11am, making sure folks driving the 3 hours or so east of San Francisco get there (ideally folks arrive Friday night, but undoubtedly some will come on Saturday).

Around 11:15am we have the kick off. Some brave soul will face the crowd, tell them what WineCamp’s all about, and what the heck we’re doing. Yeah, that’s likely going to be me. The day’s loose schedule will be reviewed and then we’ll break out into small group pow-wows, with all the ad hoc trappings of Barcamp, but without wifi, without power, without PowerPoint or any other digital or powered accoutrements. Seriously. Day 2 is a day for gathering, for conversing, for just being with other people outside — outside talking about the things that really get them excited to wake up every morning — but that all also rile them up around midday when the technology they have gets in their way.

The point is to talk about where we’re at, what we love and what we can make better.

We’ll go into the evening, have a big dinner cookout BBQ fit for Matty Matt. The works, y’know? Ribs or whatever you carnivores like. Plenty of veggies and corn and — yes — salad or something. Drinks, dessert. Y’know. A big cookout!
Oh, and did I mention the pure flow of wine all day long? Yeah, that’ll help tide people over who are off their digital fix for the day.

So we go until whenever Saturday night, I dunno, we’ll figure it out.

Sunday the junkies can have their toys back because on Saturday, in the afternoon, they would have planned out what they wanted to do the next day in small teams of creators, thinkers, implementers, users and reality-checkers. These small teams will determine what happens where on Sunday — whether it means going back into the town of Murphy’s where we will have power and wifi for your hacking needs or whether you stay at the vineyard and keep thinking big thoughts that will change your organization (or the world) upon your return.

Look, it’ll all make sense and work out when we get there. We’re all smart people with something to contribute; I’m not going to worry about it!

Things we do need to work out? Getting meals like lunch and dinner sponsored. Getting a port-a-potty on site (I think Andrew has this one covered). Buying firewood. Water. T-shirts! Provisioning a conference-center space on Sunday for hacking and creating (though we seem to have a sponsor that will take care of this!). There are plenty of things to do. There are few of us. There seem to be many people interested in attending. And I’m totally jazzed about what this event will mean for the open source and non-profit communities.

So I guess I’m asking now — in the spirit of open sourcing this event — to start turning this into your event. Tara and I leave for Bangalore in a week and will be gone for about that long (for Barcamp Bangalore). We’ve got lots of things going on. And already, we’ve had a great outpouring of support from folks like Chris Heuer, Jen Myronyk, Andrew Ferriere and great folks at Tech Soup/Compumentor/Net Squared like Billy Bicket, Greg Beuthin, John Lorance, and Marnie Webb.

This is all a big experiment and hey, the more folks who really own a piece of making this event a success, well, the more a success it will be.

So if you can contribute and help organize, join up on the mailing list, drop on the wiki or let us know how you can help. And yes, we have a sign up page too… it’s not quite as simple as registering on Upcoming — we’re actually collecting money to cover the cost of food this time — and any extra money we have left over will be donated to Net Squared. So get in early if you’re really planning
on going — spaces are limited to 150.

The cardinal flies at dawn

Will‘s announced that the specifications for next release of Flock have been made public.

Things to pay attention to (and to offer your feedback on!):

New photo uploader
New blogging interface and shelf location (aka “web clipboard”)
Photosharing features

To be honest, I’m not entirely sure how all these things fit together based on the current spec, but I’m interested in giving them a go when they’re out.

And so you know, I’ll still be consulting for Flock on things yet to be determined, but I’m sure I’ll have the chance to talk to the folks in charge of design about the upcoming changes and how they see it all fitting together!

Code search engine Krugle looks promising

Code search engine Krugle seems to be nearing its initial release and based on a screencast they put out a few weeks ago, it looks like it’s going to be a tremendous resource for developers.

Ironic though — and perhaps a vehicle for an academic attitudinal adjustment — Krugle may give rise to a level of productive and efficient code reuse that could hardly be attained before. Which is to say that the need to write original code anymore will certainly become… deprecated. Man, is copyright so obsolete or what?

Mashpit Dallas II & Mashpit San Francisco II

Brian Oberkirch has announced Mashpit Dallas II taking place… today! He writes:

Several Dallas Barcampers are getting back together to kick off what (I hope) becomes a routine thang: a jam session of folks interested in social media. Tomorrow night we can talk a bit about what we each want to get out of such a working group. But, in the spirit of factoryjoe’s Mashpits , I also have an idea we can all work on.

Tim Williamson is the founder of The Idea Village, an entreprenuer bootstrapping/launching pad in New Orleans. The devastation all these months later isn’t just physical — ‘our social networks are destroyed,’ he says.

He did a triage grant program. Now wants to move it to the next level, making Idea Village the place people can go to get or contribute information & expertise so badly needed in the community. Idea Village, 2.0.

Our mission, should we choose to accept, is to whiteboard up some ideas for how the Idea Village can leverage social media to aggregate, plus up, and spread info around NOLA.

Tell anyone who might be interested. RSVP at the Upcoming page. We can order in some Gloria’s.

Don’t forget, we’ve got out own Mashpit II coming up on April 15 in South San Francisco at France Telecom’s offices. We’re looking for 30-40 folks who want to hack, smash and build cool stuff — and no, you don’t have to be a developer to contribute! Trust me, we need designers, thinkers, idea people, marketers and folks of all stripes to make these projects as good as possible. After all, they’re only as good as what goes into them.

So if you’re looking for something fun to do on tax day, definitely sign up. I hear there might be work on that nifty Mapendar idea…

The failure of stakeholder capitalism

William Pfaff chimes in with an enlightening piece about the riotous protests going on in France, positing observations about the differences between the modern (American) model of capitalism and the previous model that the French are trying to protect:

The earlier model said that corporations had a duty to ensure the well-being of employees, and an obligation to the community (chiefly but not exclusively fulfilled through corporate tax payments).

That model has been replaced by one in which corporation managers are responsible for creating short-term “value” for owners, as measured by stock valuation and quarterly dividends.

The practical result has been constant pressure to reduce wages and worker benefits (leading in some cases to theft of pensions and other crimes), and political lobbying and public persuasion to lower the corporate tax contribution to government finance and the public interest.

In short, the system in the advanced countries has been rejigged since the 1960s to take wealth from workers, and from the funding of government, and transfer it to stockholders and corporate executives.

The second change Pfaff discusses is the effect of globalization and an internetworked environment, demonstrating the widening segmentation of the employers and the employed. Essentially, and certainly this is true in larger organizations, the “faceless masses” that occupy the millions of cubicles in Western workplaces now cost too much to maintain. What with health care, benefits and the cost of physical space, it simply makes more sense to move the engine of the economy to cheaper, more “accommodating” (and less developed) countries:

We need go no further with what I realize is a very complex matter, other than to note the classical economist David Ricardo’s “iron law of wages,” which says that in conditions of wage competition and unlimited labor supply, wages will fall to just above subsistence.

There never before has been unlimited labor. There is now, thanks to globalization – and the process has only begun.

It seems to me that this European unrest signals a serious gap in political and corporate understanding of the human consequences of a capitalist model that considers labor a commodity and extends price competition for that commodity to the entire world.

Truly the economic theories that have dominated the landscape for the last century are in need of a serious rethinking. And if not, then we must refactor our institutions and indeed, our civilization, to deal with the obsolescence of formerly dependable insulating walls that kept economies independent and serving of the local geographic population. As those walls now no longer exist, the socialist system is in jeopardy of withering away completely and the striation between those who have and will continue to have more and those who never will in capitalist systems means that we’re in for a rough ride ahead (bubble or not).

Surely as the internet diffuses power throughout the world’s connected, those folks lacking economic mobility or the opportunity and privilege that others speak of freely will take to this new medium to make their voices heard and, perhaps, make their struggles felt — offline. It’s happening in France now; though none can say if it’s a short term anomaly, it does seem that a great deal of unrest is pervading the societies of the world as modern capitalism colonizes new markets. I can’t help but consider what this means and what the 21st century will look like as territorial conquest fades from relevance and ideological domination becomes the new tell tale indicator of power and influence.

Who is Mozilla?

ExMo Chase Phillips asks: “What do you think Mozilla is all about?” Well, what do you think? Speak up!

I need a Mapendar!

Ok, here’s an idea for some ingenuitive masher.

I’m a visual person. I suck at planning when I can’t visualize the what and where of what I’ll be doing (or what I’ve done). In that single respect, thank Ford for Web 2.0 making things a degree more designerly!

Anyway, here’s what I want.

Take Google or Yahoo Maps. Take my Upcoming feed (or just grab a microformatted event listing like the one on Tantek’s site). And sure, grab a list of free or open wifi hotspots from Plazes. For bonus points, cross-reference the data with my Trazes and Dodgeball checkins to let me know when and if I or my friends have been there. Oh, and yeah, grab stuff from my Flickr stream and hey, Riya? could you like do some searching for photos from the events that I didn’t attend but was watching on Upcoming? Yeah, tanx. And heck, let me throw random things at it like my PiC’s feed or listing of upcoming Barcamps.

Oh, and Flock? Could you like toss in my browser history sorted by geolocation and where I published various blog posts from? Sweet.

Now, I want to see this stuff all pulled in together and tossed on a map. I want 30boxes without the 28, 29, 30 or 31 boxes. I want a big effin’ map (I know Jeremy Kieth can help). And I want to see time represented like sheet music (credit goes to Greg Elin for that idea).

Oh, and please note, this is not a business. It’s an interface.

…Alright, fine, it’s a big old Attention Aggregator — except that it can look into the future and tell me where to be, when. Which makes this what?, an Intention Aggregator? Anh, whatever. It’s a Mapendar and I want one!