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Ay caramba, Ubuntu 12.10: Get it right on Amazon!

Ay caramba, Ubuntu 12.10: Get it right on Amazon!:

Another glimpse at the new Ubuntu, and at what makes it awkward. Mr. Shuttleworth has already declared that all your data belong to him …

“Don’t trust us? Erm, we have root. You do trust us with your data already.”

Silly me, I was thinking I had root over my own computer, and noone else, but apparently I should check the code. And 12.10 includes data-leaking features you need to switch off yourself.

New publication: business intelligence in the aid sector

Announing a new publication: “An Information Platform for Business Intelligence in the Aid Sector based on Open Data and Documents; Integrated Access to structured and unstructured data using the document-oriented database CouchDB”, by Michiel Kuijper.

../../../assets/posts/88ffe7dada8b1b3de25ad586d587173e_MD5.pngEarlier this year, I was approached by Michiel Kuijper, who was working on his Bachelor degree at the Amsterdam University of Applied Sciences, and was looking for a project to combine Business Intelligence and text mining. Together, we started exploring how to apply this in the development aid sector.

Denying service to my own mail server

We had some intermittent problems recently with a mail server not being available. As it turns out, I basically was doing a “denial of service” attack on my own mail server, thanks to some caveats in how IMAP, push notifications, and my mobile email client, K9 work together.

The problem

One of the mail servers we operate quite regularly became unavailable, apparently not accepting any connections. We managed to investigate the problem as it was happening, and found out all available connections for the IMAP server were in use, and nearly all of them originated from a familiar IP address: my home.

I disconnected the email clients on my devices (laptop, phone, tablet) and switched them on one by one. Clearly, my Android-based phone and tablet with the K9 mail client were causing the problem: they made dozens of connections. It turned out the problem was even worse: K9 reconnects several times.

IMAP and push notifications

Normally, an email client connects to the mail server to check if there is new mail in any of the folders, via IMAP. It would be nicer if the server just informs the client if there is a new mail available. The client will know immediately, and doesn’t have to poll the server so often, which reduces the load on the server too.

Such “push notifications” are not part of the original IMAP protocol. There are two ways in which IMAP tries to solve this:

  1. Keep the connection between client and server open with IDLE commands, so that the server can talk to the client.
  2. Extend the IMAP protocol with “ IMAP NOTIFY “, that both server and client need to implement, to offer more sophisticated push notifications over a single connection.

Sadly, the second option is still under development, and clients and servers (such as Cyrus) haven’t really implemented it yet.

And even more sadly: with IDLE, you need an open connection for each folder that needs push notifications. If you only have push notifications enabled on one Inbox folder, that’s not such a big deal, but to have push notifications on a dozen folders or more, you need a dozen or more open connections between server and client.

How K9 and Thunderbird deal with it

Apparently, Thunderbird limits itself by default to five open connections to the server, no matter how many folders you have. As far as I found out, you’ll have push notifications on the last five folders you’ve looked at.

But K9 does not limit itself. In my case, with a few accounts on our server, and with “push” enabled on all my preferred (“First class”) folders, that resulted in a few dozen open connections.

To make things even worse, K9 quickly detects when I switch networks, for instance when going from Wifi to 3G, and establishes new connections for those folders over the new network. While the mail server still has the old connections open, waiting for them to time out before closing them.

How I “DDOS” my own mail server

On a regular day, I start at home, then go to my office, with all my devices.

  • Phone and tablet: 2 devices
  • Running K9, each with perhaps 20 connections for various folders
  • Switching from my home Wifi to 3G, then to my office Wifi, usually within 10-15 minutes: 3 networks

That adds up pretty quickly: 2 * 20 * 3 = 120 connections. No wonder my colleague had trouble accessing email as soon as I started working.

Suffice to say: I switched off push notifications.

Deploying a website with lftp

a3e419a79945282c3a90deb03218793f_MD5.png There still are web hosting providers offering only ftp access to your website files. No fun if you’re used to version control systems and shell access.

I had to deal with that situation, and used Linux’s strength: combining several small tools.

I have a laptop running Ubuntu, a website in WordPress, git for version control, and use Eclipse as my development environment. I first looked at Aptana and other options for Eclipse, but I wanted a more light-weight solution that I could also use outside Eclipse.

lftp

Ubuntu comes with lftp, an ftp client that can be scripted and has a “mirror” command to basically get a target location synchronised to a source.

(It actually can do a lot more, and work over http or bittorrent too, but that’s outside the scope of this post.)

.gitignore

Not all files need to be uploaded. Typically, the.gitignore file already has a list of files and directories that are not under version control and wouldn’t go live when using git to update a server.

The lftp mirror command lets you exclude files and directories too, but curiously has no option to read a list of exclusions from a file. Martin Boze wrote how he fixed that, by using sed and tr.

scripting

I didn’t want to write a series of lftp commands, but instead would prefer to connect once, then run a series of transfers, inside a single script.

Specifically for WordPress, I also like to have a local mirror of images and documents uploaded on the live site.

It is possible use lftp as the shell to run a script, but unfortunately, it’s not possible to use environment variables or Martin’s “sed” trick in such scripts.

But it’s not to hard to do using the Heredoc syntax.

git branches

I use branches in git to separate my development version from a preview and a live version. By adapting the upload script in each branch, I can simply call “deploy” to upload the files to the right place.

#!/bin/bash
lftp <<EOF
user ftp-username ftp-password
open ftp.provider.com

# "mirror" from local copy to server, use .gitignore to excude files (sed, tr), delete remote files if needed
mirror -R -e -v -x \.git.+ -x scripts \`sed 's/^/-X /' .gitignore | tr '\n' ' '\` /var/www/dev_sites/website.org /www

# wordpress-specific
# "mirror" uploaded images on live back to local, don't delete local files if not on remote
mirror -v /www/wp-content/uploads/ /var/www/dev_sites/website.org/wp-content/uploads/
EOF

The only thing left to desire is a way to speed up ftp deployment…

Getting my GSM modem working under Ubuntu

../../../assets/posts/ef4b092c09313cac69cca10fc5ce9eae_MD5.pngAnother “hack post”, to capture how I got mobile broadband working on my Sony laptop. Sony makes laptops with cutting-edge features (small, solid-state disk, full HD screen) and a stylish look, but doesn’t like to help you take full advantage of it unless you’re on Windows. Undocumented tweaks to the hardware, hard-to-find technical information, and so on.

I bought a Sony VPCZ1 (to be more precise: VPCZ13C5E) with a WWAN module installed, with the idea that I could be online anywhere, without any dongles sticking out, or having to connect by tethering it to my phone over Bluetooth or USB. I’ll pay the extra fee… provided it works.

I have installed Ubuntu 10.10 (which was an effort in itself), and went on an excursion to get mobile broadband running.

First, let’s find out what the hardware is: it’s not listed on Sony’s specs page, but according to the specs of a similar model, it’s a Qualcomm Gobi 2000 (PDF link). It apparently needs to be loaded with a firmware before it will operate. I had to install the Ubuntu package gobi-loader as a starting point.

apt-get install gobi-loader

However, that package does not provide the actual firmware. It expects the firmware in /lib/firmware/gobi, but that directory doesn’t even exist.

The discussion about a Qualcomm problem on Launchpad made me look at a way to get the firmware from the Microsoft-based Qualcomm Gobi2000 (WWAN) Driver 1.1.80 that Sony provides. After unzipping that file, we have a directory with a file GobiInstaller.msi… the firmware is somewhere in there.

After installing either p7zip-full or cabextract, we can extract the contents of the.msi file, to end up with a long list of crypticly named files.

Thanks to a post by Madox, and the discussion after it, I saw what to look for:

/lib/firmware/gobi$ ls -l
total 13888
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 11096116 2009-12-11 21:10 amss.mbn
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 3104812 2009-12-11 21:10 apps.mbn
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 9284 2009-12-11 21:10 UQCN.mbn

As it happens, there is just one file with length 11096116, just one with length 3104812, and 18 with length 9284 bytes. The first two are easy, the UQCN.mbn file contains the specific setup for a region or provider.

When using a hex editor (like hte in the package ht) to inspect the various variants of 9284 byte files, there is a string at the end revealing a bit what it is intended for: umts_gen, umts_orange_nogps, umts_tmo_noxtra and so on. See below for a table of strings, file names, and md5 checksums in my setup.

../../../assets/posts/7fa7d93755494aad8e6c412ba8926dde_MD5.pngAfter copying the appropriate three files with the right name into /lib/firmware/gobi, I flipped the “wireless” switch off, waited some 10 seconds, and switched on again. And was greeted with a pop-up to enter the PIN code for my SIM card: indicating that the modem had been detected, the firmware had been loaded, and my SIM card was working.

Under the Networking menu, I could add a new mobile broadband network, and connect after a few simple steps of selecting my country and provider.

Notes: various posts for earlier versions of Ubuntu mention hacking in qcserial, or compiling your own kernel modules. I didn’t have to do any of that.

string file name in.msi md5sum
umts_gen _61F1C9E9670341009A49DFBF7ED9308B e601a7bf3c55104badcdf21bcbb0bfa9
umts_gen_nogps _82F1F7B633254DD8943C3C66695180D4 633bed88c29244683635c261849d0e88
umts_gen_noxtra _B1755EF712704F6EA05AD29399FDAAD2 f1911bcefc4bd5bf8d8fd401082c1a5a
umts_orange _D086B5600A824F88A7B5B4DA9AEC7393 0044ef086b828c30689b899a3570dd56
umts_orange_nogps _EAA5B766B8FC42258CF0903EB29B3866 1dbb1ce26cb59f9d7b551e54c9f71c80
umts_orange_noxtra _97CDF82428924F739C17CEC7DB7642C5 668d1e8903f362b4fc5ec66145ab9b36
umts_telital _FF884A864DC04D3B9BE3B80CA0D6365D 6f575f681ffad81bf3159c7b2d7122a9
umts_telital_nogps _F5A8481D6D0141DDB5AC04E02C5D6B77 bf6b02a2e4ac42c40b028519ed5db487
umts_telital_noxtra _CE104EC699FA4012AF9BF053838EFEEA 6a1b2b342a9e3548dc02f882f156ec21
umts_tellfon _F85609A0A9B64C399F670AE6D78A9EDD b0edb9f5ee92204f9d0e455ff860ca84
umts_tellfon_nogps _AB685C9BC9BF406691ED3CC70C0EA2F8 345c4671242f94d31e3161ead89227db
umts_tellfon_noxtra _D9B76BE055B04137AB32632049501DF1 f064a0c0c7806d30dacd33b4672661cc
umts_tmo _FC981235AEDB429BA1F601941B97E11C 1061d15ca89d0d8f66919c99cb67cc45
umts_tmo_nogps _A6C51028090341929FAC167B2938F19C 6d7b94fed93f47ceafc9ba0c7889fc1f
umts_tmo_noxtra _9358B6316845471886EF8B592B400046 4132ebbea25e4014043d902d7e272f71
umts_vod _A51C11D307D344229DD775AD527BA6DA 4d1b58cb79817dbe111194dfc286e57a
umts_vod_nogps _890ED25310C543B483CA0E67C40B9C54 d06886a62c5c42e2076e0d2a055d1675
umts_vod_noxtra _A66130F57F1E4EFCAA571D5BFBF84CE4 39f0b2663f682b5c9d97cdaddaa72813

Hacking away on my Zim notebook

Working with open source is fun because it lets me explore software and change little things. If you’re not really into code and config files, you might want to skip this post 🙂

../../../assets/posts/bbf2d03c0084735555b1df6f5de661b9_MD5.png

Zim task list (default)

Since some time I use Zim, a desktop wiki, to take notes in meetings and at conferences. It shares a few good things with Tomboy, the default notebook on Ubuntu (linking pages, immediately saving what you type so you don’t loose anything on sudden power loss) but has a few things I prefer:

  • Notes are stored as plain text: easier to use other text editors, version control, and scripts, and if for any reason Zim fails, I can still access my data quite easily.
  • The main interface makes organising and navigating notes easier.
  • The Task List plugin extracts lines with possible tasks, so it’s easier to keep track of follow-ups or actions in notes by simply typing a line like: 
    [ ] Document my hacks in a blog post

The Task List itself is a separate window you can pull up, to see all open to do’s. But I wanted to fix a few things to make it more powerful in daily use.

The suggestions below are based on Ubuntu 10.10, and with Zim 0.49 installed as Ubuntu package.

../../../assets/posts/132b9064332c92edf3b2f785d333ada2_MD5.png

Zim notes with tasks

Quicker access to Zim

The first step is to have Zim available at my finger tips, so that taking notes is instant. I want to use the key combination Win-Z to bring up the notebook. You need the wmctrl package to be able to raise the window if it already is open but buried under other windows.

sudo apt-get install wmctrl

Next, I went to the menu System > Preferences > Keyboard Shortcuts and added a custom shortcut. It starts Zim to make sure it is running (make sure your notebook is set as the default notebook to open in Zim’s preferences), then raises the window to the top:

bash -c "zim && wmctrl -R \"Notes - Zim\" "
../../../assets/posts/12cbe898bd36a09ff55e6c2c818aab2e_MD5.png

Zim custom shortcut

Quicker access to the task list within Zim

I’d like to have the task list available via a keyboard shortcut. I prefer the combination Ctrl-T, which already is assigned to Format > Verbatim (monospaced). So I edited ~/.config/zim/accelmap and uncommented the relevant lines to show the task list and to apply that formatting, to assign the key combination to the task list.

(gtk_accel_path "<Actions>/TaskListPlugin/show_task_list" "<Control>t")

(gtk_accel_path "<Actions>/PageView/apply_format_code" "")

Bonus key combination: (while we’re here anyway). I have enabled the Inline Evaluator plugin in Zim, so that I can do quick math within my notebook. If I type 1500*1.19 and select the menu item Tools > Evaluate Math, Zim calculates the outcome and changes the line to: 1500*1.19= 1785.0. To make that easier, I’ll assign Ctrl-= to that function:

(gtk_accel_path "<Actions>/InlineCalculatorPlugin/eval_math" "<Control>equal")

Shorter task descriptions column

The column with task descriptions is made wide enough to contain complete task descriptions. Which means that you usually need to scroll to see the other columns.

../../../assets/posts/8ebe99130683b636b20e87d82744dd10_MD5.png

With many pages, seeing in which page a task resides helps a lot to understand its context. The descriptions should be limited to a more narrow column.

../../../assets/posts/89814ab2317c357b0b9b8692460c9f48_MD5.png

Task list more optimal

Diving into the source code, I found out that the developers already thought about that as well. They implemented a fixed-width column for the Maemo platform, with the remark

# FIXME probably should also limit the size of this
# column on other platforms ...

That made it really easy to change my own copy of Zim to do just that. It results in a simple patch:

--- tasklist.py.or 2011-01-15 16:36:42.624406264 +0100
+++ tasklist.py 2011-01-15 16:12:01.555792557 +0100
@@ -564,6 +564,8 @@
             column.set_sort_column_id(i)
             if i == self.TASK_COL:
                 column.set_expand(True)
+                column.set_sizing(gtk.TREE_VIEW_COLUMN_FIXED)
+                column.set_fixed_width(500)
                 if ui_environment['platform'] == 'maemo':
                     column.set_sizing(gtk.TREE_VIEW_COLUMN_FIXED)
                     column.set_fixed_width(250)

It’s a good idea to keep the patch around: upgrading to a newer version of Zim would remove the hack, so I just made a script to re-apply the patch:

#!/bin/bash
# Apply patch to Zim tasklist plugin to set fixed-width task description column
# Best performed with sudo
cd /usr/share/pyshared/zim/plugins
patch < /home/rolf/bin/fix-zim-tasklist.patch
cd -

Better positioned task list window

The Task List window often pops up over the notebook itself, and stays on top. Clicking on a task brings up the note in which the task resides, and focuses it on that task. But that’s not so useful if the note is hidden under the task window.

I already use Devil’s Pie, self-described as “A totally crack-ridden program for freaks and weirdos who want precise control over what windows do when they appear.” Install gdevilspie if you like a GUI to set up rules for windows.

I have plenty of screen (1920×1080) so I decided to let the notes and the task list live next to each other, with these two rules in ~/.devilspie/zim.ds

( if ( begin ( is ( window_name ) "Notes - Zim" )) ( begin ( geometry "926x1032+0+24" )))
( if ( begin ( is ( window_name ) "Task List - Zim" )) ( begin ( geometry "990x1032+930+24" )))
../../../assets/posts/3bc8c158860f824d1ad00def1003efa4_MD5.png

Zim notes and tasks side by side

Done

My laptop has become a better notebook! At any moment, Win-Z brings up my notes, to quickly jot down something, and when in my notebook, Ctrl-T brings up the task list to let me easily navigate the to do’s and follow-ups in my notes. Staying on top of things has become a little bit easier.

Tasktop to improve a knowledge worker’s productivity

I’ve been using Mylyn for quite some years now. Mylyn introduced the concept of task-focused work: activate a task in your to-do list, and only see the files relevant to that task. Tasktop, the company behind Mylyn, extends Mylyn as Tasktop, with even more features, and promises “improved productivity, guaranteed.”. It works great when I am developing software, and also could support me as knowledge worker, for instance by managing bookmarks and browser tabs in Firefox. But I’d like to see it offer more support for task management within Firefox too. A bit like this.

Mylyn and Tasktop

If you’re a developer, you probably at least had a look at Eclipse at some point. And perhaps at the Mylyn extension, to connect it to various bug trackers to populate your to-do list. It provides a standardised way of keeping track of issues in bug trackers, and helps to focus on the files relevant to a specific task. Switching from one task to another becomes lots easier, and so the cognitive overhead of managing tasks (especially finding the files associated with a task) is reduced significantly. As Mik Kersten, one of Mylyn’s masterminds, demonstrated in his PhD 1.

Mik founded Tasktop, a company that takes the “task-focused desktop” approach even further, connecting Mylyn also to email (Outlook, Gmail, IMAP) and to the Firefox web browser.

And Mylyn and Tasktop have a lot more features, many of which I am not – or perhaps: not yet – using.

From developer to knowledge worker

These days, I hardly get to spend time on programming, but instead spend most of my time as knowledge worker. Firefox is now my predominant “desktop”, and I find myself flipping back and forth between Eclipse and Firefox quite a bit.

The people at Tasktop have been very responsive to feedback, and thereby also encouraged me to make regular contributions to their issue tracker, mostly with suggestions for improvements or new features. So I filed a suggestion to expose more of Mylyn and Tasktop in a Firefox extension.

I recently decided to try out Wireframesketcher, another Eclipse plugin, developed by Petru Severin, to sketch a bit how I think an extended TaskTop addon for Firefox might help me better.

Use case: stumbling upon a new thing for my to do list

../../../assets/posts/1d38dfe92a46d352bd21fc468c10fcd0_MD5.png

Step 1: See an interesting page

I somehow end up on a page in my browser for a conference, event, or topic I am interested in. For instance via email, a chat, a twitter message, a phone call, a visitor in my office. I want to quickly make a new task to capture what I’m looking at.

../../../assets/posts/e7c043f1bf8cff670187fa7c14122d24_MD5.png

Step 2: Collect information

Once I created the task or activated it, I want to perhaps add a few pages to the task context, and perhaps some notes or a copy of some text on a page. And maybe schedule it or add a due date, for instance a deadline for registration, or for submitting a proposal or a paper.

Ideally, the task context could also add downloaded files to the context.

../../../assets/posts/11b8f5199af1a4d7291f9fecfe576b95_MD5.png

Step 3: Back to previously active task

And then I want to go back to the task I was working on, or another one on my schedule.

In summary, my wishes:

  • create a new task or switch to another task within Firefox, without switching to Eclipse;
  • have access to notes, task context (especially bookmarks and visited pages), and scheduled and due dates
  • be able to add or remove pages that I have open to my task context.

1 Mik Kersten, “Focusing knowledge work with task context” (Vancouver, BC, Canada: University of British Columbia, 2007), http://www.tasktop.com/docs/publications/2007-01-mik-thesis.pdf.

Switching from Beagle to Tracker and solving the performance problems

When I update my laptop to the next version of Ubuntu (Lucid Lynx or 10.04 this time), I usually have a look at the general direction for some of the “ desktop core elements”, like desktop search. I decided to switch from Beagle to Tracker and hopefully have tackled the performance problems it seems to come with.

The Ubuntu community has been shipping Tracker desktop search for some time already. It seemed to often freeze up my computer completely while it was indexing files. Beagle, the best alternative, did not, and also seemed to have a better feature set. For instance, it indexed my chat logs in Pidgin nicely.

But Beagle doesn’t seem to be developed very actively, whereas Tracker, as part of the Gnome desktop, seems to be going actively towards supporting the Nepomuk semantic desktop. Which then paves the way to let other applications use Tracker to retrieve information. And store information!

Adding tags or a description to a photo in one application will make it available to other applications as well. Instead of letting each photo application build their own application-specific database.

All these applications also periodically want to go through my files and directories to see if there is new content that they can handle. It just adds to potential performance problems. But switching back to Tracker also meant switching back to its performance problems. As soon as some sort of disk-intensive activity started, my whole system froze.

But Ralf Nieuwenhuijsen gave an explanation about the background of the problem in the Ubuntu brainstorm.

“Currently, what happens is that linux saves a last-read-timestamp on every file. So when tracker indexes it, it also has to write it. Hence the trashing. This has become worse over time. Although most of you associate this with tracker, all file-io with lots of small files is horrible at the moment in linux. Nothing tracker-specific about it.”

That lead me to explore this “last read timestamp” a bit more: do I need it anyway? Apparently not: a pointer to discussions in the Linux community suggest that it might be switched off by default in the future, and let me to an article by Kushal Koolwal explaining the different options atime, noatime and relatime.

So I edited /etc/fstab, replaced relatime by notime, and remounted the disk. And started Tracker again. Had Rhythmbox running. Asked Eclipse to compare a project in CVS with its repository. All tasks that read (sometimes a lot of) files on disk. Without any hickups so far.

Lets hope the search results that Tracker delivers are useful too, in practice 🙂

chevron_left OpenOffice as (blog) writing tool

All hands on deck: building civil society 2.0 chevron_right

OpenOffice as (blog) writing tool

I’m a geek. So when it’s not a writer’s block keeping me from producing a blog post, I’ll dive into tools and techniques to “optimise” my writing experience before I start typing out sentences. Lets call it preventive productivity: getting a lot of related things done in order to be more efficient later. Like getting the tools and the work flow right. Perhaps I managed that, now that I can really use OpenOffice to write blog posts, with Zotero to manage my reference, and the Sun Weblog Publisher to push the result towards my website.

A writer’s technical block

I don’t really have a lack of stuff to write about (yet). But so far, I never was happy with how the writing went, as a process, as a work flow.

  • I keep quick notes in TomBoy: easy-to-use, always at hand, just enough formatting and wiki-style linking to add a bit of structure. Even somewhat useful for basic writing.
  • But then it needs to go into the web: endless battles with the “WYSIWYG” (What You See Is What You Guess) editor in Drupal and loosing my content over a disconnect; or hand-coding HTML in TomBoy or a text file with a regular editor.
  • And not to mention adding images, links and references… usually this means more hand-coding, copy-and-pasting, and so on.

Adding it all up, I usually end up spending 2 to 3 hours to get a blog post done, and around half of that is on the technical stuff.

That creates an additional problem: I don’t always spend those hours in one session. I want to be able to stop now, and continue later.

Failed contenders

I’ve looked at specific tools, like HTML editors that would let me focus on writing instead of coding. ScribeFire offers a few nice features in publishing a blog post from within Firefox, but offers no simple way for simple mark-up like

. KompoZer (follow-up to Nvu) is nice for building complete HTML, but yet another tool and not really focused on writing.

The most obvious choice to write texts is to use something like OpenOffice, especially when using Zotero to easily add bibliographical references. It has the best tools for spell-checking, the simplest ways to add links to sites, and so on.

But in its basic form, it doesn’t do a great job in producing HTML. “Save as” produces better HTML than “Export as”, but then you loose the special fields that allow you to later change references etc. And I’d still have to copy-and-paste the proper part of an HTML file into a new blog post.

Combining (new) tools

As part of today’s preventive productivity, I found the Sun Weblog Publisher extension for OpenOffice. Which adds a nice button to publish a document to a blog, using a variety of protocols. And also to download existing posts from that blog to edit.

It still produces problematic HTML, but at least my writing experience is improving a lot: quickly adding links, inserting references and footnotes, and so on.

In addition, having my preliminary blog posts in OpenOffice files makes it easier to use Tasktop, which promises better productivity by making task switching a lot easier. Their Firefox add-on tracks the sites I visit while working on a specific task.

A smoother process

Whenever I have an idea for a blog post, I add it as a task in Tasktop. That enables me to do a bit of planning for it, and also to activate it whenever I am looking for information to include. If I can’t finish it all in one session, I just stop the task, and when I reactivate it later, my browser tabs and the file I was editing are back in focus.

OpenOffice allows me to focus on writing texts while adding both links to sites and bibliographical references, and checking spelling and basic layout of headers, tables, and so on. I still need to decide whether a good template will help improve this step.

The Weblog Publisher extension lets me push my text to my website as a draft post, repeatedly if needed. I then need to do the last part of publishing on my website: adding appropriate tags, cleaning up HTML, and perhaps adding one or more images.

Does it work? Yes!

This is the first post I did this way. No references in this one, but adding the links was definitely lots easier. And the publishing part now only took 15 minutes (cleaning up some of the superfluous HTML, mostly). It definitely feels a lot smoother.

Curing “Data Hugging Disorder”

Last Friday, the 1%Club held their (first, probably not last) 1%EVENT, about “international development cooperation 2.0”. I facilitated a session on “connecting the platforms”, to pave the (technical) way towards a cure for what Ushahidi’s Juliana Rotich aptly referred to as “ Data Hugging Disorder “. It resulted in a positive discussion with several people of organisations that build or host online platforms. Coming Monday, I hope the discussion continues at a meeting in The Hague about a possible Dutch IS-Hub.

Tools, platforms, exchange, goals

9c281bc736439c61aa73c77ef0d8a4c1_MD5.png The evolution of international development cooperation in a nutshell:

  1. first we tried to build the best water pump
  2. we realised we need to build the right water pump
  3. then we started to exchange lessons learned about building water pumps
  4. and now we have the Millennium Development Goals to let all water pump work contribute to a common goal (in this case: “ Target 7.C: Halve, by 2015, the proportion of people without sustainable access to safe drinking water and basic sanitation “)

“International Development Cooperation 2.0” heavily depends on using ICTs as tools for collaboration. In essence, my feeling is we’re repeating the process in building online platforms: some people still want to build the best platform, most are busy building the right platform for the situation, and (as the session proved) are getting ready to exchange the lessons we learn, and for standards to work towards common goals.

Open standards as a way forward

With several people in the room with (information-)technical affinity, the discussion quickly moved to open standards to choose or to develop. Although there are many concerns about privacy, identity, and security, an important breakthrough was that most of those concerns are not at all specific to the field of international development cooperation. We should make sure our concerns are documented, but more likely than not, those concerns will be addressed in some form by the big platforms. For the exchange of “actionable opportunities”, the Open Actions format is just emerging. The uncharted territory seems to be information around projects in international development.

Probably no coincidence: some of my current consultancy work is on project administration and project management solutions in such a context. Logframes are popular vehicles for project goals information, but so far I haven’t found clear patterns in how organisations deal with their projects and programmes from a management process point of view. Maybe this is the area where the conversation still needs to develop before standards can emerge.

A Dutch IS-Hub?

The time is apparently right to get to standardisation: indepently, Cordaid and their platform development company have initiated a discussion on Monday about how to deal with the technical, organisational and legal aspects of sharing information and reducing redundancy for people in building up expert profiles and making them available on various platforms.

Again, this is not an area specific to international development cooperation, so hopefully a chance to benefit from the work in many other places. Not so long ago, Aldo de Moor and I visited D-CIS at Delft University, where they try to solve similar problems in a different domain: how do you create “actor-agent systems”, where software helps a crisis manager to quickly get to the right expert in the case of a disaster. How to harvest expert profiles across many fields of expertise and organisations, and also take into account that an expert is not an expert anymore after 48 hours without sleep…

Making “data portability” the next “accessibility”

As the Dutch Ministry of International Cooperation is shaking up the NGO world here in The Netherlands. “Collaboration” and “Partnerships” are the new buzz words, and since “2.0” is part of the official policy, many organisations are slightly panicing about how to move forward, and how to quickly embrace some of that “2.0”. A great time to leapfrog for the Dutch international development cooperation world.

Over the years, “accessibility” has become a standard requirement for web sites. It’s easy for a client organisation to demand compliance to a certain level of accessibility as specified in open standards. It would be great if we now can move to a similar model with levels of “data portability”, to get NGOs to add those to the requirements of their next platform.

Hopefully, Monday’s discussion is a next step towards such a standard requirement, and also offers a common road map for the platform builders. That would also open up the opportunities for BarCamps and such to join forces on implementation.

A quick guide to standards

Here’s a dump of the standards mentioned at Friday’s meeting (not linked yet, but maybe one day):

  • News, updates: RSS, well-accepted by now
  • Identity and authentication: OpenID, OAuth
  • “Social actions”: Open Actions
  • Projects: Open Archive Initiative as meta-level, Dublin Core, DIDL, OpenPro
  • Constituency, membership:?
  • Social networks: FOAF, XFN
  • Applications: Open Social, Facebook Connect?
  • Payments: mobile banking? how to do payments?
  • Market places:?

Raw notes of the session

After an intro by Niels about the importance of open source and free software as a basis, and my intro about Social Actions, the Change The Web contest, and the emerging Open Actions format, almost all of the 25 or so attendees (note to self: build a list of participants again next time!) shared their concerns and aspirations. I have tried to write down key elements I heard, here’s the raw dump of the flip chart notes:

  • How to work together? Technical standards seem feasible, pride and identity seem to get in the way.
  • What are the standards we should focus on?
  • Is there any form of collaboration already?
  • What open standards for exchanging projects are there? Is it about project information, how to deal with quality, what about the social networking around it?
  • How to get away from having profiles on many different sites?
  • How to enable collaboration on many different platforms?
  • How to make the collaboration itself central: from social network to collaboration network?
  • For example: how to get Kiva into your project environment, rather than your project into Kiva?
  • Concerns about identity, safety, privacy, security. How to keep control over where your information and identity is going?
  • What formal ways are there to capture documentation?
  • How to activate people who normally wouldn’t be active or interested in this context?
  • Can we enable knowledge sharing through micro-blogging?
  • How to guide the choice of a platform?
  • How would we even define “platform”, are we all talking about the same thing when we use that word?
  • Lets create best practices, compatibility, and meta standards. But: we can’t do that, “Google should do it” and “Facebook wins”.
  • Types of information we could share, standards in that area we could use (see earlier in this post).
  • Which platform gets what part? For instance: the business model of one platform is based on taking a percentage of the funds raised – how to deal with that when adding the fund raising feature to another platform?

Thanks 1%Club

For the 1%EVENT, Bart and Anna walked the talk, listened to all the suggestions made to them over time, and had two great Open Space facilitators to set up the day’s agenda. Maybe not every attendee and “poster pioneer” felt comfortable with it at once, but the co-created, slightly chaotic and creative sequence of events was precisely the kind of event I missed in The Netherlands so far!