Updates¶

16 May 2010
in Technical
2 min read

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

9 April 2010
in Tools, Syndicated
2 min read

Tools that work: OpenOffice as a blog writing tool

Syndicated

This is a version of my earlier post, made to the short-lived "Tools that work" blog.

As my first contribution to the Tools That Work blog, why not present a tool to make the process of writing a blog post easier: t he Sun Weblog Publisher for OpenOffice. I still prefer to write text in a word processor, with the best tools for spell-checking, the simplest ways to add links, and Zotero to manage references to sites and literature.

![29c332a9cb651cb393554ed5d4a36f44_MD5.png](https://toolsthatwork.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/04/screenshot-send-to-weblog-2.png)

Uploading a post as draft to a blog

But then the text needs to go into the blog: copy-pasting creates endless battles with an online “WYSIWYG” (What You See Is What You Guess) editor, reformatting lists and headers, or losing carefully crafted sentences through browser hick-ups and poor form handling.

Editing the HTML itself isn’t fun either. OpenOffice produces poor HTML output, “Export as” even worse than “Save as”. An unappealing alternative: coding HTML in a text editor, adding things like by hand. I’ve looked at HTML editors that would let me focus on writing instead of coding. KompoZer (follow-up to Nvu) is nice for producing reasonable HTML, but yet another tool and not really supporting the writing process. And it then still is an effort to get the proper part of the HTML into the blog.

I also tried ScribeFire, which lets you write a blog post and interact with the blog software from within Firefox, but it offers no simple way for simple structural mark-up like a

header. And, no support for references.

The Sun Weblog Publisher extension for OpenOffice seems to change the way I work: it adds a button to publish a document to a blog, using a variety of protocols to support different blog software, like WordPress. And another button lets you download existing posts from that blog, to edit them. The process of pushing a post into the blog has become a lot smoother.

![315a16b228566d9b9c94671a68c57fc5_MD5.png](https://toolsthatwork.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/04/screenshot-3.png)

Upload and download posts from a blog

There is still some online processing to do, like adding tags and minor HTML cleanup. And I’m not sure how well it will handle images or complex layouts. But writing a post and pushing it into the blog has become a lot easier!

Edit

5 April 2010
in Technical, Tools
3 min read

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.

8 February 2010
in Conferences
4 min read

FOSDEM 2010, getting up to speed again

../../../assets/posts/5187bcb73db0da20810292ba75c7dd92_MD5.jpg Racing back to Amsterdam at 270 km/h, time to consolidate my takeaways from this year’s FOSDEM in Brussels. More geeks (5,000+ expected), more lectures (200+) and more topics I wanted to follow: succeeded with OpenOffice, Drupal, and CouchDB, but not with Mozilla and XMPP. A geeky overview of my takeaways.

OpenOffice

Already some 5 years ago, we put PDF and Word output of surveys into our WebEnq online survey software, and recently we added more extensive reporting options as well, giving partners in IICD’s Monitoring and Evaluation programme a text document with all major calculations and tabulations already filled in. And right now, Jaap-Andre and Bart are working on a way to generate hundreds of personalised PDF reports from student data on courses they took and evaluated.

In our first approach we worked with Latex, since it offered the kind of formatting options we were looking for (keep a question and all answer options on a single page, for instance). Latex is a complex beast to tame, and the conversion to PDF and Word is far from flawless. Bart found ODTPHP, a library that might help us use OpenOffice documents as reports templates instead, which definitely would help — but again, a lot of functionality to be desired.

Yet, the XML-based ODF standard feels like the best way forward. What I learned at FOSDEM:

Sun apparently offers a commercial “convertor in a box” to transform documents from one format into another.
Alfresco seems to have something like that as well.
The code for OpenOffice is slowly being split to between the filters and the UI parts, to allow headless services to be built more easily.

Bart Hanssens gave a high-level overview of some ODF aspects, with my takeaways:

ODF version 1.2 is still a draft specification, although OpenOffice 3 already uses it. The book OpenDocument Essentials by J.D.Eisenberg is freely available, and although starting to get outdated, still a good introduction into working with ODF.
It enables RDF enhanced meta data, XML-DSIG digital signatures, syntax and semantics for open formula, and front-end database functions. All things we could use sooner or later.
Officeshots.org is a web service to compare document renderings in various word processors (like Browsershots, Browsercam or Litmus app for web pages)
Apache Lucene has a Tika project to extract metadata and content from “almost anything”: ODF, Microsoft Office, HTML, PDF, mbox, multimedia files, …
He referred to OSOR, the Open Source Observatory and Repository: a European Union repository of projects aimed at public administrations.

Svante Schubert (Sun) talked about the ODFDOM project:

ODFDOM tries to break down complexity of getting stuff into ODF, and create testable parts. It separates an ODF schema layer from an ODF package layer.
They develop the API from test cases and test scenarios, which keeps the discussion about API elements focused on concrete cases with business value, rather than nice designs.
He also mentioned schema2template, a tool or library to create models from schemas, that enables easier comparison of schema versions.

And he mentioned LpOD, a project about which Jerome Dumonteil (Ars Aperta) spoke next. lpOD is written for Python, Perl, Ruby, and partly focuses on using ODF for XML repositories, more than on individual documents. Think of large multimedia sets like in the Louvres, with combinations of text, film, photo, and so on.

Drupal

The list of takeaways from the Drupal talks I attended is considerably shorter:

Thanks Károly Négyesi for an update of how Drupal 7 is different from 6. The debate whether Drupal is a CMS or a programming platform will probably not die for a while, and it is interesting to see the direction Drupal is taking, compared to Typo3 (which started by developing a whole new framework for their next version CMS). Given where Drupal 7 and Typo3 5 both are in their development and future direction right now, I think I’ll concentrate on Drupal as the platform of choice.
Roel de Meester offered a few new tips (masquerade, reroute email, and schema modules), but mostly I’m already using more or less the same toolset he proposed. And together with catching a last bit of the “upgrading” talk, I have to conclude that it’s still mainly a mess to get a real development-staging-live work flow running. DevelopmentSeed seems to be furthest with this.

CouchDB

Stephane Combaudon gave a nice introduction to CouchDB for people used to working with SQL/RDBMS. Document-oriented, working with JSON, RESTful, and then written in Erlang and using MapReduce functions… It definitely seems to make a lot more sense than the current struggle with database tables, but I haven done any functional languages or lambda calculus since my university courses.

No XMPP, no Mozilla 🙁

The XMPP room was full when I arrived there, so I thought I’ll then have a look at Mozilla’s talk about HTML5, but ended up in an even bigger crowd not able to fit inside that room. Mozilla’s update on Thunderbird, on Sunday, turned out to be rescheduled to earlier when I arrived there in time, and Mark Surman’s talk about Drumbeat in Europe was at the same time as a Drupal talk I wanted to see.

So only heard a few things about the XMPP sessions from a friend who did get in, and exchanged a few words with Mark in the hallway, but even our plan to hook up at one of the many parties at night fell through.

Thanks, FOSDEM

Again a year of getting up to speed with the latest and greatest in a short time, in enjoyable Brussels.

17 November 2009
in Ideas
2 min read

Goodbye to the gatherers, welcome to the web: mammoths and modernity.

Imagine the first farmers: they lived in a society of hunters and gatherers. Every so often, you’d pack up your stuff and move along, to follow your food. Find new things to eat, because you’ve exhausted the place you lived in.

The farmers introduced a new way of thinking: what if we could just grow our food in one place? That would save the effort of travelling around. So they started experimenting: sowing seeds, taking care of the young sprouts, trying to cultivate their plants. Until it was harvest time: reap the benefits of your labour, indulge in cornucopia for a while, store a bit, and start working on the next cycle.

The hunters and gatherers must have looked upon those folks as weird people: building houses ("sure, nice to live in but not very practical on your travels!"), creating ploughs and tools ("great way to move dirt, but how are you going to catch a mammoth or pluck a berry with that?"), storing food in storages ("won’t the mice and the rats just run with it?"). The hackers and nerds of their times, saying "go ahead and chase your mammoth, I’ll see you around, next Summer".

The farmers prevailed. They changed the way society works in most places on the world. We try to stick to where we are, and we even make rituals and routines around that, to affirm our convictions and location. And most of us are no longer involved in producing food, but rather in pursuing other goals.

I’m working in the field of international development collaboration. I often feel like a farmer, talking to hunters and gatherers, about what "web 2.0" is really about. Oh, he’s a techie, an engineer. But I’m experimenting with ways to grow compassion, engagement, collaboration. Online communities? Blogs and bookmarks? RSS and wikis? Social networking? Sure, but won’t the rats just eat your products while you’re having a party?

We don’t eat a lot of Mammoth Burger these days. And we could cultivate collaboration towards a common goal, without sacrifice or giving up (a lot of) our current live. We can build a global society based on solidarity, without loosing identity or community.

Lets move from chasing to cultivating.

(photo: CC-BY-SA-NC-20 by Poo-tee-weet?)

11 November 2009
in Ideas
2 min read

Flying saucers, flow and serendipity shape the web

Recently, my work has moved again towards "concept" and "facilitation", into the realm of the unknown, the things to be discovered. Especially around online collaboration, platforms to facilitate that, and internet strategies and architectures to support such processes: Web of Change, WijZijnMedia, NABUUR, Internationale Samenwerking 2.0 (in Dutch for now). It’s all about new community-organising strategies and tactics, and I love it: a potent mix of "where do we go from here" and "what will we have built by the end of today". Pragmatic idealism: punk+utopia with web 2.0+mobile as catalyst, or perhaps: "do it yourself serendipity". But also: how to let flying saucers get you there. Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s talk at TED and Matt Leacock’s Google Tech Talk guide me.

"The travels and adventures of Serendipity" is a book, given to me by a dear one, about sociological semantics and the history of the term "serendipity". And although my short life seems full of serendipity, I haven’t paid proper respect yet to both the book and the gift and the idea, by reading it. I’m more of a "watching" person, absorbing presentations, documentaries and films over reading a book. Maybe soon, but until then, here are two (connected) examples to show what I understand by "serendipity".

First, I watched Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi talk at TED about his chance encounter to get into the psychology of flow through flying saucers. His TED question "What makes a life worth living?" touches deeply on the kind of talks we have at Web of Change, the kind of work that made Obama’s campaign so successful, and NABUUR’s concept so addictive: once you feel connected, you can take on the world, and once you’re in flow, you change reality:

Then I watched Matt Leacock’s Google Tech Talk on how he used the principles of Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi to guide his design of a cooperative game: Pandemic. As players, to win you basically need to beat the system ("the algorithm" as he puts it — any similarity to Google and the "Society of the Query" conference in Amsterdam this week is purely serendipituous, not coindicental). The link between Pandemic and current society obviously is left as an exercise to the reader, and I encourage you to watch till the end: the Q&A with Matt had some insightful moments for me.

Around an hour and a half watching time to put ideal theories into practice, pretty close to where I work right now. Matt’s takeaways common to game design and user experience design are worthwhile.

12 September 2009
in Tools
6 min read

Creating wire frames and mockups

Communicating web concepts for user experience and site structure is a challenge. Wire frames and interactive prototypes are great for this, and over the years, I have been using those with many designers and developers in a variety of web projects. But creating and sharing such mockups still is a laborious task, so I went around the web again to look for a tool that truly makes that task easier. Pidoco seems to offer the best way forward for me.

Supporting the design process

So far, I have worked with a variety of tools to document site structures, page mockups, use cases, and interaction flows: pen and paper, Powerpoint, diagrams (Chartist, Visio, Dia), HTML pages (Dreamweaver, plain text, even out-of-the-box Drupal and Typo3 sites).

The design process ends up being frustrated on at least one of these criteria:

Sketch a mockup with standard page elements: Powerpoint and HTML pages suck.
Demonstrate the navigation through the site: pen and paper and diagrams don’t work.
Collaborate with several design team members, all on different platforms: only pen and paper in a workshop setting seems to do that
Share the results with the wider project team, or even a wider general audience: usually this is done with static images via email or on a website.

I took Saturday afternoon to find and compare a couple of “wire frame mockup tools”, and to review the whole work flow around design. Last month, Andreas Norman compiled a nice list of 12 tools that offered a great starting point.

My basic requirements:

Should be usable on all platforms: I’m using Linux, designers usually want a Mac, and project clients often are still stuck on Windows.
Should not require software installation, or expensive subscriptions to participate for people outside my organisation.
Software as a service (SaaS) is ok, if I can take my data with me.
Integration of the whole work processes with how I work would be great, specifically allowing offline work on designs.

There are two I will evaluate in a pilot project (Pidoco and WireframeSketcher) and a few I’ll keep an eye on (Balsamiq Mockups, iPlotz, and Pencil Project).

Reflections

The sketchy style of such tools clearly conveys it’s just a design and a work in progress, but it also makes it feel a bit like there’s no effort in there. I definitely like the more “formal” styles.
Once you build an interactive model, you really would like the tool to “just create the site”: it would be great if a mockup model could be used to configure an existing CMS, or generate the basic MVC classes in a framework of choice.
Only WireframeSketcher seems to have a simple way to create “Lorum ipsum” dummy text. It would be great to see that in more of these tools.
None of the tools offers process or work flow design features. Wouldn’t it be great if you could create diagrams to illustrate the flows through the pages?

This is just an overview of looking at a handful of tools from a slightly longer list. I discarded all Windows-only or Mac-only products from the start. I know there are software development tools (especially for Java) that help move from interface design to code, but I haven’t seen such tools for web-based projects yet.

I’ll probably be looking around again in a few months, so any suggestions for other tools, services and approaches are more than welcome!

Reviews

Pidoco

An online suite of modules to visualise, create prototypes, and review; can also work together in real time.
No offline versions, but the export feature offers a simple way to get all pages in (x)html and svg to publish for instance on your own server.
“Walk the talk” demo, using the wireframes for their own website. Cool! Uber-cool would have been to use those wireframe as the company website 🙂
Pricing is from $7.50-$30 per month with a year-long subscriptions, but it’s not quite clear how many people will have access.
Easy to quickly get first results, and to use “content overlays” to set up interactive navigation. Limited collection of widgets and standard elements
Use Case feature to highlight navigation between a sub-set of all pages.
HTML/javascript

Verdict: worth to try in a next project. These guys do a few things right: preview without registration; the export feature is wonderful; real-time online collaboration is great to have; and the Use Case repository could become a very useful feature (but doesn’t do a lot at this point).

Wire frame Sketcher

Support for story boarding and master templates, but with a limited set of standard items. I like the style, but there are very few formatting options to tailor it.
Offers free licenses for open source developers and reviewers; and if you’re a Java developer, it can import existing SWT dialogs to as mockup designs.
No interactive options, limited presenter mode (no online presentation).
Will need to export each image (but perhaps using Eclipse’s build options can automate creating and uploading of images).
Eclipse plugin: great to integrate in my work environment (have sketches included in Mylyn task contexts, use version control to share designs within my organisation), but basically preventing collaboration on designs.

Verdict: maybe worth a try in a project, and at least at hand in my Eclipse workspace now. Not really answering my needs, except the integration with how I work.

Balsamiq Mockup

Has a true sketchy nature, including “sketchy” import of images
No page “templates” or master layouts
Has a good preview mode for meetings where everyone is in the same room, but not for online meetings (the web-based version that they’re working on might cover that)
There are plugins to integrate it with some wiki software (Confluence, Jira, Xwiki, Fogbugz), but “our license agreement specifies that we as Balsamiq employees are the only people allowed to build such integrations.” Very bad policy.
They seem to have relaxed requirements for “do-good” organisations to get a free license; otherwise, it’s $79.
Adobe Air

Verdict: not suitable for me yet; the upcoming online version might change that.

iPlotz

Available online and as desktop application.
Page snippets and public projects help to extend the standard version.
The online version has a project management environment (yet another one… no integration with other trackers or to-do managers).
Seems to be limited in formatting options. No auto-snap (aligning objects to each other) while editing. Can’t get the tab bar working interactively.
Adobe Flex

Verdict: maybe will check again in the future, but doesn’t feel right at the moment.

Pencil Project

Open source
No library of shapes for standard stuff (of course: open to add stencils)
Seems to be a limited diagramming tool.
Firefox addon

Verdict: revisit again later, for now too limited in its features. But open source!

ForeUI

Offers a few drawing styles (hand drawing, more formal drawing, Windows, Mac)
Interactive simulations based on DHTML, no additional effort on side of occassional participants, but no support to upload the HTML automatically.
Mock text consists of gray lines instead of “real” dummy text, doesn’t work good enough for me.
Adding interactive behaviour quickly becomes messy: there is no copy&paste or sharing between pages, and keeping tabs/menus and their linked actions accurate quickly becomes a hassle.
One-time license is $79

Verdict: not suitable for me, Pidoco does most of it too, and does it better.

ProtoShare

Convincing video tour of what it can do.
Enables export of specifications, and supports moving from wireframes to designs in the same environment.
Offers masters and reusable components to quickly build mockups.
Has online collaboration features, and looks highly interactive.
$19-89 per month; white-labelled self-hosted solution possible too.
Question: “How can I backup my data?”. Answer: “ProtoShare does not have a backup feature. Your data is safely stored in our secure server environment.”

Verdict: not suitable. The answer to the question “How can I backup my data?” basically already disqualifies ProtoShare. Trying to export the example project resulted in a Word document of 50 pages, and it just feels too heavy.

Flairbuilder

Several widgets are actual true widgets: they are only really visible in preview mode. Watching a random YouTube video actually is not what wireframes and mockups are all about.
Anyone wanting to view designs, needs to install a (free) player or this software.
Adobe Air

Verdict: not suitable for me.

OverSite

Verdict: a Java-based product, but somehow the web pages and screen shots kind of push me away from this tool.

8 June 2009
in Ideas, Technical
5 min read

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

The evolution of international development cooperation in a nutshell:

first we tried to build the best water pump
we realised we need to build the right water pump
then we started to exchange lessons learned about building water pumps
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!

1 April 2009
in Conferences
4 min read

In the middle of the Ecampaigning Forum, I’m trying to turn my notes about Monday’s “pre-ECF” session on Social Actions and the Change The Web contest into a blog post. Peter Deitz presented his vision on making opportunities for social activism available on the web, and together with Janelle Ward, Thiago Carrapatoso, Romina Oliverio, George Irish, Amy Sample Ward and Jonathan Waddingham, we looked at 8 of the submitted application for the Change The Web contest (deadline for submissions is this Friday!). Here are my notes of the discussions we had.

Great appeal, could be promoted by an organisation to their Facebook constituency. Good presentation in search results, maybe more narrowed down would work better. Adding the “favicon” of sources as “bullets” to the list of promoted actions may be nice. Add promoted actions to your news feed so that friends can “share” and “like” those actions (“share” now leads to share the application, but several of us don’t like to add apps to my profile. Perhaps use the “redirect” mechanism in Facebook so that the Facebook toolbar is on the top of the page you and up, makes sharing easier too. Perhaps show the number of clicks on an action (is available in the Social Actions API?)

We had some concerns hether it should be a “destination site” (who would go there?) or should be a widget? Maybe just a widget based on specific topics? It might be nice to combine it into a service, so that when a topic I care about is trending, it will post a tweet on behalf of me? Or maybe send a tweet with an action for a trending topic? (This kind of adds to the “trending spam” that seems to emerge already, so not sure if it’s a really good idea). Or maybe combine this with something like cloud.li (makes a cloud of words you tweeted) with added actions?

This plugin selects the actions to present based on the tags of the post (the plugin from Social Actions selects words from the whole page content). We liked the presentation with the emphasis on the action type. Although in our little groiup, WordPress also turned out to be the most-used blog tool, it might be relatively easy to clone this plugin into also a Drupal module?

Charity Meter

It mentions taking Open Social as a starting point, so we’re curious to explore more of the opportunity for this one (we didn’t quite see the Open Social aspect yet). It could also take the Facebook to a higher level. The idea of promoting things is generally shared, but not everyone would like to see the “dollar value” on it too (some would like to, others would be scared off, maybe this is related to cultural differences? So it would be great if it not only shows donations, but all kinds of social actions. And maybe it can then also suggest next actions for you based on your “action profile” (whether you’re more into giving or loaning money, volunteering, petitioning, etc.)

“Take Action” Button

We generally liked the button. We gathered a couple of suggestions for the pop-up. Maybe it could contain a link to “more actions like this”, or “previous/next” or “see another” options. A “share this” box may be nice too. Perhaps it also would be nice to have a few variations of the button, for instance with the Social Actions logo? Our main concern for this application right now, is that it is relatively hard to install. Perhaps it would be possible to deliver it as a WordPress plugin as well? Or make it more like a bit of javascript or code that you can more easily paste into a page?

SocialActions iPhone application

Yes we need an iPhone application 🙂 Bringing actions to your (i)phone is obviously interesting. It would be great if those actions would be actions that you can do from your phone, or close to where you are. TheExtraordinaries are building a similar tool. It would be really great if it also works with “social networking” features, for instance find friends in the same March? Also, it would be great if what you contributes to a “bigger picture” somehow, as a form of crowd sourcing. An example that was mentioned: safe bicycle routes. By using the GPS on your phone and cycling a route, you can then upload it as a “safe route”, and make it part of a bigger map and route planner.

SocialActions Search for Firefox

Right now, it adds a search engine. It’s powerful in its simplicity, but we had some discussion on who would use it (not everyone uses the search box). We discussed some additional features mainly, like a toolbar in Firefox, or a sidebar application with opportunities around the page you’re looking at (like the Knowmore addon for Firefox.

Peter already explained how Social Actions will be working on their search interface, so seeing this submission kind of felt like a great start for that. Especially the idea of having permalinks for searches is good, and it would be great if the search engine could be tailored and made available as a widget, for instance to put actions around “Earth Day” on a web page, or allow people to search “human rights” activities on your site. The RSS feeds on search results is great too. It would be great to add keyword highlighting to the results.

Thanks!

That’s it. Thanks for all the submitters of applications, and all the participants on Monday. I really got a better sense of what Social Actions is, and could grow into. (We had a conversation about Open Actions at the following Ecampaigning Forum, but need to write that up still.)

14 March 2009
in News, Ideas
3 min read

Clay Shirky as my Sound Byte Hero

I haven’t managed to write (publicly) for some time: new projects kept me busy, either launching, or preparing. But thanks to a tweet by Planspark, I read (yet another) piece by someone who is becoming my personal “Sound Byte Hero”: Clay Shirky. At the moment, Siegfried Woldhek and I are preparing a position paper on how International Development Cooperation will change, as part of a series of debates with existing organisations and the Minister for Development Cooperation here in The Netherlands. So when my friend Tim Bonnemann send out a tweet today “Must-read of the day: Clay Shirky’s “Newspapers and Thinking the Unthinkable”, I summarised the take-away quotes for me.

My personal selection of “quotable quotes” from Clay Shirky’s “Newspapers and Thinking the Unthinkable”

“With the old economics destroyed, organizational forms perfected for industrial production have to be replaced with structures optimized for digital data. It makes increasingly less sense even to talk about a publishing industry, because the core problem publishing solves — the incredible difficulty, complexity, and expense of making something available to the public — has stopped being a problem.”

“As novelty spread, old institutions seemed exhausted while new ones seemed untrustworthy; as a result, people almost literally didn’t know what to think. If you can’t trust Aristotle, who can you trust?”

“And so it is today. When someone demands to know how we are going to replace newspapers, they are really demanding to be told that we are not living through a revolution. They are demanding to be told that old systems won’t break before new systems are in place. They are demanding to be told that ancient social bargains aren’t in peril, that core institutions will be spared, that new methods of spreading information will improve previous practice rather than upending it. They are demanding to be lied to.
There are fewer and fewer people who can convincingly tell such a lie.”

““You’re gonna miss us when we’re gone!” has never been much of a business model”

“Imagine, in 1996, asking some net-savvy soul to expound on the potential of craigslist, then a year old and not yet incorporated. The answer you’d almost certainly have gotten would be extrapolation: “Mailing lists can be powerful tools”, “Social effects are intertwining with digital networks”, blah blah blah. What no one would have told you, could have told you, was what actually happened: craiglist became a critical piece of infrastructure. Not the idea of craigslist, or the business model, or even the software driving it. Craigslist itself spread to cover hundreds of cities and has become a part of public consciousness about what is now possible. Experiments are only revealed in retrospect to be turning points.”

““If the old model is broken, what will work in its place?” The answer is: Nothing will work, but everything might. Now is the time for experiments, lots and lots of experiments, each of which will seem as minor at launch as craigslist did, as Wikipedia did, as octavo volumes did.”

“Society doesn’t need newspapers. What we need is journalism.”

“No one experiment is going to replace what we are now losing with the demise of news on paper, but over time, the collection of new experiments that do work might give us the reporting we need.”