Lately I’ve been volunteering a little bit for Ushahidi. After a few months of work, we have gotten a new wireframe of the mobile app running on the iPhone. Ushahidi is an open source tool for monitoring crises and disasters. It recently won the the NetSquared challenge and was called one of the top startups to watch in the MIT Technology Review. Man, I really don’t have to give up anything to work on this one — it’s really a top notch operation going on. Other nonprofit and open source teams could learn a lot from the Ushahidi project.
Some of the amazing things about the Ushahidi project include:
Rapid prototyping. (Really rapid: the first version of the app was built in a weekend.)
The application is completely open source.
It’s a platform, not a web application: you can get the code and extend it for your own uses.
Strong user-centered design principles.
Great attention to detail in the design and insistence on top-notch interfaces (including the marketing website and the admin pages of the application).
Anyway here’s the latest mockup. Here’s the latestsource PSD. It’s v0.2 and still has a long way to go. We did the iPhone app first and will be using lessons learned from this one to port the project to other platforms.
I did most of the sketching and developed the concepts that were flying around, and then my man Joe Jones did all the real work in Photoshop. It’s been a really fun time so far and I am looking forward to implementing some of the changes being discussed on the Ushahidi blog.
Also make sure you check out some of the geniuses behind the project:
Things are looking great so far with this hairbrained project of ours.
Fabulous, actually: Bolt | Peters is super interested in the project and wants me to work on it for some percent of my total time at work. Which is fan-freaking-tastic! Thanks BP!
If you have no idea what I am talking about, check out my last post about it.
But, in short, these are the three things that I love about Kestrel already:
Kestrel is a web application for farmers.
Kestrel is a participatory design project.
Kestrel is an open source project.
Kestrel is a user-centered project. (Deeply so; as in, we won’t build it if it doesn’t solve real-people problems.)
Ok that was four. Anyway, I’ve gotten so much great feedback already by email phone and comment — and I am now setting up interview dates. Let me know if you would like to talk on the phone for about an hour. We’ll be gathering feedback about the initial concept and looking at some first drafts of first drafts. Basically, we’re gabbing on the phone for a bit and I’m taking some notes.
You can participate in a number of ways:
Giving feedback based on your professional experience (as a farmer, user researcher, designer, guru …)
Giving feedback based on your experience with other applications for famers.
Giving feedback as a CSA manager, owner, or eater.
Giving feedback as one of my parents, friends or online weakly linked nodes.
Etc.
Please leave a comment or email me at unthinkingly at gmail if you want to participate. You know you wanna. Research is fun!
We’re conducting real live conversations, not just email exchanges, though email is also a great way to give feedback. Also, note that, as much as possible, we’ll be recording interviews; part of the point of this project is that the methodology will be completely documented. We record stuff partly just part of the public nature of participatory design, partly because we want to get as much informed criticism as possible, but also because we want to teach other communities of practice to create a web app!
Dammit, if we (as a very small, active team) can build something that work really well for 50 farmers, then we probably have created something that will work really well for 50,000 farmers.
Thanks to tes, Andrea, Beck, Mary, Chris R., Rick, Ben, Mike, Nate and Anne for commenting already on the previous post; we already have strong support in San Francisco, Portland and Central NC.
There has been a lot of excitement recently around a couple of developments in touch screen interfaces: First there was the insane presentation at TED 2006. Secondly, of course, the iPhone made everyone all hot in the pants for it’s touchable goodness.
In Malawi, the NGO Baobab Health Partnership … adapted Linux to $100 touchscreen Internet appliances, then wrote a program for Opera to run in full-screen kiosk mode. The resulting terminal can easily manage the nation’s health data and is scalable wherever a web connection can be made.J. Goodman at Vestal
Fundamentally I think that touch is intimate and intuitive, and clearly touchable interfaces have incredible potential, especially for the folks that haven’t been brow-beaten into adapting to 20th-century conventions of computer interfaces like the QWERTY keyboard.
(i.e., the billions of people that will be introduced to “desktop” computing the next decade. See the OLPC, just launched for reals in Uruguay.)
So I’m excited about a new project at work that involves designing a web application for use with a touch screen interface. When I first heard about it from the client I was coffee-though-the-nose excited because I have been infatuated by a recent project I read about on Vestal: Malawi, Linux, & The Fight Against HIV. I knew immediately that I was going to rip off the idea. (In the best open source sense, of course.)
Unfortunately the iOpener touchscreen used in the project is no longer for sale (it had a lovely $100-$200 price tag b/c it came with some money-making software — there’s a funny story about the linux hack), so I was hoping someone might have some idea about how to implement this as cheaply as possible.
A few criteria:
As open-source as possible
Durable
Replicable
Low Power
Low CPU resources (The machine will be cheap, with flash memory, prob.)
Beautiful (in a Platonic way )
Basically I want to avoid wire splicing and flaky homegrown drivers in favor of something that is replicable and extremely flexible. I want to be able to develop a web application with an appropriate UI and let it rip. (Which will be greatly facilitated by the work of the Baobab programmers’ “touchscreen toolkit“). This might not be easy given the limitations of cheap machines.
So far I’ve got anEboxPC in the office (a nice, fanless machine with CF and VESA mounts for the back of the monitor) with some form of embedded Linux (we’ve built a tiny Linux distro for our rural wireless network that might be usable if we can get the drivers to work with the touch screen). Looks like we can get screens for about $100 and then we’ll have to put a touch screen on top. Regardless, this is still in the brainstorming phase, so that’s all likely to go out the window.
Anyway, what good is a touch screen like this?
Well, combined with the right software, I think you can really leverage usability to do a hell of a lot:
Make a huge impact in developing world healthcare like Baobab has done.
Collect data easily from a kiosk at a disaster area.
Setup a database-driven check-in desk at your next nonprofit conference.
Collect survey data remotely (anywhere in reach of the net).
Setup a small store without an incredibly expensive, proprietary POS system.
I think there are lots of possibilities given that the interface could just be so much more usable. Just looking into it briefly I found an open source POS system for use in cooperative markets. Brilliant. This is software that could really benefit from an inexpensive stable touchscreen implementation.
Does anyone have any experience or ideas?
I’ll be posting my findings here, along with the software design considerations that I run into.
“When I go to a restaurant, and look at leftovers on my plate, I don’t see food, I see information. If the restaurant were Google, they wouldn’t just take that plate and scrape it off into the trash. There would be a camera in the kitchen, photographing every plate coming back, with analysis of what people liked and disliked, and what portions were too big, helping to optimize future servings.”Jon Orwant, on Oreilly Radar
A recent post on O’Reilly Radar describes a “pervasive culture of measurement” which is touted as an example of how “smart” web companies these days are maximizing their use of data from their consumer’s “leftovers.”
Hmmm.
Waitasecond. Photographing my leftovers? You’re totally creeping me out. I mean, I get the point, but is that really the direction that savvy Web-2.0-aware businesses take these days? The overtone of pervasive surveillance makes me feel a bit ill. Minus points for O’Reilly implying that this will lead to Web 2.0 apps that are constantly improving themselves based on user activity. Of course the corporate world has always wanted to know as much about me as possible. But what do they usually do with it? Banner Ads.
I’m getting into an excellent free pdf called “In the Shade of the Commons,” a publication from the Waag Society, which bills itself as a small group of enthusiastic idealists … with a mission “to make new media available for groups of people that have little access to computers and internet, thus increasing their quality of living.”
They sound like a nice little bunch of information hippies in the Netherlands.
“We value information as a human resource of cultural expression rather than a commodity to be sold to consumers. … We realize that intangible information resources raise the issue of a digital ecology, the need to understand ecosystems constituted by information flows through various media. ” The Vienna Document In the Shade of the Commons.
They have quite nicely put together a range of material about the fragility of openness in up-and-coming information societies and the need for “intellectual commons.” My favorite part of it so far is the “Vienna Document,” (quoted here) which summarizes a number of thoughtful progressive info-principles.
The lesson I’m taking away is not just that “information should be free” (ZZZzzzzzz…. ), but there is also need for a kind of “humane” network design that leverages openness in ways that are beneficial to more than just a select minority.
For those of us who design software (which is now 99% defined by networked computing), I think this has pretty hip implications.
I think it is brilliant to conceptualize information, as they do, as a product of “intellectual labor.” In this light it becomes clearer how the information that we produce (in the context of, say, social tagging) can be evaluated as a product that can be shaped by the conditions in which it is produced, controlled, consumed and potentially misused.
Really, what is the most profitable thing to do with a massive database of human generated metadata? Exactly how often should we expect The Most Profitable Thing to line up with the most useful thing for real-live human beings?
Anyway, this line of thinking seems especially relevant to me now that I am so frustrated to discover that more than 1000 nptech tags are apparently not shown in some views of del.icio.us. I can’t really blame del.icio.us for whatever is causing this, but it is a reminder that we are trusting our attention data to the databases and algorithms of a corporation with no vested interest in the integrity or proper use of our data. It’s enough to make me want to start googling for an open source alternative … but then there goes my intellectual labor being photographed again …
Recently there has been a lot of discussion among the nonprofit technology geeks about the use (and usefulness) of the tag “nptech”.
When the nptech tag started one of the ideas was to gather enough data to look and see what words people were using to describe, say, open source (open source, floss, foss, open source software) and then use those words to inform a taxonomy. It’s a taken a long time but I bet there’s enough data in the nptech tag on a combination of bookmarking systems to do a little crunching and get at some of those commonly used terms. Sort of an emergent taxonomy… Marnie Webb, nptech proto-tagger
The nptech tag (on del.icio.us) dates back to December of 2004 and was created by a group of nonprofit technologists that were exploring the potential for social tagging in the community. While I have a “curmudgeonly” eye for Web2.0 gizmos, in addition to a deep distrust of technophilic “progress” … I think that the development of this tag is arguably the single largest reason for the current (thriving I think) state of what is commonly called the “nptech community.” Which means a lot to me.
Opinions abound. Most of us seem to be worked up about the efficiency of the tag. On this note there has been a lot of interesting reaction to a post by Gavin Clabaugh, which was critical of folksonomies. Laura Quinn of Idealware largely agrees with Gavin.
In this context, it seems that generally the consensus has been that 1.) Taxonomies are harder to create than Folksonomies, but they are better in many contexts. And 2.) we need more data about how to make the nptech tag more useful as an “emergent taxonomy”.
So, in the spirit of improving the tag and promoting the nptech community, here’s some data:
A plain text listing of every word that has been used on del.icio.us in association with nptech. fulltext.xml
The script that I wrote to gather the data from delicious (in perl): community-tag-robot.txt. (The code is also displayed below with syntax highlighting.)
The script that I wrote crawls the pages of del.icio.us and pulls out all of the tags that were used to describe the same stuff tagged “nptech”. This gives us an idea of how the tag has been used — effectively describing the tagged links, if we assume taggers are using “synonym clouds”. Del.icio.us has a “related tags” feature but it is lame (only 10 are listed), and judging from my initial review of the data it is pretty random. (Not really sure if I broke some terms of use or not with my script, but it’s *our* data, right? And besides, the script is very polite.)
There are a lot of delicious mashupy-type things that show you tagging patterns, but these approaches seem somehow very passive, and not community-oriented. I mean, in general delicious is used very passively — people want to be able *consume* more efficiently, not create some community in which greater action can be taken. Or it is just used for explicitly personal purposes, as a web-based bookmark service.
What I like so much about the nptech tag is that it was intentionally created to support and reflect a community (unlike, say, the tag “nintendo,” which may very well support a community, but it is not active in a self-critical, dialogic way.) And certainly there is a beauty, I think, in using these hyper-technological tools (which have the ability to be very atomizing and consumerist) for the sake of doing things that are explicitly not-for-profit and mission-driven.
And personally I tend to agree with Michelle Murrain that we need to be wary of an “expert” approach to developing our tags and community taxonomies. That line of thinking is what made me want to do this in the first place. (Likewise I need to point out how much I have really been thinking lately about stuff that I have been reading at Ulises Ali Majias’ blog like this.)
Anyway, further experimentation (graphs/charts from excel would be easy using the text files, for instance) would be nice; please let me know if you are doing something interesting with the data. I’m hoping that this will help us, as a community, determine what we want to do with this tag now that we have been using it for more than two years. What patterns do you see in the data? What does the nptech tag mean for our community? I am not going to try to start doing any analysis here, now — but I would really like to hear what people’s reactions to the tag timeline are.
There are still a lot of holes in this data that I could answer with a bit more programming. (i.e., who has been using the tag?) Suggestions for extending the script are welcome. What do we want to know?
Linux and open source computing is going to have a great 2007. In spite of a few hiccups in some communities, and the astonishing lack of penetration into the mainstream brain, it is obvious that we are seeing more and more people getting it.
When you think of Windows server, you think of rebooting the server, of always having to apply security patches. You think of viruses … Linux and Solaris prove to be a lot less headaches than any other platform.ÂAmy Niersbach, Chicago geek-honcho
Of course, it is a bunch of elitist BS to pretend that the only reason people don’t “get” desktop Linux is because they are just ignorant — Linux is hard. Switching is hard-ish.
These governments are not doing something that is totally obvious — they are, but contrast, pioneers, and they are taking no small risk in putting Linux desktops in front of their municipal employees. I mean, really, I just can’t see *my* Dad using ifconfig to fiddle with his network settings. Only recently has Linux distributions emerged that I would consider suggesting to my family, much less my family’s coworkers.
(By contrast, of course, Linux as a *server* platform has had success for so long, and open source software is clearly dominant on the server.)
Ever since the Ubuntu Linux campaign began a couple years ago, we have all seen how much it makes sense (in terms of attracting an audience) to focus on getting things to Just Work on a *personal computer*. Ubuntu has ridden the hype skyrocket right past Debian and Suse etc … well, because they have a millionaire at the wheel … but also because they have taken on the closed-source OS’s head-on with regard to *usability.* They put a lot of time into making a Linux distribution that would recognize your iPod (and monitor and printer and keyboard …) the first time you plugged it in. They even have a branch devoted to a kid-friendly version, edubuntu. And they have done a lot of steady work to make a more useable experience generally (even if they aren’t rewriting the Gnome desktop). I think their whole approach deserves applause, despite all the remaining gotchas of linux. (Certainly there is not a Linux desktop the tops the Mac OS usability experience, in my opinion.)
I think that Tux Magazine started a couple of years ago.
For a number of reasons–not all financial–the model we had built for TUX was not sustainable. At this point, a group of us who were involved in TUX are tossing some ideas around. Where it will go we are not sure but let me assure you that enough of us feel TUX needs to exist that we will try our best to come up with, as they say, “Plan B”.
Their goal was to server the “new Linux user,” with glossy color articles about installing the latest KDE, understanding the differences between the various distros, and getting your new printer to work with Ubuntu.
It was an interesting niche that seemed really promising. (Several other Liunx magazines exist, but are written more for the hardcore geeks.)
Alas, just before their 21st issue, they have just announced that they are closing down.
I wonder what this means for the state of the Open Source OS in 2007?
Many Debian developers denounced the Dunc-Tank proposal. Some even demanded that Towns be removed as leader because he supported Dunc-Tank. Their objection was that by financially supporting developers, Debian would become a two-class system and that, in turn, would be destructive to the Debian community.
Linux-watch.com just posted this article commenting on recent delays in the much-loved Debian distribution of Linux. Interesting to note some of the internal politics on an open source project. I have to respect the developer’s (reported) concern that the new pay structure at Debian might create a kind of class system on the project. So to me it makes sense the developers might stop contributing their time if something starts to smell bad in the project, but I haven’t ever seen a “strike” called quite like this as the article suggests. I might be inclined to chalk this one up to something other than pure politics, anyway. (Gasp, a behind-schedule software project?)
I missed this writeup from a little while ago. It is a good description of what Geekcorps is doing in Mali. Some of their really interesting projects are the Water Bottle Antenna, which provides a powered wifi antenna for about $3 (compared to $100) and the Desert PC which is basically a fanless, sealed machine designed for tough conditions (running a version of Linux of course — customized to minimize hard drive writes for durability!) What is not to love about a custom Linux distro for the developing world?
In the village of Bourem Inaly, Mali there are over 120 television sets powered by 12-volt car batteries, but there is almost nothing to watch. With its CanTV project, Geekcorps has helped the local radio station stream video content to the local community over WiFi. The radio station which rents these units out benefits from a new monthly revenue stream, while the villagers benefit with an improved source of news and entertainment.
Geekcorps Mali (which seems to be their flagship outfit in Africa, and was founded by Ethan Zuckerman is probably on the leading edge of in-the-field low-bandwidth applications. Geekcorps Low Bandwidth Networking is a wonderful (technical) document that describes in some detail the setup they are using. I use a lot of the same technologies (the mail and webserver) in my job as a sysadmin.
And I am totally in love with their Cantenna TV project for its emphasis on community media. Check out the video demo’ing a build of one of their antennas.
Ever since the introduction of Microsoft Office 2003 it has been possible to distribute documents that can only be used in the way that you want them to be used — such as limiting who can copy, print or forward the information. This type of control, however has been easy enough to defeat with a third party reader that ignores the “Information Rights Management,” which is really just a bunch of plain text XML, as Cory Doctorow explains at Information Week. So IRM is really not about security in the first place.
“The current version of remote attestation facilitates the enforcement of policies against the wishes of computer owners. If the software you use is written with that goal in mind, the trusted computing architecture will not only protect data against intruders and viruses, but also against you. In effect, you, the computer owner, are treated as an adversary.” -The E.F.F.’s analysis on the new techniques
Microsoft, naturally, would like to end the ability to use third-party readers like OpenOffice all together, and is working to develop an industry standard that will allow your motherboard to take digital signatures in order to prove that your software is not tampered with. Security is touted as being the reason for all the work, but it seems clear enough that a uber-vendor-lock-in is attractive to the Men of Microsoft.
The Electronic Freedom Foundation has a typically well-researched document on the background of the situation, with some proposals for mitigating the vendor lock in issue.
Great, reveling post about the remaining difficulty of running Ubuntu (the “sexiest” open source Windows-killer yet) in Ethopia by Andrew Heavens over at Meskel Square.
There is one thing that the bright-eyed fans of Ubuntu and its kind never tell you. That is that if you install it on to an old Windows machine in a country where dial-up internet connections are still the only way — then you are in for a rough, rough ride.
Just found this nice, basic, summary of the various Linux distributions.
Linux is an operating system that was initially created as a hobby by a young student, Linus Torvalds, at the University of Helsinki in Finland. Linus had an interest in Minix, a small UNIX system, and decided to develop a system that exceeded the Minix standards. He began his work in 1991 when he released version 0.02 and worked steadily until 1994 when version 1.0 of the Linux Kernel was released. The kernel, at the heart of all Linux systems, is developed and released under the GNU General Public License and its source code is freely available to everyone. It is this kernel that forms the base around which a Linux operating system is developed. There are now literally hundreds of companies and organisations and an equal number of individuals that have released their own versions of operating systems based on the Linux kernel.
If you are new to Linux, this may help to explain a lot of the confusion in your head about the numerous versions of the platform.
This is where it’s at folks: free programming and web design books. Make your computer do impossible feats of inhuman strength with this collection of languages and techniques, from old-school Fortran to Web 2.0 hipster-standards AJAX or Ruby.
I’m loving this collection and (hopefully by mid spring) I’m going to gather all of my favorite tutorials for use as a singe “Intro to web design” document. (Round of applause for the Creative Commons license, please.) So far I have been using Google’s wonderful new “Search by license type” feature on their advance search page, but this yields mostly just very specific tutorials. This page just turned me on to a whole lot of ther helpful resource, even if I can’t redistribute materials from the big publishers.
Most of the books here are just distributed online for free because they are older editions. They aren’t using an Open license, except in the case of the many online tutorials that are linked here (which are typically carefully chosen, I found).
This collection contains a lot of really great books (many from O’Reilly) that just happen to be a little out of date. I tend to get real excited when I find these things in the basement of my local thrift store, so this is real exciting. I’m noodling around this afternoon with a 2002 edition of “Mastering Regular Expressions,” which is the perfect book to find used becuase you don’t want to memorize all of it and it just doesn’t change very fast. In general I find that computer books are still really useful until about 6 years (or, for web design books, pre-IE6).
A couple of golden links for the basics:
The 2000 (O’Reilly) Definitive Guide to CSS (I use this one at home. Totally comprehensive, excellent in spite of the age, and written by the CSS demigod Eric Meyer. It never has been — and never will be — a great reference for browser support, which adds it’s timelessness.)
The Definitive Guide to HTML and XHTML (I use a hard copy of this one too. Great for looking up all those form and table tags you forget about. Written shortly after the standardization of XHTML 1.0, there’s no reason I can see to use a later version for now.)
Didn’t think I would find these for less than the $0.50 I paid for mine at the thrift store.
Last night I was trying to do something that I thought would be pretty simple: display a bunch of recent weblog posts on one page.
There is a great online community of folks in the biofuels blogosphere, and this page would give a quick summary of their myriad, nerdy, wonderful events and research.
So the goal is to have the title of a weblog, followed by the most recent posts, each with the date posted and a bit of the post body. The entire web page might be called “biofuels digest,” with a total of perhaps 30 weblogs. Often on the web you will see “blogrolls” that list lots of blogs, but these are usually just links to the blogs (there isn’t a post excerpt) and they are almost always either hardcoded html or javascript-included from a third party like Bloglines (see my own blogroll on the front page).
I’d had experience with building this type of page last year, when I just wanted to have an “aggregator” page of all my most loved online reading. I ended up just slapping things around with Magpie RSS (an excellent open source PHP class), and it worked fine. Not slick, but fine.
I could have easily used a number of services that are available online for displaying other people’s rss on your own page, without all the mussing with PHP. (Feedburner or Feed Digest are services that I’d recommend for doing this type of thing, if you want to go that route.) But who wants to mess with a bunch of javascript calls to someone else’s server? And you get stuck with limits on the number of feeds you can run. And the there’s the annoying “powered by …” sticker at the bottom. And you’d have to use a third-party RSS splicer to combine all of your feeds.
So forget all that, because this isn’t just a wonky personal project — it will hopefully end up being part of the excellent Piedmont Biofuels website — so it needs to be quick and hosted on the server.
So last night I opened up the latest installation of MagpieRSS and installed it on my server, created all of the necessary php for each of the blogs, and I ended up with a decent document. The major problems with this first version (using just the Magpie class) is the inconsistent treatment of the posts — some appear and some don’t — and the improper encoding of the blogs. (I went ’round and ’round with the encoding. It’s a common problem, but I couldn’t get those damn posts clean.) Probably a few days in the Magpie listserv archives at Sourceforge would clear all of this up … but the archives are exceptionally annoying, the Magpie blog is down, and the first version was still surprisingly slow anyway, even with the cache working.
So I found another solution, Alan Levine’s Feed to JS, which is built on Magpie. This is an excellent free (and libre) service that has both hosted version and downloadable script. (It relies on the magpie class, but uses javascript to display the results., giving the added benefit of having an administrator’s page that simplifies some of the options for display (such as the number of posts), and it yields much more compliant utf8 encoding (no more bloody diamond question marks in place of fancy quotes).
The downside: there is currently no way to “splice” all of the feeds together before running them through the javascript, so you end up calling the js file for each feed you parse. I felt sure this would make it to slow to be usable, but I think (hope) I was wrong, even with 25 blogs on the same page. I trimmed each of the blogs to display only 3 posts anyway, so at least the compiled filesize is real slim.
(Actually, while I’m writing all this out, I should bother to mention that there are a hell of a lot of 3rd-party RSS splicers/combiners … but, again, they’re all third party, and they seem to go extinct quickly: e.g. the defunct rollup.org. Most of these also have ads, are not free, or have limitations on the number of feeds, like feed digest. I was surprised and disappointed that I couldn’t find something to install on the server that would take care of this — somebody please let me know if there’s something reliable out there. This would allow me to combine all the posts and just run the JS once.)
So, from a programmer’s view, this is a little inelegant, but the result is really consistent, and it still comes in at 8.5 seconds on 56K. The (minimally styled) latest version is here.
The Tactical Technology Collective is a nonprofit based in Amsterdam that has been doing great work distributing Free/Open Source technology to the global NGO sector.
This morning I was reminded (via Worldchanging) that they are working on creating several different “best of” software compliations for NGOs– kind of like that lovely old mixtape you have in your car, except with encryption tools, spyware tools and Firefox, among many others. And better liner notes. The first to be released was the “Security Edition” last October (which I suppose is, um, not to be confused with the ubiquitous AOL Security Edition discs at the grocery store).
The security version of NGO-in-a-box … is aimed predominantly at human rights, anti-corruption, and womens groups, independent media and journalists. Its purpose is to help these groups, and those who work as trainers and technical support with these groups, to orient themselves with the kinds of security and protection tools they could use and the ability to easily access and try them out. This boxset is made of three CDs and printed manual.
One of the most important parts of the CDs is the documentation, which somes in English, Spanish, French, Russian and Arabic. (Unfortunately a lot of the software only comes in English.)
It came as some surprise to me that the Security edition comes with a collection of FOSS applications that are designed to run on Windows (TM)(!). I think the decison to run on a closed platform (instead of Linux) was rather unfortunate … and unfortunately necessary for now. This CD provides a lot of great tools for NGOs at zero cost — and very few of the Tacitcal Tech’s audience is up and running with an Open platform on all of their machines. I hope, of course, that this won’t be the rule for future releases, but for now it seems pragmatic.
I’m looking forward to their future releases of a “Base Edition” “Advocacy Edition,” and especially the “Open Publishing Edition” (they’re only a few months behind schedule …)
Also worth noting: the Tactical Technology Collective is also a great proponent of the E-Riders philosophy + practice. They have a great page about eriding, and will be releasing a new white paper on the subject sometime soon. There is also a good website about E-Riding at http://www.eriders.net/ … it’s really too bad their blog has been dead all year!
Rosetta is a web-based platform that does exactly what I thought needed to be done: it makes open source software translation really easy for lots of people, and it makes it easy to collaborate on a translation project.
Instead of having to edit .po files manually, this web interface allows you to easily just … translate. Read the message, type your translation, save. It’s that easy.
Well, almost: the result still should be combed over with a something like POedit.
But Rosetta nontheless is an incredible project about which I am very excited, and I congratulate their team and the 8796 translators (according to public page stats) working to make free software available worldwide. I especially like logging into the website and being able to see the progress on each translation for each of the O.S.S. projects they work with. (Currently there is no Wordpress 2.0, just 1.5, unfortunately. There is also no Swahili team, prior to myself and Ndesanjo.)
The Rosetta project is, I believe, originally the translation interface for the Ubuntu Linux community. Ubuntu is a distribution (a version) of the Linux operating system.
For those who are new to the world of Open Source, Linux is a platform for your computer, just like Microsoft Windows or Apple’s Macintosh OS. But Ubuntu-flavored Linux is free, community built and, indeed, community oriented. Ubuntu Linux is “beating out” a lot of the more traditional flavors of Linux because it is more user friendlily. I like to think of Ubuntu Linux developing enough to enter the mainstream as a free alternative to Windows.
From the Ubuntu website:
“Ubuntu” is an ancient African word, meaning “humanity to others”. Ubuntu also means “I am what I am because of who we all are”. The Ubuntu Linux distribution brings the spirit of Ubuntu to the software world.
The Ubuntu community is built on the ideas enshrined in the Ubuntu Manifesto: that software should be available free of charge, that software tools should be usable by people in their local language and despite any disabilities, and that people should have the freedom to customise and alter their software in whatever way they see fit.
The Rosetta project has a lot of these fuzzy overtones. I love it. I would encourage anyone with strong language skills to log in and start translating one of your favorite programs.
The free and open source software movement is moving, rapidly. The open sourcing of Solaris has added lent enormous weight to this community based development culture. The community behind free and open source software is changing the very landscape of software development and moving the value away from traditional delivery of a piece of software. What is making such communities very successful? What obstacles do they face? And what should we all be doing to ensure continued success?
Jonathan Schwartz, President and COO, Sun Microsystems answers these questions and more in his keynote address at the OSB. Mr.Schwartz, one of the most high profile corporate bloggers around, goes back in time to show how standardization and access to communication has resulted in enormous all round economic growth. Starting with the standardization of canals and railroads dimensions to a standard voltage and plug form for electricity distribution he explains how industries have created new opportunities and moved on to deliver value in non-traditional ways.
He talks about how Thomas A. Edison, the inventor of the light bulb and holder of a few hundred patents, failed in trying to protect his Intellectual Property by trying to trash rivals and draws parallels to more recent efforts of companies which try to protect their IP and hypocritically participate in community development. You wouldn’t expect Mr. Schwartz to defend FOSS in anything but the strongest terms and he delivers in a manner which will gladden the hearts of this increasingly visible community.
This is minor news in most contexts: Google Earth (the software power tool that feels like a toy) has been released for the Mac.
Aside from the obvious usefulness of this release, this signals a money-where-their-mouth-is confirmation thae Google isn’t just reinforcing Microsoft’s monopolistic dominance.
Google has offered a wealth of opportunities for open source, multi-platform development. But their unusual business model (offer almost *everything* for free) means that they’ve been targeting the largest mass of computer users — Microsoft-bound users, that is.
As (Open Source Journalist) Glyn Moody wrote recently:
Google’s software is heavily weighted towards Microsoft Windows. Programs like Google Earth and Picasa are only available under Windows, and its latest, most ambitious foray, the Google Pack, is again only for Microsoft’s operating system. This means that every time Google comes out with some really cool software, it is reinforcing Microsoft’s hold on the desktop. Indeed, we are fast approaching the point where the absence of GNU/Linux versions of Google’s programs are a major disincentive to adopt an open source desktop.
Glad to see that little bit of criticism go so out of date so quickly. Now, Google, a Linux release, please.
Via: The Map Room: Google Earth for Mac Officially Released
Key system requirements: OS X 10.4 (Tiger), a 400-MHz processor, and 16 MB of video RAM, minimum — essentially, even a G3 iBook from mid-2002 should be able to handle it — but they recommend more than 1.5 GHz, 32 megs of video and a fairly speedy broadband connection. I’ve been restraining myself from acquiring the leaked beta, but I’m going to download it now.
All state-collected geographic information should be shared, for a myriad of reasons. Now you can add your name to a growing list of folks that agree.
Geodata is a public good. Open access to it, under a ‘Commons’ (ShareAlike) license, is the best way to see its full benefits realized by industry and citizens. At the same time such an arrangement, by requiring users to redistribute updates and improvements to the data, promises to deliver more and better data for less.
Lately I’ve been volunteering a little bit for Ushahidi. After a few months of work, we have gotten a new wireframe of the mobile app running on the iPhone. Ushahidi is an open source tool for monitoring crises and disasters. It recently won the the NetSquared challenge and was called one of the top startups to watch in the MIT Technology Review. Man, I really don’t have to give up anything to work on this one — it’s really a top notch operation going on. Other nonprofit and open source teams could learn a lot from the Ushahidi project. 
This collection contains a lot of really great books (many from O’Reilly) that just happen to be a little out of date. I tend to get real excited when I find these things in the basement of my local thrift store, so this is real exciting. I’m noodling around this afternoon with a 2002 edition of “Mastering Regular Expressions,” which is the perfect book to find used becuase you don’t want to memorize all of it and it just doesn’t change very fast. In general I find that computer books are still really useful until about 6 years (or, for web design books, pre-IE6). 
The Rosetta project is, I believe, originally the translation interface for the Ubuntu Linux community. Ubuntu is a distribution (a version) of the Linux operating system. 
For those who are new to the world of Open Source, Linux is a platform for your computer, just like Microsoft Windows or Apple’s Macintosh OS. But Ubuntu-flavored Linux is free, community built and, indeed, community oriented. Ubuntu Linux is “beating out” a lot of the more traditional flavors of Linux because it is more user friendlily. I like to think of Ubuntu Linux developing enough to enter the mainstream as a free alternative to Windows.