openness
From Smashup to Mashup
As somebody who is not wont to restrain himself when the UK government gets it hideously wrong on the IT front (hello, ID cards), it behoves me to offer a little praise when they get things right. This seems to be a rare and therefore welcome case of the latter:
The UK Government wants to hear your ideas for new products that could improve the way public information is communicated. The Power of Information Taskforce is running a competition on the Government's behalf, and we have a £20,000 prize fund to develop the best ideas to the next level. You can see the type of thing we are are looking for here.
To show they are serious, the Government is making available gigabytes of new or previously invisible public information especially for people to use in this competition. Rest assured, this competition does not include personal information about people.
Do As I Say, Not As I Do
I've noted several times on this blog the tension between openness and privacy, but reading the excellent Your Right to Know blog - which, to my shame, I've only come across recently - another dimension became apparent.
This is the interesting contrast between what UK politicians want to do to us in terms of constant surveillance and intrusion into our private lives, and their own - outraged - refusal to allow us to do the same, even when it concerns them spending our money through their extremely generous allowances. For example, try this for hypocrisy:
Henry Poole Quoted on Web Security For Political Campaigns
Our very own Henry Poole was quoted in a PC World article on Barack Obama's web security:
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Openness in the Middle Kingdom
The most senior Chinese official jailed for sympathising with the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests has urged the leadership to make public the events that led to the government's decision to crush the pro-democracy movement.
The demonstrations, which lured more than a million people on to Beijing's streets, ended in a military crackdown on June 4 of that year. Now a fading memory, the massacre is still taboo in the Chinese media.
Bao Tong, once the top aide to purged Party chief Zhao Ziyang, argued that China has been praised for its transparency in handling the devastating May 12 earthquake and should also reveal the rifts in the leadership that led to the massacre.
"Through this quake ... they have tasted the benefits of openness and should know that openness is better than being closed," Bao told Reuters in an interview at his Beijing home.
NetSquared Project Highlight: KnowMore.org
At lunch today I had a great connection with Joe Solomon, a Social Media Consultant, who is the Project Lead of the KnowMore.org Firefox extension.
When installed, KnowMore's icons integrate into Google's search results to help users understand data from the KnowMore database.
KnowMore is community dedicated to chronicling corporate abuses, worker's and human rights, fair trade, business ethics and the environment, via a vast user-generated wiki database.
The extension is powered by KnowMore's new API which enables any developer to take KnowMore's corporate data and build web apps that empower consumers and help citizens hold corporations accountable.
NetSquared Project Highlight: MetaVid
The MetaVid project captures legislative proceedings and make full video streams accessible and searchable from the text transcripts.
Check out MetaVid directly or search Pelosi
VIA Releases OpenBook, Opens CAD Designs under CC BY-SA 3.0
Today VIA launched their OpenBook, an innovative subnotebook platform. You can buy it now and also download the raw CAD files released under a Creative Commons Attribution ShareaAlike 3.0 license, meaning you can get the raw machine files to make whatever case or version you want, as long as you release your modifications under the same license and give attribution back to VIA. The VIA press release today states:
Opening Up the Commons
Well, it's a start:
The Commons' members' estimates committee agreed last night it would not appeal against a ruling by the high court ordering publication of the detailed expenses of 14 prominent MPs.
I particularly liked this:
The three high court judges left little room for an appeal: "We have no doubt that the public interest is at stake. We are not here dealing with idle gossip, or public curiosity about what in truth are trivialities. The expenditure of public money through the payment of MPs' salaries and allowances is a matter of direct and reasonable interest to taxpayers."
Indeed, and not only...
Google's Friend Connect vs. Your Privacy
Google is announcing Friend Connect tonight, a service advertised to "help website owners grow traffic by enabling any site on the web to easily provide social features for its visitors." Friend Connect employs OpenID and oAuth which is a good start, but how it puts them together is lacking vision and, disturbingly, may raise significant privacy concerns.
ACLU's "Freedom Files" Season 2
Many folk don't know that the ACLU has a TV series called "The Freedom Files". Season 2 can be seen on PBS stations throughout the country. Episodes can also be viewed online at aclu.tv which we re-launched for the new season recently.
Tech Tuesday: Loading GMaps Asynchronously On The Witness Hub
Last week the Witness Hub was updated with new enhancements and features -- most obviously, the Hub Map is now also on the home page!
Here is a video demonstration:
This feature required asynchronous loading of the Hub Map, including it's full-screen switcher and chunk marker loader code and features, on-load of the 'Map' tab (a Hub-customized version of jQuery tabs).
Via tiptoes toward openness
Board and chipmaker Via is gearing up toward releasing Linux driver source code and product documentation for its popular x86-compatible chipsets and peripherals. The company has launched a website where Ubuntu 8.04 and SUSE 10 binary graphics drivers can be downloaded, with source code and documentation to follow, it says.
Drupal, Pengiuns, and Sharks
I had the joy of attending Linuxfest Northwest on April 26 in Bellingham, WA. The weather was great (just like last year), and the atmosphere relaxed and fun.
Linuxfest is a 2-day community event, run by volunteers and free to the public. It is such a cozy atmosphere, and it is easy to interact with the speakers and the exhibitors.
