Open Source – you get what you pay for

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Elgg is a social networking (like MySpace) and learning (not like Blackboard) platform that I use and have implemented for clients. It is free and open source, under the GNU Public License or GPL.

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Recently, Ben, the main programmer for Elgg, has been getting some comments about the lack of documentation for Elgg. He has responded, correctly, that the voluntary developer team has not been able to complete all of the documentation but volunteers are always needed and appreciated. Dave, the concept guy behind Elgg, has set things straight with his post, Understanding Open Source.

I think that these misconceptions about open source being free and fully supported come from the now common phenomenon of free web applications, like Gmail or Skype. Perhaps the average user doesn’t know that there can be a difference between “free” and “open source”. Initially, it may not make much difference to the user, but it can be important later.

Open source software is released under a variety of licenses such as the GPL. Free software that is not OS is owned by someone else and only its use is made available for free, under certain conditions. With open source, the rub is that the community has to stay involved to make the software better. If you’re looking at OS software, check out the size and involvement of the developer and supporter communities first. With free software, you usually have to give something away in order to use it. Quite often it’s your privacy, as you do not own your data, or you may have to put up with advertising on your application. Someone has to pay.

Open source gives you something extra though, and that is the ability to take the whole application, source code and all, and move it or even modify it. For instance, my website uses WordPress, an OS blogging platform. If I am not satisfied with my host, I can take the whole application and set it up somewhere else. I cannot do that with Gmail or Skype. Therefore, I own my data and the application that makes my data available to my readers. With almost 1,000 posts on this blog, this data is becoming quite important to me as my knowledge base. The decision to use an OS system as well as an OS database gives me a certain amount of flexibility, evidenced by my switch from Drupal to WordPress this year. My only costs were labour. I could not have taken my data out of a proprietary system (like Blackboard) as easily.

Using open source requires a commitment. That commitment may be less with the more popular programs (OpenOffice, Firefox) which have corporate or foundation backing. The little guys need your help, but you can also have a lot of influence on smaller projects.

So if you’re using open source applications, get involved; because you get what you pay for.

Five Things Meme

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Dave Cormier has slapped me with a meme, kind of like a chain letter, to write 5 things that you may not know about me.

Memes can be very powerful and some can actually be dangerous, and if you want to know more about memes and memetics, listen to Sue Blackmore’s presentation at Pop!Tech. This meme is fairly safe, even though there is some (friendly) coercion that if I don’t pass it on I’ll not be part of the group. Interesting things, those memes.

So here are 5 things that you may not know (or don’t want to know) about me.

First of all, Dave, I don’t have a secret love of armadillos; sorry :-(

In chronological order (drum roll please):

  1. I played Frosty the Snowman in the school play in grade 2 and was a celebrity for the rest of the year
  2. I was on our school team on Reach for the Top (we lost)
  3. I played piccolo in a military marching band during university (it was easier than carrying a rifle on parade)
  4. I met Pierre Trudeau one evening in 1977. I had a blind date for a dance in St-Jean sur Richelieu and my date was a personal friend of the Prime Minister. My French at the time was very poor while my date’s English was passable. Trudeau told us this was a great example of his vision for bilingualism; an anglophone trying to speak in French to a francophone speaking English. Vive la différence!
  5. I was an amateur vintner in Germany, after a friend passed on a very small plot of about 200 vines on the local hill that was covered with “real” vineyards. It cost me about $10 a year to lease it from the town. All I ever made was bad vinegar, but the grape-pressing party was great.

I’ll pass this along to another five people, but don’t feel guilty if you decide not to reply:

Hal – I’m certain that you have done some interesting things

Jay – because you have lots of spare time ;-)

Jon – to know more about you

Karyn – to get a different cultural perspective, from across the pond

anol – for another cultural perspective, across a different pond

If you’ve already been tagged, then of course you’re off the hook :-)

Moving from Furl to del.icio.us

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I’ve been using Furl as a social bookmarking tool for a few years but the RSS feed has not worked since September 2006. I decided to try to transfer my Furl archive (+800) to del.icio.us. I used the export as Mozilla bookmarks function in Furl and then saved the page as an HTML file on my desktop. In del.icio.us, I used the import/upload function and uploaded the file. It worked quite well and saved my files with their tags. One glitch was that all of my imported bookmarks were marked private and I had to individually change the settings to public. The other problem was that del.icio.us only imported about 500 of the bookmarks. However, I have most of my bookmarks in del.icio.us and will be using it as my primary tool for sharing web pages because it seems to be more collaborative and the RSS feed works.

Conversations create markets

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Markets are conversations and conversations create markets.

What follows is a case study that shows how important conversations are in the marketplace and especially in our ubiquitously connected world.

I have been using SmartDraw for several years and made my first post about this diagramming software in May 2004. I was approached by the company and asked to write a testimonial, which I did for free. I later became an affiliate which meant that I could place “click-through” ads on my site and I would get a commission on any subsequent sales.

This year I downloaded the new version, SD2007, and checked it out. I liked the look and feel and found it easy to use. The company had changed the free trial period from 30 days to 7 days, so I didn’t have a lot of time to test it. I decided to wait before purchasing SD2007. I posted my opinions on this blog on 31 October.

What followed were a number of questions and comments, mostly negative. I tried to help out those who commented and personally replied to some of them. This post became the unofficial SmartDraw complaint site, because there was no public forum offered by the company. In the course of the last month and a half, traffic to this post has been steady:

  • Searches containing word SmartDraw (mostly Google) that came to this site since 31 October – 211
  • Visits to my blog post on SmartDraw since 31 October – 411 (this doesn’t include any views from RSS aggregators)
  • Click-throughs to the SmartDraw download page:
    • November (negative comments began in mid-November) – 22 Clicks and 12 Downloads.
    • December to date – 3 Clicks and 2 Downloads.

Someone also set up a wikipedia page on SmartDraw, though its commercialism was in question, and even decided to link to my post. The link to my site is currently not there, perhaps because of the negative comments (5) on my post.

I signed up as a SmartDraw affiliate as an experiment with online advertising. I liked the product and felt comfortable endorsing it. The SmartDraw ad was not as “in your face” as Google Ads, so I thought it would be better for my viewers. During the course of over two years I’ve earned about $150 in commissions. I noticed that of the people who clicked-through this year, 70% downloaded the software but only 4% actually purchased it. Given the negative comments I’ve received and the lack of company response to the issues raised, I doubt that I will purchase SD2007 in the near future.

Let’s go back to the Cluetrain Manifesto, from which we get the initial thesis that markets are conversations. In this case, I think that theses 11 and 12 are much more pertinent:

11. People in networked markets have figured out that they get far better information and support from one another than from vendors. So much for corporate rhetoric about adding value to commoditized products.

12. There are no secrets. The networked market knows more than companies do about their own products. And whether the news is good or bad, they tell everyone.

SmartDraw is a small business, not some multinational corporation, and I’m sure that they’re trying to do the right thing. However, at this time SmartDraw is not engaging its customers in real conversations. Instead, customers are venting on my site, because there is no other place to go. A company blog, or an evangelist who knows what’s going on inside the company, would be quite helpful right now.

Staying quiet and letting others carry the conversation is not in the best interest of SmartDraw. It’s not in the best interest of any company. With blogs and powerful search engines, anyone can find out who is talking about your company. If your company doesn’t make it easy for customers to converse on your website, then they’ll find somewhere else to do it.

The Cluetrain left the station a long time ago; 1999 to be exact.

Update: Paul Stannard, CEO of SmartDraw has added a detailed comment on the evolution of the product to my original post.

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When oligopolies win, people lose

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Warning: Rant Ahead

Windows does it again. This evening I rented a DVD from our local movie store. I decided to watch it on my PC, a Dell XPS M1210, which I recently purchased for almost $2K. I had already watched a movie on it and had used Dell’s CinePlayer, which worked well.

On loading the movie (an older movie: Memphis Belle), I couldn’t get it to run in CinePlayer, Creative’s Media Center, RealPlayer or Windows Media Player. Here was one of the messages:

Windows Media Player cannot play the DVD because a problem occurred with digital copyright protection.

Basically, I was locked out by my software. I put the the DVD on my older Windows PC and it played like a charm.

So; I can rent a legal version of a movie and my software can decide that I cannot play it. Who are the pirates here? The oligoplolists who try to control every aspect of our lives with usurous “End User Licence Agreements” and copyright protection that protects everyone but the paying customer? I say bring on the “pirates” and bring down the big media oligopoly! Let’s keel-haul the bilge rats.

Informal Learning on the Road

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I’m heading out on the road in 2007. I will be giving a one day workshop on informal learning in Ottawa on January 30th, through CSTD. Time and location will be posted early in January. If you plan on attending, please feel free to contact me with your preferences or issues you’d like to explore. After three online unworkshops, I’m excited about trying out this new face-to-face technology ;-)

Immediately after the Ottawa workshop I’m jumping on a plane for ASTD TechKnowlege in Las Vegas. Jay, Judy and I will be presenting on informal learning on February 1st.

I’m really looking forward to seeing old and new faces and engaging in some good corridor discussions. The informal stuff is always the best.

Shaping versus Modelling

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Dr. Clare Brant was the first Aboriginal psychiatrist in Canada and a professor of Psychiatry at University of Western Ontario. In 1982 he presented Mi’kmaq Ethics & Principles, which included an examination of the differences in teaching between native and non-native cultures.

Now the Teaching; Shaping Vs. Modelling

This is a more technical kind of thing. The white people use this method of teaching their children – it’s called ‘shaping’. Whereas the Indians use ‘modelling’. Shaping is B.F. Skinner’s ‘Operant Conditioning”, if you want to look into that one. Say a white person is teaching a white kid how to dress – he uses the shaping method, one way being “rewarding successive approximations” of the behaviour he wants. Some are really complicated; for instance, if a white woman wants to teach her kid how to dress, she puts his sock on halfway and encourages him to pull it up, finishes dressing him and says he’s a good boy having done that much. The next day he learns to pull the whole sock on, then the other sock. Now that process takes about six weeks. But the white mother who does not have all that much to do can take that time to do that sort of thing every morning to teach her kid how to dress. So in this group that we ran, with these young Native people in London, we started to sniff this out, and there is nothing random about this, as a matter of fact. I asked Mary, a Native person, how she taught her kid to dress and she said, “I didn’t, he just did it.” And I said, “Well, what do you mean?” It came to me that she did it until he was four or five years old, and then one day when the kid felt competent, he took over and did it himself. He did it then ever after, unless he was sick or regressed in some way.

Brant concludes this section by stating:

I’ve been having some collaboration with a professor of education, and he says that modelling is the best way to teach people. But shaping is the method that has to be used because there is so much information that has to be imparted in the system that you cannot use modelling. I suppose that the ultimate method would be for the teacher to go up to the blackboard and do algebraic equations for 7 or 8 months and invite one of the kids to come join him and do one with him. and maybe if one of the kids got interested, or knew how to do it, he could start solving the algebraic equation. But that’s not going to happen in the school system. There’s just not enough time.

I think that our industrial society has come full circle and in a McLuhanesque reversal we are overwhelmed by information. No longer can we use shaping but we have to reverse back to modelling. Shaping worked when our environment was complicated, but it is now complex. As knowledge expands and new information is constantly added, who has the base knowledge to do the shaping anyway? In our internetworked world, modelling how to learn is a better strategy than shaping on a pre-defined curriculum.

As can be seen by Dr. Brant’s examples, with modelling the learner is in control and with shaping the teacher is in control. This takes me back to something we were told about toilet training children.

Q: How long will it take if you train (shape) them?

A: About 3 months.

Q: How long will it take if you let them learn (model) by themselves?

A: About a quarter of a year.

Gracian on Learning

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I dusted off the cover of a book I bought many years ago, and found some words of wisdom. The Art of Worldly Wisdom by Baltasar Gracian (1601-1658) to be exact. I found several that relate to informal learning in organisations.

Advice is sometimes transmitted more successfully through a joke than through grave teaching.

The wisdom passed along in conversation has meant more to some than the seven arts, no matter how liberal.

Much of our lives is spent gathering information. We see few things for ourselves, and live trusting others.

A shortcut to becoming a true person: put the right people beside you.

Nothing bewitches like service to others, and the best way to win friends is to act like one. The most and best we have depends on others.

The art of conversation is the measure of a true person. No human activity calls for so much discretion, for none is more common. It is here that we win or lose.

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Pre-Christmas Spam Sale?

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I’ve been averaging 200 – 300 comment spam per day over the past few months. Today, my comment spam has bounded like twelve lords a leaping to over 1,500 in the past 24 hours. Luckily, all of the comment spam has been caught by the Akismet spam plug-in for WordPress. According to the Akismet site, “93% of all comments are spam”, and my own stats confirm that.

Thank you, Akismet. You are doing the world a great service.