Technology

information & communication technology

Open Source Model for Developing Bids

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Nick Booth passed this on to me a while back. It’s about a bid to government that was developed in a completely open and transparent manner. The entire story and process is available at the Open Innovation Exchange:

This Open Innovation Exchange site was launched on April 22 2007 and used until May 14 2007 to develop an “open source bid” to the UK Cabinet Office, which invited proposals for a Third Sector innovation exchange. The invitation to tender for a £1.2 million three-year programme said:

“The innovation exchange will pilot new approaches to fostering, exchanging and replicating third sector innovation, ensuring that public services benefit from the approaches they pioneer. The innovation exchange will seek to connect innovators to one another, to those who might benefit from their work, including public service, commissioners and third sector organisation, and others who might invest in their work.”

We believed that we could develop a better proposal by sharing our ideas with others, and inviting comments and contributions. We succeeded in that, and delivered the final proposal on May 14. It is available here.

However , we aren’t are stopping now, and we invite people to continue to contribute ideas on how the exchange – and other collaborations in the field – could work.

Below are a set of question and answers on our original approach to the bid. Simon Berry answers some challenging questions here.

You would never see a corporation opening up its bidding process to the world and if it tried, its lawyers would strongly advise against it. But in this case, it worked. Once again, an industrial model has been flipped on its head by the Net.

I believe that this is an indicator of the future of collaborative work and shows how the open source model is not just for software development but can be used in almost all work endeavours.  The Internet is a revolutionary and powerful tool for all of us, as long as we keep it open and neutral.

Seen in passing

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If mobile learning interests you (you know, cell phones and the lot), then check out the new and improved mLearnopedia.

I was also introduced to Coventi this week, which is similar to Google Documents, but 1) it’s not owned by Google and therefore is not connected to all that other information about your Web life and 2) it features a chat bar. Think of it as a user-friendly wiki with integrated text chat. Conventi offers 3 roles – reviewer, author & owner.

RSS Feed Stealing?

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Scott Leslie is concerned that someone has taken his entire feed and used it in a way that contravenes his Creative Commons license, which happens to be the same one I use for this site.

A quick aside – if you don’t understand CC licensing, you should review the license explanations before you start using other people’s work on the Web, and if you are a teacher, you should ensure that students understand copyright and copyleft.

In my comment to Scott, I noted that there is another organisation, The Human Capital Institute, that uses many RSS feeds (including mine) but makes you register for their “service” before you can read a complete post. Some might think that this too would contravene the copyright license that I use. Here are two other CC-licensed sites I noticed from the same website:

e-learnspace

InternetTime Blog

I also noted that many blogs do not have clear copyright statements, like The Learning Circuits Blog, which means that they are fully copyrighted, so that taking an entire feed would likely infringe copyright. If you have a blog or website and want to share, then you should use something as simple and easy as a Creative Commons license. However, it obviously doesn’t mean that everyone will play by the rules.

Update: Following my notification of copyright infringement to the Human Capital Institute, they promptly deleted my feed from their resource list.

Business Plans in 2009

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Three years ago, Seth Godin wrote about what the future might hold in 2009 and I wondered how this would change anyone’s business plan. We’re more than half way there, so are these assumptions coming true?

There is no doubt that hard drive space is getting cheaper, and Gmail’s 2.8 GB of free space is a good indication. It sure is getting harder to sell storage space.

Wi-fi connections are not everywhere but many of us wish they were. Some cities are more advanced than others, but my recent travels to the US and larger Canadian cities found it to be expensive, whereas I can get free wi-fi down the street in our small town.

Yes, it seems that everyone has a digital camera or at least one on their cell phone.

Connection speeds have improved (mine have doubled) but it will be a great leap to be 10 to 100 times faster.

I’m not sure about Wal*Mart’s sales but at least the company is going to opt for compact fluorescent lightbulbs.

Compulsory retirement ages seem to be a thing of the past and I think that they will be gone in a few years,. When I was in the military, the compulsory retirement age was 55 and in 2004 it was raised to 60. There is little doubt that this trend will continue.

As for the assumption that our current professions will be gone or totally different, I believe that change will be uneven. In my own area of experience, I think that Instructional Design as a field will all but disappear.

So what does this mean for business plans?

  1. Don’t try to build another #$%* portal, because people have lots of places to put their stuff and they are getting information from a whole bunch of sources. Think small pieces, loosely joined.
  2. Anywhere can be a hotspot so adding wi-fi just might get some interesting people to gather around you and that’s what’s really important.
  3. All of those digital pictures are looking for a place to be shared. They might even improve your organisation’s learning about itself and its environment.
  4. Remember those folks that you thought would leave with all their knowledge? Well, they’re not leaving, or they’re probably interested in a new relationship, so get them while you can.
  5. Job? What’s a job?

Bridging Troubled Waters

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It’s Friday, and if you have some time you may want to watch the keynote speech by Jennifer James, at the BCEd Online Conference. It’s a streamed presentation and is over an hour long but I found it fascinating. James is a cultural anthropologist and discusses how technology and people have been interacting for thousands of years and links this to the role of educational technologists.

Near the end of her presentation, James talks about the stages of human adaptation to major new technologies, such as the Internet.

First the technology concentrates energy and changes our definition of intelligence. For instance, emotional intelligence is becoming more important in an environment of limitless data and information.

Second, the economic system adapts to the technology. This results in population and demographic shifts.

Third, the demographics adapt to the economics.  James – “If you have an international market; you have an international labour pool; you have an international gene pool. And wait and see who your kids and grandkids bring home for dinner.”

… and then there is a long time lag … (this is where we are in relation to the Internet economy/society)

Finally, the culture changes when the old mythologies break.

Take some time, put your feet up and have a listen. Please comment, if you have the urge.

Elgg powers business and academic community

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Emerald Publishing has started an online community based on the open source Elgg platform. The news release compares the community with MySpace and Facebook:

Amanda Briggs, Head of Research and Development at Emerald, says, “InTouch was developed with our research and contributor communities in mind. Online technologies have had a dramatic effect on the educational and learning environment and students regularly use informal social networking sites such as MySpace and Facebook to communicate with their classmates. Now, Emerald authors and editors can take advantage of these technologies in a space that is designed specifically for the academic and business community – InTouch. Users can create online communities based around journals or research interests, share ideas and expertise with (and learn from) their peers. This service supports our commitment to building and facilitating communities around key management research areas.”

This is great to see, but most of that functionality comes from Elgg, which only gets a quick mention. You would think that they could have at least put a hyperlink to Elgg in their news release, n’est-ce pas?

Office 2007 Overkill for Schools

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Via Stephen Downes and Dave Warlick is a previous report I filed away in January. It seems that the British Educational Communications and Technology Agency (Becta) doesn’t see much value in adopting MS Office 2007 for schools:

A Becta review of Office 2007 identified more than 170 new features, but considered many of them to be of more use in a business environment than an educational one.

A detailed analysis of the new functionality again found that none of the new features was a “must have” for schools and colleges.

Becta said, “As the costs of deployment of Office 2007 would be significant, Becta has not identified any convincing justification for the early adoption of Office 2007.”

I’ve already said why I won’t use Vista and I don’t feel any pressure to start with Office 2007 either.

Using Wndows Vista is Torture

Izimi, the future of file-sharing?

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 Izimi

Izimi is a program that allows you to share unlimited files without uploading them to a third-party site:

izimi places the power right in your hands, where it should be – it’s a truly democratic web. With izimi there’s no need to upload your content to any server: you decide what you’ll publish, there are no limits on quantity or quality (we won’t degrade your videos, photos or music), and you retain ownership and control.

In my case, it should make my website host happy that I’m using less bandwidth [right, Chris?]. According to some people, Izimi will make YouTube obsolete. Though I’m not sure about this, I’ve downloaded the application and have set up my Izimi site.

There’s only one file available available on my site so far, Seth Godin’s Bootstrapper’s Bible. It’s a Creative Commons licensed PDF that I used to have available for download from this site.

Izimi requires M$ .NET framework, so it may take a while to install. Izimi only works on Windows XP or Vista, so I may not be using it for long, unless they make it cross-platform compatible in the future.

Business Quote of the Week

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Patents and copyrights were conceived as individual rights, not corporate goods. And open source proves that inventions can be even grander than before if rights to the work are held in common.To some people this still sounds like revolution, like a peasant’s revolt. It’s not. It’s just a new market reality, one which has no use for Kings.

Dana Blakenhorn on ZDNet.

The difference between revolution and evolution is a matter of perspective.

Update: On second thought, perhaps this decision from the Supreme Court of Canada (2002) would be a better quote:

Excessive control by holders of copyrights and other forms of intellectual property may unduly limit the ability of the public domain to incorporate and embellish creative innovation in the long-term interests of society as a whole, or create practical obstacles to proper utilization.

Facebook selling your information?

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Last week, I said that I thought that there should be an open source alternative to Facebook (and there is at least one) . A few days later I came across this video overview of the money and politics behind Facebook, though I wasn’t sure of its veracity. Today, I saw this note from Lorne Novolker on Facebook:

Apparently Facebook has started SELLING user information (surprise, surprise!) to third parties. They call it the “Facebook Development Platform.”

To restrict use of your information, do the following:
Click “Privacy” on top right.
Under the “Facebook Platform” section click”Edit Settings”.
Scroll down to the bottom and UNCHECK ALL of the items under facebook platform.

Most creepy is the inclusion of photographs!
(Do your friends a favor and repost this as your own note.)

Unless a platform is truly open source, it seems that when we participate, someone else always profits.