So I finally decided that Google had more than enough information about what I liked and disliked, that the laggy Google Reader interface was much more trouble than it’s worth, and Google Reader meant a separate and completely unnecessary inbox, which was playing havoc with my workflow.
So instead of going for a specialized RSS feed reader, I decided to integrate my RSS subscriptions into an inbox that I already know how to manage: my email.
I’ve done this before, and it worked really well. New items show up as emails, which I already know how to manage online and offline. They’re easy to forward, easy to search for, and so on. I’ll give up the Buzz and “sharing” option, but that’s what Twitter’s for, anyway.
To get this working, I installed the rss2email program on my server, and set up a cron job to run it every 15 minutes or so. New articles are emailed to me at a special address, which my mail server automatically files to a “news” folder. In order to get rss2email to use the same subscriptions I had in Google Reader, I had to add OPML import support to rss2email. It was pretty simple. I found a patch for this already, and just had to port it to the most recent version of rss2email. Here’s the updated patch, which applies cleanly to version 2.66. With that patch in place, I exported the Google Reader OPML file, and with a quick r2e import google-reader-subscriptions.xml, all my subscriptions were now being polled by rss2email.
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Although it may be simple to conflate the Apps for Democracy and Apps for America contests with the exciting new Apps for Army contest, they really couldn’t be more different. Together they represent an exciting experiment in what it takes to pull communities together around a problem. Though they all offer cash prizes to the winners, they each took a slightly different approach, with different results.
Cash incentives are somewhat controversial in open source circles. Most old-school advocates for open source development strongly prefer developers who are personally invested — famously, those that “scratch their own itch.” Developers who are paid a salary to work on software are also invested, but perhaps less zealously than those who are solving a problem they are afflicted with themselves. Developers who are working for glory and cash prizes, the model used by the “Apps for…” competitions, is yet another class of developer, and despite the excellent submissions to the previous contests, there are valid concerns that the quality and sustainability of the code is not as good as it could be with a different set of incentives. Time will tell, of course.
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Michael Daconta at GCN has posted a brief call to arms for the software industry. Here’s the gist:
Although I am a believer in free markets and the benefits of competition, industry has a responsibility to work together on the foundational layers to build security, quality and reliability from the ground up to advance the professionalism of the field. In essence, the information technology industry must emulate other engineering disciplines, or technological disasters and cybersecurity holes will worsen.
Daconta is uneasy with the number of platforms and methods available to software developers, and sees ever-more options and disruptions in the near future; IPv6 and 64-bit computing seem to trouble him particularly. We’re already balkanized and disorganized, how can we possibly expect to produce reliable and useful software with all this messy innovation happening?
The answer, of course, is control. Lots of it. Specifically, three proposals:
- Licenses for software developers
- A new, reliable, layered software platform developed by the NSF and DARPA
- Treat software like engineering, not art.
Gracious. I barely know where to start. Let’s try to imagine the software development world in five years, with these proposals in place.
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Like most of Jonathan Ive’s work, the iPad is beautiful. Like most of Apple’s work, it also makes me uneasy. I was planning to write about this feeling of unease, so imagine my delight when I discovered that Timothy B. Lee and others have already done the work for me. In “Why Geeks Hate the iPad,” “Tinkerer’s Sunset,” and “Nothing Creative,” we’re treated to a thorough overview of what’s sacrificed when Apple compels you to trade flexibility and freedom for a shiny new platform. I believe you can apply this same analysis to the iPhone, the iTouch, and everything else in the Apple’s consumer electronics stable.
Put another way, the iPad and its siblings are not personal computing platforms. They’re Apple computing platforms. The hardware itself is sealed, discouraging anyone from seeing how it works or improving on it. The platform software is largely proprietary. The vaunted App Store, which brought to the computing public the same ease of installation and application management that open source users have been enjoying for years, is rigidly controlled to advance Apple’s interests. Just ask Google.
Now, this doesn’t make Apple evil. They’re obviously entitled to produce as many beautiful, locked-up devices as they like. It’s important, though, to understand just what you’re trading for Apple’s warm, comfortable architecture of control.
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In case you needed more evidence that IA is a chaotic, arbitrary, and disorganized activity in the DOD, this map tries to impose order on the process. Lulz ensue. Driptray rightfully declares this mess a “glorious misuse of the portable document format.”
HT: The inimitable Mr. Carr
On the heels of the Open Government Memo of January 21st, 2009, the Obama Administration has issued the Open Government Directive. The Directive tells agencies what they must do to meet the expectations set by the Memo. The directive names many deadlines for agency compliance, most of them around reducing FOIA backlogs and increasing the amount of agency data released to the public. This isn’t surprising, since the Memo names transparency, collaboration, and participation as the guiding principles. Transparency is the easiest to articulate and implement — just get the data out there in a useful form. Josh Tauberer’s Open Data is Civic Capital: Best Practices for “Open Government Data” is an excellent handbook for doing this. If you want to track agencies’ progress, the Sunlight Labs folks have produced the outstanding Open Watcher.
What’s most interesting to me, and my friends at Open Source for America, though, are the more ambiguous orders. Although the Directive does not use the phrase ‘open source software’ at all, many of the principles and methodologies described are obvious references to open source. Many of these orders stand out as opportunities for open source developers, in the public and private sector, to demonstrate how our development model can help the Administration also make good on the last two principles: collaboration and participation. As Macon Phillips, the White House New Media Director said, “Open Source is… the best form of civic participation.”
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In mid-October, the U.S. Department of Defense CIO released a memo on the use of open source software in the DOD. The Clarifying Guidance Regarding Open Source Software (OSS) was hailed as tremendous leap forward for open source software in the US Government. And indeed it is. At its heart, the memo is fairly simple. The basic points are:
- This is not formal policy, just a clarification of policy that already exists.
- OSS is COTS (Commercial, Off-the-Shelf Software) and the same rules that apply to regular software apply to OSS. In other words: you cannot disqualify an open source software product just because it is open source.
- Further, the memo reminds us that COTS software has special status in DOD procurements, because you’re supposed consider commercial alternatives before writing your own.
The memo has been under development for 18 months, and can trace its lineage to the DOD-commissioned report by MITRE. You can think of the 2007 Navy memo as a kind of prototype for this document, which applies to all of DOD.
The memo’s Attachment 2, though, grows more bold, offering several specific benefits that open source software can offer the DOD:
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Higher education is now almost absurdly expensive. In an effort to reduce the cost of developing and delivering educational material, there are a number of initiatives around open curricula right now. The idea is that content generated by the academic community can be made freely available so that professors and publishers don’t have to reinvent the wheel each time. It’s basically a commons for educational content. The folks at the Community College Consortium for Open Educational Resources (who have a pretty great blog on this subject) call it “OER.” Ultimately, advocates like CCCOER hope to make higher education more accessible. The Open College Textbook Act of 2009, for example, notes that 200,000 students do not enroll in a higher education system due to the cost, which includes an average annual textbook budget of $805 to $1,229. The bill appropriates $15 million in 2010 for one-year grants to anyone who wants to create open content.
A few weeks ago, the Obama administration announced a $12 billion investment in community colleges, and $500 million of that is allocated to sponsoring the creation of open courseware. As described by Inside Higher Ed:
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I’ve been there quite a lot, lately. This last weekend’s highlight was a spectacular time on the High Line.
I'm the Chief Technology Strategist for the Red Hat US Public Sector group, an open source and free culture advocate, a picky drinker, an amateur aesthete, and a dog enthusiast.
