Courtesy CycleDog, Licensed CC-BY-NC
I was really pleased to read the announcement that Lockheed Martin’s social networking platform, EurekaStreams, was released as an open source project today. Lockheed is a very conservative company, and while they’re happy to use open source internally and on projects for their customers, this is their first experiment with actually running a project themselves. I think it’s a big deal, not just for Lockheed Martin, but for large corporations who are considering a more open, more innovative approach to software development. And yet, Dana Blankenhorn hates it:
I don’t see anything in Eureka Streams I can’t do in Drupal, or a number of other high-quality open source projects that have existed for years. Lockheed has reinvented the wheel — why?
So here’s the nice thing about the open source community: competition. If I think I’ve come up with a better way to solve a problem, it can easily compete with the incumbents. Low barrier to entry, we say. Let the best ideas win. Unless, apparently, the best ideas come from a company I don’t like.
Then things start going sideways:
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Billy Graham’s Hard-Drinking Granddaddy’s House
Originally uploaded by Gunnar Hellekson
I wasn’t expecting to see this today, and certainly didn’t seek it out, but I’m glad I stumbled on it. It is, by the way, in the same town in which you can find the remnants of the PTL.
Gov 2.0 Expo is coming to Washington, DC next week. It’s the latest offering from the O’Reilly event machine, which is unmatched in its ability to generate buzz and get everyone excited about topics that they’ve never heard of.
I though I’d post the sessions that I plan to attend. You can subscribe to my calendar using this link. Below, I’ve included some highlights Hope to see you all there!
Apps for the Army Keynote Kickoff
5:10pm Tuesday, 05/25/2010, Location: Ballroom A
Lt. General Sorenson is the Army’s CIO. He has a deep understanding of how technology is shaping the armed forces, and that’s led him to launch the Apps for Army competition, which is a bold attempt to change the way the DoD innovates. Rather than relying on large contracts and central planning, he’s encouraging the folks at the “edge”, the end-users, to build apps that can solve their own problems. The awards are due in August, and I’m excited to get an update.
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I’m a long-time fan of the mutt email client. I’ve probably been using it for ten years. It’s quick, text-based, and does precisely what I want. I’ve been using the vim text editor for even longer than that.
In using mutt and vim, though, I surrender some of the convenience of a mail client like Thunderbird, Mail.app or Outlook, which are fully integrated with contacts and calendars. Fortunately, mutt and vim make it easy to solve my own problem.
Finding Contacts
First, install goobook. It’s a python script that lets you easily query Google Contacts. Goobook returns results in abook format, which is great if you’re using that companion utility for mutt to provide email addresses to mutt before you draft your email. I prefer to just hit compose and get a blank email and fill in the To:, Cc:, etc. myself.
So what I want is to hit a key while I’m editing a message, have vim read the word that I’m on, and autocomplete that word based on my Google Contacts. First order of business is fixing the output of Goobook to something useful, which I do with this little script:
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Tagged abook, address book, contacts, google, Life Hacks, mutt, No Category, scripts, sed, utiltiies, vim
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The Obama Administration’s Open Government Directive ordered Federal agencies to produce open government plans by April 7th, and while some advocates are disappointed, we have before us a bewildering number of initiatives to improve transparency, collaboration, and participation across the Government. It will not surprise you to learn that I spent some time looking for places where open source is being used in these plans.
I’m not sure I can recommend reading all of the plans cover to cover, but if you’re an advocate or have a vested interest in the future of a Federal agency, these plans are fascinating peek into each agency’s interior life. It’s not just the content of the plans, which run from exciting to comical to mundane. You can also learn a great deal about how agencies view themselves from the way these plans are presented and marketed. It will come as no surprise that the Department of Justice’s rather unlovely document spends a lot of time thinking about reducing its FOIA backlog. The Department of Energy clearly understands itself to be a first a research organization, based on its flagship data sets. The Department of Defense plan is crisp, to the point, and focuses on getting the behemoth to better collaborate and interact with other agencies, rather than the public.
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“Open source and open government are not the same,” I’ve been reading recently. When discussing the role of open standards in open government transparency projects, Bob Caudill at Adobe, is concerned that open source and open standards are being conflated. He likes open standards just fine, but:
“Open standards are driving for interoperability between systems or applications, while, the goal of open source is to make high-quality software available to the market free of charge.”
As an open source advocate, I’m surprised. What, I have to wonder, is so threatening about open source? Why the effort to take open source off the table? I’ve written on the topic before, and I didn’t think this was controversial — but apparently I was wrong. Andrea DiMaio at Gartner is more pointed:
“For those who have been following some of the vintage discussions about government and open source, this will probably sound like a déjà vu. I honestly thought that people had finally given up pushing the confusion between open source and open standards or open formats, but here we are again.”
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Earmarks are a notorious vehicle for pork, in part because they lay nestled inside opaque legislative prose. In the FY2010 budget, WashingtonWatch’s crowdsourcing effort identified 40,000 separate earmarks — about 75 for every elected official.
There was a lot of talk about earmark prohibitions earlier this week, and each party swears it will be responsible with earmarks this year. But how do we hold elected officials accountable to these pledges?
Well, we can start by ensuring that earmarks see the light of day. A coalition of transparency advocates, including Sunlight Foundation, Americans for Tax Reform, OMB Watch, and OpenRegs.com all call for earmark data to be published in a standard format, so they’re easy to find, easy to understand, and easy to analyze. You can show your support here: http://earmarkdata.org/petition/
And if you’re a developer, take a look at the schema. What kind of applications could we build on top of data like this? What if I could get an RSS feed of earmarks for my elected officials as they’re reported? What if we could automatically rank the worst earmark offenders? What if we could correlate earmarks with campaign contributions automatically? The mind reels.
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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Tuesday, February 16, 2010
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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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.
