GoodGNUs

This article is a placeholder for the links that will be appearing here for readers of the “Free Exchange, Open Money” article in Linux User & Developer magazine, issue 104 - and for those attending my recent talks on the subject. I’m expanding and tidying the links, and they’ll be put up here on 28th August.*

It can be reaches with the shortened URL, http://ur1.ca/4jn41

Meanwhile if you’re interested in the Cuprium Credit Union software, please contact me: +44 (0) 77 94 56 07 14.

*Yes, it did say 25th - GCSE celebrations & urgent work intervened :-/

Yesterday’s ShropCamp event was a great success, attracting a diverse crowd of people wanting to work with Open Data and local government. In particular it brought in a far greater crowd of non-technical people than these events generally attract.

This is good news, of course - but it did mean a lot less awareness of data privacy and, in particular, data ownership.

Facebook

In the four sessions I attended, participants talked around issues of building Facebook pages, and getting their communities to come there. This brings up one or two issues I promised to address and link to, so here they are:

Going to the places where your community already is, and talking to them there, is a strategic decision, and a correct one. Selecting Facebook, and building your presence there is a tactical decision, and one not to be made without a clear understanding of the downsides.

I’ve covered a lot of this in an article in Linux User last year, introducing open social networks: Social networking: The good, the bad & the ugly. The article was aimed at a technical audience, although the discussion on data privacy and ownership is non-technical. However, to save you wading through it, let’s cover the main points.

Whose data?

1. Facebook is very good at importing data from your other networks, whether tweets or social bookmarks. It’s not so good at passing it back to the outside world. In particular your contacts as a user or your community as a group (those who “like” your page). Should you ever lose your Page, through inadvertently violating the terms of service, what happens to your carefully-nurtured group?

2. There is little privacy on Facebook. Although you can change your settings, few users are even aware of how much about themselves they expose to advertisers and others. If you are building a group of vulnerable users, it may be better to hold most of your discussions with them somewhere you can control the safety of the environment

But our users are on Facebook

There’s no easy answer - you must go where your community is. But go in with your eyes open.

Try and collect name / e-mail at least by persuading people to sign up for a minimal set of announcements (e.g. once a month), which should get the majority of your community to click through and register. That way, were you to ever lose your FB page, you have not lost touch with everyone.

Investigate federated & open social networks. GNU Social and Diaspora are not ready for mainstream use yet, but consider trying Status.Net a sort of federated Twitter, which will make the foundation of GNU Social) internally with staff and volunteers. You can set it to forward all posts to Twitter - and thence on to FB, your blog, and elsewhere - yet remain in full control of your data, and your privacy settings.

Postscript

You can read a little more at:

The Interview with Status.net’s Evan Prodromou.

See links relating to this & ScraperWiki which I mentioned at #Shropcamp

and for those who asked me for more about what I do: try this: -)

& the Complementary Currency Unconference.

Postscript:Political Facebook Groups Deleted On Royal Wedding Day

[added 30/04/2011]
“The Anti-Cuts Space London facebook group has been taken down without warning or permission. In the last 12 hours, facebook has deleted around 50 sites…” Read more here. Interesting comments, including additional groups deleted in the original article. Further coverage in The Guardian.

See also: http://www.openrightsgroup.org/blog/2011/facebook-takedowns:-burying-bad-news

& http://wiki.openrightsgroup.org/wiki/FB_takedowns

And compare with FB’s tardiness in responding over many of the hate groups with pages on Facebook.

To re-iterate: play in somebody else’s walled garden and you play by their rules. If you want freedom of expression, and control of your environment, then you have to make your own. Listen to this:

A couple of chats recently - at North Staffordshire GeekUp and elsewhere - have turned to programmer education. My particular input to the conversation, reflected the same concerns I express in discussion over the male:female imbalance in Free Software projects, namely we need to enthuse people about IT early on.

In short, people are being turned off (or at least not turned on to) IT at an early age. Programming, and everything web, too, is creative. It should appeal in some way to nearly everyone.

Let’s get some real and fun IT education into Primary schools - don’t wait until it’s too late. I’d love to see playground games where kids take the part of bits moving through logic gates; 10 year-olds should be flowcharting how to program a robot to make a cup of tea; and kids - all kids - should learn how to program. It’s a skill that teaches valuable logical thinking.

Where to start on the programming? Naturally, every time a group of geeks discuss this there’s a mini language war, but choice of language makes a difference. Simply, don’t use a language that overwhelms: C is simple, but involves learning too much about computing for a 12 year old to dive in and start thinking about how to program; Java is just a mess, and too big.

I’d be fine with Ruby or Python, and perhaps a Lisp dialect like Clojure could be used - but now I’m reviewing Eloquent JavaScript, by Marijn Haverbeke [Kindle edition], & I think it could be adapted.

The big advantage with JavaScript is that every computer contains a runtime for it - and one with which most kids are familiar - the Web Browser.

The recent GeekUp thread on programming prompted me to try Fizz-Buzz in JS, and there’s little cruft in the language to stop you getting straight down to it:

<html>
<head><title>Fizz-buzz</title></head>
<body><script type="text/javascript">

var count = 1;
while (count <= 100) {
  if (count % 3 + count % 5 == 0){
    document.write("fizz-buzz");
  }
  else if (count % 3 == 0){
    document.write("fizz");
  }
  else if (count % 5 == 0){
    document.write("buzz");
  }
  else{
    document.write(count);
  }
  count += 1;
  document.write(" &nbsp;&nbsp; ");
}

</script></body></html>

So what do people think? Anyone interested in helping to write a course for 8 to 13 year olds to learn programming? Using JavaScript? Want to do it in another language? What should we teach and what should we miss out? Let me know in the comments…

JavaScript is available everywhere that the Web is.

EDIT

Please join the conversation at http://teachyourkidstocode.org/wiki/ as we try and get something going - all ideas welcome :-)

To MadLab, yesterday, for the Together Works AGM. Together Works is the social enterprise network for Greater Manchester, and the AGM was a chance to network, then take part in a debate on the future of Social Enterprise in the current climate of cuts.

The panel included Social Entrepreneur Dave Dawes, who started with a strong denouncement of grant-dependency in the sector: “Grants are evil, corrosive - they will destroy you. They are precisely the same as heroin”

“What amazing sculptures would Michaelangelo have done if hadn’t been dependent for 4 years on an income stream from the Pope for the  Sistine Chapel,” he continued.

All of us in the room had been involved at one time with voluntary organisations that had, if not sold their soul, at least severely switched direction for the sake of grant funding. However not all social entrepreneurs have completed a change of mindset to meeting a market’s needs - Dawe’s provocative phrasing drew a stark picture of the effective choice.

Embracing failure

Fear of failure was another key topic as one speaker seemed to say that if you got your market right you wouldn’t fail - forcing me to point out that all sorts of things could make an enterprise fail, but that was a fact of life. You recover and move on.

What’s important is not letting fear of failure stop you trying again (and again).

In that vein I mention here that following the disappearance of the two best people I had to launch a new Social Enterprise for voluntary sector Cloud Software, I’m working on new plans for two projects that had been on the back-burner.

Anybody looking for a new project, feel free to get in touch. I’ll post more here later as things develop.

Yes, too busy to post much - but as 50% of time seems taken up by websites, I took the Survey For People Who Make Websites, 2010. Why? Well, without web developers taking part we wouldn’t get this sort of information.

It’s been a while since we’ve done any work with schools - something I hope to change in the next year, but it meant that when I was asked to write up case studies and apps for FOSS in education, to contribute to International Software Freedom Day leaflets, I had to go back a bit.

I’ve been involved in a number of efforts to get Free Software into UK schools (and often written on the subject), as well as working with schools to get IT into the community, so it’s ironic that things seem so quiet just as the biggest opposition to FOSS has vanished.

Here, then, is the text on:

• Educational software - the highlights.
• How to increase your IT provision while cutting spending.
• Curriculum software – some thoughts.

I’ll add more to the page as events dictate (but bear in mind that things I meant to post here a year ago are still unposted - if you think there are too many blog posts on the Internet, just think how dwarfed they are by the number of unposted items, particularly since we all started diverting our efforts to micro-blogging).

A memory game from GCompris, by Bruno Coudoin (screenshot under GNU/FDL)

To Liverpool Wednesday, for an enjoyable afternoon interviewing Aidan McGuire and Francis Irving of ScraperWiki, then an evening at Liverpool’s Social Media Café event.

ScraperWiki is a code wiki that provides you with a maintained scraper to extract data from any public source on teh InterWebs, for any purpose. A great example is the map showing oil drilling around UK shores at the same depth as the Gulf of Mexico Disaster. Thanks to Aidan and Francis for lots of info about what ScraperWiki is up to, and where it’s going - if I can’t find a publisher for the interview (my usual outlet can’t fit it in), I might post more here.

Talks at #smcLiv were given by Mike Nolan, on coping with social media overload, and Jon Bloor, on Publish & (Don’t) be damned. Social Media & the Law. Mike is certainly tapping a rich vein, given the number of information channels we’re all hooked into, and talk around the tables afterwards ranged from GTD through #inboxZero to using the good old-fashioned telephone to cut down on e-mail.

Social Media Café at Static Liverpool, 25 August 2010, pic by Mike Nolan

There was also a talk given by myself, on Open Social Networks - or what to do about FaceBook being Evil. I’ll be writing here soon about GNU social, Diaspora*, and other ways of taking back control of your social media use, but for now please see the article at LinuxUser magazine - and the extracted interview with Evan Prodromou.

As I prepare for the third Ignite Liverpool event, I found my first talk online, on urban food - from foraging to guerilla gardening. As a pecha kucha style talk it’s a bit of a gallop, but manages to cover a few points.

(It also doesn’t jump after a minute like the Manchester recording did.)

I’m at WordCampUK - a conference for WordPress developers and users. There have been great presentations, from Accessibility & HTML5 to WordPress Themes. However the real value of any conference is the corridor time, face-to-face chat with peers, and people doing all sorts of unexpected and fun things with Free Software.

WordCampUK has been a bit short on corridor time, but has made up for it with socials, and lunch-time meetings: today in particular when most of the 3rd sector people got together for a not-for-profits meetup. As promised, below are the details of everyone at that lunch, so that WordPress people working in the voluntary sector can find each other:

Not-for-Profit people working with WordPress

Name/Twitter or Web Link & region or country:

Richard Weltman, NW

Chris Middleton, Notts

Jason King, London & NW

Steve Graham, S/SW

Linda Parkinson-Hardman, SW

Chris Witham, Yorks/Derbys

Daniel Koskinen, Finland

Kristina Krause, Seattle & Kent, UK

Chris Booth, Scotland

Jag Gill, Sheffield

Alex Stuart, Scotland

Chris Murray, Sheffield

Andrew Laughland, Bucks

Richard Smedley, NW

Added in from comments & tweets…

John Adams, Glasgow

Steve Taylor, London

If you’re doing something with WordPress in the not-for-profit sector, please feel free to put your name and link into the comments. I’ve no idea if anything useful will come out of this, along the lines of Plone’s NGO group, or Drupal’s various specialist groups - I just offer this set of links up with a vague hope ;-)

Update

There’s now a mailing list for anyone helping the sector using WordPress - sign up and say hello, everyone welcome.

I’ll be giving a potted 45min version of the Social Media & the Accessible Web introductory course at the next Green Drinks meeting. 6pm, Thurs 8 July at The Loggerheads pub, Shrewsbury. Also featuring Judy Coleridge, Editor of Shrewsbury Green Guide.

Feel free to come along - Green Drinks is also a great networking event. Meet people from environmental businesses, campaigns and social enterprises from across the region.