Archive for the ‘Links & Misc’ Category

Free Exchange, Open Money

Monday, June 27th, 2011

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 :-/

Beware the Walled Garden

Thursday, April 21st, 2011

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:

Surveying the Web

Friday, October 22nd, 2010

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.

ISFD & schools info

Thursday, September 9th, 2010

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:

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, from http://gcompris.net/ )

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

Food from the city

Tuesday, July 27th, 2010

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.)

Food for thought: links for 2010-06-29

Wednesday, June 30th, 2010

Emacs - time to modernise? (links for 2010-06-24)

Friday, June 25th, 2010

Seeds for change (links for 2010-05-06)

Friday, May 7th, 2010

Growing rare veg - some resources

Open Hardware & CopyLeft

Monday, April 12th, 2010

LinuxUser & Developer, issue 86, just came through the letterbox. I flicked through and a reader’s letter caught my eye - not because it called my Arduino article “wonderful” <blush>, but for its links to CopyLeft hardware resources.

Small Form Factor, Free Software, Open Hardware - 3 out of 3 for the NanoNote.

Small Form Factor, Free Software, Open Hardware - 3 out of 3 for the NanoNote.

QI-hardware, producers of the Ben NanoNote, and the MilkyMist One boards are all projects deserving much wider publicity within (and beyond) the Free Software and hardware hacking communities. I’m certainly very tempted by the NanoNote.

Thanks to Wolfgang Spraul of QI Hardware for writing in to LU&D with the links.

Picture Credit: http://sharism.cc/ - licensed under CC-BY-SA 3.0.

Answering the “non-believer” (links for 2010-03-12)

Saturday, March 13th, 2010