GoodGNUs

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:

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.

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 spent the early part of this week helping Birmingham Friends of the Earth upgrade their LTSP system; one installed by my former colleague, the late Richard Rothwell. There’s always space for a hiccough or two across a major upgrade, but as ever the excellent community-contributed documentation on the Ubuntu fora provided answers to every puzzle.

The advantage with LTSP is that this is only worked through once, on one PC, to upgrade a whole office network. For an environmental organisation like Birmingham FoE, however, there are more compelling reasons for choosing the technology.

What is LTSP?

Linux Terminal Server Project may sound like jargon, but what it means is a return to the computer mainframe days when one computer did all the work for thousands of connected dumb terminals (little more than teletypewriters) at the user end.

An LTSP installation - many desktops, one new computer

In this case the mainframe is no clanking, room-sized monstrosity, but a Quad-core Xeon with a few extra GB of RAM, and the terminals are older PCs discarded as useless, and once destined for landfill.

In this country we throw out 3 million PCs every year. The majority of which could be used in homes, offices and community centres, given the apropriate GNU/Linux install - but even the slowest and lowliest can live again with LTSP.As old computers are free, all you need is space: that spare room in the community centre can be an income-producing training room full of PCs.

Take a 12 year-old PC, remove the hard disks & fans, and plug into an LTSP network. The PC network boots from the server, finding a Linux kernel to run, then displaying apps which are running remotely and speedily on the server. Ancient PCs with only 64MB of memory sit on desks running OpenOffice.org, Mozilla FireFox & dozens of other memory-heavy programs.

Each desktop PC is drawing half the power it would with its own hard disk and the heavier load of local apps - alternatively special thin-client terminals can be used, drawing even less power: silent and cool-running. Each PC can be simply replaced with another without fuss, as all of the apps and data are on the server.

There’s now just one computer to back up. One to upgrade. Any user can sit at any desk and have all of her e-mails and docs there - ideal for busy organisations with many volunteers, or in education.

A footnote

Many times LTSP enabled some schools (such as Skegness Grammar School in the UK, and the Spanish region of Extremadura) to massively expand their IT provision, while saving money. In the case of Extremadura, this meant one PC per 2 pupils in every classroom, and 2 weeks for 2 people to update 80,000 desktops!

After a decade of opposing attempts to introduce Free Software systems like this to UK schools, the quango BECTA met with its demise this week. We now have the chance to get more IT, more freedom, and better learning opportunities into school for less money & lower power consumption. Perhaps it’s lucky that the money ran out before the education budget got committed to “An iPad for every child”?

Saturday saw the annual Chorlton Big Green Festival, one of the country’s largest Green Fairs, and this year blessed with a stall from Manchester Free Software (MFS).

Those of us volunteering to staff the MFS Stall had a great time - not just enjoying the vegan food and drink of the Fair, and catching up with old friends from Manchester’s numerous environmental groups in attendance, but from several hours of talking to the general public about software freedom.

While MFS membership is heavy in Unix admins and programmers, the group is about the philosophy of software freedom, not playing with technology - thus we all enjoyed engaging with the public on why freedom matters in software. Passers by ranged from committed Ubuntu users to those without a computer at home, yet nearly all were responsive to the principle of software built on values of community, education, and sharing knowledge.

Freedom in the 3rd Sector

Indeed, it continues to remain a puzzle why so many in the charity sector actively campaign against Free Software solutions, and promote the sector’s continued reliance on an unsustainable model of dependence on a few tax-subsidised, private companies.

These are issues I hope to tease out a little in my talk on Free Software in the UK Voluntary Sector, and why you should care, at MFS’s 20th April meeting. I’d welcome people with a wide range of views to come along and debate the issue afterwards.

To the UKUUG’s Large Scale System Administrators’ conference today where I was the rather strange choice of last minute speaker. Having spent 18 hours at the keyboard yesterday I wasn’t best prepared, but speaking on The Third Sector and Free Software shouldn’t have been too much of a challenge to me.

Indeed, despite the talk being more of a ramble at times, I think I managed to distill 4 key messages for the assembled Unix crowd:

1. There’s a real lack of IT knowledge in many VCS groups resulting in too many having no IT strategy. Please get involved with a local group at a governance level and help to make up this deficit.
2. Of all the resources lacking, training is holding back most groups. Please give a little time for effective training.
3. Many groups are tied into niche proprietary applications. Please help to code web-enabled, Free Software replacements.
4. I’m involved in lots of projects with great potential but not enough man power - please speak to me about collaborating on them.

I think I may also have mentioned what a great business model the Social Enterprise is rather too many times. :-)

If you were at the talk and want to get in touch about any of the projects, please e-mail me, or find me on Twitter.

At recent events, when I meet new people, we naturally ask each other “What do you do?”. I’m failing quite badly at summarising my activities, so thought I’d briefly list current projects here, for reference:

1. Gaia University - IT strategy, project management, & SysAdmin, in a programme to gradually upgrade every online aspect of this international sustainability university over the next few years.
2. Social Media & the Accessible Web - the Profitable Conversations courses highlighted on the courses page. Got off to a good start last year, now lining up a number of courses around the North West for the Spring.
3. Hackspace North West - 10 months ago I started bringing people together whom I thought would be interested in getting spaces off the ground. I have done very little on this as fortunately it turned out there were plenty of people also wanting local hackspaces, and they’ve gone on to work towards getting them going. Latest steps in Shropshire & Staffordshire.
4. Credit Unions - Free Software solutions
   Should have been going a long time ago, but a key personnel hiccough has delayed things. Now we’re on the move again, and I’ll be posting announcements on the project here very soon.
5. Other financial software & local currencies…
   Next step is looking for partners to take the core of the Credit Union software, and adapt it for 3rd Sector book-keeping needs. This is something VCOs have been crying out for.
   We’re also talking to those involved with Complementary Currencies in a number of countries - something just beginning to gain ground in the UK after a brief flurry of LETS in the 80s.
6. Cloud Computing for the 3rd Sector.
   Voluntary Groups can’t host sensitive data in the USA, and don’t want to be advertised at by Google. Hoping to work with Fossbox on this, and looking for a sponsor to host the 1U server I have that was donated to the project by Blue Fountain.
7. Permaculture
   I studied for my Permaculture Designers’ Certificate in 1993-94, while also studying for the Royal Botanic Gardens’ diploma at Kew. It was the wrong time, and once back home in Montgomeryshire there was little or no work. Now I find a resurgent interest in sustainable design, and am following recent speaking engagements with more practical work.
8. IT Recycling
   M6-IT cic had a great success here, with Richard Rothwell’s Supported Family Computing project reaching dozens of families with recycled hardware, Free Software, family training, and local support, as well as broadband for people previously blacklisted by the ‘phone companies.
   Search for partners to replicate this has been unsuccessful, but it’s been a privilege to lead workshops on community recycling with ArcSpace in Hulme, Manchester, with an interesting and enthusiastic crowd of local activists.
9. Web
   Preparing new sites for local sustainability groups, campaigns, and VCOs: some Wordpress, blog-based, mostly Drupal CMS. I miss Plone, but it’s unsuitable for the quick and low-resourced sites I’m doing now.
   When a few more get finished I’ll put up some portfolio pages.
10. Blogging?
    I’m developing a horicultural/ethnobotany blog I started designing some time ago, and a *nix introductory blog for NetBook users. Once I can get a 30 hour day I’ll push these through to publication. :^)
11. Journalism - Linux User & Developer magazine recently commissioned me for a few articles. The first of these, on Arduino boards and open hardware hacking, hit the shelves a few days ago.
12. In Transition - the two towns nearest to our village are both in possession of new groups moving towards Transition Town Status. I’ve been lucky enough to meet some very interesting people, and get a chance to begin to investigate local food and power solutions.
    It’s certainly easier to work totally locally, than try to bring people together at a distance as I did at FACT’s Small Steps to Sustainability workshops. More soon here, and on Twitter.

Hope that helps fill a gap until I renew my calls-for-collaboration posts, too. As to Networking events, maybe I should print this list on a postcard?

I’m travelling back from the Connecting 2.0 Communities event held this afternoon and evening at Madlab, in Manchester’s Northern Quarter. An MDDA-sponsored event to give technical and social media advice to community groups. I was arm-twisted into giving a short talk, so rapidly prepared an item on Social Media tactics and strategy culled from our 3hour course.

Firefighting IT problems? Get some IT strategy in your Org!

However the first speaker, Matt Haworth, did such a great job on exactly the same subject, with the wonderful local example of Manchester’s  Lesbian & Gay Foundation’s viral response to US hate adverts, that I mentally ripped up my improvised speech, and settled on the least interesting topic under the sun: IT Strategy. IT Happens, I told the unfortunate audience, it drops from the sky as meteorites of randomly-funded PCs, and volunteer-coded websites, and leaves organisations busy fighting fires as IT fails to do what it should, instead of concentrating on delivering the front-line services for which they have so much enthusiasm.

So, what’s to be done? Organisations with chronic IT problems tend to be those which don’t just lack an IT strategy, but often don’t really realise how essential it is to any modern organisation. These groups usually lack IT expertise not just in staff and volunteers, which is understandable, but in their boards of governance, too. In an age when hardware and software is effectively free, IT funding should first go into bringing in outside help to assess an organisation, and help to draught its strategy; something that would pay for itself in a very short time.

Back in my M6-IT days (and before that at BVSC’s MOST project) we ran courses on IT strategy for decision makers in Voluntary Sector groups. In both cases we relied on carrot and stick from partner organisations to bring in attendees who most needed the courses. What can be done? I’d love to hear ideas for reaching groups (other than springing them on an unsuspecting audience like today ;), otherwise third sector groups will continue to fight fires, instead of using IT to grow and support their organisations.

• A few voluntary organisations using Drupal web software | VoluntaryNews
  I’m developing a few sites in Drupal myself, and it’s good to see that I’m not alone in this :-)
  (tags: webdesign cms drupal vcs)

The Association For Free Software (AFFS) has been formally wound up this week. Founded at a meeting during the 2002 Sheffield Linux Seminar, AFFS was a membership organisation for UK supporters of Free Software - as distinct from a national chapter of the Free Software Foundation Europe (FSFE), which would have been more official, and less member-led.

AFFS had some great early successes, including securing donations from UKFSN (apologies for the 3rd set of initials in two paragraphs) to support UK Free Software projects. Jason Clifford’s UK Free Software Network is a not-for-profit ISP created to support the local Free Software community.

I was co-opted to the committee early on to help with projects such as campaigns to get Free Software into schools, and served as chairman for a few months before family needs and conflicts with work led to me scaling back voluntary commitments.

Sadly AFFS had problems with membership renewals, and stalled somewhere along the way. Now it has been formally wound up I hope we can look back on the successes of the Free Software community in the UK, and ponder what comes next. A UK chapter of the FSFE perhaps (the UK being the only significant country without one), or some other form of membership organisation. Does the success of the Manchester Free Software Group show the way? After all, it’s always best to build on existing structures.

Free Software Funding

The residual membership voted to distribute the remaining AFFS funds as follows:

The funds remaining in its (the AFFS') bank account have been disbursed
as follows, two thirds, £2307, to the FSFE, and one third, £1154, as a
grant, to a UK project to develop software.

In more detail, that £1154 has been entrusted to me to disburse to the Free Software projects I’m working on for the Voluntary Sector. It will be mostly used to fund financial software for Credit Unions, and to help with a project trying to provide entirely Free Software cloud services for 3rd Sector groups.

Open Collaboration

More details of the projects will appear here, as part of my “Calls for Collaboration…” posts, however here’s the basics: We have begun work on flexible, web-based, Credit Union software. Development cost is currently covered, mostly through donated time, but incidental expenses need to be met.

For cloud services I have a server generously donated by Blue Fountain Systems. We’re hoping to get donated hosting (call me on 0779 456 0714 with your generous offer), but the project has expenses to meet in getting geographically-disparate volunteers together.

By funding projects that have actually started, but are at early stages, and by funding incidental expenses to supplement voluntary and otherwise funded coding, I hope to make the community’s money go much further. For this reason I may also consider other projects that arise over the next 12 months.

Transparency & Accountability

Regular updates will appear on Twitter, with occasional summaries published here. However, to be clear on what’s happening with the money, I will publish an interim summary of progress here next summer, and a clear summary of where the money has gone at the end of 2010.