Went to this great session at Ontario Library Ass’n conference about e-IFL FOSS. Thought you might be interested.

Here are my notes:

OK – what is eIFL-FOSS? Electronic Information for Libraries: Free and Open Source Software.

From their website: “eIFL-FOSS advocates free and open source software (FOSS) use in libraries in developing and transition countries.” Access in these countries is mainly via university and academic libraries, but there is some country-wide access in some places. “eIFL-FOSS aims to raise awareness and understanding of FOSS, to facilitate eIFL.net member engagement with FOSS development communities, and to undertake projects of special significance to eIFL.net members. To this end, eIFL-FOSS: Has created a network of library FOSS champions; Promotes understanding of FOSS through case studies, briefing notes, and discussion; Has created a project supporting evaluation of and migration to a FOSS integrated library system (ILS).”

Bess spoke first about the concept of “free” software (versus “information imperialism”). Free means: “you are free to run the program; you are free to study and adapt the program to your needs; you are free to redistribute; you are free to improve the software and release your improvements (and the whole community benefits).”

Examples given about commercial software being unsuitable to many libraries (former USSR countries can get software in Russian but not in their own language, for ex.), including one about Linux available in Dzonka language in Bhutan!

An academic librarian in Ghana tells Bess, “students in Ghana can view artifacts from Britain” – through the British Library’s online collections – “more easily than they can artifacts from their own heritage.”

There was a fierce discussion at conference Bess was at about importance of open source software in countries where access to basic food and medication is scarce. I.e. software doesn’t solve these problems! No, but…where will skilled workers receive training/find relevant information?

Comment from librarian from Africa: “If knowledge/information is available to all it will be part of the solution!” “The empowerment of citizens depends on equal access to information worldwide!”

Barriers to FOSS programs: technical and language, economic, HR, socio/political, etc.

What does eIFL-FOSS do? Negotiates price/availability of e-resources/databases with publisher (reduced price dependent on country GDP); library consortium-building/developing; raising awareness about open access; eIFL-IP (intellectual property and copyright issues in libraries); knowledge sharing (e-newsletter, conferences); OSS for libraries. Sometimes also involved in creating supporting documentation for software, pilots/case studies.

EIFL receives core funding from the Open Society Institute and some other funding from various foundations including the MacArthur Foundation and the Ford Foundation.

Other guys’ notes:
http://superconference2008.blogspot.com/2008/02/session-418-open-source-and-libraries.html
eIFL-FOSS blog:
http://www.eifl.net/cps/sections/services/eifl-foss/foss-blog/

Looking back to the Million Penguins project, which wrapped up in March of last year, puts Costory in some more perspective. Million Penguins was a joint effort between Penguin Books and the Online MA in Creative Writing and New Media at De Montfort University in Leicester – the students were the Moderators, hmm… The novel was authored by some 1500 collaborators while the process was blogged by Penguins. The process blog is some of the most interesting stuff, to my mind, as you watch these book industry dudes sway from pretentious lit.crit. to Doubting Thomas, to flumoxed, laughing, bewildered, apologetic, honest, happy, over it.

All to the good, but Problem #1: why put an end to the process? Locking down a version for release and sale – hell yes, I’d expect that, though they haven’t announced any kind of publication yet, far as I know. But then I’d have thought they’d re-open a Beta version with a new call for editors and adapters and, why not, keep it evolving. Often community development doesn’t move fast and decisive like inside a strict hierarchy. It takes more mess and longer to get to the goal, but the whole point is that it’s iterative, evolving in response to found bugs, new readers, new contexts over time, gradually becoming stable and flexible enough to hold up the Internet (eg; Apache). So while the Penguin project was much lauded (and lambasted), hyped and misunderstood, it seems to me that 1 year’s worth of work means it was only at best well begun, and then worried by authorial anxiety before being safely sealed up. Sad, sort of.

Plus, Problem # 2: there’s the whole license issue, making it well, not open source at all:

By posting your submission on the Wiki Novel and the Site, you grant us a non-exclusive, perpetual, royalty-free, world-wide licence to use, reproduce, modify, adapt, translate, publish, distribute and display any content you submit to us in any format now known or later developed. If you do not want to grant us these rights, please do not submit your content to us.

As Lise Treutler pointed out a while back on Indyish, Margaret Atwood joined in on the Million Penguins project but called it “Writing without responsibility” – Thing is, this is not a feature of open source, but of the way Penguin organized their experiment. No one is attributed for their work, and Penguin keeps all the content. Kind of the opposite of true open source where names, acknowledgment and reputation are super important BECAUSE public ownership and visibility redefines the context.

Costory is less shiny, branded and publicist-y than Million Penguins, and it’s closer to the core of what the open source license theorists and activists have been thumping about for decades but it’s still limited a bit, in terms of it’s ability to activate exponential effects, by the license chosen. Unlike the Penguin project, everything on the site is licensed NonCommercial Attribution Share Alike.

In neither case is the fiction fantastic, but call me crazy, I have a lot of hope for the next evolution of this experiment with collective authorship. I think when it’s done right this process can provide inspiration and empowerment to distributed artists. A Costroy with an inspiring foundation, a dedicated leader, and licensed so that everyone who participates can sell copies (crazy sounding? but that’s how Linux works, and those are the original Million Penguins =) could become a perpetually refilling and refining resource of art and income. So Indyish is keeping an eye out and fingers crossed, even if it takes another decade.

2007 International Symposium on Wikis

Wikis at Work in the World:
Open, Organic, Participatory Media for the 21st Century

October 21-23, 2007
Palais des Congres de Montral
Montreal, Quebec, Canada
http://www.wikisym.org/ws2007/

———————————————————————–

Registration is now open for WikiSym 2007, convening October 21 through 23
in chic, sophisticated, metropolitan Montreal, Quebec.

**Deadline for early registration is September 13th**

NO ORDINARY CONFERENCE

WikiSym is the only international scientific conference dedicated to
wikis. It brings together wiki researchers, practitioners, and users. The
goal of the symposium is to explore and extend our growing community. It
has a rigorously reviewed research paper track as well as plenty of space
for practitioner reports, demonstrations, and open discussions. Anyone who
is involved in using, researching, or developing wikis is invited to
WikiSym 2007!

We recognize that the online world is always evolving, and therefore
welcome people interested in other online media consistent with the wiki
philosophy of being open, organic and participatory.

PROGRAM HIGHLIGHTS

Our headline speakers this year include many of the thought leaders on
wiki. Our keynote speaker will be Jonathan Grudin (Microsoft Research),
one of the world’s leading researchers on Computer Supported Collaborative
Work. Ward Cunningham (AboutUs), inventor of wiki and founding father of
our field, will give the closing talk. Peter Thoeny (StructuredWikis),
creator of TWiki, will give a half day tutorial on wikis in the workplace.

To put it bluntly, software, really like all technologies, is inherently political. Even the most disruptive technologies, the innovations and ideas that can utterly transform society, carry with them the legacies of past decisions, the culture and history of the societies that spawned them. Code inevitably reflects the choices, biases and desires of its creators.

This will often be unambiguous and visible, as with digital rights management. It can also be quite subtle, as with operating system routines written to benefit one application over its competitors (I know some of you in this audience are old enough to remember “DOS isn’t done ’til Lotus won’t run” — if you have no idea what I’m talking about, ask the guy with gray hair closest to you). Sometimes, code may be written to reflect an even more dubious bias, as with the allegations of voting machines intentionally designed to make election-hacking easy for those in the know. Much of the time, however, the inclusion of software elements reflecting the choices, biases and desires of its creators will be utterly unconscious, the result of what the coders deem obviously right.

We can imagine parallel examples of the ways in which metaverse technologies could be shaped by deeply-embedded cultural and political forces: the obvious, such as lifelogging systems that know to not record digitally-watermarked background music and television; the subtle, such as augmented reality filters that give added visibility to sponsors, and make competitors harder to see; the malicious, such as mirror world networks that accelerate the rupture between the information haves and have-nots — or, perhaps more correctly, between the users and the used; and, again and again, the unintended-but-consequential, such as virtual world environments that make it impossible to build an avatar that reflects your real or desired appearance, offering only virtual bodies sprung from the fevered imagination of perpetual adolescents.

So too with what we today talk about as a “singularity.” The degree to which human software engineers actually get their hands dirty with the nuts & bolts of AI code is secondary to the basic condition that humans will guide the technology’s development, making the choices as to which characteristics should be encouraged, which should be suppressed or ignored, and which ones signify that “progress” has been made. Whatever the degree to which post-singularity intelligences would be able to reshape their own minds, we have to remember that the first generation will be our creations, built with interests and abilities based upon our choices, biases and desires.

This isn’t intrinsically bad; emerging digital minds that reflect the interests of their human creators is a lever that gives us a real chance to make sure that a “singularity” ultimately benefits us. But it holds a real risk. Not that people won’t know that there’s a bias: we’ve lived long enough with software bugs and so-called “computer errors” to know not to put complete trust in the pronouncements of what may seem to be digital oracles. The risk comes from not being able to see what that bias might be.

Many of us rightly worry about what might happen with “Metaverse” systems that analyze our life logs, that monitor our every step and word, that track our behavior online so as to offer us the safest possible society — or best possible spam. Imagine the risks associated with trusting that when the creators of emerging self-aware systems say that they have our best interests in mind, they mean the same thing by that phrase that we do.

For me, the solution is clear. Trust depends upon transparency. Transparency, in turn, requires openness.

Here are three of the many different businesses you can support.

Over time I think Kiva will be increasingly interesting by making it possible to see and follow and learn from which types of businesses and individuals consistenly attract support, or are successful. Microfinance systems have been around for a while now, but can the internet help activate their best intentions, improving not only individual lives but “capitalism” too? Making it more fair and sustainable? If you think of capitalism as a machine, then you can think of it as software, especially once it’s happening online. If the “many eyes” can help make great software like this Linux machine that keeps my ancient hardware running, and languages like the javascript Kiva and Indyish use, then maybe they can help bug test our global economic systems a bit, hmm?

Maybe.

Check out Kiva’s “due diligence” section and tell me what you think… Are they doing a good job so far? And maybe I can get our sometime contributor Mike to let us know what he thinks from his perspective working with the internally displaced people in in Azerbaijan too… hmm… I’ll get back to you.

Fourth Edition of the Quebec Free Software Week (SQIL)
For sustainable development.

For the fourth consecutive year individuals and organizations from all corners of Quebec join together for the Quebec Free Software Week. The launching of the new web site for SQIL represents the beginning of the organization of SQIL activities which will take place from September 15th to September 23rd 2007. The objective of SQIL is to promote free software and to foster a solid relationship between users and free software through sharing and exchange of knowledge.

This year’s theme, “For sustainable development”, encourages participants to forge strong links before and during the event in order to better present the stakes of free software in all of it’s forms. With its exciting possibilities the philosophy of free software redefines our vision of software and our rights to software. It is important to inform people from the start in order to encourage the growth of free software and its use within the world population. This applies to enterprises, associations and individuals.

An event on a provincial scale doesn’t arrange itself! This is why the organizers of SQIL are in search of people willing to help and to take part in the organization of an event with such a large mandate. Whether you are representing a company, a non-profit institution, media, a school, other organization or you are an interested individual you can take part in the collective effort by proposing activities, by promoting SQIL and free software. You could even lend a hand with the website organization, creating the flyer, the posters etc.

For further information concerning the organization, activities, the resources that can be placed at your disposal as a promoter or to obtain general information consult the SQIL web site regularly.

George Osborne, the shadow chancellor, has critisised the government over its apparent lack of support for open-source software.

He said that many of the world’s multinational corporations are developing open-source software strategies, and that “far-sighted governments are also taking advantage of this trend”.

But Osborne said the case in the UK was very different. Speaking on Thursday at a conference organised by the Royal Society for the Arts, he said: “In recent months, Conservative MPs have put down parliamentary questions that reveal most central government departments make use of no open-source software whatsoever”.

The problem is “the cultural change has not taken place in government”, and, within government, the balance is weighted against open source. “There isn’t a level playing field for open-source software,” he said.

“Too many companies are frozen out of government IT contracts, stifling competition and driving up costs,” he said. “Not a single open-source company is included in Catalyst, the government’s list of approved IT suppliers.” One of the problems is that “a government IT system is incompatible with other types of software, which stifles competition and hampers innovation”.

He condemned the “litany of IT projects that have collapsed or spiralled over budget”, and said: “It’s clear that this has meant billions of pounds wasted and public service reform being hampered”.

The shadow chancellor went on to applaud “software that’s developed collectively”, and he criticised the government’s strategy of sticking to the major vendors. The result is that “unlike traditional proprietary software, users can access the source code, making it possible for them to tailor the software to their needs and make constant iterative improvements”.

Osborne also set out the Conservative party’s strategy on technology, pointing to “three pillars” on which the Conservatives intend to build — equality of information, social networking and open source. He said that they would enable a future government to “recast the political settlement for the digital age”.

Osborne was keen to explain that he saw open source not just as software, but as a concept of collaboration. And he was careful to avoid implying that to support open source was to condemn proprietary vendors such as Microsoft. “Adopting open-source software in government departments does not necessarily mean having to stop using Microsoft products,” he said.

Read the interview in full, and Microsoft’s measured response, on ZDNET.

Tehran, March 5, Taliya News –
Member of Board of Directors and Manager of Linux Persian National Project reiterated in an interview with CITNA,

“Taking advantage of open source software leads to lowering dependence on foreign made software, technologies, expertise, and code surveys, as well as assuming the continuous free flow of information.”
(…)
Khansari reiterated,

“Avoiding getting locked when using a certain salesman’s software, provision of software diversity, ending the monopoly of certain companies, and providing the ground for making various software indigenous in accordance with local demands are among advantages of using open source software that both diversify our choices and strengthen us.”

full article here.

Open systems for education and health care (which I’ve been trying to keep an eye on over at Sourceforge as they develop) can sound geekily utopian and be as tricky to pick as any other system- there are lots of options, lots of forks, lots of different good ideas about what such a system might need and what bugs should get fixed first. When choosing an os program you need to be pretty rigorous about looking past appearances to see whether there is a healthy community behind the project that sincerely believes their work is being responded to and built on to be given away in all the right ways. Red Hat is the open source Industry leader and by teaming up with Fortune 500 health care company McKlessen to offer an Entreprise linux for Healthcare, a sturdy, supported, open protocal and standard compliant option seems assured. The best part: any investment in an open source area of development is an investment in all of open source. The public code gets a shot in the arm with new developments like this, as the Red Hat license fundamentally insists, and other os Healthcare and other large organizational projects not aimed at Entreprise license and support business models, should benefit as well. Competition behaves a little differently in this environment..

“Our healthcare customers require highly reliable systems with highly responsive support,” added Simpson. Doctors, nurses and other clinical staff are depending on these systems to care for patients, 24/7. The Red Hat Enterprise Healthcare Platform fits seamlessly with McKesson’s commitment to product quality and customer service.

As a leading provider of technology solutions to the healthcare industry, McKesson has been at the forefront of innovative technologies, deploying many of its advanced Horizon Clinicals® applications on Linux running on Intel-based hardware. Hospitals with these deployments have already realized cost savings of up to 60% compared with traditional system deployments.

“Over time, we have evolved our approach to system reliability in healthcare,” said Kay Carr, chief information officer at St. Luke’s Episcopal Hospital in Houston, Texas. We used to focus on redundant hardware for disaster recovery, with an emphasis on back-up and restore procedures. That was a costly but necessary approach at the time. Innovative technologies like Red Hat Enterprise Linux have allowed us to transform our approach to one of continuous availability. Now we’re deploying our McKesson clinical applications on multiple, inexpensive, commodity-based servers set up in separate locations for site-to-site failover. With this highly flexible approach, we have the mission-critical reliability we need for patient care at a much lower cost.

Red Hat’s core platform, Red Hat Enterprise Linux, has been widely adopted as a robust and economical open architecture alternative in other industries that demand highly reliable systems. Red Hat maintains a single Enterprise Linux distribution that has been extensively tested across a wide range of computing environments. Prior to incorporation, all new features are vetted throughout the open source development community to ensure seamless integration and reliability.”

Read the press release in full on the McKlessen website.