Month: April 2004

Advokit looking for lead developer

The Project
AdvoKit is a VoterID/GOTV Web application being developed as free software / open source. AdvoKit combines support for the best practices of traditional
VoterID/GOTV campaigning with the power of social networks and friend-to-friend methodology. Current proprietary systems cost upwards of 100k for use by a state campaign. This is a very high barrier to entry for
smaller organizations.
To see a background white paper on the project, check out this PDF
The Community
Several people who have been involved in the Howard Dean and Dennis Kucinich campaigns are nurturing this effort. The team is involved in mature discussions with a variety of potential users (local and state organizations) as well as the leading national organizations who could deliver training and hosting for users of Advokit.
Funding
The project has received a very high degree of interest from several organizations and adequate funding for a small team of developers will be in place very quickly.
The Technical Lead
The team is looking for a person who has coordinated volunteers and maintained a free software or open source package. The ideal person would have experience with web application and database development.
Contact
For more information on this project, please contact Henri Poole

joint copyright assignment

Many open source projects, including the Free Software Foundation, Red Hat and OpenOffice.org require that contributors assign their copyright when they contribute code. Sun, the NetBeans project sponsor, has come up with an innovative Joint Copyright Assignment (“JCA”) that allows contributors to retain their own copyright while sharing a joint copyright interest in the contributed code. This way contributors retain all the rights granted by copyright law while sharing those rights with the open source project sponsor so that the code is protected by both the Sun Public License (“SPL”) and copyright law.

interesting option. we are trying it out with the xaraya project.

optimizing urls for google

certainly of interest to open source cms (some of which have horrible urls) is this article by Brice Dunwoodie

More specifically, Google will parse and underscore literally and will parse a dash as a “token”, that represents white space. So if you construct a URL that contains “enterprise_content_management” in it, Google literally sees the word “enterprise_content_management”, which is really not a word at all.

WYSIWYG editors

with the recent move of the kupu project (and impending one of the bitflux editor) under the oscom umbrella, we have created a new mailing list to discuss wysiwyg editors:
editors@oscom.org
for those interested, please sign up. and if your CMS / web application still uses earlier generations of editors, now would be a good time to migrate.
which wysiwyg editor should you use for your CMS or web application? there is currently no editor that supports both Mozilla and Internet Explorer and can handle both XHTML and arbitrary XML schemas. at the same time, there are countless “solutions” that produce horrible markup and should NOT be used. there are, however, excellent open source editors available that produce well-formed and valid XHTML or XML. note that both bxe and kupu are OSCOM projects, while Xopus is a proprietary product from Q42.

XHTML XML (arbitrary)
Mozilla BXE, Kupu BXE
IE Kupu Xopus

moblogs are so 2003

hp always-on wearable cameramoblogs are just a glimpse into what is coming with always-on wearable cameras Mobile phones and PDAs with cameras are increasingly common; 16% of phones sold in 2003 had a camera in it, and last year camera phones actually out-sold other digital cameras. The bigger change will come from an entirely-new class of hardware — what I call the “personal memory assistant.” Both Hewlett-Packard and Microsoft have built test versions of wearable cameras designed to record the world around you as you go about your day. If you’ve seen or used a TiVo, imagine a TiVo for your day-to-day life. If you don’t think that’s revolutionary, consider that human memory is notoriously faulty; what happens when a person can have perfect recall?

No to suburbia

martin geddes sums it up why living in the city will continue to beat the alternatives:

So perhaps the future of American suburbia will remain 2 kids, an SUV and an expensive trickle of data for the foreseeable future.

quite a few acquaintances have moved to suburbia over the years, claiming that they want to live “out in the green”. never mind that when you visit them, they live next to the highway interconnect and across the mall, and that there are spots of green in the city, too.

World traveler

Science is the most interconnected of all human activities, they say, and requires a new series of maps to chart the changing scientific landscape. Knowledge has left books and libraries and is now changing more rapidly than ever before

as i am reading virtual reality and wondering where it got lost (wasn’t VR supposed to be here by now?), sites like nooface and this nsf project rekindle my interest.
you gotta love vivid descriptions like

Ultimately, I’d like to see a map of science in schools, as common as the political world map. ‘Continents’ would represent the diverse areas of science, and closely related areas would reside on the same continent. Teachers might say, ‘Let’s look at the new research frontier in sector F5.’ Students could say, ‘My mom works over there.'”

gives the notion of world traveler a new, highly appealing, twist.