Tag: OSCOM

Fostering the provision of public goods

Let’s say for instance, that Xaraya attracted 5 more non-profit organizations to the development group. They would then be in a collective of IT development for a single purpose. Are there costs involved? Absolutely, but when you compare the costs to hiring an IT staff of 40 to 50 with a range of experience from management, database design, server management, etc.., it makes sense in the long run.

john muses on what would happen if xaraya were able to gain the support of additional non-profits. i think the time is right to actively work towards this scenario. the tools are ready, and the developers can be had at a discount currently. it is highly motivational and piques my curiosity to see the ideas in Free Provision of Complex Public Goods being implemented. who knew that i would see the application of highly theoretical work i pored over for my thesis in my lifetime 😉

OMG

i had lunch with richard m. soley, OMG chairman, on tuesday. he took me to a great chinese place in cambridge, and started to explain how he had built up OMG as a non-profit company that has reinvented itself around objects, CORBA, UML and most recently MDA. OMG organizes conferences and workshops as a means to drive adoption and consensus around areas ripe for standardization. i very much enjoyed richards insights into the conference circuit, and his advice for OSCOM. maybe there is some common ground in the future?
richard also was one of the first developers of emacs, shares the RMS initials with the other richard, and was at MIT at the same time.

Learning from the masters

i just got back from las vegas, via a (less than satisfactory) detour through NYC. apachecon 2003 was a great time to learn, meet and geek out. i haven’t been to a conference (besides our own) in a while where i felt so at home and had such a vibrant network right from the start.
now, the real challenge strikes me as enabling this level of interaction for the interested conference goer who is not fortunate enough to be associated with apache. clearly, that is almost unattainable, but some measures we tried at OSCOM 3 may be helpful.
attendees never do the sensible thing before the conference, it seems, and most calls for a good self-preparation (in the interest of a better conference experience) are not widely heard.

IA frontier

having met christina wodtke of boxesandarrows.com fame, i am convinced that the frontier for CMS is in the user-facing layers (information architecture especially), not in the bowels. The lower CMS layers are being commoditized, or at least are maturing considerably.
as a tool vendor, it is our quest to help users develop accessible sites with a sound information architecture. if the tools could somehow steer the users to do the right things by virtue of following the path of least resistance.. this is the real frontier. i will ponder this subject a bit more in the coming days.
oh and christina referred to me as the crazy swiss and was very intrigued by our experience with oscom. in fact, she invited me to a IA conference in february in austin. i’m intrigued.

inroads

Though open source, Zope4Media came out of the box with a software framework, an information repository, and a user-interface toolkit. We were able to hit the ground running and built a content management solution that fit our business needs rather than revamping our business to fit into a vendor’s product solution.

it is very nice to see open source solutions making inroads in the more hesitant us. kudos to the zopistas. as sean upton points out though, zope4media is not open source, it just uses open source. oh well.

blogs vs mailing lists

one of the crucial questions i want to explore in the remainder of 2003 is whether blogs are better than mailing lists for collaboration. i believe they are, but need to try it to be sure. some data points:

  • persons with inadequate email archives are no longer crippled
  • categorization beats subject prefixes
  • linkability: prior art (older posts) are first class citizens as opposed to vanishing in the archives / trash
  • trackback: get more brains to attack the problems
  • it is easier to filter out “me too” posts

the klog mailing list (ahem!) has very good thinking on the issues.
related issues: blogs vs wikis. mailing lists vs wikis