Web 2.0 and F/LOSS

I am weary of the term "crowdsourcing." Now, I'm not against the concept. I think small, bite-sized acts of service and kindness can make huge differences in the right situations. Indeed, it's the social-benefits business model of The Extraordinaries, and is at the core of what Yochai Benkler means when he discusses the power of "peer production" in The Wealth of Networks:

People began to apply behaviors they practice in their living rooms or in the elevator — "Here, let me lend you a hand," or "What did you think of last night’s speech?" — to production problems that had, throughout the twentieth century, been solved on the model of Ford and General Motors. The rise of peer production is neither mysterious nor fickle when viewed through this lens. It is as rational and efficient given the objectives and material conditions of information production at the turn of the twenty-first century as the assembly line was for the conditions at the turn of the twentieth.

But the term "crowdsourcing" itself is outdated. It presumes that there's some central organization doing the sourcing (paralleling "outsourcing"), and it seems to get applied in all sorts of roles where that's not relevant.

Who's using XP?

With a surprising lack of fanfare, OLPCNews recently revealed that Sugar is beating out Windows XP in XO deployments:

Apparently the conversations are going pretty much as many of us had expected: Initially country representatives inquire if Windows XP runs on the XO laptop. That doesn't really come as a surprise - for many people Windows is the definition of a computer. However, upon further investigation every country decided to stick to Sugar.

It's hardly a surprise, based on the wretched state of XP on the XO for educational purposes.

The surprising part is that after thousands of people screaming (including myself) about XP on the XO, the news that everyone is choosing Sugar went almost unnoticed.

This is a very good, if somewhat Pyrrhic, victory - there was a lot of time and effort lost to get XP to run, and a lot of bad blood created.

Long-term, however, the fact that head-to-head, Sugar is winning installations after review by education ministries is fantastic:

-It's an important mindshare victory for open source, especially at the operating system level (on the computing side) and at the ministry-decision-makers level on the policy side. This win will put downstream decisions on software on a more level playing field (hopefully?)

There's been a lot of noise about the role of Twitter in the recent Moldova protests. Ethan Zuckerman took it on himself to quantify the data. It's not as glamorous as blindly claiming that twitter did (or did not) ignite the protests based on some stories, but it does provide a good sanity-check:

My bitter, cynical hope had been to demonstrate that the conversation switched from a small Romanian-language conversation about the actual protest events to a self-congratulation festival in the English-language twittersphere. Good thing we’ve got data to prove me wrong. [...] I’d expected to see “twitter” emerge as one of the most popular terms by Wednesday or Thursday, and to see the conversation shift into English. [...] But by Thursday, Twitter’s out of the top 20 entirely and “comunistii” ranks behind Moldova and Chisinau. So yes, the conversation on Wednesday - the busiest day with over 1,000 authors - included lots of non-Moldovans. But the conversation quickly shifted back to the political standoff.

That being said, there are under 200 reported actual twitter users inside Moldova; so while the conversation avoided turning into the twitter version of back-patting, it also is not the twitter flash-mob we're looking for.

Worse, governments are getting more sophisticated in limiting the utility of mobile phones for this kind of disruption, as Evgeny Morozov at ForeignPolicy reminds us:

I've just spoken to a Moldovan friend who is himself a big technology fan; according to him, there is little to none cellphone coverage in the square itself (turning off cellphone coverage in protest areas is a trick that was also used by the Belarusian authorities to diffuse 2006 protests in Minsk's central square), so protesters have to leave it to post updates to Twitter via GPRS technology on their mobiles.

It seems likely that next time around, the government will also make sure GPRS is hobbled as well, and there were reports that the government was strong-arming local ISPs into restricting outside connections.

So while Twitter was involved, it seems too early to claim it's victory, as both Evgeny Morozov and Ethan Zuckerman seem to agree on. There was no sign-in form at the protest with a "Where did you hear about this? ( ) Twitter ( ) Facebook ( ) SMS (non-twitter) ( ) Friend ... " so we can't really be sure of the impact of any one social utility over another (though we could do some interesting things with Facebook photo tagging perhaps?), and this will continue to haunt any attempts to link online social media movements with offline action.

That's not the only story here, though. While I'm excited about turning online interaction into offline action, I strongly believe that the lower-hanging fruit in social media sites is real-time, mass reporting of events. You may get a thousand different viewpoints, but you're guaranteed to not just get one filtered and sanitized report. As Evgeny Morozov notes;

There are also a few moving English-language Twitter posts like this - "in #pman a grenade thrown by the police has torn apart one of the protester's leg"- that would surely be perused by foreign journalists.

We saw the role of SMS and Twitter in getting the news out about the Mumbai bombings in November 2008. As microblogging sites get increasingly sophisticated (or their users settle on hashtags and location update formats) I think we can expect to see fast local news coming not from traditional media but from our peers. Without editorial oversight or research/verification, we'll have to rely on mass numbers of twitterers reporting on each event to present an evenhanded view, but overall I see this move towards instant sharing of information as an amazing development that will only getbetter and more interesting, both in the case of free speech and media, and for mobile possibilities for development.

Jamaican ICT4D practitioners and
teachers see the XO in action

OLPC and F/LOSS enthusiast Dr. Sameer Verma, an Associate Professor of Information Systems at San Francisco State University has been beating the XO drum in Jamaica with this presentation to the University of the West Indies/Mona (UWI) and at the ICT4DJamaica conference (with great photos) last September.

You probably already know Sameer from either his role as organizer of SF-OLPC or his OLPCNews guest entry earlier this year, OLPC Jamaica, and the beginnings of a pilot project in August Town, a community near UWI, a stone's throw away from where I lived while in Jamaica.

It's been a while since I posted on my Drupal Mapping project, and that's partially because I've been spending some time getting a great site that aggregates and re-publishes news for the volunteer service world together at ServiceWire.org using Drupal 6, FeedAPI, Views, and some other fun tricks - you can follow it on Twitter at @ServiceWire - it posts about once an hour or so with news about volunteer service and service-learning.

Anyhow, my experience working with D6 and the newest Views module have convinced me that as long as most of the tools I need for the map are available on D6, it's time to move. So I'm rebuilding from scratch (bad luck with upgrades of recent, and I'd like to apply and cement my recently gained knowledge). Unfortunately, the Node_import module - key to a lot of the testing I want to do on the map and views - is not quite ready, so I'm waiting for that to release an update that works with Location and CCK, and in a holding pattern until then.

Series: Overview | Modules | Structure and Taxonomies | On Drupal 6 | Functionality

Drupal by itself is pretty powerful, but where it really shines is when you start plugging in the modules which have been developed for it. There are hundreds (if not thousands), and the first mistake I made on my first Drupal install was to just start clicking away before I'd learned the ropes. Luckily, this is what sandbox installs are made from, so a few database drops and folder deletions later I could start from scratch (again).

To get this all working, I now present you with the modules I activated or installed for the map project:

This week's Technology Salon was on information sharing and ways to use social media and peer-generated content in international development. Less of a lecture and more of a roundtable discussion, lots of interesting ideas were floated, from using Peace Corps volunteers as on-the-ground information resources to running contests for ways to use technology in development scenarios.

This quirky animation compares social media to ice cream to explain the value of basic customer generated content (uin the form of tagging, rating and comments). It does two things - makes you hungry for ice cream, and understand the need to enable your website guests to leave feedback.

(I found this on Richie Zamor's excellent site)

Today, Twitter launched one person from their normal Internet life to getting news on the California-regional LAist and valleywag blogs, CNet, a top-rated digg story, a google search term all to herself, fan-created artwork, and a skyrocketing number of followers inside Twitter. In three hours, with one twitter.

While few of the concepts at the 2.0 nonprofit conference were hardly new to me (Use twitter! uh, ok.); it was good to see where other nonprofits were and what the nonprofit leaders in the space were doing, and what the lessons they had learned were.

Again, trying not to sound snooty here, but the lessons weren't very "new" either, but the way they phrased them were -- instead of speaking about crowdsourcing, peer-production and open source/sharing, the presenters framed the same general concepts in communications and strategy language like message control (it's dead), reader-focused theories of change, stakeholders/champions, voice and vision, and so on. This gives me more relevant vocabulary to use to champion the full-sharing concepts when I speak with nonprofits.

Read on for my run-down and links to even more event notes!

Would you like an Ubuntu to go?A recent The Guardian interview with Canonical CEO Mark Shuttleworth reveals this gem:
TG: Will you be coming out with a tailored version of Ubuntu for the ultraportable sector?

MS We're announcing it in the first week of June. It's called the Netbook Remix. We're working with Intel, which produces chips custom-made for this sector.

Global Youth Service Day will be brought to you in live Twitter form with event updates (and locations, to broadcast on TwitterVision.com) throughout the day.

I predicted in January that Facebook would "hit its limit. I predict some more ad snafus a la Beacon, and the 3rd party apps become overwhelming and all-too-reminiscent of MySpace.", and today the Sillicon Alley Insider predicts a Facebook decline: For some early users, the thrill is gone.

Engadget is reporting that Microsoft has posted a formal offer to buy Yahoo (and by proxy, flickr, del.icio.us, and steer the development of Flock (...into the ground).

Google, step up your game

A recent thread of emails over on the 501 Tech Club DC email list brought more Web 2.0 resources to light. So in the spirit of sharing:

NetworkForGood has an excellent set of short articles on using social sites for fundraising.

http://www.cmswire.com/ Offers news on content management

A quick rundown of my recent posts looking at the value of using Open Source in combination with Web 2.0 tools for non-profits / NGOs and the like:

The Power of Open - an introduction to the economic background knowledge important to discuss how Web 2.0 and Open Source work (also discusses what Web 2.0 and Open Source mean).

Twitter - A sidetrack to peek at a new Web 2.0 service.

I've been dancing around how open source software, strong standards, and the various web 2.0 technologies actually help your organization out. So let me show a few examples. This blog entry, and in fact all joncamfield.com/blog entries get written once, here at this website.

The problem I face most often when trying to show someone a new powerful open source tool is that they just can't believe that the things I tell them are possible. Microsoft has had such a vice grip on the everyday computer experience that it's akin to telling someone that while they've been walking their whole life, it's actually possible for them -- for anyone -- to leap up and start flying like Superman.

If you think back to the opening Econ 101 entry, I ran through network effects, transaction costs, rivalrous and excludable goods, and their inverse, anti-rival goods, which combine the efforts of many in an ever-building and evolving structure where rule is the more the merrier - something, while not new to the world, but dramatically facilitated by modern information and communication technology.

The last entry was the theoretical underpinnings of how this whole web 2.0 thing can work, so today let's get into some of the more common terms you've heard thrown around, what they mean and how they work. We'll start talking about blogs (like this), wikis, social networks, and other crazy web 2.0 tools themselves.