Digifesto

June 30, 2011

Oh but of course: comparison of Google and Open Source innovation models

What is below is mere speculation. I don’t know anything about Google.

I guess this just is an admission of naivete, but one of the most surprising things about Google+ to me right now is that it’s been a surprise. Wave was a huge technical investment that flopped. Buzz happened and was meek. For some reason, they became old news. But Google is super organized on the inside, and can actually afford to annoy people mildly or lose cool points for the sake of conducting an experiment. Does Google+ use Wave technology? Well who knows because it’s locked down behind the NDA. Was it inspired by Buzz usage and feedback? Is it powered by Buzz data? It’s safe to assume so, right?

Part of Google’s power is that it isn’t just a startup operating in the market. It is a whole bunch of startups operating in a coordinated collective. A lot of its advantage is in its efficiency as an incubator, which means its ability to recycle old technology choices, talent, expertise. It’s other advantage is to have a business model that’s going to scale up with the amount of data collected, which means it can focus on user experience).

The only comparable thing I know of in terms of efficient recycling of technology and content is the “open source world.” People build technology for their application or to scratch their itch, and it sticks around for reuse. if a particular funder drops a project that has reached half of its potential, the same team can find a new funder to pick it up and take it the rest of the way. And hackers who learn something on one project are under no legal restrictions to take that human capital with them on to the next.

But there isn’t a unified business model for open source development. Its still struggling for funding, fighting the inherent free rider problems and figuring out how to get funders who are willing to take risk.

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March 21, 2011

Interview on National Broadband Map architecture

Interview with Juan Marín Otero from Computech on development of the National Broadband Map, released by the National Telecommunications and Information Administration and the Federal Communications Commission.

The selection of open source software has been critical in my opinion. The entire project has been constructed with open source tools, from the operating system to the last JavaScript library used in the presentation layer. The main reasons are the flexibility and easy development that these solutions give us. When we evaluated the requirements of this project, some open source tools began with a clear advantage (functionality and easy to deploy) over most of the commercial tools.

Developing on open source has given us the flexibility needed in a project like this without having to worry about whether we had enough licenses per computing “core” or not, and choosing the right components for each requirement, rather than having to adopt monolithic suites with great functionality but poor performance and little chance of adaptation. One of the advantages that may seem trivial but in this work environment is very important is that I have the whole project on my laptop, and I can make changes from a Starbucks, if necessary (and I use this example because it happened to me once on the project).

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January 31, 2011

No adequate social media options

While this post is guaranteed to be a pile of cliches, I need to write it anyway to get it off my chest.

None of the current social media platforms are doing it for me right now. Why is that?

There are the minimal functions that I want out of social media.

Self-expression. There needs to be a blogging/publishing platform to support self-expression. So that that self-expression can be authentic, there needs to be fine-grained privacy controls so that I can choose who I’m exposing my thoughts to.

Sharing. I want to take advantage of and participate in crowdsourced content curation on the web. When my friends are interested in something or think I will be interested in something, i want to hear about it. If like something that somebody has showed me, I want to be able to share it with other people. It is very important to me to be able to attribute the thing I’m sharing back to the person who shared it with me–it is a way of respecting them and congratulating their good taste, and not taking credit for how cool they are except by proxy. It is not at all important to me to acknowledge some global idea of how much something is “liked.”

So far, this description covers almost all the major platforms, especially Facebook and Buzz. However, those aren’t so good for other reasons.

One is that the software needs to be open source and my content portable from system to system. I don’t want Google or especially Facebook keeping ownership over all this material which might be very personal. I don’t want the features in my social media to be distorted by a profit motive.

Another has to do with comments. Comments on existing content are a means of self-expression and a means of sharing. Currently, the conventions around commenting are confused: bloggers will post a blog post which is essentially a comment on an existing work, with an excerpt, but will need to put it in a separate context because of technical constraints. Meanwhile, responses to a Buzz or Facebook item are displayed as second-class content and are not themselves resharable. I want my comments to be considered first-class self-expression and be stored on the service under my control.

Moreover, I want threaded comments, because ultimately what I want is to have conversations with the people I care about about the things we are sharing together, but I want to be able to filter out other commenters who I don’t care about.

So when I look at a piece of content shared by a friend, I want to know the lineage of how the friend found it, and I want to see the conversation about it thats been had by people I know about or who some algorithm thinks I could be interested in. I want to be able to tune out boring people and tune in interesting people.

I want there to be “communities,” which could really just be done through an ad hoc tagging system to start with. I.e., I would “follow” a tag and then see the feed of content surrounding that tag.

Of course, it would be hard to monetize such a service, as it would promote genuine community among people who care about each other and not the targeting of advertising. So as far as I’m aware such a thing doesn’t exist yet. But a guy can dream.

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September 15, 2010

“SDI Best Practices with GeoNode” Slides

Slides from my FOSS4G tutorial on GeoNode available here:

Spatial Data Infrastructure Best Practices with GeoNode

View more presentations from Sebastian Benthall.

The talk was well received, and many people I talked to were interested in installing GeoNode. Overall, the conference was a great one.

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September 6, 2010

Preparing for FOSS4G 2010

Two years ago when I had the incredible opportunity to go to FOSS4G 2008 with OpenGeo, I was very new to the scene. I had been working on OpenLayers-based web applications for just a year at that point. Attending that conference gave me a much broader look at the industry I was entering, and was a crucial chance to become better acquainted with the people behind the IRC handles I was learning to recognize.

I’m back this year, with eleven other members of OpenGeo. Our contingent’s preparation in the past few months has been led by Paul Ramsey, who has a deep professional and personal connection to the conference. We are more coordinated than ever before; if you’re at the conference, you’ll see us in matching t-shirts and with advertised “expert hours” at our booth. Our intention is to make a strong showing and become our own self-fulfilling prophecy of a successful and growing open source geospatial company.

A key part of that vision is OpenGeo’s main product, the OpenGeo Suite. As the internal argument goes, software consulting as programming-for-hire doesn’t scale up as a business model. To prove that open source geospatial can really triumph in the industry, open source consulting shops need to evolve into a product-based company that sells support and training, and funds software development indirectly–but more efficiently, as with more flexibility the company can make wiser long-run decisions. So we are here to sell Suite contracts, we were reminded in our team meeting earlier tonight.

But what’s keeping me up at night right now is the knowledge that this year, unlike two years ago, I have something to say: I’m giving a tutorial on Thursday morning with Galen Evans announcing GeoNode to the attending members of the FOSS4G community.

I am quite nervous. Though we have been tweeting and blogging and releasing news bites about GeoNode with increasing frequency in the past year or so of development, we have for the most part been too busy building it to publicize what we are working on. Often when I try to explain the project, I’m still met with “Ok, but what is it?”

Now I’m hoping we can just show people. We’ve been ironing out the bugs from our 1.0-beta release over for a couple weeks now, and despite some worrying regressions I’m confident that what we’ve got to show is something genuinely new, compelling, and full of potential.

But it’s not for me to decide that. I’ve had my nose stuck in this project for a year, and am still fairly green in the geospatial domain. Meanwhile, the community at FOSS4G is full of jaded industry veterans, well aware of the alternatives and the pitfalls of new software projects. And their judgment matters: GeoNode depends on many other FOSS geospatial projects’ communities, and for us the ideal is for more open source geospatial developers to see potential in GeoNode and consider contributing.

So a lot is riding on this conference. Even if GeoNode is a commercial success, it won’t stand for what it ought to unless it is also a community success. And for that to happen, it needs to earn the respect of colleagues at FOSS4G.

I suppose I really should get back to working on my slides…

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August 27, 2010

GitHub Unicorn

GitHub consistently amazes me with how quickly it adds new features. Here is the latest one that blows my mind.

David Winslow tells me that this just part of a larger pattern of unicorns taking over the internet.

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August 3, 2010

Job opening at OpenGeo for GeoNode

It looks like OpenGeo is going to be getting a lot of business in the coming year for GeoNode–so much that we can’t handle it with the size of our current team.

So we’re hiring a new Software Engineer.

What we’re looking for is somebody who has both the engineering chops to handle our complex stack (which includes Django, GeoServer, GeoNetwork, and GeoExt) and the inclination and aptitude to provide on-site consulting, training, and support to clients. Because of our partnership with the World Bank, many of these deployments will be around the world. So this job will likely offer the opportunity to go interesting places and meet interesting people, on top of coding for a very well poised open source, open data project.

OpenGeo, I have to say, is a kickass place to work. I’ve been working for it and our parent organization OpenPlans for almost three years now, and I am challenged and inspired daily by the intelligence of the people around me and the dynamism of the organization. It’s also committed to openness with a sincerity that is extraordinarily compelling to the right kind of person.

This blog post, for example, divulges crucial information about our business strategy in an unprofessional medium. “What is going on?” you might ask. “Why is he doing this? Is it a corporate ploy?” No. Our business strategy isn’t a secret. On the contrary, we want as many people to know about it as possible so that more people will get involved in our open source projects and communities. And though our work and life itself demands humility, on rare occasions (just as when we are trying to attract applications from Software Engineers) we get to brag about how great we are.

Something else I like about us? We are scrappy. OpenPlans has subsisted primarily on donations from Mark Gorton for most of its existence. We are in a turbulent time, because the LimeWire lawsuits mean that we can no longer depend on Mark. But seriously in the nick of time, we warming up our business development machines.

The leads are coming in, and we are growing (did I mention that we are hiring?). It feels like the helicopter is lifting off just as the ground beneath us is melting into hot lava. And yet, we aren’t afraid. Yesterday I saw Vanessa Hamer give a budget report for OpenPlans. The gist of it was: even assuming that lots of things go wrong with our funding pipeline, we are well prepared to thrive in the future. I have never had more confidence in this organization than I do now.

This is a great thing. It is great because OpenPlans and OpenGeo are working on great things. OpenGeo in particular is in the early stages of transforming the geospatial software industry from one dominated by proprietary desktop software to free web software. It is providing tools that will help institutions transform their closed and cobwebby data silos to nodes in a vibrant, open geospatial web. For great justice.

“Are you for real?” Yes, I’m for real. OpenGeo is that good. I know we’re that good because we have attracted successful geospatial software industry entrepreneurs (1) (2) (3) as our upper level management in the past year. These folks aren’t just all geniuses. They are geniuses with domain expertise who are passionately dedicated to transforming an industry with an impact on millions of people.

We also have some great connections going on. I believe I’ve mentioned that we’ve been working with the World Bank’s CAPRA initiative on this GeoNode project (the one we are hiring for). The people behind CAPRA are rockstars within a superorganization with a mission to save Central America from natural disasters.

Oh, and we’re going to be working with the Global Earthquake Model soon. Those guys are a crack team of brilliant scientists with a mandate to unite all earthquake modeling under one banner using open source software. If it works, it will have an impact on everyone who is in an area that suffers earthquake risk, because earthquake modeling is used by everyone from humanitarian NGO’s who do disaster relief to insurance companies who wind up taking on a lot of the corporate/economic risk of natural disasters. It’s a mandate that would be ludicrously ambitious if it weren’t happening right now with web technology that has just recently been perfected and available.

It is so fucking cool I can hardly contain myself. I have to suppress these thoughts normally so I don’t get so distracted by how cool it is that I don’t get any work done. It is so cool that it’s hard to talk about publicly because it all just seems so unbelievable.

That is what we are hiring for right now.

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July 8, 2010

Personality

Maybe what unites the open-* movement is a kind of personality.

Discomfort with authority, desire for autonomy, but a yearning for community nonetheless.

The movement aspires to a society that supports itself and acts collectively without preventing any of its constituents from being their authentic selves.

Hence all the importance of aggregating patterns from individuals and then using those patterns to inform (but not coerce) other individuals. Hence the active politics of forking and merging. Hence the flattened hierarchies. And so on.

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July 7, 2010

Dewey’s Social Ethics

From Elizabeth Andersons’ excellent Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy article on (John) Dewey’s Moral Philosophy. Emphasis mine:

As a progressive liberal, Dewey advocated numerous social reforms such as promoting the education, employment, and enfranchisement of women, social insurance, the progressive income tax, and laws protecting the rights of workers to organize labor unions. However, he stressed the importance of improving methods of moral inquiry over advocating particular moral conclusions, given that the latter are always subject to revision in light of new evidence.

Thus, the main focus of Dewey’s social ethics concerns the institutional arrangements that influence the capacity of people to conduct moral inquiry intelligently. Two social domains are critical for promoting this capacity: schools, and civil society. Both needed to be reconstructed so as to promote experimental intelligence and wider sympathies. Dewey wrote numerous works on education, and established the famous Laboratory School at the University of Chicago to implement and test his educational theories. He was also a leading advocate of the comprehensive high school, as opposed to separate vocational and college prepatory schools. This was to promote the social integration of different economic classes, a prerequisite to enlarging their mutual understanding and sympathies. Civil society, too, needed to be reconstructed along more democratic lines. This involved not just expanding the franchise, but improving the means of communication among citizens and between citizens and experts, so that public opinion could be better informed by the experiences and problems of citizens from different walks of life, and by scientific discoveries (PP). Dewey regarded democracy as the social embodiment of experimental intelligence informed by sympathy and respect for the other members of society (DE 3, 89–94). Unlike dictatorial and oligarchic societies, democratic ones institutionalize feedback mechanisms (free speech) for informing officeholders of the consequences for all of the policies they adopt, and for sanctioning them (periodic elections) if they do not respond accordingly.

Dewey’s moral epistemology thus leads naturally to his political philosophy. The reconstruction of moral theory is accomplished by replacing fixed moral rules and ends with an experimental method that treats norms for valuing as hypotheses to be tested in practice, in light of their widest consequences for everyone. To implement this method requires institutions that facilitate three things: (1) habits of critical, experimental inquiry; (2) widespread communication of the consequences of instituting norms, and (3) extensive sympathy, so that the consequences of norms for everyone are treated seriously in appraising them and imagining and adopting alternatives. The main institutions needed to facilitate these things are progressive schools and a democratic civil society. Experimentalism in ethics leads to a democratic political philosophy.

My suspicion is that John Dewey’s ethics would provide a substantive philosophical foundation for the latest swathe of open government and “Gov 2.0” initiatives, if anyone bothered looking for one.

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