Software Cooperative News

Co-operatives 2010

On Friday, I was at this event in Plymouth. The basics of it are pretty well covered by John Atherton’s blog post. I led one of open surgeries on use of Social Media, which I’m going to try to summarise and expand into an interactive briefing note on the website of our co-op. If you’ve hints and tips, or questions you feel I should cover, please leave me a comment here.

Other than that, I was trying to help support the event (as I’m one of the steering group for co-sponsors Co-operatives SW), so I was carrying some kit around and videoed the Question Time. That and some other clips should find their way online next week, along with some other thoughts triggered by the presentations. It was a pretty interesting and productive day, worth the ticket price in my opinion.

Happily, we launched the new Co-operatives SW website from a train at 9am Friday because of some unforeseen events and it seems to be working fairly smoothly. Please be gentle with it. I like the Members News section, but then I would, wouldn’t I?

I’ve been watching the June budget and pondering its effects on me, our co-op, co-ops in general and the wider community.

IT Taxes

I just want to flag this one up as a special interest: the telephone tax is killed off before it starts. Yippee! But now we get to wait and see how “the government will support private investment” to get universal provision of fast broadband. I’ve no problem with tax relief for the video games industry being scrapped - why should any type of software get special treatment?

VAT up 2.5% to 20% from 4 January 2011

This seems bad for everyone. It’s a bit less bad for our co-op because we have some international suppliers, whose sales tax rates won’t change, but we buy a lot from the UK too and it hurts all our workers.

Personal Taxes

The basic income tax allowance rise of £1,000 is welcome, as is restoring the pension-earnings links. More widely, the freezes in various things, increase in Capital Gains Tax and drop in cider tax all seem broadly good ideas. The housing benefit £400 maximum is a bit mixed - how bad it is may depend how lenders react when borrowers get into difficulty.

Business Taxes

At a time when a VAT increase is called “unavoidable”, it stinks a bit to cut corporation tax, extend the 10% capital gains tax allowance and raise the employers’ National Insurance threshold. Of course, our co-op pays none of those, so it also hurts us by giving our competitors an advantage.

Business Incentives

George Osborne said he wants to tackle regional economic differences, but the big change in this budget is bad for all existing businesses outside London, the South-East and East: National Insurance exemptions for new businesses. Once again, existing co-ops take it in the neck from another government obsessed with capitalism and employment instead of businesses and work. Meanwhile, increasing the Enterprise Finance Guarantee props up debt-laden business and a new Growth Capital Fund encourages capitalist businesses, while both appear useless to good co-ops at first glance. I don’t mind being ignored, but could we please elect a government which doesn’t actively hinder co-ops? Where’s the fabled “commitment to fairness”? Promises around the Green Investment Bank and Green Deal sound good, but are in the future.

Council Tax

Council Tax will be frozen for a year. I wonder if that applies to parish councils, because our village planned a cut after a one-year project-based increase last year. The Budget Document has pretty much no detail.

So, how was it for you? Have I missed some friendly changes?

Our co-op has joined Book Industry Communication as an associate member, mainly in order to voice experiences of the Koha community and ourselves about RFID tag standardisation and related sustainable development. I want us to give the Free and Open Source Software library world and our charity and academic clients more input in developing this big change to libraries.

Even so, it wasn’t an easy decision to join. I still believe that RFID standards development would be better done in an open forum, but there doesn’t seem to be a perfect choice and I don’t think we can create one. BIC already has cross-sector support and seems much more open than the so-called “RFID Alliance”. Pragmatism was enough, this time, and so far BIC seems friendly and welcoming. I see that a larger service provider co-operative, OCLC (UK), is also a member, so hopefully that means it’s safe for co-ops.

I think most of the readers of this will be free software developers, koha users and/or members of other co-ops. So, I ask you, what do you think of this move? Leave me a comment on our blog – or email me if you prefer to keep it private.

RMS will be visiting Kosovo today to speak at the national library. There is no entrance fee, however the number of seats is limited to 250, so please register by writing to register@flossk.org.

Less illustriously, MJR will be visiting Plymouth to run a social media surgery as part of Doing business the co-operative way on Friday 25 June (tickets £25 or £75 – email now). I’ve a few good ideas for what to cover if people are interested but don’t have specific questions (and I’ll post a few of them here later), but what tip would you give to a new social media user?

The Eurovision Song Contest has been and gone with a better-than-usual winner and much of the snarkiness was on microblog sites like identi.ca this year. Search for #ESC, #eurovision or incomprehensibly-to-me #eurovison (no second i – is it spelt like that in some language, or can thousands not spell?). Anyway, enough of the title, on with the message…

I’ve been irritated by my linphone SIP internet phone (Skype without lock-in, with standards) taking up my screen space for a while. I’ve been meaning to upgrade to one of the recent versions that includes the linphonecsh shell and write some client that only displays windows when it’s needed, but I’ve been writing programs for work so much that I’ve not even found time to write blog posts recently, much less fun code, so that’s not happened.

So I’m quite happy to find linphone.el for my GNU Emacs text editor and find it mostly works. I changed one line at the end to (define-key global-map [menu-bar tools linphone] '("Linphone" . linphone)) to put it on the tools menu, but other than that, it just worked. Well, the Mute doesn’t, but that’s probably my phone headset being a different ALSA device. I don’t care: I use the hardware mute button.

In previous times, I would have added the link to the venerable EmacsWiki too, but it has the evil bad wrong Google reCaptcha on the edit page to stop disabled users, so screw it. Google’s reCaptcha seems to be spreading again, obstructing more people when accessing more websites. Is there a reason for that? The re in reCaptcha stands for replace with real anti-spam, please!

Anyway, now I’m controlling phone calls from Emacs. Whatever next? Voice recognition, M-x doctor and a speech synth?