2009 Software in the Public Interest Board Election

2009-07-08 by mjr

It’s the SPI annual meeting tonight at 2000 UTC (2100 UK). Once again, I’m elsewhere (probably still out after Somerset Cooperative Services CIC AGM in the day and North Somerset Cycle Forum at 5.30pm), but I’ll try to connect to the SPI IRC from a mobile device.

“There are two potential new associated projects to vote on (OSUNIX and Open64), plus reports from the secretary and treasurer, one set of minutes to approve, and a bit of discussion of the currently ongoing SPI election. One board member has sent tentative regrets.” (Jimmy Kaplowitz)

Like it says, there’s a currently ongoing SPI election. At the time of writing, there aren’t even enough nominations.

As I’ve written elsewhere, I’m concentrating on co-ops this year, so I’d like to see another candidate pledge to anonymise SPI votes (the election votes are stored indefinitely at present), talk to members and the wider community more and help SPI actually publish its annual report. It would also be good to see candidates from a variety of the supported projects: debian, Drupal, Fresco, freedesktop.org, Gallery, GNUstep, GNU TeXmacs, The HeliOS Project, madwifi.org, OFTC, OpenOffice.org, OpenVAS, OpenWrt, Open Voting Foundation, PostgreSQL, Privoxy or Tux4Kids.

Nominations need to be in by the 13th. Would you stand?

Posted in SPI | Tagged , , , , , , | 2 Comments

OCLC Record Use: Reboot

2009-07-07 by mjr

Disruptive Library Technology Jester reports that OCLC Formally Withdraws Proposed Record Use Policy. The Series Table of Contents there gives a pretty good history, or you can read my past comments in Libraries, Cooperatives, OCLC and TTLLP and OCLC Library Data-grab Policy Countdown.

Sharing library data is a big topic. There are a lot of small libraries who would be really empowered by easier sharing with the rest of the community. I think a lot of other cooperatives in other fields could be persuaded to follow OCLC’s lead if they adopted something like the ODbL or another open data licence.

OCLC says that a new group will be named to begin work to draft a new policy. Until then, we’re back with the not-privatised but not-particularly-cooperative 1987 rules. I guess it’s better to go nowhere than to move in a bad way?

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Oh no! Ex-MP Richard Allan hired to make the EU more Facebook-friendly

2009-07-06 by mjr

As you may remember from my Google-WEF rant a few years ago, I strongly believe that governments should regulate private corporations and not the other way round. It is part of our job as business owners to try to stay within the limits agreed by society. If we want to influence those limits, we should do that as individual citizens as much as possible, not by using our businesses to bankroll representatives.

Now I read this in the Guardian: “Facebook has hired Richard Allan, who was previously the head of European regulatory affairs for the technology giant Cisco, to lead its efforts in lobbying EU governments.” When I was working for the Association For Free Software (2002-5), Richard Allan was one of the more informative and knowledgeable MPs. I expressed some concerns when he joined Cisco, but he chaired the Power of Information Taskforce in 2008. Now it looks like he’s gone from the deep blue sea to the devil.

To be honest, I’m even more worried by the prospect of Facebookier government than the Google government I’ve ranted about in the past. What are you playing at, Richard Allan? Maybe in a few days, his website will explain, but it’s been very unsociable about Facebook at first.

This is another example of the problem that Europeans don’t even know which companies are meddling with our government. Our law is nowhere near as strong as the US now, with only a voluntary register.

Registers of interests of elected representatives are sometimes better (I have to check my declarations on Monday and I’m only a councillor for a small village), but I’ve no idea how to see my MEPs’ interests and I found nothing on EuroParl UK website. Anyone know how to find out?

I much prefer it when politicians meet directly with community members, like President Lula at FISL (reported on Nardol), rather than having companies that sell to communities paying people to meet politicians. That’s about four steps removed from the citizens, isn’t it?

Why is no-one talking about cleaning up the EU in UK elections? Bizarrely, the recent EuroParl election was mostly fought over UK expense-fiddling allegations! How do we clean our governments up? Should we care?

On a somewhat amusing footnote, Puffbox notes Richard Allan doesn’t have facebook.com/richardallan (namespace collisions were always going to happen, which made the late introduction of facebook usernames rather daft, upsetting many of their users) – I wonder if they’ll snatch it back from its current user?

Posted in Web Development | Tagged , , , | 2 Comments

Happy International Day of Cooperatives

2009-07-04 by mjr

Today is the 87th ICA and 15th UN International Day of Cooperatives. There’s a PDF message from the United Nations secretary general.

It’s also the start of the Tour de France, which runs for the next 22 days. There are four cooperative-linked teams which I’ll be hoping do well: AG2R-LA Mondiale, Caisse D’Epargne, Rabobank and Milram. It’s also probably the first tour de tweet and there’s a list of links here or you can probably find many others. I wish they were on OpenMicroBlogging, but they’re not.

It’s only half-way through stage one and I’m already bored with people grumbling about the terrible internet video streams. Internet video’s always terrible and it will be a while before the <video> tag saves us, thanks to vendor squabbling. It’s much easier to get your MPEG-2 streams by satellite if you live in Europe – and it also helps those outside Europe by reducing the demand on the streams. I compiled a list of free-to-air satellite channels covering the Tour de France.

So, what have you been doing today?

Posted in Cooperatives | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , | 1 Comment

Small is beautiful or big is better? (#coop09 sw audio download)

2009-07-03 by mjr

There were several interesting conferences last week. An honourable mention to the Worker Co-operative Forum, but the most interesting for me was the Cooperatives-SW annual conference in Plymouth on Tuesday 23 June 2009.

This free event was split into three parts: the formal business (reports, accounts and so on), an interesting direction-finding session facilitated by Marc from the Zebra Collective and a debate on the question “small is beautiful or big is better”? At the moment, there are a few massive UK co-ops emerging, particularly in retail, but also a thriving range of small independents. Must co-ops grow to survive? Are large co-ops as democratic?

The question was debated by Alan Bonner, chief exec of Radstock Cooperative Society, Chris Herries, board member of the Cooperative Group, Alex Lawrie, of Somerset Cooperative Services and Steve Guy of (I think) City of Plymouth Credit Union.

Download it in Ogg Vorbis format (5.3Mb, about 49 minutes, instructions on how to play, hosted by TTLLP). The recording was taken on an s1mp3 player I quickly threw on the table, but it performed remarkably well. There should be a video too, but it needs some codecs I don’t have.

So who do you agree with? Is it the old software question: do you merge, collaborate or fork to survive?

Posted in Cooperatives | Tagged , , , , , , , , | 1 Comment

Digital Britain Report: first glance

2009-07-01 by mjr

The Digital Britain Report was published on 16 June 2009. I only got time to look at it quickly recently because this is one of the co-op AGM seasons.

At first glance, it misses the mark. It doesn’t do anything to unlock Digital Britain and make us a more sharing and social place. From failing to open the 3G mobile networks to the Phone Co-op and other operators completely (they describe it as already being “highly competitive” – haven’t they visited a South West “notspot”?), through the unnecessary increase in protection for Star Wars’s foreign owners, right down to the continued support for Adobe on the report download site instead of third-sector-produced pdfreaders.org, it looks like the report won’t stop us being “Digital Divide Britain”.

I also have my suspicions about the effect of the “DAB-only from the end of 2015” decision on our community radio companies, but I’ve not been active in that sector for years and there’s a further consultation about that.

Ultimately, “the Government believes piracy of intellectual propert for profit is theft and will be pursued as such through the criminal law” is the killer phrase in this report. The concept of being allowed to file-share without payment doesn’t even appear in the same section. I’ve been warning about these “New Enclosure” attempts for years: I didn’t expect the Digital Britain report to be such a leap towards them.

I think many of these problems could have been avoided if digital production cooperatives had been included in the preparation of this report in any significant way. I feel it has been captured by the private sector and a few trading funds, to the detriment of the nation. Shouldn’t we expect better from a Labour and Co-operative government?

What did you think of the report? What else am I missing? Seen any good reviews of it for free software fans or cooperators?

Posted in Cooperatives, GNU/Linux, SPI, ThePhoneCoop | Tagged , , , , | 4 Comments

Possible new word: attendocracy?

2009-06-29 by mjr

I think I’ve just made up another new word (to go alongside my pet hate lawyerbomb):

attendocracy
a whole society run mainly by meeting attendees. Usually, the meetings are basically non-discriminatory (all members may attend) and attendance is itself enough to give one power, but those not at the meeting are positively ignored (no postal ballots or elections). Choice of location, price and time of meetings is key to power in an attendocratic society.

Did this word exist? Is there another existing word for this idea? Is it the same as meetingocracy? Is there a better word for it?

I’m broadly in favour of do-ocracy (even when it doesn’t work out as I want), so I think I’ve been handling attendocracies badly. Are they worth the time?

Posted in SPI | Tagged , , , , | 2 Comments

Heatwave!

2009-06-29 by mjr

Well, what passes for a heat wave in England: “an average threshold temperature is 30 °C by day and 15 °C overnight” according to the Met Office: Heat-Health Watch.

So, I’ll be following HOWTO not melt – keeping cool at midsummer again. Anyone got any new tips or tricks for 2009?

Finally, one of TTLLP’s full-timers is away this week, so enquiries may get saved and answered in batches. If it’s urgent, please put “urgent” in the subject line of an email.

Posted in Cooperatives, Education, Training and Information | Tagged , , , , , , , | 5 Comments

qpsmtpd Improved Things

2009-06-19 by mjr

As you may remember from past problems with joe-jobs, TTLLP still has a few (maybe only one left?) qmail servers rattling around. The comments on spam-filtering suggested a few possibilities for easing matters.

As I wrote I would, I gave spamdyke a go. Maybe the out-of-the-box configuration isn’t right for me and maybe I didn’t configure it correctly, but it only cut a bit of load down and didn’t really work for me. MagicSpam seemed like a bad idea, partly because I want to slowly move people out of Plesk, not tie them into it and I hate surrendering autonomy to black boxes.

So, I installed qpsmtpd, as suggested by the legendary Steve Kemp. I found this guide to Installing qpsmtpd on SuSE 10.0 with Plesk 8.0 helpful (even though I wasn’t installing on SuSE or Plesk) and got plugins » auth » auth_imap from the qpsmtpd wiki to get SMTP AUTH working again.

The main lines of defence on the Exim servers remain a fun mix of IP-based throttling formulae and greylisting. The Postfix ones only really use greylisting, as far as I can remember. Those servers are much older than the qmail-using one, but still seem to cope.

Have you had to step-up your anti-spam systems recently? Is qmail that much worse, or is that soon-to-be-replaced 2-year-old server simply inadequate now?

Posted in GNU/Linux | Tagged , , , , , , , , | 3 Comments

SPI June 2009 and WsM BikeWeek Breakfast

2009-06-17 by mjr

The monthly board meeting of Software in the Public Interest will take place on irc.oftc.net #spi tonight (Wed 17 June) at 20:00 UTC. The meeting announcement was posted and there are indeed minutes to approve, a financial report, and nothing else.

By the way, can anyone tell me how to get a copy of the bylaws of an Ohio corporation? It doesn’t seem to be on the state business website and the corporation doesn’t publish them. Am I stuck?

Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m off to the FREE breakfast for cyclists 8.00am-9.30am at The Victorian Cafe (Near the pier on Weston-super-Mare seafront). Weather is quite a bit better this year, so hopefully turn-out will be better.

Posted in SPI | Tagged , , , , , , | 3 Comments