BikeWeek 2009

2009-06-13 by mjr

Biking past the co-op
Bike and Co-op

It’s biiiiiiikeweeeeek!</noddy>

Once again, I’m supporting BikeWeek. I generally use a bike as the first leg of my work journeys, although my company doesn’t have a “Green Travel Plan” yet. It’s mainly the time taken writing such things which has stopped it. I think we’re in favour of such ideas. Has anyone got a plan we can just adopt?

There are events all over the country. Sadly, yet again, I can’t take advantage of the local offer of free entry to Tyntesfield if you turn up on a bike because I’ll be off to the Co-operative Group regional AGM.

Two ideas which I’m seeing in lots of areas are Commuter Challenges like JamBustingJune (which TTLLP is signed up to) and lots of bike shops supporting the event, such as Edinburgh Bicycle Cooperative in Edinburgh, Aberdeen, Newcastle, Manchester and Leeds.

What are you doing for Bike Week? Watching some races on TV? Taking part in local events?

Posted in Cooperatives | Tagged , , , , , , , | 2 Comments

Timeclock Functions in my .emacs

2009-06-08 by mjr

I’ve a ton of stuff that I want to write up, but the business busy-ness I mentioned in Elect MEPs for Freedom Now continues unabated. I’ve a good business reason for publishing these Emacs snippets, so here we go…

I nearly always have Emacs running. Although I don’t use it as my editor, it always has several useful files and utilities running. It tends to be one of the first applications I install on my workstations because it can also deputise for some more specialised tools. Among the useful utilities, I’ve been using timeclock for over a year and have grown some helper functions in my .emacs. Here’s a short tour. First of all, turn timeclock on and give myself an easy way to count with interval minutes:-

   (require 'timeclock)
   (defun timeclock-interval (i) (list (floor (/ (- (timeclock-time-to-seconds (cadr i)) (timeclock-time-to-seconds (car i))) 60)) (caddr i)))
   (defun timeclock-intervals (i) (map 'list 'timeclock-interval i))

Next, I want to summarise days according to how long I worked on what:-

   (defun timeclock-today (&optional daysago) (timeclock-intervals (cddr (nth (or daysago 0) (timeclock-day-alist)))))

(defun timeclock-total-today (time-projs &optional result)
  (if (equal (car time-projs) nil)
      result
    (let ((tp (sort time-projs (lambda (a b) (string-lessp (cadr b) (cadr a))))))
      (if (equal (cadar tp) (cadadr tp))
	  (timeclock-total-today
	   (cons
	    (list (+ (caar tp) (caadr tp)) (cadar tp)) 
	    (cddr tp))
	   result)
	(timeclock-total-today (cdr tp) (cons (car tp) result))))))

(defun timeclock-today-interactive ()
  (interactive)
  (princ
   (apply '+
	  (map 'list 'car 
	       (princ (timeclock-total-today (timeclock-today)))))))

Then I want to total up a number of days and break it down by projects:-

   (defun timeclock-print-total (i) (princ (car i)) (princ " ") (princ (cadr i)) (newline))

   (defun timeclock-project-totals (&optional log-data)
     (map 'list
	  (lambda (i) (list (apply '+ (map 'list 'car (timeclock-intervals (cdr i)))) (car i)))
	  (timeclock-project-alist (or log-data (timeclock-log-data)))))

   (defun timeclock-print-totals (&optional data) (map 'list 'timeclock-print-total (or data (timeclock-project-totals (timeclock-log-data)))))

I think a running count in the modeline is helpful:-

(defun timeclock-update-modeline ()
  (interactive)
  (setq timeclock-mode-string
	(propertize
	 (format 
	  "%s %.0fm " 
	  (caddr timeclock-last-event) 
	  (/ (timeclock-last-period) 60)))))

(timeclock-modeline-display)

And finally, c-X c-T shortcuts to control the timeclock quickly. There’s no sense using timeclock if you spend too much time on doing the monitoring, is there?

   (define-key ctl-x-map "ti" 'timeclock-in)
   (define-key ctl-x-map "to" 'timeclock-out)
   (define-key ctl-x-map "tc" 'timeclock-change)
   (define-key ctl-x-map "tr" 'timeclock-reread-log)
   (define-key ctl-x-map "tl" 'timeclock-visit-timelog)
   (define-key ctl-x-map "ty" 'timeclock-today-interactive)

Comments and enhancements welcomed!

Posted in GNU/Linux | Tagged , , , , , , | 6 Comments

Elect MEPs for Freedom Now

2009-06-04 by mjr

Hi! I’ve been away, but as you might have seen from identi.ca, I’m back but busy.

You may remember from posts such as Reject the Term Extension Directive and Improved Telecom Package Passed by EuroParl that MEPs can influence FOSS laws in many ways, because a lot of our copyright and patent laws are international now. Last time around, I compiled euroVote: copyright and patents but I’ve not had time this year. Thankfully, others have summarised them.

Mote Prime: Technology: Letter to MEPs on Software Patents Legislation summarises positions on the old swpat chestnut. European Parliament elections, the Green Party and free stuff By tom introduces the Green position. VOTE 2009: Spot the difference – Lib Dem “shocked and angered” special: The Bristol Blogger shows me getting annoyed with the LibDems.

If you’re in the UK, you can look up your MEPs on the ORG EU Elections Site which looks pretty accurate to me.

Anywhere in Europe, you can try to find some MEPs on the Free Software Pact country listing.

Posted in Community, Democracy | 1 Comment

SPI May 2009

2009-05-20 by mjr

The monthly board meeting of Software in the Public Interest will take place on irc.oftc.net #spi tonight (Wed 20 May) at 20:00 UTC. The meeting announcement was posted and there are indeed minutes to approve, a financial report, and a report on official correspondence related to DebConf10.

For the 27th meeting in succession (feels like it anyway), I may be without a stable network connection during the meeting because I’ll be at another event, raising the FOSS banner for TTLLP while speakers tell everyone to proprietarise everything (based on the preview essays). Even so, watch the comments below this article for a link to the summary when posted.

In other news, the Koha foundation is still going through its birth pangs. I’ve suggested associating with SPI in the meantime, so the project could manage assets better, but it’s just not happening. I feel partly it’s due to misconceptions about SPI and its activities, but there also seems to be some blind faith in private companies. I heard a quote about the current UK Parliament crisis which seems relevant to the situation: “He is behaving as if he is just running this gentlemen’s club. What we need to do is ask people to be involved.”

Posted in SPI | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , | 1 Comment

Enterprise Hubs, Societies, Newsletter and AGM

2009-05-08 by mjr

Cooperatives-SW (which I’m currently helping to direct) has been approved for Co-operative Enterprise Hub funding for 2009. Well done to Viv and the rest of the hard-working team who have been doing miracles for co-ops in this region with relatively little funding for so long now. (But if you’ve got a pot of money to donate, let me know, please.)

Industrial and Provident Societies are the traditional form for registering UK Co-operatives, but there are a number of things in its 1960s law which aren’t reflected in general company law (which was mostly updated since the mid-1980s). For starters, IPSes are registered with the FSA, whose website isn’t as good as Companies-House WebCHeck for Limited companies. Cooperatives-UK are pressing for the law to be modernised.

C-UK sent us a status update (which I can’t find on their website yet) this week. Amongst other things, they’re seeking to introduce provisions to allow online registration and filing for IPSes. I’ve asked them to take the opportunity to press for similar provisions for LLP Co-ops, or directing Companies House to act on any such existing provisions. At the moment, it seems unfair that LLPs are excluded from online filing, so paying double for routine administrative filings and relying on the increasingly dysfunctional Royal Mail.

Finally, the next Cooperatives-SW print/PDF newsletter should be out next week. Hope to see lots of you at the AGM in Plymouth on 23 June!

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

Koha IRC General Meeting Report

2009-05-07 by mjr

The Koha IRC General Meeting finished quite late for us Europeans, so LibLime Developers’ Blog: Koha project IRC meeting (Galen Charlton) was the first report to appear. Rather than repeat it here, go read it there.

See you on the first Wednesday of next month. Hopefully it will be a shorter meeting without nearly two years of backlog since the last meeting to cover!

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Koha IRC General Meeting

2009-05-06 by mjr

There will be a general meeting on the #koha IRC channel on Wednesday, 6 May 2009 at 19:00 UTC with a nominal finish time of 21:00. To convert to your timezone, try date -d @1241636400 (thanks to SPI (Joerg?) for that idea).

The meeting will include Koha 3.2/tip status and timeline, Koha 3.0.x status, Koha bugs database, KohaCon 2009 report. The full agenda is on the wiki.

Connection details are shown on the wiki front page but are basically irc://irc.katipo.co.nz:6667/#koha

Hope to see you there, or a summary should be linked from the comments here later.

Posted in Koha | Tagged , , , , | Leave a comment

Bristol Social Enterprise Summit Consultation

2009-04-29 by mjr

Last Thursday, I went to the Social Enterprise summit regional workshop that I mentioned. Apparently, SEC are hoping that ministers Mandelson, Purnell, Byrne and Blears will be at the summit, along with people from various famous co-ops.

I took along some email feedback I received on ’supporting new blood in social enterprise’ about needing help to bridge the gaps (financial, social, training) between taking on new members and them being productive enough to “break even”. Happily, that was echoed and reinforced by other delegates – I shared a table with people from Trinity Community Arts, AvonCDA, Sofa Project, Somerset Co-operative Services and Community Action.

Emboldened by that, I ranted about the Business Support Simplification Programme (which seems to mean that only BusinessLinkSW has any gov.uk money in our region and they’re being really poor at co-op support) and I threw a couple of ideological-explosives into the consultation, suggesting that franchising has failed as a way of spreading social enterprise and we need to start offering General Public Licensing of our business models, because we’re not franchising businesses and most of us don’t want to be. I wonder if that idea will detonate somewhere helpful.

The Social Enterprise Coalition officers had some details of the support programmes that are already announced. One of them is a “golden hello” where the enterprise gets money when a new person joins. It’s run by jobcentreplus. So yesterday, when I was at a Business Link “Real help for business” event, I asked the jobcentreplus officers there about it: apparently it’s useless to TTLLP because all our workers are partners and not employees. I was expecting more support for co-ops from a Labour+Co-op government, but it shouldn’t’ve been a surprise after the budget.

After that, I don’t think it’s worth posting details of the other SE assistance programmes mentioned: they’ll probably turn out to be equally useless for co-ops and I don’t want to waste your time. I’ll rant about that and the BusinessLinkSW event another day or in another place. Ask me if you want details and I’ll put them in a comment or email them.

And in that spirit, it’s back to programming for me!

Posted in Cooperatives | Tagged , , , , , | 6 Comments

What do you want to tell a Social Enterprise Summit?

2009-04-23 by mjr

There is a Social Enterprise summit in London in May with cabinetoffice.gov.uk/thirdsector. As part of representing TTLLP to Cooperatives-SW, I will be at a regional workshop this afternoon “to enable the sector to input the summit”(?). More detail is available at tinyurl.com/cnm5c3

The workshop topics are

  • ‘fighting the recession’;
  • ‘social enterprise informing a rebalanced economy’;
  • ‘supporting new blood in social enterprise’ and
  • ‘scaling up the sector’.

If you have any thoughts on those themes, please send them to me by IM, microblog or as a comment on this article. I may be commenting on identi.ca if I get internet at the event.

Posted in Cooperatives | Tagged , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

UK Budget Day 2009 and other days…

2009-04-22 by mjr

The UK Budget is out. I’m pretty disappointed for TTLLP – the headlines for business look rather unhelpful to our co-op.

  • It supports loss-making businesses – keeping our unsustainable competitors in business for longer,
  • it spreads business rate up-rating – which we pay through rent on the few places we pay it, probably no change overall,
  • it introduces a credit insurance scheme, also keeping our unsustainable competitors in business for longer by letting them run up more debt when the banks are cutting it off, and
  • introducing a vehicle scrappage scheme which appears to discourage sustainable travel (which most members try to do), be open to abuse (is it just a buy-a-banger bonus?) and have other side-effects which can be seen in Germany and France already.

I’m thinking that our co-op will see more benefit from the EU capping mobile telecoms prices, Earth Day or even Plone Day than UK Budget Day 2009.

What’s in the UK budget for you? I may have missed something useful for cooperatives, so please tell us if you spot something in it for us, too!

Posted in Cooperatives | Tagged , , , , | Leave a comment