Beware the march of the IP trolls at the House Committee on Small Business

I just got an announcement of a hearing to take place tomorrow before the U.S. House Committee on Small Business. I don't see many representatives of small businesses on the panel, but rather spokespeople for the most conservative forces in the area known as intellectual property. Speakers come from the Computer & Communications Industry Association, the Songwriters Guild of America, the Business Software Alliance, the Association for Competitive Technology, and the Motor & Equipment Manufacturers Association.

It would be eye-opening for the House Committee to listen to actual innovators, garage inventors, and creative artists trying to work around the copyright and patent traps in the current system. I do not oppose copyright or patents and I know they sometimes produce rewards for innovators. But the forces before the committee are no friends of creative people. Most of them are well-known to readers of this website for their raids on defenseless shops and their attempts to unfairly extend the control that the law has traditionally given them through technical and legal machinations.

(continue reading)

Four short links: 20 July 2010

Hardware Hacking, BI Reporting Tool, Book Recommendations, and Winning the Futurist Lottery

1. Dangerous Prototypes -- "a new open source hardware project every month". Sample project: Flash Destroyer, which writes and verifies EEPROM chips until they blow out.
2. Wabit -- GPLv3 reporting tool.
3. Because No Respectable MBA Programme Would Admit Me (Mike Shaver) -- excellent book recommendations.
4. The Most Prescient Footnote Ever (David Pennock) -- In footnote 14 of Chapter 5 (p. 228) of Graham’s classic Hackers and Painters, published in 2004, Graham asks “If the the Mac was so great why did it lose?”. His explanation ends with this caveat, in parentheses: "And it hasn’t lost yet. If Apple were to grow the iPod into a cell phone with a web browser, Microsoft would be in big trouble."

Social Security in the Gov 2.0 age

Social Security CIO Frank Baitman on open government and social media.

Last week, I visited Social Security Administration headquarters outside of Baltimore to speak about social media and government at its Employee Open Government Awareness Day. Before my presentation, I sat down with Frank Baitman, the agency's chief information officer, to talk about Gov 2.0, open government and technology. A video of my interview with the Social Security CIO is embedded below.

What does open government mean, in the context of the agency?

"Social Security touches virtually every American," said Baitman. "I think over 97 percent pay into retirement now. A large number of Americans come into contact with the agency for other reasons as well. Social media and open government offer ways to communicate with them. In a democracy, it's core to government that people understand what government is doing with their tax dollars."

Where does open data and Data.gov factor in to that discussion? "We had 16 data sets at the beginning," said Baitman. "We have many more now. I see that as just the beginning. Putting data out there from an agency that's data-centric is really what we're about here. There are cool things happening out there in the not-for-profit and open government community."

There's much more from our extended discussion on social media, teleworking, cloud computing and accessibility after the jump. Look for a followup article on Social Security and open government later this week.

(continue reading)

In defense of games in the workplace

"Gamestorming" author Dave Gray on how games cut through creative chaos.

We're hardwired to play games. We play them for fun. We play them in our social interactions. We play them at work.

That last one is tricky. "Games" and "work" don't seem like a natural pairing. Their coupling in the workplace either implies goofing off (the fun variant) or office politics (the not-so-fun type).

Dave Gray, Sunni Brown, and James Macanufo, co-authors of the upcoming book Gamestorming, have a different perspective. They contend that an embrace and understanding of game mechanics can yield benefits in many work environments, particularly those where old hierarchical models are no longer applicable.

In the following Q&A;, Gray discusses the collaborative power of games and how they can cut through increasing workplace complexity.

What is Gamestorming?

Dave Gray: Gamestorming is a set of collaboration practices that originated in Silicon Valley in the 1970s and has been evolving ever since. It's an approach that emphasizes quick, ad-hoc organization of teams so they can rapidly co-design and co-develop ideas. As my co-authors and I observed these practices, they seemed to look more like games than any other form of work we were familiar with. Hence the term "gamestorming."

(continue reading)

Four short links: 19 July 2010

Open Source Brain Software, Mind Control, Data QA, Android Game Engine

1. OpenVibe -- open source software for brain-computer interfaces, from Inria.
2. Robot Controlled by Mind (video) -- uses OpenVibe. I love that this can see blinks and other neural activity, and that it's hackable.
3. Talend Open Profiler -- open source tool to QA data.
4. AndEngine -- open source 2D OpenGL Game Engine for the Android platform.

Report from 2010 Community Leadership Summit

It's hardly pertinent to summarize an unconference, because it's all over the map by (lack of) design. Anyway, you don't need me to tell you about the the topics at this year's community leadership summit because you can view the wiki pages for the Saturday and Sunday sessions. What I like each year is the little space we all create for ourselves at CLS in a forlorn corner of an overwhelming, cold conference locale that makes it very hard to feel community.

(continue reading)

The art of community leadership

I stopped by the Community Leadership Summit 2010 as I was preparing for OSCON this coming week. It is an open unconference-style event, now in its second year, that's held the weekend before OSCON. Everyone who attends is welcome to lead and contribute sessions on any topic that is relevant. In these discussion sessions the participants can interact directly, offer thoughts and experiences, and share ideas and questions. There will be another more detailed post about this event later on Radar, but if you are in Portland, Ore. this weekend you can still register for Sunday's sessions here.

I spoke with the event organizer Jono Bacon, who works at Canonical as the Ubuntu community manager, and is author of the book "The Art of Community: Building the New Age of Participation." Watch below as he describes how the basic principles of his book led to the creation of this event:

Four short links: 16 July 2010

GPL Debate, Storage Costs, Social Software, Vodafone's Open Source

1. GPL WordPress Theme Angst -- a podcaster brought together Matt Mullenweg (creator of WordPress), and Chris Pearson (creator of the Thesis theme). Chris doesn't believe WordPress's GPL should be inherited by themes. Matt does, and the SFLC and others agree. The conversation is interesting because (a) they and the podcaster do a great job of keeping it civil and on-track and purposeful, and (b) Chris is unswayed. Chris built on GPLed software without realizing it, and is having trouble with the implications. Chris's experience, and feelings, and thought processes, are replicated all around the world. This is like a usability bug for free software. (via waxpancake on Twitter)
2. 480G SSD Drive -- for a mere $1,599.99. If you wonder why everyone's madly in love with parallel, it's because of this order-of-magnitude+ difference in price between regular hard drives and the Fast Solution. Right now, the only way to rapidly and affordably crunch a ton of data is to go parallel. (via marcoarment on Twitter)
3. Pandas and Lobsters: Why Google Cannot Build Social Software -- this resonates with me. The primary purpose of a social application is connecting with others, seeing what they're up to, and maybe even having some small, fun interactions that though not utilitarian are entertaining and help us connect with our own humanity. Google apps are for working and getting things done; social apps are for interacting and having fun. Read it for the lobster analogy, which is gold.
4. Wayfinder -- The majority of all the location and navigation related software developed at Wayfinder Systems, a fully owned Vodafone subsidiary, is made available publicly under a BSD licence. This includes the distributed back-end server, tools to manage the server cluster and map conversion as well as client software for e.g. Android, iPhone and Symbian S60. Technical documentation is available in the wiki and discussions around the software are hosted in the forum. Interesting, and out of the blue. At the very least, there's some learning to be done by reading the server infrastructure. (via monkchips on Twitter)

Analysis: A defining moment for "meaningful use"

How new rules will affect patients, providers, and electronic records.

We have reached a fulcrum point in the history of health care in our country. The announcement on Tuesday of the final rule establishing Medicare and Medicaid incentive programs for the meaningful use of electronic health records (EHR) creates a framework for change that will have reverberations throughout the health care industry. An important companion rule (pdf) was also released that establishes standards, specifications and certification criteria for EHRs.

David Blumenthal, the national coordinator for health information technology at Health and Human Services (HHS), and Marilyn Tavenner, principal deputy administrator of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS), published an overview of the meaningful use rule in the the New England Journal of Medicine. John D. Halamka, of both Harvard Medical School and Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, wrote an excellent analysis of the final standards rule on his blog. I expect in the coming months there will be a great deal of parsing of the language of these two rules, which total 1,092 pages.

The rule defining meaningful use will now allow health care providers to adopt health information technology that aligns with the goals of the incentive program included in the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act. The criteria for achieving meaningful use has been substantially scaled back from the proposed rule, which came out at the beginning of the year. After receiving more than 2,000 comments, the rule has some significant changes that could make reaching stage one of meaningful use easier.

A major shift is the move away from an all-or-nothing approach, where providers had to meet every single measure to be eligible for payments. Instead, there's now a set of must-have core requirements and an a la carte menu of discretionary options. There are 15 core requirements for physicians and 14 for hospitals. Health care providers can then choose five of 10 menu options to meet phase one of meaningful use. This strategy will enable a great many hospitals and small practices in rural and underserved areas to have a shot at cashing in on incentive payments.

(continue reading)

App Inventor and the culture wars

Google's new App Inventor gets to the heart of the cultural difference between Apple and Google. If you haven't seen it yet, App Inventor is an experimental new SDK for the Android platform. What's different about App Inventor is that there's practically no coding per se; it's an entirely visual language. Its heritage goes back to Logo, but more directly, to Scratch, which has a snap-together, building-block model for describing behavior.

App Inventor's intent is to enable people who wouldn't normally program to develop the apps that they want; to make it possible to write Android apps without being a "software developer." This is revolutionary; they're not trying to lower the bar, they're throwing it away entirely. I don't know if App Inventor will succeed, but it's an important experiment.

I want to contrast this with the iPhone, which has a much different model. When I last wrote about the iPhone, many commented on Apple's focus on the perfect user experience. I largely agree (and said so in the article), and I think Google is unlikely to match that. Apple has an app store to guarantee that poorly designed apps never get to the user (the fact that many junky apps make it into the store is, well, another issue). The user gets the perfect curated experience. I won't even begin to argue about whether App Inventor's UI components are as elegant as Cocoa's. They aren't. But Google has taken another direction altogether: the user's experience isn't going to be perfect, but the user's experience will be the experience he or she wants. If you want to do something, you can build it yourself; you can put it on your own phone without going through a long approval process; you don't have to learn an arcane programming language. This is computing for the masses. It's computing that enables people to be creative, not just passive consumers.

(continue reading)

Health Care Challenge combines patient empowerment and data crunching

I looked over the five applications requested by the Health Care Challenge launched last week. This challenge was set up by the organizers of the Health 2.0 Conference along with the Department of Health and Human Services and other partners (including O'Reilly Media). Two unifying threads tie together all the challenges, indirectly showing the way the health care field is heading.

The first thread is involving the patients in their own care -- sometimes collaboratively. The health care field has come to realize that as we pick off and solve the obvious problems that surgery or drugs can take care of, and as the population's general health and hygiene increase, diseases are getting harder to deal with. The patient has to be responsible for his or her own well-being.

This is fairly clear in problems such as high blood pressure and obesity, but applies even to conditions that are immediately treatable by health care professionals. Take surgery, for instance. It would seem the ultimate occasion for passivity on the part of the patient, but every surgery requires a lengthy recovery. If the patient fails to follow orders or doesn't understand the need to report a complication, she could end up worse than she started.

The second thread is collecting and sharing data. Sometimes this involves existing standards for electronic storage, but many vendors are creating their own APIs and data structures to fill the gap left by these standards -- especially to record patient activity, as part the previous thread involving the patients.

Together, these threads take health out of specialized, clinical settings and integrate it into everyday routines -- the way true health has always been attained.

Take a look at the five challenges and see whether you'd like to try your hand at them. More challenges will hopefully be added.

(continue reading)

Four short links: 15 July 2010

Measuring Life Success, Music Industry Woes, Google Humanities, Open Source Hardware

1. How Will You Measure Your Life? (HBR) -- Clayton Christenson's advice to the Harvard Business School's graduating class, every section a gem. If you study the root causes of business disasters, over and over you’ll find this predisposition toward endeavors that offer immediate gratification. If you look at personal lives through that lens, you’ll see the same stunning and sobering pattern: people allocating fewer and fewer resources to the things they would have once said mattered most. (via mjasay on Twitter)
2. Lyle Lovett Yet To Make a Penny From Record Sales (TechDirt) -- read with Virgin Sues Platinum-Selling Band and Zoe Keating's ongoing exploration of life outside a label. Big record companies take the album profits but give you visibility so you can tour. This sucks if you're a good musician but can't tour (e.g., just had a #cellobaby). (via danjite on Twitter)
3. Google's Commitment to Digital Humanities (Google) -- giving grants to universities to work with digital works. Will also be releasing more corpora like the collection of ancient Greek and Latin texts.
4. Open Source Hardware Definition -- up to v0.3, there's momentum building. There's an open hardware summit in September. The big issue in the wild is how much of the complex multi-layered hardware game must be free-as-in-speech for the whole deal to be free-as-in-speech. See, for example, Bunnie Huang's take.

Recent Posts

• Taking on IT challenges at California scale | by Alex Howard on July 14, 2010
• Four short links: 14 July 2010 | by Nat Torkington on July 14, 2010
• Four short links: 13 July 2010 | by Nat Torkington on July 13, 2010
• Health and Human Services finalizes meaningful use for electronic health records | by Andy Oram on July 13, 2010
• Crowdsourcing the search for aliens | by James Turner on July 12, 2010
• Four short links: 12 July 2010 | by Nat Torkington on July 12, 2010
• Gov 2.0 Week in Review: Summer Heatwave | by Alex Howard on July 9, 2010
• Hardware hacking heaven | by Edd Dumbill on July 9, 2010
• Four short links: 9 July 2010 | by Nat Torkington on July 9, 2010
• Ruminations on iPhone 4, iOS and mobile video | by Mark Sigal on July 8, 2010
• Four short links: 8 July 2010 | by Nat Torkington on July 8, 2010
• Mobile, desktop or cloud: Where does the future of open source lie? | by James Turner on July 7, 2010