Cost is only part of the Gov 2.0 open source story

Washington, D.C. CTO Bryan Sivak adds realism to his open source advocacy.

Bryan Sivak, chief technology officer for the District of Columbia and a speaker at the upcoming Gov 2.0 Summit, has smartly mixed healthy realism with enthusiastic support for open source in government. The result is a message that resonates beyond open source evangelists.

For example, here's what he recently had to say about the allure of open source cost savings:

"I don't think cost savings of open source is the panacea that everyone thinks it is. It's true that there's no upfront licensing cost, but there's cost in figuring out the appropriate implementation strategy, making sure you have the people with the right skills on staff, and making sure you're able to maintain and manage the system. You need to put a lot into how you implement it."

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Four short links: 23 August 2010

Crowdsourced Architecture, Lego Timetracking, Streaming Charts, and The Deeper Meaning of School

1. Open Buildings -- crowdsourced database of information about buildings, for architecture geeks. A sign that crowdsourcing is digging deep into niches far far from the world of open source software. (via straup on Delicious)
2. Lego-Based Time Tracking -- clever hack to build physical graphs of where your time goes. (via avgjanecrafter on Twitter)
3. Smoothie Charts -- a charting Javascript library designed for live streaming data. (via jdub on Twitter)
4. The Big Lie (Chris Lehmann) -- why school is not only about workforce development: I think - I fear - that the next twenty or thirty years of American life are going to be difficult. I think we're going to have some really challenging problems to solve, and I think that we're going to be faced with hard choices about our lives, and I want our schools to help students be ready to solve those problems, to weigh-in on those problems, to vote on those problems. It's why History and Science are so important. It's why kids have to learn how to create and present their ideas in powerful ways. It's why kids have to become critical consumers and producers of information. And hopefully, along the way, they find the careers that will help them build sustainable, enjoyable, productive lives. Also read Umair Haque's A Deeper Kind of Joblessness which Chris linked to.

Opensource and Javascript: Polymaps Used To Make PrettyMaps

SimpleGeo, geo cloud services and data provider, and Stamen, creators of many beautiful data visualizations, have teamed up to release Polymaps. Polymaps is an opensource Javascript mapping framework. It's been on Github for a while, but they are finally announcing it.

Out of the gate, Stamen has also launched a great example application, PrettyMaps, combining Natural Earth, OSM and Flickr layers. The effect is, well, pretty. Here is the continental United States at zoom level 3:

And here is Los Angeles at zoom level 8:

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Space IT, the final frontier

Exploring open source cloud computing, virtualization and Climate@Home at NASA's first IT Summit.

When people think of NASA and information technology in 2010, issues like the future of manned space flight, the aging space shuttle fleet or progress on the International Space Station may come to mind. What casual observers miss is how NASA is steadily modernizing those systems, including developing open source cloud computing, virtualization, advanced robotics, deep space communications and collaborative social software, both behind the firewall and in the public eye.

NASA has also earned top marks for its open government initiatives from both the White House and an independent auditor. That focus is in-line with the agency's mission statement, adopted in February 2006, to "pioneer the future in space exploration, scientific discovery and aeronautics research," and it was on display this week at the first NASA IT Summit in Washington, D.C.

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Be innovative, but don't use that word

Author Scott Berkun revisits the "Myths of Innovation" three years later.

Scott Berkun challenged popular assumptions about innovation and greatness three years ago with "The Myths of Innovation." Now, as an updated paperback edition arrives, Berkun revisits the book and its themes.

Among the points Berkun makes in the following interview:

• He isn't a fan of self-defined innovation. "It's a good word to let other people say about you, rather than use it in reference to yourself," he says.
• Not feeling creative? Berkun proposes an easy (albeit claustrophobic) method for getting it back.
• He says our emphasis on fantasies, heroes, and silver bullets obscures the real stories -- and the real work -- behind notable people and projects.

The full interview follows.

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Four short links: 20 August 2010

Case Study, Promise Transparency, Scriptable Browsing, Open Science Data Success

1. Case Study: Slideshare Goes Freemium (Startup Lessons Learned) -- I love case studies, they're the best part of every business degree. The MVPs were tricky to implement for emotional reasons, too. Because the SlideShare team was used to giving away a high-value product, engineers balked at charging for a clearly imperfect product. The analytics package, for instance, launched in what Sinha calls “a very crude version; we started off and sold it before we were comfortable with it."
2. Guardian's Pledge Tracker -- keeping track of the pledges and promises from the new UK government. (via niemanlab)
3. luakit browser framework -- script WebKit using Lua. (via ivanristic)
4. Sharing of Data Leads to Progress on Alzheimers (New York Times) -- The key to the Alzheimer’s project was an agreement as ambitious as its goal: not just to raise money, not just to do research on a vast scale, but also to share all the data, making every single finding public immediately, available to anyone with a computer anywhere in the world. No one would own the data. No one could submit patent applications, though private companies would ultimately profit from any drugs or imaging tests developed as a result of the effort.

The software behind the VA health care transformation

A review of Phillip Longman's book "Best Care Anywhere."

Phillip Longman's book "Best Care Anywhere," just released in its second edition, had a strong effect on me that cascaded off of several other experiences and encounters I've had recently. The material should have been more familiar to me. The Department of Veterans Affairs' quality efforts have become health care industry buzz, and its illustrious VistA software has also often made the news, a couple times for its near-death experiences. But VistA is still not the subject of daily discussion in American public life.

I'm beginning to think our blind spot about the VA and VistA comes from the sheer magnitude of the whole achievement. Longman's modest-length book is just an introduction to the swirling mass of issues that come with this topic: what VA's quality program has to say about health care, about business motivations, about government, about software development, even about ordinary people and how they handle the most important aspects of their own lives.

There's just too much there for us to absorb, and the lessons of VistA force us to relinquish too many prejudices. I'm beginning to make the necessary shift to understanding VistA after talking to doctors, hearing from the people porting it to new environments, and now reading Longman's book. For other people without so many contacts in the health care field, his book is a good start. Don't expect it to answer all your questions, but just to make you uncomfortable enough to change the way you think -- and act.

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Four short links: 19 August 2010

Satellite-based Forecasting, Design Book, Submarine Cable Map, Brain Science

1. New Big Brother: Market-Moving Satellite Images -- using satellite images of Wal-Mart and Target parking lots to predict quarterly returns. (via Hacker News)
2. Form and Code -- beautiful book on the intersection of code, design, architecture, form, and function. One of the authors is Casey Reas who was also one of the people behind Processing. (via RandomEtc on Twitter)
3. Cable Map -- major underwater communications cables around the world. (via berkun on Twitter)
4. Ray Kurzweil Does Not Understand The Brain (Pharyngula) -- To simplify it so a computer science guy can get it, Kurzweil has everything completely wrong. The genome is not the program; it's the data. The program is the ontogeny of the organism, which is an emergent property of interactions between the regulatory components of the genome and the environment, which uses that data to build species-specific properties of the organism. He doesn't even comprehend the nature of the problem, and here he is pontificating on magic solutions completely free of facts and reason.

Facebook Places plays nice with Yelp, Foursquare, Gowalla and Booyah

Facebook just launched Places for the United States. In short, it is a location check-in platform. They launched with four partners (Foursquare, Gowalla, Yelp and Booyah) all of whom are federating check-ins in some way. The Places API is currently read-only, while the Write & Search API are in closed beta.

Facebook Places was created with three goals:

1. Helping people share where they are
2. Seeing who else is around you
3. Seeing what's going on around you

The launch will be available via a new iPhone app and the Facebook mobile site (requires a browser with HTML5 and geolocation). From these apps you can check yourself into a location, create a new place ,and check-in friends. Every Place has a "People Here Now" section where you can see who else is at a location during a particular time window.

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Linked data is opening 800 years of UK legal info

The new legislation.gov.uk site brings the semantic web into government.

Earlier this month, the National Archives of the United Kingdom launched legislation.gov.uk to provide public access to a primary source of legal information for citizens. Legislation.gov.uk covers more than 800 years of legal history in England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland.

When I heard about the new site, I dialed up John Sheridan (@johnlsheridan), head of e-services and strategy at the UK's National Archives, to talk about its implications for open government. Our conversation is embedded as a podcast in this post.

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The laws of information chemistry

Data will flow and recombine, or not, according to principles we teach.

In the course of my work on the elmcity project I've talked to a lot of people about forming networks of calendars. One of the major hurdles has been the very idea that we can form such networks, in an ad-hoc way, using informal contracts. Later in this series I'll explore why that's a tough concept, and mull over how we might soften it up. Here I'll focus on an even more basic conceptual stumbling block: information structure.

Everybody learns that things in the physical world are structured in ways that govern how they can or cannot interact. Whether it's proteins folded into biochemical locks and keys, or metallic parts formed into real locks and keys, we know the drill. The right shape will open the door, the wrong one won't. You can't get through grade school without being exposed to that idea.

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Thousands of workers are standing by

CrowdFlower's Lukas Biewald on the repercussions of crowdsourced work and the state of human-machine relations.

Labor isn't what it used to be. Where in past years the expectation was that jobs were done at a certain place and time, now there are entire swaths of work that can be accomplished by anyone, anywhere.

Lukas Biewald, CEO of CrowdFlower and a speaker at next month's Web 2.0 Expo in New York, is at the center of the labor shift. His company has found an interesting way to tap Internet-connected groups to get work done -- think Mechanical Turk, but with additional tech and quality-assurance layers added on. What's really surprising is that many of the groups CrowdFlower turns to would never define themselves as formal workforces.

Biewald covers a variety of topics in the full interview, including:

• He sees similarities between "labor on demand" and cloud computing: both keep costs down and reduce the risks associated with scale.
• "It’s hard to explain my business to my mother," Biewald says. In the interview, he digs into CrowdFlower's unusual -- and somewhat complicated -- business model.
• He provides further proof that virtual currency is a big deal: Around half of CrowdFlower's work involves it in some fashion.
• He acknowledges that distributed work has a disruptive and negative affect on many businesses. However, Biewald believes it's a "rising tide" that will "increase the GDP of the world."

Read more after the jump.

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Recent Posts

• Four short links: 18 August 2010 | by Nat Torkington on August 18, 2010
• Tracking the tech that will make government better | by Alex Howard on August 17, 2010
• On re-reading Steven Levy's "Hackers" | by Andy Oram on August 17, 2010
• Four short links: 17 August 2010 | by Nat Torkington on August 17, 2010
• Stepping it up with Transit Score | by Brady Forrest on August 16, 2010
• Geeks at work | by Mac Slocum on August 16, 2010
• Four short links: 16 August 2010 | by Nat Torkington on August 16, 2010
• Open source givers and takers | by Mike Loukides on August 13, 2010
• Four short links: 13 August 2010 | by Nat Torkington on August 13, 2010
• Watson, Turing, and extreme machine learning | by Mike Loukides on August 12, 2010
• Four short links: 12 August 2010 | by Nat Torkington on August 12, 2010
• Wacky Google/Verizon net neutrality theory | by Marc Hedlund on August 11, 2010