Openness

Just about a month ago I returned from the NTEN NTC in San Francisco where I had the opportunity to talk with Peggy Duvette, Angus Parker of WiserEarth and Leif Utne of Zanby and organizing force behind Open Wiser. I then blogged about the OpenWiser fundraising drive to raise $10,000 to build an open API to WiserEarth's database of information about organizations around the world working towards a more sustainable civilization.

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Last week was quite interesting, I happened to show up at Google IO developer Conference 2009. Committing to writing about the entire Google IO event in a single post is a tough job, so friends here is a succinct post covering the topics that seems most exciting to me.

1. Google wave:

As many may have read already, Google announced a new Internet-based communications and collaboration platform Google Wave in the second day's key note talk at Google IO. Google Wave seems to be an integrated communications platform that brings together email, chat, twitter, social networks, photo-sharing, and collaborative editing features. Google describes a 'wave' as "equal parts conversation and document" and the Wave team basically sees it as a replacement for email and other collaboration tools. Google's announcement of wave was the most exiting technical demonstration I ever been to, it was full of cheers, applause and whistling, evidence of the excitement about this new product which could revolutionize the world of emails, instant messaging, photo sharing, blogging, social networking and intranet communications.

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Ah, admin/build/modules...I really want to love this page. It lists all of my modules. It shows version numbers. There's a lot to offer. When you work on a larger site, there are so many modules. CCK, Internationalization, and of course Core provide long lists of modules. How do I find that one module in that big list?

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I like many others was completely blown away by Paul Hawken's Blessed Unrest. The last 3rd of the book is a compendium of non profit and non governmental organizations around the world that are working on social justice, human rights, sustainability, environmental and indigenous people's issues as well as many others. Hawken's describes these groups collectively as a movement, the largest movement in the history of the world. A movement that is decentralized and global.

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This Saturday the Seattle DUG is hosting a one day DrupalCamp. We are calling it a MiniCamp, because we usually manage two day events. This one is a little different. In true BarCamp style, we are not specifying speakers or topics. Heck, a schedule barely exists. The intent is to bring people together, to cooperate and learn more about Drupal. I am really excited about this, because there is more opportunity for everyone to participate.

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I had a page open from NPR in another window and forgot to mention in my previous post, but NPR also has an API as part of their Open Content Strategy. In keeping with NPR's mission of "a more informed public" allowing public access to content and allowing developers to mash up and revolutionize how people consume NPR content.

Ok, actually, it's the New York Times which has developed an "API" for the U.S. Congress. Basically, the Times has munged together a bunch of data sources (see below) and developed an "API" to allow developers to access and use the data. The information you can get access to includes roll-call vote (voice and division votes are not available right now). The Times does extra calculations including party totals.

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In this episode

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Data mining systems like Google Analytics (used by some of our sites) that collect and analyze vast amounts of user data raise privacy concerns that need to be carefully considered when building community and social networking sites. As societal interactions rely on trust or reputation, it's important that this trust can be accumulated and even measured in a safe and secure way.

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Drupal Project founder Dries Buytaert's recent blog post on Contributing Back to Drupal came on the heals of much discussion of the same topic while I was the Lullabot DIWD Seminar. It is not a new conversation, at CivicActions we have been having it for as long as I can remember.

The Community Stipend Program

Recognizing that it was hard for our company as a company to "give back" beyond our sponsorship of DrupalCons and DrupalCamps we have made efforts to empower all of our team members to give back. A big part of this is our Community Work Stipend Program which we started in 2006. Team members who achieve a threshold of client work each month earn an additional stipend to do "community work". This can take the form of maintaining modules, working on patches for contrib or core, organizing or presenting at Drupal events like camps, cons or user groups, or writing documentation.

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