'Til All Are One

We at OLPC Aus­tralia cel­eb­rated our first birth­day with a massive bang — a black-​​tie gala event held at the Museum of Con­tem­por­ary Art on Sydney Har­bour. It was a won­der­ful night of cel­eb­rat­ing Aus­tralian Indi­gen­ous art, music, cul­ture and food. Cor­por­ate spon­sors gen­er­ously donated to the cause.

Of spe­cial note was our key­note speaker. Prime Min­is­ter Kevin Rudd voiced his sup­port for our mis­sion, extend­ing deduct­ible gift recip­i­ent status to all dona­tions made to us. Also in attend­ance was the Assist­ant Treas­urer and other rep­res­ent­at­ives of state and fed­eral government.

Myself and other mem­bers of the OLPC Aus­tralia team were for­tu­nate enough to meet with Kevin before the offi­cial pro­ceed­ings com­menced. He took the time to con­verse indi­vidu­ally with each of us. I related my exper­i­ences in Dhal­inybuy, where every child has their own com­puter on the Inter­net. This ratio of 1:1 access is almost unheard of even in city schools. I was pleased to see one of our anec­dotes make it into his address, not very long after our conversation.

It’s an indes­crib­able feel­ing know­ing that you’re on the radar of the highest polit­ical office in the land. We are a small team and have a long way to go, but I firmly believe that we are on track to empower remote com­munit­ies across Australia.

I was asked by a journ­al­ist to com­ment on the NSW gov­ern­ment decision to dis­trib­ute Win­dows 7 “mini note­books” across schools. Here’s my reply:

I used to work with satel­lite net­works, provid­ing Inter­net access to
most of NSW before wired broad­band was widely avail­able (and it still
isn’t in a lot of places). We had many rural schools and local
coun­cils as cus­tom­ers. The dif­fi­culties of get­ting com­put­ing and
Inter­net resources to remote areas (with asso­ci­ated infra­struc­ture,
train­ing, etc.) can­not be underestimated.

Firstly examin­ing from a busi­ness per­spect­ive, how is this to be
fun­ded, given that NSW is in a poor fin­an­cial state and the gov­ern­ment
has been axing pro­jects left, right and centre? What altern­at­ives were
con­sidered? How were they eval­u­ated? Was there an open ten­der­ing
process?

What mat­ters most is what we can achieve with this pro­gramme. Simply
throw­ing a com­puter to every stu­dent won’t cut it. There needs to be a
clear plan and set of out­comes defined, as you would have with any
reas­on­able busi­ness arrange­ment. This press release doesn’t touch upon
any of that.

What is the oppor­tun­ity cost of fund­ing this scheme? Could the
resources have been spent on bet­ter facil­it­ies for the chil­dren or
bet­ter teach­ers’ salaries?

The phrase ‘new era’ implies some sort of major change. Has this been
adequately planned for?

Teach­ers have a hard enough time keep­ing up with tech­no­logy. Will they
be given train­ing and con­tin­ued assistance?

How will these devices be integ­rated into cur­ricula? How can they
become effect­ive teach­ing aids and not just expens­ive appendages?

Will the focus be on teach­ing or train­ing? I am a firm believer that
schools should teach chil­dren to be clever and think for them­selves,
cre­at­ing the basis for a flex­ible work­force. They should not simply be
trained to mem­or­ise the func­tions of a par­tic­u­lar ver­sion of a piece
of soft­ware. Rote-​​learning like that will be worth­less when they
gradu­ate and enter the workforce.

Will there be any addi­tional costs required to prop­erly use the
equip­ment? Are classrooms adequately equipped with appro­pri­ate
elec­trical wir­ing and capa­city to charge all of these? What about
net­work con­nectiv­ity? What will it take to main­tain the infra­struc­ture
required for these, includ­ing hard­ware and soft­ware for serv­ers,
routers and so on.

In fact, there is no men­tion of sup­port­ing infra­struc­ture at all. What
are the costs of the entire life cycle of these devices, the soft­ware,
main­ten­ance, infra­struc­ture and so on?

Who will own the note­books? Will stu­dents be free to explore and learn
about their com­puters, or will they be locked down? Can they install
whatever soft­ware they want? Will they be tied to par­tic­u­lar
applic­a­tions and file formats?

There is no men­tion at all of what soft­ware will be installed on these
com­puters. An oper­at­ing sys­tem without applic­a­tions is use­less. Will
the included soft­ware be enough to empower and teach our chil­dren?
Have deals been struck with other soft­ware sup­pli­ers? Will there be
addi­tional costs to acquire the soft­ware for par­tic­u­lar sub­jects? Who
bears this cost — the school sys­tem or parents?

Has open source soft­ware been con­sidered at all? There’s plenty of
open source soft­ware that works hap­pily on top of Win­dows. Microsoft
may have dis­coun­ted Win­dows, but did they include an office suite?
Open­Of­fice would do the job just fine.

Even if you believe the tired-​​old argu­ment that the state MUST
pur­chase Microsoft Office for each and every stu­dent (which works out
to tens of mil­lions of dol­lars), wouldn’t it be bet­ter to choose
Open­Of­fice for free, and spend those mil­lions on new lib­rary books or
hos­pital beds?

I’ll admit that Open­Of­fice isn’t exactly the same thing (it’s bet­ter
in some ways, not as good in oth­ers), but it’s so sim­ilar that it
doesn’t really make a dif­fer­ence. It is worth tens of mil­lions of
dol­lars just to get the Real Thing? Does learn­ing MS Office 2003 in
school really pre­pare you for using Office 2007 (with its com­pletely
new inter­face) once you hit the work­force? Refer to my earlier
com­ments about teach­ing versus training.

Are they includ­ing graph­ics soft­ware for the art and design classes?
Are tax­pay­ers going to have to pay for a copy of Adobe Cre­at­ive Suite
for every­one? How about we save the hun­dreds of dol­lars per stu­dent
and use the GIMP and Ink­s­cape instead? Examples such as these abound,
and there are plenty of other open source applic­a­tions that simply
have no good par­al­lel in the pro­pri­et­ary world.

I find it strange that the country’s largest state would tie the
edu­ca­tion of its chil­dren to a totally unproven oper­at­ing sys­tem. A
smart pur­chaser — espe­cially one pur­chas­ing at such a grand scale -
would wait until the soft­ware had been out for a while and had been
thor­oughly tested by con­sumers around the world. Internal test­ing is
one thing, but you can­not beat real-​​world experience.

A point-​​zero release is sure to have rough edges, and it would have
been far wiser to wait for at least the first ser­vice pack like most
organ­isa­tions do. Can you ima­gine the fury that would have been
unleashed if the NSW Gov­ern­ment had decided to kit out the state with
Win­dows Vista before its release? Sure it soun­ded good before it came
out (“The wow starts now!”), but it lost its lustre very soon after
unveil­ing. Many people today still cling onto Win­dows XP, and oth­ers
have switched to Linux and Mac OS X, in response to Vista’s abysmal
state.

The OLPC Pro­ject has already iden­ti­fied and addressed many of the
issues that may be faced. They have done this through devel­op­ing a
com­bin­a­tion of hard­ware, soft­ware, infra­struc­ture, train­ing,
pro­ced­ures and learn­ing mater­ial. It would be wise to learn from their
experiences.

The whole mini note­book revolu­tion star­ted with Linux. Start­ing with
the OLPC XO laptop, Linux has proven to be a flex­ible and cap­able
oper­at­ing sys­tem suit­able for small devices. Its res­ist­ance to vir­uses
and other net­work nas­ties is legendary. The last thing I’d want is for
my child’s com­puter to get infec­ted and start show­ing kid­die porn.
Anti-​​virus and anti-​​malware soft­ware are band-​​aid solu­tions. I’m not
going to build a castle on a swamp.

Com­mer­cially, devices like the Asus Eee PC could not have exis­ted if
it were not for Linux. It forced Microsoft to actu­ally com­pete for
once, by resur­rect­ing Win­dows XP and slash­ing its price to a more
reas­on­able level.

The press release claims that this scheme is ‘unpar­alleled in
edu­ca­tion glob­ally’. There is con­sid­er­able risk in being first off the
block. I’ve already explained the risks of using an unproven oper­at­ing
sys­tem. It would be more prudent to learn from other large scale
rol­louts in education.

Take the Repub­lic of Mace­do­nia, for example. Des­pite being one of the
poorest nations in Europe, they are the only nation to have one
com­puter per stu­dent. They achieved this through the use of Edubuntu,
a vari­ant of the pop­u­lar Ubuntu GNU/​Linux oper­at­ing sys­tem that is
spe­cially tailored for edu­ca­tion and learn­ing. With that, they got a
vast lib­rary of open source edu­ca­tional soft­ware, which was all
trans­lated into their nat­ive language.

Sim­ilar stor­ies abound in places like Brazil, Rus­sia, India and China.
Col­lect­ively known as the BRIC coun­tries, they are con­sidered to be
the up-​​and-​​coming nations to watch over the next few dec­ades. Their
eco­nom­ies have been grow­ing at break­neck rates, partly because they
have been clever in their invest­ments. These nation states recog­nise
that edu­ca­tion is the key to long-​​term eco­nomic success.

You might say that these coun­tries are poor and that is why they are
choos­ing to use open source soft­ware. It is true that they don’t have
plenty of money to throw around, but does New South Wales? Does
Aus­tralia? Where would you want your tax dol­lars spent?

I don’t get it. In a com­munity where open­ness is prized, some have seen it fit to cri­ti­cise that very tenet. In the world of FOSS, bug track­ers are laid open for all to see (and con­trib­ute to), and mail­ing lists are a hive of dis­cus­sion and innovation.

So why is it such a bad thing when we openly dis­cuss the nature of our com­munity, and the gov­ernance thereof? Kevin Rudd was widely praised for his prom­ises to pro­mote open gov­ern­ment (we’re still wait­ing, Kevin).

To put any uncer­tainty to rest: Linux Aus­tralia is in great shape. We just had yet another suc­cess­ful linux​.conf​.au and have built up a sub­stan­tial pot of sav­ings, all in the face of a global fin­an­cial melt­down. We are indeed in an envi­able pos­i­tion, and we could not have done it had we not stayed true to our beliefs. Linux Aus­tralia is defined by its com­munity sup­port and participation.

Can we do bet­ter? Of course we can. What I’ve tried to artic­u­late is that the best means of doing that is by scal­ing our com­munity. To use a code ana­logy, I effect­ively pos­ted a pub­lic bug report and invited the com­munity to help find solu­tions. You don’t see that level of trans­par­ency from many other organ­isa­tions, and I for one am very proud of that.

The FOSS com­munity in Aus­tralia will con­tinue to grow and thrive — any­body who went to linux​.conf​.au should be con­vinced of that. The bazaar feel is stronger than ever, and Linux Aus­tralia will con­tinue to hold a vital role in stim­u­lat­ing and facil­it­at­ing that devel­op­ment. But to do so in a man­ner that best suits the community’s interests requires some delib­er­a­tion, plan­ning and com­mu­nic­a­tion with the very com­munity that it seeks to assist. What’s wrong with that?

If only my local MP was as in touch with his constituents…

LotD: OpenAus­tralia, open source good­ness applied to gov­ern­ment

So the Pope is com­ing to Sydney, and the New South Wales Gov­ern­ment is scram­bling to pro­tect him. What bet­ter way to shield an abso­lute mon­arch than with des­potic legislation?

We can bitch and whine about it. We can blatantly flout these laws and hand out free con­doms, as some are plan­ning.

Or we could stop and think about it. If only we could identify the oppor­tun­ity here.

Here’s my sug­ges­tion: make badges/​buttons — lots of them. Print on them, in big bold let­ters, “ANNOYING”. Noth­ing more. The aim isn’t to offend, it’s to pass­ively protest stu­pid laws and cel­eb­rate our freedoms.

Now, get people to sell the badges. Have volun­teers spread all over the city selling them. Also make deals with shops to have them avail­able next to the till.

Recog­nise this idea? It’s no dif­fer­ent from what’s done on Daf­fodil Day or Red Nose Day. Have the pro­ceeds go towards assist­ing AIDS vic­tims. I would sug­gest AIDS orphans. Make sure the group it goes to is cred­ible and sec­u­lar. It’s heart­break­ing how many so-​​called ‘char­it­ies’ are just cyn­ical mis­sion­ary Inquis­i­tions in drag.

I con­sider this to be a win for all. Cit­izens get to peace­fully protest, World Youth Day isn’t dis­rup­ted, and the chil­dren get some help. Would the gov­ern­ment dare to stop this? Would they halt a funds-​​raising oper­a­tion for dis­ad­vant­aged chil­dren? I don’t know, but it’s worth a shot.

I’d actu­ally be sur­prised if this is an ori­ginal idea. I haven’t had time to pay much atten­tion to the mat­ter, so I’d expect that someone is already work­ing on some­thing similar.

(fully expect­ing the oblig­at­ory “why is this on Planet xxx???” whinging from people who don’t under­stand the point of a Planet and who like to oppress those whom they dis­agree with)

LotD:  Happy, Healthy Har­old — Behind The Puppet

Donna Ben­jamin roun­ded a small group of us together to write a let­ter to Julia Gil­lard, Deputy Prime Min­is­ter and Min­is­ter for Edu­ca­tion. The res­ult was widely syn­dic­ated, hope­fully build­ing some mind­share in the pro­cess. The Edu­ca­tion Expo proved to me more than any­thing else that FOSS is quickly becom­ing accept­able to the gen­eral pub­lic — the trick is in how you pro­mote it.

So where to from here? How can we cap­it­al­ise upon the gains we have made?

Per­haps our greatest single weak­ness is the per­ceived lack of pro­fes­sional sup­port. I think OSIA should be doing more to address this (note: I’m not imply­ing that OSIA isn’t tak­ing this ser­i­ously). Here’s an e-​​mail I wrote to the osia-​​discuss mail­ing list (which is unfor­tu­nately subscriber-​​only):

The best thing OSIA can do is fight the pop­u­lar notion that there’s no
pro­fes­sional sup­port avail­able for FOSS. We can beat the TCO and Free­dom
drums as hard as we want, but few organ­isa­tions are will­ing to entrust their
com­put­ing to ‘com­munity’ support.

I man­aged the Linux Aus­tralia stand at the Edu­ca­tion Expo a few weeks ago, and
my impres­sion is that FOSS is on the cusp of main­stream acceptance:

http://​www​.dhanap​a​lan​.com/​b​l​o​g​/​2​0​0​8​/​0​6​/​2​9​/​e​d​u​c​a​t​i​o​n​-​e​x​p​o​-​r​e​p​o​rt/

Schools are cry­ing out for ways to get bet­ter value for their dol­lar, but they
aren’t going to even think about FOSS if they can’t get pro­fes­sional support.

If I run the stand again next year, I’d like to see some involve­ment from
OSIA. At the very least, we should have avail­able some leaf­lets show­ing that
yes indeed there is qual­ity, paid sup­port for FOSS.

Also note that FOSS isn’t Linux. We got the most interest in the
OpenE­duca­tionDisc, a com­pil­a­tion of FOSS for Windows.

On the com­munity side, we can con­tinue to make FOSS more accept­able to school admin­is­tra­tions, bur­eau­crats and politi­cians. Here’s my idea:

My sug­ges­tion is for us to build a Web site focused on open edu­ca­tion in
Aus­tralia. We already have the per­fect vehicle: http://​opene​duca​tion​.org​.au.
How­ever, at present it’s just a messy wiki more suit­able for our own
brain­storm­ing than for being a public-​​facing resource.

The wiki should of course remain, but I pro­pose that we build a proper,
present­able Web site that is dir­ectly access­ible via the
http://​opene​duca​tion​.org​.au address.

Why do this when we already have http://​linux​.org​.au/​e​d​u​c​a​t​ion? Open Edu­ca­tion
is much big­ger than Linux, and cer­tainly should not be anchored to it. Here’s
a short list of what it can include:

• FOSS
• (GNU/)Linux OS — on servers
• (GNU/)Linux OS — on clients/​desktops
• open stand­ards
• open languages/​libraries/​APIs
• free content/​culture
• open learn­ing
• open cur­riculum

To be hon­est, I fear that we might be only hurt­ing ourselves by tying open
edu­ca­tion to a com­pletely Free com­put­ing envir­on­ment. That might be a worthy
aim, but few insti­tu­tions are going to switch over all in one go. By offer­ing
a migra­tion path (or paths), a school can migrate more com­fort­ably at its own
pace. We ought to be provid­ing real choice, not just a bin­ary ‘with us or
with the terrists’.

FOSS (Fire­fox, Open​Of​fice​.org, Scribus, etc.) can run on oper­at­ing sys­tems
other than Linux. To use the recent Edu­ca­tion Expo as an example, we got a
lot of buy-​​in through the OpenE­duca­tionDisc, a com­pil­a­tion of FOSS for
Windows.

Also note how I split Linux cli­ents from serv­ers. Linux’s place in the server
realm is very solid, but con­vin­cing an insti­tu­tion to accept a Linux cli­ent
solu­tion is tougher. And by ‘cli­ent’, I mean either tra­di­tional desktops or
thin cli­ents. The lat­ter are often cost-​​effective and rep­res­ent a real
strength of Linux, but are often over­looked or even have reg­u­la­tions work­ing
against their adop­tion. On the server side, we have some great edu­ca­tional
tools such as Moodle and LAMS.

Open stand­ards obvi­ously include things like file formats and pro­to­cols, which
will become even more rel­ev­ant as we see more applic­a­tions (pro­pri­et­ary or
oth­er­wise) pick up stand­ard­ised meth­ods of inform­a­tion exchange such as ODF
and PDF. This should also ease the integ­ra­tion of FOSS into pre-​​existing
envir­on­ments. It also can include lan­guages and all things related. Why are
schools still teach­ing Visual Basic when they could be teach­ing Python?

The final three points all link together. Most not­ably, they are not depend­ent
upon tech­no­logy at all. Your aver­age teacher isn’t a tech­no­lo­gist, and
shouldn’t have to be. Know­ledge can be shared and organ­ised openly just like
code. Wiki­pe­dia has proven that great things can be built if ordin­ary people
are given easy to use tools.

Where to from this point? I sug­gest that we work towards get­ting a CMS run­ning
at opene​duca​tion​.org​.au. We’ll have to agree upon a design and the mes­sage
that we want to pur­vey. Con­tent cre­ation should be sep­ar­ate from tech­nical
abil­ity, so the CMS should be simple enough for any­body to contribute.

Here is some inspir­a­tion from the UK:

• http://​www​.openschoolsal​li​ance​.org/
• http://​schoolforge​.org​.uk/

The UK edu­ca­tion sec­tor appears to be much fur­ther ahead of us in terms of
embra­cing open­ness, and I think we can take some les­sons from their efforts.

To cla­rify one thing in the above, I wrote the text for http://​linux​.org​.au/​e​d​u​c​a​t​ion, but I never felt com­fort­able with it being there. So much of open edu­ca­tion has noth­ing to do with Linux and Linux Aus­tralia shouldn’t be divert­ing its focus to dwell on it dir­ectly. With a more inde­pend­ent Web pres­ence (in col­lab­or­a­tion with Linux Aus­tralia), I feel that we can be much more effective.

LotD:   Open sourcing Aus­tralia: OpenAus​tralia​.org goes live

The last two weeks have been quite event­ful. Each of these prob­ably deserves its own blog post, but since I don’t have the time to write them all I’ll just give a summary.

Doc­u­ment Free­dom Day, 26 March

The first annual Doc­u­ment Free­dom Day (inspired by Soft­ware Free­dom Day) was cel­eb­rated glob­ally. In Sydney, the cel­eb­ra­tions were hos­ted by Google at their offices, sup­por­ted by the Inter­net Soci­ety of Aus­tralia and the Sydney Linux Users Group (SLUG). As the SLUG rep­res­ent­at­ive, I was asked to say a few words about our organ­isa­tion and its rel­ev­ance to doc­u­ment free­dom. Not hav­ing time to pre­pare, I man­aged to ad-​​lib a speech, draw­ing on memor­ies of what I had writ­ten before on the Domes­day Book and Domes­day Pro­ject. I’m not an exper­i­enced speaker, so I’m very glad that it came out well.

Sen­ator Kate Lundy and David Vaile delivered great talks that made us think about open­ness of inform­a­tion and their import­ance to soci­ety. For the most part, we didn’t men­tion the war (which unfor­tu­nately has been lost), but there was no escap­ing acknow­ledge­ment of the Waughs. Any­one dis­il­lu­sioned at the state of polit­ics in Aus­tralia ought to speak with Kate. Even after 12 years in par­lia­ment, she is still inspiring.

All in all, it was a fant­astic night. Thanks to Alan Noble, Andrew McRae and the other folks at Google for mak­ing it hap­pen. Andrew and Sarah Mad­dox have writ­ten good sum­mar­ies of the evening.

I would have loved to have taken Kate up on her invit­a­tion to join her ‘Found­a­tions of Open: Tech­no­logy and Digital Know­ledge’ local 2020 Sum­mit, but alas a trip to Can­berra for one day was a bit much. I’m glad to see it all went well, though.

Sydney Linux Users Group Annual Gen­eral Meet­ing, 28 March

What can I say? Thanks to every­one in SLUG who sup­por­ted my can­did­acy for the role of Pres­id­ent. The new Com­mit­tee looks like a great mix of tal­ents, and we already have some good ideas in the pipeline. The next twelve months is look­ing to be excit­ing indeed.

We had the first gath­er­ing of the new Com­mit­tee on Sunday. It was a han­dover meet­ing, with the old Com­mit­tee mem­bers present to pass on their wis­dom and exper­i­ence to the new. My sin­cere grat­it­ude goes to the depart­ing Com­mit­tee mem­bers. I feel truly hon­oured to have worked with them over this past year.

Aus­tralian Open Source Industry & Com­munity Report 2008 launch event, 1 April

Free soft­ware and free beer! It appears that with FOSS, you can have your cake and eat it too

Note: there was no cake — but there were Iced Vo Vos! Sweet!

It’s great to finally have some author­it­at­ive stat­ist­ics to back our cause. Com­mon myths were dis­pelled, and we had con­firm­a­tion of things that seemed so obvi­ous to us but might have been less so for others.

Bar­Camp Sydney, 5–6 April

Bar­Camp 3 was not­able for expan­sion to two days of rev­elry. The venue migrated from UTS for the first two Bar­Camps to the UNSW Round­house for the third, which des­pite the longer com­mute I feel was a good move. Attend­ance did seem thin­ner than in pre­vi­ous years. This was prob­ably due to vis­it­ors spread over a lar­ger venue and across two days. One thing I like about Bar­Camp is that I get con­tact with people and ideas that I oth­er­wise wouldn’t notice from FOSS gath­er­ings like SLUG. Bar­Camp has con­sid­er­ably more pro­pri­et­ary soft­ware developers and entre­pren­eurs. Less Google, more Microsoft. As much as I love FOSS, I do like to see what’s hap­pen­ing in the rest of the ICT universe.

I made an effort this time to attend talks that were less tech­nical and more busi­ness or per­sonal devel­op­ment ori­ented. Stand-​​out speak­ers included Nick Hodge, Matt Moore and Richard Hayes.

Per­haps the high­light was the Sat­urday even­ing. Mike from Atlas­sian led us through a few rounds of Were­wolf, a vari­ation (and an improve­ment, IMHO) of the clas­sic Mafia game. I still can’t believe that we didn’t deplete the bar tab that Mike set up for us. We’ll have to have SLUG’s Deb­SIG present at Bar­Camp 4

LotD: Open​Of​fice​.org en masse in NSW schools!

I’m a little late on this, but Marco Ostini has done a fine job of cre­at­ing a sub­mis­sion [PDF] to the Fed­eral Treas­urer for Linux Aus­tralia. I feel espe­cially stoked to see that it includes some of the explan­a­tion of FOSS that I main­tain for Linux Aus­tralia. Nice to see that my work is help­ing to make a dif­fer­ence

LotD:  Aus­tralian Cit­izen­ship test

I am still try­ing to under­stand the bene­fit to local res­id­ents of host­ing APEC in Sydney. Sydney­siders have been effect­ively told that they won’t be wel­come in their own city for over a week — so thought­fully exten­ded by two days by our good friend George W. Bush (God bless his soul!).

What have we got in return? With the CBD stran­gu­lated and trans­port crippled, there are cer­tainly no eco­nomic bene­fits. In fact, The NSW Busi­ness Cham­ber of Com­merce estim­ates a loss to the NSW eco­nomy of between $300 mil­lion and $1 billion.

For ordin­ary work­ers, we got just one measly day off, in return for over a week of incon­veni­ence. I don’t under­stand how people of priv­ilege such as John Howard and Jeff Ken­nett can refer to ordin­ary Aus­trali­ans in such dis­par­aging (and ironic) terms as ‘the Chardon­nay set’. As far as I am (and evid­ently much of Sydney is) con­cerned, there is no bene­fit from this exer­cise, either in the short– or longer– terms. And no, I don’t count ‘inter­na­tional prestige’ or any such wank­i­ness as a real benefit.

Has it been worth it, to bend over back­wards for someone so stu­pid that even other world lead­ers laugh at him?

Can some­body please prove me wrong? All I see at the moment is a giant white ele­phant (par­tic­u­larly given the secur­ity blun­ders), but surely there must be more to it than that.

By the way, has any­body else noticed that the offi­cial APEC 2007 Web site does not work prop­erly in Fire­fox? Prob­ably because their ‘exclus­ive tech­no­logy part­ner’ (read: government-​​authorised mono­pol­ist) is our good friend, Microsoft. What else would you expect from a mob that rules the words ‘Linux’ and ‘Unix’ to be ‘inap­pro­pri­ate lan­guage’? I have tested this myself, and it does appear to be delib­er­ate: you can’t even fool it with simple alter­a­tions like adding spaces or dashes between the letters.

LotD:  Chinese stock mar­ket regrets switch­ing to Win­dows Vista

George Orwell’s clas­sic allegory, Animal Farm, presents many per­spect­ives on human beha­viour and soci­ety. One of these is how people can be led and manip­u­lated through the con­trol of inform­a­tion. In the story, the Seven Com­mand­ments formed a de facto con­sti­tu­tion for the Anim­al­istic soci­ety. Since only a hand­ful of anim­als could read, the rest were depend­ent upon what they were told was writ­ten. Gradu­ally, the writ­ing was cun­ningly altered to the bene­fit of the pigs above all other anim­als, and the popu­lace was taught to not trust their recol­lec­tions of what was writ­ten in the past.

What made this sub­ver­sion pos­sible was the inab­il­ity of most anim­als to read. The two anim­als that could read (aside from the pigs) chose not to do any­thing about what they saw. Amongst other things, the right to access and read inform­a­tion is an import­ant corner­stone of democracy.

This is where open file formats come in. As our lives become increas­ingly defined by elec­tronic records, there needs to be a way for inde­pend­ent view­ing and audit­ing. Paper is eas­ily read, but com­puter files require soft­ware to decypher them. Ima­gine if you needed spe­cial (and expens­ive) glasses just to read the let­ter that you your­self wrote only a few years ago.

There has been a fair amount of dis­cus­sion in the press regard­ing the Open­Doc­u­ment and the so-​​called ‘Open’ XML formats. The primary focus of this report­ing thus far has been on the polit­ical and tech­nical facets. This is slowly chan­ging, as the import­ance of long-​​term data pre­ser­va­tion and free­dom of inform­a­tion become appar­ent to ordin­ary folk.

The BBC has pub­lished a report on the prob­lem, and dis­cusses how the UK National Archives are attempt­ing to deal with it. Alas, it appears that they have opted for a short-​​sighted approach, rely­ing on vir­tu­al­isa­tion of older oper­at­ing sys­tems and applic­a­tions, through a dir­ect part­ner­ship with Microsoft. With this approach, the format decoders/​viewers (not to men­tion the oper­at­ing sys­tem and soft­ware per­form­ing the vir­tu­al­isa­tion itself) remain closed in source and spe­cific­a­tion, and one must deal with a cum­ber­some vir­tual machine just to view a document.

Where is the guar­an­tee that files can be read hun­dreds of years from now, just as we can do today with paper doc­u­ments such as the his­toric Magna Carta? How does this part­ner­ship bene­fit me, an ordin­ary cit­izen who might wish to view ten– (or even two-​​) year-​​old pub­lic doc­u­ments that are only avail­able in a pro­pri­et­ary elec­tronic format?

It’s both sad and frus­trat­ing to see that his­tory is yet again repeat­ing itself. Whilst the con­tents of the Domes­day Book can still be read nearly 1000 years after com­ple­tion, the digital BBC Domes­day Pro­ject was rendered vir­tu­ally unread­able a mere 16 years later.

Thank­fully, there are efforts to cre­ate an infra­struc­ture for long-​​term pre­ser­va­tion and man­age­ment of digital doc­u­ments. To start with, there are open formats such as Open­Doc­u­ment and PDF. The Aus­tralian National Archives have long been sup­port­ers of Open­Doc­u­ment, to the extent that they are stand­ard­ising upon it. Put­ting their money where their mouths are, they are build­ing a com­pletely open source (GPL, no less) data man­ag­ment sys­tem that any­body can use or improve to suit their needs. Michael Carden gave a great talk [Ogg video] at this year’s linux​.conf​.au about this tech­no­logy, known as Xena [PDF]. Whilst their UK coun­ter­parts seem to have for­got­ten that access to data is not just a priv­ilege for those able to make exclus­ive agree­ments with pur­vey­ors of lock-​​in tech­no­lo­gies, the Aus­tralian National Archives have been striv­ing to ensure that nobody is left out of the digital revolution.

Four legs good, two legs… bet­ter? Let’s pre­vent this sub­ver­sion from happening.

LotD:  Mex­ican ‘world’s richest person’

There appears to be much con­fu­sion amongst the press and the gen­eral popu­lace regard­ing the One Laptop Per Child Pro­ject, which I blogged about earlier. This art­icle in the Mur­doch press, for example, has stim­u­lated some of these mis­con­cep­tions. They stem from the false assump­tion that the OLPC is a com­put­ing pro­ject. “Don’t these kids deserve food, water, cloth­ing and shel­ter first?”, some people ask.

The fact is that the OLPC is far more than a simple com­put­ing pro­ject. It is an edu­ca­tion pro­ject, or more broadly, a devel­op­ment pro­ject. The com­puter is merely the tool to enable edu­ca­tion and cre­ativ­ity. How can one learn when a text­book costs more than an aver­age weekly wage? Ima­gine if you could inter­act with your text­book, in the form of games and exer­cises. Ima­gine if you could learn to write your own soft­ware for this device, and dis­trib­ute it to help oth­ers in your com­munity. You can cre­ate your own art­works, write your own novel or make your own music. Wire­less mesh net­work­ing allows the dis­tri­bu­tion of data between com­puters, and even the shar­ing of one Inter­net con­nec­tion across a vil­liage. For many house­holds, the key­board lights will be the only form of arti­fi­cial light­ing. The pos­sib­il­it­ies are effect­ively limitless.

The point that I am try­ing to make is that it is not the com­puter that is import­ant, it is what you can do with it that truly mat­ters. The com­puter is an ena­bler, a tool that allows people to ulti­mately cre­ate their own live­li­hoods and futures. There’s no point in keep­ing people depend­ent on handouts. Let’s encour­age them to stand on their own feet.

Back in the developed world, I was able to attend a panel dis­cus­sion for NSW ICT for the forth­com­ing state elec­tion. Pia made some good ana­lysis of the event. In sum­mary, the rep­res­ent­at­ive for the Lib­eral Party was com­pletely and utterly use­less when the ques­tion turned to open stand­ards and FLOSS. Moreover, both sides (Labour and Lib­eral) would seem­ingly delib­er­ately con­fuse open stand­ards and open source when ques­tioned about them. The key when ques­tion­ing such people is to not men­tion open stand­ards and open source together. Force them to address the issues sep­ar­ately, or they will con­flate the two. The City of Munich was dis­par­agingly referred to sev­eral times as an extreme case. What dis­turbs me is that there was spe­cific­ally strong emphasis on NSW as a pro­curer and con­sumer of ICT, rather than as a pro­du­cer. So while pro­jects like the OLPC can pro­mote local edu­ca­tion and industry, the NSW gov­ern­ment wants to keep us depend­ent upon for­eign providers.