Selections on a theme of openness, starting with "open source" and going wherever curiosity leads
Old blog post from blogging pioneer Dave Winer, but still applicable now. As with anything posted on Open Season, it’s worth reading in full.
“Anyone who has worked with me knows how much I value prior art.”
“Here’s how it goes. We’re designing a feature, getting ready to implement it. At some point in the design process we ask “Has anyone else done this?” and if so, we consider doing it that way.”
“Yesterday, the new media team at the White House announced via the Associated Press that whitehouse.gov is now running on Drupal, the open source content management system.”
“This move is obviously a big win for open source. As John Scott of Open Source for America (a group advocating open source adoption by government, to which I am an advisor) noted in an email to me: “This is great news not only for the use of open source software, but the validation of the open source development model. The White House’s adoption of community-based software provides a great example for the rest of the government to follow.”
“There are few things that annoy me more than fake transparency. The duplicity of being lied to makes it all the worse when you realise somebody who says they’re being open with you is, in fact, just pretending.”
“Right now, we’re experiencing an epidemic of openness, particularly in government. Just witness the way that everybody from Barack Obama to David Cameron to San Francisco is jumping on the open bandwagon to get an idea of the importance of the concept of openness in government at the moment. Along the way, the buzzword gets grabbed by anyone trying to appear transparent - such as Adobe, who are trying to market closed standards as open ones in order to get more business from government.”
Blog comment:
“The core Creative Commons licenses are, of course, based upon Copyright law and this does not apply to factual data…”
“Here at the Sunlight Foundation, we spend a lot of time with Adobe’s products— mainly trying to reverse the damage that these technologies create when government discloses information. The PDF file format, for instance, isn’t particularly easily parsed. As ubiquitous as a PDF file is, often times they’re non-parsable by software, unfindable by search engines, and unreliable if text is extracted.”
“The Obama administration has made transparency and public access to government information a high priority. Adobe is attempting to capitalize on initiatives to make government information more accessible while promoting its technologies, such as Flash and PDF, as cornerstones for implementing open access. However, these technologies are actually an impediment to making information truly accessible…”
“There are two critical structural differences between Facebook and Twitter that are essential to understand before discussing the practices: 1) social graph directionality; 2) conversational mechanisms.”
“The project is an open source approach to designing a city council website using a user-centred philosophy.”
“I would say that having a strong open-source community adopting that thinking in a city is a good thing.”
“This blog itself is built on the open source Wordpress platform, which was put together by Matt Mullenweg and an army of volunteers. On one hand you could say that releasing an easy to use blogging platform harmed the industry - businesses at that point were building their own commercial systems and subsequently lost clients and saw budgets reduce.”
“On the other it is easier to argue that systems like Wordpress offer a set of tools that enable commercial activity built on them, create jobs, and expand the numbers of people who use digital media tools, and thus leading to higher demand for digital services like marketing.”
