Rant about an "Issue Aggregator"

When at BarCampWellingtonNZEGov, I had occasion to have a bit of a rant about an aggregator that was required for enhanced citizen participation in e-government.

I just saw Jason Ryans post about Media Monitoring over at The Network of Public Sector Communicators, where he talked about the open source

BuzzMonitor which can do some of this aggregation (maybe all of it). I am republishing my comment here.

I was suggesting a news aggregator (similar to news.google.com) that could bring government/authoritative and private space comments together to provide a common view of the various sides to an issue. Ranging up and down the long tail to provide visiblilty to the Transit NZ discussions in Auckland over roads and equally apply to the liver bellied spotted newt's wildlife sanctuary proposed for just west of the median barrier on highway one north of Foxton.

Buzzmonitor seems to be a very good start to that aggregator. I plan to have a play with it myself.

I have thought harder on the problem and see major problems in my idea, among them :
The inherent bias of the 'controlling' entity, The difficulty in defining the issue accurately without misrepresentation. The lack of enough visibility into the authoritative government sites (my assumption, sorry to government web masters out there).

I suppose they are all solvable, likely by a bit of magic "Wisdom of the Crowds" fairydust, but for someone with more free time than me.

Reply to: Open XML Crunch Time

Rod Drury Blogged today on Office Open XML

My Answer to Rod on his blog:

Rod respectfully, I suspect that you have been talking to far too many people who have already hitched themselves to the Microsoft horse.

I work in Government and there is serious concern throughout government that this standard will perpetuate monopoly and achieve nothing else, except get around some mandating of standards in Government purchasing.

Microsoft has documented OOXML, great.
OOXML has different use-cases to ODF, great.
OOXML preserves legacy document formatting, great. Lets hope that Microsoft Office will actually display it correctly across versions, they often fail.

But why do we need to standardise something that is looking backwards not forwards. Standards are designed and discussed in order to serve the requirements of the future, and this standard wasn't designed to address the future and is badly designed for it. Why do we have to allow this standard that has massive holes in Internationalisation, Documentation, flexibility and implementability.

Ask your Microsoft friends to please throw out this insulting 'Promise not to sue' and actually give us a licence (irrevocable, perpetual, worldwide, sublicencable). We don't even have the right to amend the documentation for the standard to fix the gaping holes.

The standard will go through even with my vote of "No, with comments", because Microsoft and the ISO working group will fix many of the issues and re-submit the standard, because this isn't about not having a standard, it is about having a good one.

Andrew.

Additionaly it is named (or perhaps misnamed) Office Open XML, which is bound to confuse, unpronouncable and misleading compared with OpenOffice.Org (ooo). The earlier name "MS Office Open XML", is much clearer and accurate.

Forever minus a day Copyright, splutter splutter!

I came across a breath of fresh-air today, courtesy of Groklaw latest news picks .

Rufus Pollock has written a paper analyzing the optimal level for copyright in the current technological environment to balance the financial incentives to the author/publisher and the public, Forever Minus a Day? Some Theory and Empirics of Optimal Copyright.

This gives a bit more ammunition to offset the power of the entertainment lobby which constrains culture with their need to control their content mercilessly.

This control of culture and our more broadly our physical lives by corporations is one of the worst evils in the world today, not that I can do anything about it of course ;)

The corporations are somewhat forced into it by the imperative to maximise their profits at the expense of culture, environment, customers, employees, ethics and government. It is a fundamental weakness of the checks and balances in our capitalist/democratic/consumerist society.

More later.

The Tyranny of Subscription Living

In the beginning we lived from the land, with calluses and broken bodies to prove it.
These days companies are trying to nickel and dime us to death with the rise of the tyrannical Subscription Model. You pay $29/ month for telecom service, you pay $1 per day for your power service, you pay $78 per month for internet service, you pay the same way for Mobile phones and Cable TV and software is also being converted to subscriptions.

This is a terrible thing to do to the poor Citizen Consumers of the world, to tie us to products that we cannot purchase and must keep on paying for till we die, and probably beyond.

Besides the raw cost of living in such a model which is demonstrably more expensive than purchase living, there is the brittleness of living with dependencies on all these services. This brittleness is hidden until there is a disaster, but it should be uncovered and removed if possible.

A great example here in New Zealand (and elsewhere) is the preferred way to create a Photo Voltaic/Solar powered house. The preferred method is to hook the house to the grid and use the grid as a big battery. Thus perpetuating the dependency cycle. For an extra investment the home owner could use batteries to entirely disconnect themselves from the grid, and eliminate the per deim cost of the grid.

Similarly the Energy efficient Hybrid cars also tie the consumer to buying petrol, without the inbuilt ability to re-charge overnight. This is a little larger issue as it is a cross industry effort to retain consumers sucking at the petrol teat. If an equivalent teat could be constructed the corporations would jump on it.

One of the underlying issues seems to be the lack of a democratic force in the absence of a corporation to buy the politicians favour. Just in the case of Open Source software, there are very few people willing to go in to bat in the political arena for the right solutions if it doesn’t have a money spigot attached. I see the problem is world-wide and it is a fundamental weakness in the political system of democratic countries.

The Matrix says it best: You are just a battery for the soulless machines.