A brief introduction to the Knowledge Society[1] by Peter F. Drucker[2] from a speech at Harvard where he discusses the chances and drawbacks of a Knowledge Society.
[1] http://www.ksg.harvard.edu/ifactory/ksgpress/www/ksg_news/transcripts/drucklec.htm
[2] http://www.innovation-award.ca/about_peter.html
The Heinrich Böll Foundation (foundation of the German Green Party) has put up a Web site[1] on the World Summit on the Information Society.
The World Summit on the Information Society[1] will be held in two phases. The first phase of WSIS will take place in Geneva hosted by the Government of Switzerland from 10 to 12 December 2003. The second phase will take place in Tunis hosted by the Government of Tunisia, from 16 to 18 November 2005.
Communications Rights in the Information Society (CRIS)[1] is a campaign to ensure that communication rights are central to the information society and to the upcoming World Summit to the Information Society (WSIS). The campaign is sponsored and supported by the Platform for Communication Rights, a group of NGOs involved in media and communication projects around the word.
1dok.org[1] works on an open standard for free and unimpeded exchange of electronic documents via internet.
In case you haven’t already heard: The OASIS standardization organization founded a TC to create an open, XML-based file format specification for office applications.[1]
[1] http://www.oasis-open.org/committees/tc_home.php?wg_abbrev=office
Sam Ruby describes some of the currently popular techniques used to promote collaboration and group forming via weblogs.[1]
Ben Hammersley put together some information on TrackBack and its variants.[2]
Urs Gehrig has many more blogs on Weblogs.[3]
[1] http://www.intertwingly.net/stories/2003/01/17/cohesion.html
[2] http://www.benhammersley.com/archives/003862.html
[3] http://www.circle.ch/blog/c12.html
Joachim Breitsprecher from our partner company d-serv told me about this interesting article[1]:
[quote]
Does an organization have anything to gain from .Net?
Despite a vaguely defined purpose, no track record and several known risks, organizations are starting to implement projects based in .Net. Carmine Mangione delves into the .Net enigma and explains why jumping on the .Net bandwagon – like blindly adopting any technology without first weighing the pros and cons – could potentially sink your organization.
[/quote]
We fully agree with the author that despite the hype concerning SOAP, WSDL & Co., these technologies are currently too imature to be used in reliable software infrastructures on a broad scale. Furthermore, we are very concerned with the latest decisions of IBM and Microsoft to leave the W3C standardization gremium for Web Services. It seems like the good old HTTP/URL mechanisms are still the best way to go, because the level of abstraction offered by the REST model[2], is much more convenient and manageable than Web Services.
[1] http://www.linuxworld.com/go.cgi?id=742092
[2] http://www.ebuilt.com/fielding/pubs/dissertation/top.htm
“Managing the Semantic Web” is the title of the session[1] Sandro Zic will hold at the OSCOM 3 conference[2]. The conference will take place at Harvard Law School in Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA from May 28-30. In his session, Sandro will discuss the question: How can we ensure efficient user-computer-interaction based on distributed content and knowledge management to make the Semantic Web manageable and useful?
[1] http://oscom.org/Conferences/Cambridge/Proposals/zic_managing_semantic_web.html
[2] http://oscom.org/Conferences/Cambridge/
From the Twisted Website:
“Twisted is a framework, written in Python, for writing networked applications. It includes implementations of a number of commonly used network services such as a web server, an IRC chat server, a mail server, a relational database interface and an object broker. Developers can build applications using all of these services as well as custom services that they write themselves. Twisted also includes a user authentication system that controls access to services and provides services with user context information to implement their own security models.
Twisted provides important features needed for networking programming, both at the high and low levels:
– Pluggable event loops allowing the developer to take advantage of platform-specific capabilities.
– Abstractions of protocols and transports.
– Through Twisted Spread, mechanisms for network encoding of data (in Python, Java, ELisp, and other languages), to a full-blown distributed object system.”
Sandro Groganz 