The timetable of the PHP and Web Standards Conference (PaWS) in Manchester/UK is up. ZZ/OSS CEO Sandro Zic will give two talks:
One session deals with the ZZ/OSS Installer (see also the project’s Web site).
The other session is titled Managing the Semantic Web. A similar talks has been provided at OSCOM 3 at Harvard by Sandro. Find the OSCOM slides online to read what he will basically talk about in Manchester.
ZZ/OSS CEO Sandro Zic will present a session about Free Software in the Knowledge Society at the first LOTS event, a kind of Swiss LinuxTag.
Come to Bern at February 18th and hear about the following:
This talk will concentrate on an often neglected aspect that the Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) community introduced to society: A new organizational form of knowledge work in networks of excellence. Due to the fact that FOSS developers and projects act in distributed and heterogenous knowledge networks and furthermore collaborate in self-organised groups, they serve as the prototype elements of the emerging Knowledge Society.
Sandro has presented this talk at LinuxTag 2003 – but don’t expect it to be the same, because the presentation style is interactive, with Sandro discussing most of the aspects with the audience. Thus, the session itself is a show case of impulsive knowledge work inspired by the spirit of the FOSS community.
A growing amount of presentations from SINN03 conference is now available online.
2. Scenario: Competition between commercial and “public” content providers
Content will also be provided by public institutions, but you have to pay for it. This will change the way scientists access information as they are used to using libraries for free.
3. Scenario: Scientific institutions will organise the text collections themselves. This will not be done by direct publishing, but organised in a network of institutions. The question remains what role the traditional commercial publishers will play: “Will they be the dinosaurs that eventually vanish away or will they become partners of the scientists?”
The moderator then asked Rosendaal whether scientific publishing services already matter?
Rosendaal answered that he advocates scenario 3 and believes that scenario 1 is not likely to happen, because such a system would simply explode. For a realistic analysis of the current situation, he proposed to look at the negotiation powers of the stakeholds involved:
Authors:
– Scientific services should convince them that they are useful incentives for them
– In general, incentives should be created that value the author for his research
Universities:
– They would have a very strong position when they realized that they have to build an infrastructure
– Unfortunately, they are too fragmented
– The problem he sees is that universities tend to take a scientific approach to professional management
In general, Rosendaal propagated that we should change the system how we rate and evaluate research. Also a better international appraisal system is needed to support an authors career path. Scientific publication systems should rather be author-payed systems.
Wätjen added that within these many scientific initiatives are footpaths, not streets or highways. His proposal is to start at every institution to offer repositories with open access to pre-prints as well as post-prints. He sees a future for university presses with open access business models.
Posing a devil’s advocate question, the moderator asked Hilf about the “dream” of open document exchange systems. Hilf replied that it’s important create a variety of services, serving different needs and different ways of archiving. Following Hilf, Fox suggested “Let’s creatively think through what packaging of the author and the reader would work”. He exemplified his concerns: “Students want to see other dissertation to learn from them, how to survive at university.” Furthermore, he stated that scientific journals usually have a lower quality then conferences.
Fox sees three kinds of services for scientific publishing:
– Zero cost services are community efforts adhering to the a buttom-up approach
– Little cost services are maintained by universities, mainly due to their teaching duty
– High cost services are funded by the state, e.g. the creation of a US-wide digital library, supported by the National Science Foundation with 130 Mio dollars. Those services come along with a top-down approach.
Summarizing his comments, Fox said that the ethic of sharing works for some people, for some it does not.
I was baffled that the panel only thought of beautifully carved scientific texts when discussing scientific publication systems. So I posed the question to the panel “What actually is a scientific publication system?”. I mentioned Harvard Weblogs and the role they play in scientific communication.
Kuhlen added that he regards Weblogs as an important part of scientific communication. They offer the possibility to put knowledge on the scientific market without a peer review within a self-evolving system. He calls such texts “open collaborative documents”. Wätjen stressed the aspect that Weblogs conform with a constructivistic look at e-learning. Kuhlen and Rosendaal nevertheless see quality assurance as an important process in scientific publishing.
My own presentation was fairly good. Someone came up with the question, how to trace changes within distributed objects. This question came up at every CONESYS presentation so far. My answer was that
1. it is a hard question
2. it could be done with a central CVS repository for example
3. it’s nothing you really want to do in a content network with lots of data
4. especially not in a peer-to-peer content network
5. and that the CONESYS DDO system simply transfers metadata about digital objects or the object itself containing files within a compressed archive.
Thanks to Heinrich that he let me stay at his place!
At Sinn03 conference, I’ll be presenting CONESYS at Friday, 12 am.
In his lightning talk at the end of UKUUG 2003, Andrew Findlay announced the very young Raddle project, which provides software to test network management systems.
Looking for an alternative to CVS (because CVS has its quirks), I attended Tony’s talk on Source Control and Configuration Management using Perforce.
The problem, perforce aims to solve is: developers want to focus on developing, not reporting, but managers want to know what’s going on.
Some features of perforce:
– client/server architecture
– off-line development support is rudimentary
– self-repair and recovery features
– atomic transactions ensure data integrity
– clean workspace, no CVS files, . files
– you can rename file extensions, move directories without loosing version tracking
– each branch is placed in a different directory (e.g. main/, release_1/, release_2/)
– branch views track intention, for example by merging branch directories: dev/* -> my/*
The perforce company has about 60 employees and 2400 customers (e.g. HP). The perforce software is closed source, but a special license for OSS projects is available.
Most of the papers of the UKUUG conference are now available online. Access them via the programme for example: click on a title and find the paper linked at the abstract page.
My notes and some comments on Andrew Nicolsons presentation Not Fired for Buying Linux? Quirks of Open Source Adopters’ worldviews
Throughout his session, Andrew did not work with slides displayed to the audience. His talk was mainly a caleidoscope of good ideas and criticism.
He started with some questions addressing the audience, the funniest one: “Who wears a dress at his working place?”
Andrew continued analysing who is actually looking at the adoption of FOSS. It’s mainly the media, he said, that presents case studies, articles, interviews, etc.; but, you usually don’t hear about people who did not go for it.
Moving on to discuss the term “computer users”, he doubted the usefulness of this term. He brought up an anology: “Although managers talk a lot, we don’t call them talkers; allthough politicians shake a lot of hands, we don’t call them shakers – but computer users are called computer users because they use the computer.”
Decisions on migrating to Linux, Andrew said, sustaine the myth of rational decision making, which is a masculin approach to decision making. In general, Andrew is a constructivist thinker when he says that a decision is made first, afterwards we piece the evidence together to make our decision defencable.
Software is created socially, in discourses, speech, text and works with conecpts, networks of concepts, theories.
His MBA research is based on some migration examples:
– the city of nottingham that moved to a SuSe email system
– a school that moved to OpenOffice
– Unilever, that decided upon a 5 year plan migrating to linux
– the west yorkshire police
The result is that he detected classical structures of fairy tales and naratives in those migration stories: There’s 1. a problem/crisis, 2. a hero, 3. a solution (linux, the “magic tool”). Andrew explained that the story makes the teller look good and is deeply deep rooted in a traditional conceptional framework/structure. It all comes down to the phrase “we lived happily ever after”.
Having a closer look at the actors in the migration narratives, he enjoyed interviews with employees of the West Yorkshire Police, stating “TV cliches” like “tax payers money”, “I am a responsible police man”.
One more interesting point when looking at the migration stories is that on the one hand, FOSS is presented as something new and different, on the other hand, its similarity is stressed (e.g. between MS Word and OpenOffice).
Andrew adviced the audience to consider that it might not be a good argument that Linux helps companies in saving money, because the power of a manager is bound to the budget of his department. The more money he (can) spends, the more power he has.
At the end of Andrews superb talk, I asked myself, what’s the essence of his statements? Is there nothing new under the sun, even with FOSS, or does it essentially make a difference?
Sandro Groganz 