Open Government NYC

The space of people excited about the intersection of e-government, transparency, open data, and open source software has exploded recently. The amount of talk and, consequently, bullshit flying around about this topic has ballooned proportionately.

Kudos to Matt Cooperrider, then, for assembling a serious meetup for local open government that has some ass-kicking potential.

About forty people met for the first meetup at New Work City. There were plenty of familiar faces from the NYC civic tech scene, but there were also several that I had never encountered before. Not for their lack of significance but, on the contrary, seemingly because of it: professionals in the open government world who normally have better things to do than go to meetups. The list of organizations represented included the New York Senate, the Sunlight Foundation, and the Personal Democracy Forum.

It’s too early to tell, but I’d say there’s a significant chance of something coming out of this.

The OpenGeo blog

Hey folks–check out the new OpenGeo blog when you get the chance. As OpenGeo’s official public-facing blog, it a place where we will be both showcasing our sexiest new offerings and elaborating on our organizational goals. Expect news on how high-profile clients are using open source geospatial software and how a high-tech “dot-org” based on principles of transparency and workplace democracy thrives in the market.

In a nutshell, the blog is going to be a steady stream of reasons why OpenGeo is kickass. I, personally, am excited about it.

Phil Ashlock and Chris Patterson added the blog to the website a few weeks ago. Posts will be written and edited by the team as history unfolds.

The End of the Open Scare

The New York Times published an uplifting article this week about R, a free software environment for statistical computing that was a side project of two academics that is now used extensively at places like Google and Pfizer. It’s a great read right up to the slam by the proprietary competitor that is so typical it may just have been included in the spirit of satire:

The popularity of R at universities could threaten SAS Institute, the privately held business software company that specializes in data analysis software. SAS, with more than $2 billion in annual revenue, has been the preferred tool of scholars and corporate managers.

SAS says it has noticed R’s rising popularity at universities, despite educational discounts on its own software, but it dismisses the technology as being of interest to a limited set of people working on very hard tasks.

“I think it addresses a niche market for high-end data analysts that want free, readily available code,” said Anne H. Milley, director of technology product marketing at SAS. She adds, “We have customers who build engines for aircraft. I am happy they are not using freeware when I get on a jet.”

But while SAS plays down R’s corporate appeal, companies like Google and Pfizer say they use the software for just about anything they can.

The comment by Milley would annoy me if the rest of the article didn’t make it look so ridiculous. As a whole, the article evidences that mainstream media “gets” open source software and that proprietary software company’s old marketing tactic of insisting that free software is inherently unreliable is becoming less effective.

The evolved version of this argument attacks free software for its unreliable support, as opposed to its inherent reliability. This is the case ESRI’s Jack Dangermond made and which Paul Ramsey so aptly deconstructed in December. But articles like the NYT expose the flimsiness and desperation of these arguments in the face of a rising tide of enterprise-level, supported open source software. Maybe soon proprietary companies will stop calling free software names.

Yes Pecan! and Common Cause

Just got an email from one of my favorite advocacy organizations, Common Cause. Here’s the news:

For the month of January, Ben & Jerry’s is renaming its butter pecan ice cream flavor to “Yes Pecan!” and donating a portion of the proceeds from scoop shop sales of the new flavor to the Common Cause Education Fund!

We’re honored to be working with Ben & Jerry’s to celebrate the spirit of activism and the newfound optimism that government can work for the common good.

Common Cause, in case you aren’t familiar with it, is a great organization which stands for participatory politics, fair elections, and open and ethical government, and responsive media.

Ben & Jerry’s, in case you aren’t familiar with it, is a great organization that stands for delicious ice cream.

Nothing but good can come out of this alliance.

Seat at the Table

The Obama-Biden Transition Project has some really excellent branding and PR.  Its name along makes me think of some kind of jazz fusion supergroup.  But it also appears to be making true progress towards government transparency, which is encouraging.

I just learned about the Project’s “Seat at the Table” Transparency policy, which is summed up in this public memo:

MEMORANDUM
From: John Podesta
To: All Obama Transition Project Staff
Date: December 5, 2008
Re: “Seat at the Table” Transparency Policy – EFFECTIVE IMMEDIATELY

As an extension of the unprecedented ethics guidelines already in place for the Obama-Biden Transition Project, we take another significant step towards transparency of our efforts for the American people. Every day, we meet with organizations who present ideas for the Transition and the Administration, both orally and in writing. We want to ensure that we give the American people a “seat at the table” and that we receive the benefit of their feedback.

Accordingly, any documents from official meetings with outside organizations will be posted on our website for people to review and comment on. In addition to presenting ideas as individuals at www.change.gov, the American people deserve a “seat at the table” as we receive input from organizations and make decisions. In the interest of protecting the personal privacy of individuals, this policy does not apply to personnel matters and hiring recommendations.

This is obviously great stuff. But I’m just as struck by Obama’s team’s continued mastery of PR and marketing. It’s like he’s still campaigning. The memo is addressed to “All Obama Transition Project Staff”, but it’s also clearly written for the public audience, opening with a reminder, in case you hadn’t heard, of “the unprecedented ethics guidelines already in place,” and then following through with an enforcement of the branding of the policy as “Seat at the Table.” And then it comes with a video commercial!

Don’t get me wrong–I’m not bothered by this. I am more amazed by Obama’s continued attention to his public image. It will keep people mobilized around him, and keep him a rock star in the public eye. And it’s because he’s got a lot of great, talented marketing experts working for him.

During the campaign, I was concerned about the role of money and technical expertise in politics. There is a democratic ideal that is is based on a fantasy of equal access to resources, an ideal with which I cannot fully part. But I spoke the other day with a friend who worked in the Obama campaign as a field organizar, and asked her what she thought legitimized an elected official. Her answer was telling, and maybe more relevant to the times: people being excited and mobilized and willing to pitch in for the candidate. If that norm of legitimacy is the standard across those touched by the Obama campaign and administration, then this sort of branding is exactly what he should be doing.

Thanks to Josh Bronson for the heads up on “Seat at the Table.”

Self referential metablogging about a horse

I recently had an IRC chat with friend and colleague David Winslow. It is of zero consequence, but provides a convenient way of breaking my own ice.

[15:25] <sbenthall> you made a post in november which egregiously demonstrates [your] bash fu.
[15:25] <sbenthall> I should totally grab stuff from the #opengeo channel and use it for material
[15:26] <dwins> i like posting snippets from irc conversations
[15:26] <dwins> they don’t lose much in the translation if you choose carefully
[15:26] <sbenthall> yeah.
[15:26] <sbenthall> i keep thinking I should start blogging again
[15:27] <sbenthall> but for some reason fell off that horse
[15:27] <sbenthall> the blogging horse

Perhaps I can remount this thing.

MIT CourseWareThatIsMerelyAjar

Yesterday I started looking into MIT OpenCourseWare and got very excited.  The range of courses for which there is open material available is enormous.  With these curricula at my fingertips, the way was open for me to educate myself, on my own time, without significant expense.

Then I dug a little deeper, into the available content for their introductory course on Nonlinear Dynamics I: Chaos.  To my dismay, I learned that their assignments involved code snippets written for MATLAB, proprietary mathematics software for which you need to purchase a license.

MATLAB is an excellent product and a standard software package used in universities, so it makes sense that courses transitioning to openness would initially depend on it.  However, it presents a serious obstacle to the open distribution and use of the course content.

Fortunately, Ryan Morlock has listed several open source alternatives to MATLAB, and some use languages that are “mostly” compatible with it.  It looks like the most of the assignments wouldn’t be difficult to port over to something like Octave.  It’s just a little shocking that nobody has done it yet.

FOSS4G Erratum

Thanks to Jody Garnett and Archeogeek for their correcting my misrepresentation of OSGeo in my first post from FOSS4G.  As they point out, OSGeo does not, as an organization, have it in for ESRI.  Rather, their mission is a purely positive one: “support and promote the collaborative development of open geospatial technologies and data.”  Indeed, I had no right to speak for the organization at all, having been exposed to it directly really only for a few days at that point.

Apologies for being caught up in the irrational exuberance of the moment, projecting my own opinions on the rest of the community, and generally overstepping.

Free software and capitalism

As the global capitalist economy tanks, and as I attend a free software conference, my mind alights on the subject of the role of free software in global capitalism.

My verdict: it is a radical departure.

Capitalism is an economic system whose foundation is the private ownership of the means of production.  Software is, among other things, a means of production.  Free software is not privately owned.*  So each successful free software project shifts the foundation of the economy towards…something else.

But what?

As Arnulf Christl has exhorted throughout the conference, the opposite of free software is proprietary software, not commercial software.  The proliferation of open source software has brought with it an open source industry that operates in the market just like other industries.

I’m certainly not the first to say this, but it seems high time for an economic theory that takes intellectual goods, and their tendency towards freedom, as fundamental instead of grafting them onto theories about trade in “normal,” material commodities.

* pace, licensing quibblers.

Computers are for computing

One of my favorite talks from FOSS4G this year was Josh Livni’s talk on Walk Score, a web service that calculates the “walkability” of an area based on publicly available data.  Walkability is calculated efficiently right against the database according to an algorithm that takes into account how easy it is to get around–and get to points of interest–by walking.  Then it displays the results using Google Maps.

It took me a while to realize what I liked about Walk Score so much.  It isn’t a fully open source stack, and though “walkability” is important to me, I don’t really have a use for this service beyond checking out the walk score of my home town.  And yet it appeals to me and has been a generally popular site.

Then I realized: this project appeals to me because it computes something interesting.

A frustrating aspect of the world of open source web GIS is that most projects appear to be hung up on the problems of making data available over the internet–in various formats, in certain combinations, with certain metadata, but otherwise essentially untouched.  Where modifying data is supported (say through WFS-T), it has to be done painstakingly by hand.

I don’t want to minimize the challenges of building the foundations that have taken so much effort so far.  But I think that what gets missed in the process is the fact that the most compelling applications compute something useful.  What people really want and need is software that thinks for them.  Or, maybe, discovers something for them.

What Walk Score does, which few applications I’ve seen this week do, is calculate something interesting for people.  Livni had the creativity to turn a human interest into a quantitative, algorithmicly calculable metric, and found a way to report that metric back to people in a way they could understand.  It provides people with something two steps ahead of them, just beyond the horizon of what they can imagine.  That’s true progress.  I hope to see more of it in FOSS/Web/GIS applications in the coming year.