Embedded: Specialization is for insects

embedded.fm has fast become my favourite podcast of the moment (always excepting QOTD). Great ideas shared in an inclusive and warm-fuzzy way.

Elecia's end-of-show quote always makes it worth listening right to the end. Until I heard #146's,
I'd struggled to find words to express exactly this. It's a quote from Robert A. Heinlein:

A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects.

Design thinking is not rocket science

OH on the ABC Radio National By Design podcast (00:56): In the field: Paul Bennet

For us the idea of small ideas that people can actually connect together and actually implement are very big ideas.

And I'm sure you've heard people describe design thinking as sort of a combination of rocket science, string theory and calculus.

It isn't. It's not rocket science at all. It's actually very very straight-forward.

It's looking in the world, being inspired by people, co-creating with them, prototyping and then iterating. And it has to be impactful. It has to work.

Amplifying Human Emotion

(blogarhythm ~ Sweet Emotion 相川七瀬)

It all comes back to connectivity. Om Malik (TWiST #327 @00:37:30) has a brilliant characterization of the true impact of the internet:

human emotion amplified at network scale

2013: Time for web development to have its VB3 moment

(blogarhythm ~ Come Around Again - JET)

And that's a compliment!

Wow. This year we mark the 20th anniversary of the Visual Basic 3.0 launch way back in 1993.

It's easy to forget the pivotal role it played in revolutionizing how we built software. No matter what you think of Microsoft, one can't deny the impact it had at the time. Along with other products such as PowerBuilder and Borland Delphi, we started to see long-promised advances in software development (as pioneered by Smalltalk) become mainstream reality:

• finally, Rapid Application Development that really was rapid
• simplicity that put the development of non-trivial applications within the realm of the average computer user. It made simple things simple and complex things possible (to borrow from Alan Kay)
• development environments that finally did the obvious: want to build a graphical user interface? Then build it graphically (i.e. WYSIWYG), and build a complete client or client-server app from a single IDE.
• an event-driven programming model that explicitly linked code to the user-facing triggers and views (like buttons and tables)
• perhaps the first mainstream example of a viable software component reuse mechanism (improved and rebranded many times over time: ActiveX, COM, .NET)

In its day, Visual Basic 3.0 was variously lauded (by non-programmers who could finally make the app they always wanted) and loathed (by IT professionals shocked at the prospect of ceding control to the great unwashed). Interestingly, Visual Basic succeeded *despite* the language (BASIC, probably the most widely derided language of all time. Or perhaps it shares that crown with COBOL).

The party didn't last long however, as by the late 90's the internet had fundamentally changed the rules of the game.

VB, PowerBuilder and the like suffered from an implicit assumption of a client-server architecture, and were not prepared for a webified world. They didn't (all) disappear of course, with Visual Basic in particular finding a significant role as Microsoft's mainstream server-side language, and it lives on in Visual Studio. Yet it lost it's revolutionary edge, and had to be content to simply fit in as an "also can do in this language" alternative.

Web Development - a case of one step back and one step forward?

You would think that over the past 20 years, web development would have been able to leap far ahead of what was best practice in client-server computing at the time.

We have certainly come a long way since then, and many advances in practice and technology have become de rigueur. Here are some examples that would not have been considered normal by any stretch in 1993:

• Reliance on open standard protocols at every tier: from client to server, server to database and messaging systems
• Global, well-known repositories of shared, reusable code (Github, Rubygems .. and let's not forget grand-daddy CPAN)
• Version control. There is no argument.
• Automated testing tools and continuous integration.
• Open source is mainstream, and even preferred in many contexts.

Yet it is also salutary to reflect on some of the great innovations we saw back in 1993 that have yet to be re-invented and re-imagined successfully for the web.

I am thinking in particular of the radical productivity that was possible with the event-driven, WYSIWYG GUI programming model. It certainly hasn't gone away (take xcode for example). But why is that not the leading way of building for the web today? After all, the web is graphical and event-driven. A perfect fit one would think.

It has perhaps been the very success of the internet, and the rapid unconstrained innovation it has enabled, that has in turn inhibited major advances in web development.

Those that have come close (such as Adobe Flash) have ultimately failed primarily because they did not embrace the open standards of the web. And others, like Microsoft Visual Studio and Oracle JDeveloper have remained locked in proprietary silos.

On the whole, we still work at levels of abstraction that are no higher, and many times lower, than those embodied by the best tools of 1993. It is, after all, very difficult to build abstractions over a foundation that is in constant flux. And with highly productive languages and frameworks at our disposal (like Ruby/Rails), it makes complete sense for many - myself included - to actively spurn graphical IDEs for the immense flexibility we get in return for working at the coding coalface.

The Tide is Turning

Once the wild west of hackety scripts and rampant browser incompatibilities, the building blocks of the web have been coalescing. HTML5, CSS3 and leading browser rendering engines are more stable, consistent and reliable than ever. Javascript is now considered a serious language, and the community has embraced higher-level APIs like jQuery and RIA frameworks such as ember.js and backbone.js. Web design patterns are more widely understood than ever, with kits like bootstrap putting reusable good practice in the hands of novices.

On the backend, our technology stacks are mature and battle-tested (LAMP, Rails). And we have an array of cloud-ready, open source solutions for just about every back-end infrastructure need you can imagine: from BigData (Hadoop, MongoDB ..) to messaging (RabbitMQ, ØMQ ..) and more.

My sense is that in the past couple of years we have been edging towards the next leap forward. Our current plateau is now well consolidated. Yet despite efforts such as codecademy to open up software coding to all, web development remains as complex as ever. To do it well, you really need to master a dizzying array of technologies and standards.

Time for Web Development to Level Up

What does the next level offer? We don't know yet, but I'd suggest the following as some of the critical concerns for next gen web development:

• a unified development experience: the ability to build a full-stack application as one without the need for large conceptual and technological leaps from presentation, to business logic, to infrastructure concerns.
• implicit support for distributed event handling: a conventional mechanism for events raised on a client or server to be consumed by another client or server.
• event-driven GUI development: draw a web page as you want it to be presented, hook up events and data sources.
• it is mobile: more than just responsive web design. Explicit suport for presenting appropriately on the full range of desktop, tablet and mobile devices
• distributed data synchronisation: whether data is used live on a web page, stored for HTML5 offline, or synchronized with a native mobile application, our tools know how to distribute and synchronize updates.
• (ideally) let's not have to go back to square one and re-invent our immense investments in standard libraries and reusable code (like the extensive collection of ruby gems)

Do we have the perfect solution yet? No.

But we are starting to see enticing inklings of what the future may look like. Perhaps one of the most compelling and complete visions is that provided by the meteor project. It is very close.

Will meteor streak ahead to gain massive mid-share and traction? Or will an established platform like Rails take another giant step forward? Or is there something else in the wings we don't know about yet?

It will be an interesting year. And if the signs are to be trusted, I expect we'll look back on 2013 as a tipping point in web development - its VB3 moment.

Do you think we're in for such a radical shift? Or heading in a different direction altogether? Or will inertia simply carry the status quo... I'd love to hear what others think!

Are You Experienced?

How many times have you seen a webdev job ad that asks for things like:

Minimum 5 years experience in Ruby on Rails, html5, JQuery, Mongo DB, and building andriod and iphone/ipad apps

So it just came up again on a mailing list, and we all had a good lol.

When people ask for more years experience than the technology has even existed, at one level the incongruity simply tickles our geeky funny bone like a classic joke setup.

At another level however - and one that HR professionals the world over still struggle with - specifying job requirements in terms of many years experience with a certain technology betrays a fundamental lack of understanding for what developers do. Like advertising for doctors "with 5 years experience prescribing naltrexone" - I don't think I want to be treated by one who was selected on that basis!

When when specifying technical job roles, it comes back to the key question of how do we ask: "Are you experienced?"

For some jobs, length of service with a technology is a useful indicator for hiring purposes. If we are seeking deep skills with a relatively stable body of knowledge: we want evidence that candidates have had enough time to get their green horns knocked off, learned to swim in the deep end, and pick up all those heuristic tricks they don't teach in school.

In the IT realm, these jobs tend to be those involved with more stable back-end technologies (e.g. relation databases), or developers doing application maintenance on legacy systems (e.g. 6 year old java applications used by a bank).

However, the closer you get to front-end technologies and the more dynamic your needs (read: startups), the more irrelevant - and often misleading - the "judge experience by years with a technology" rule becomes. The rate at which technologies change is just too fast. I've been doing this for many years (more than I'll admit here!), but:

• I'm still learning new things every month - probably at an even faster rate than when I was a fresh grad
• Half of what I learned last year is now obsolete, probably never to be called on again
• I've lost count of the number of times I've developed mastery in something for 1 project, and never used it again

IMHO, the fundamental skill that great developers share is the ability to learn and assimilate. You don't want them stuck in a rut.

So how do we measure it? Rather than years of service, we need indicators of applied learning, for example:

• A single significant project delivery (i.e. that goes live) is often enough to develop a good mastery of a technology
• Multiple project deliveries demonstrates the ability to hone and apply that knowledge in different scenarios
• Working with various technologies over time demonstrates flexibility and adaptability to the new
• Founding an open source project shows that the individual not only has the creativity and inspiration to create something new, but has the tenacity to get it done (without a boss looking over their shoulder)
• Contributing to an open source project demonstrates that the individual has pounded it enough to identify something that needs fixing, has had the mental firepower to figure out the root cause and how to fix it, and the collaborative skills to get the contribution merged.

So when I write a job ad for a technical role, I'd suggest defining the technical requirements along these lines:

• 5+ years professional web development experience
  [a guide to the level of seniority within the general professional discipline]
  
  
• Delivered multiple projects and current experience using: Rails 3.x, PostgreSQL 9.x, git
  [the specific technical skills you expect people to have on day 1. Reference major version numbers where they represent significant evolutions of the technology, and make sure you use the correct nomenclature to avoid more lolz;-)]
  
  
• Ideally, recent project experience using one of more of the following technologies: capistrano, redis, and MongoDb.
  [technologies you use or are planning to use, but it won't kill you to allow the person time to get up to speed]
  
  
• Experience contributing to or founding open source projects
  [it's almost getting to the stage where developers really have to be quite uninterested in their career to avoid some involvement with open source projects - see comments above]

I haven't asked for all the technologies they've used in the past - assuming that this will come out when they explain exactly what they've been doing during those "5+ years professional web development".

Of course that still leaves a whole range of matters such as soft-skills and how you actually go about selling your startup vacancy. You can find this and more in the most excellent JFDI Hiring & Firing guide.

Blogarhythm: Are You Experienced? - Jimi Hendrix

gource - cool and not totally pointless

Run gource on a source code repository and it animates the code's evolution. I think I first saw it used to illustrate the history of Python development since 1990, and I must admit my first reaction was cool but probably pointless.

Recently @dmm6319 ran it over our own project, and inspired me to play around a bit with it too.

So after watching our animation a few times I'm sheepishly revising my opinion of gource.

Yes, you probably need to have something invested in the particular code-base to care, and it certainly helps if you avoid the obvious cliche of using an "atmospheric" soundtrack.

But there are some real, big-picture insights that come through very clearly in the animation that you wouldn't necessarily get if you just looked at the source - for example, the shift from Cucumber to RSpec as our primary testing framework.

Blogarhythm: Asik Veysel - Joe Satriani

Mikko Hyppönen@TED

Doing more than just talking about viruses: he fires up a few classics in a DOS box and pokes around with a binary editor before looking at current threats and live infection data. Very cool and entertaining. Not many are brave enough to do live demos, but if you watch to the end you'll get to see how prepared he was for failure;-)

Best served with sides of:

• Daniel Suarez's Daemon - for the extreme version of how bad things can go wrong,
• Rebecca MacKinnon: Let's take back the Internet! - because maybe organised crime is the perfect distraction as we rush headlong to enslave ourselves to the Sovereigns of the Internet, and
• Security Now! #291 - for Steve Gibson's deconstruction of stuxnet, the most spohisticated Internet-borne "weaponised payload" ever discovered... and perhaps a plausibly-deniable warning from Government(s) that "you call that a knife? THIS is a knife!"

PS: better quality vid on youtube. And yes, that is a 5 1/4" floppy.

Blogarhythm: Security - Jo Jo Zep & The Falcons

Rock till you drop.io

Bombshell announcement on 29-Oct: drop.io have .. struck a deal with Facebook.

What this means is that Facebook has bought most of drop.io’s technology and assets, and Sam Lessin is moving to Facebook.

drop.io was widely acclaimed as the simple file sharing mechanisms we all needed. It resolutely solved the problem that everyone with a computer and a network connection has known at one time or another: how to share files too cumbersome for email, without resorting to techno-geekery like ftp and such. And it worked. Beautifully.

But it doesn't work anymore.

Goodbye drop.io! You were an amazing service. One of the best and brightest of the Class of Web 2.0. You made things simple. You solved a real, pressing problem.

Unfortunately, that's not what I'll remember you for now.

Instead, it will be for brewing a thunderstorm of concern over the very dependability of cloud services, as John C. Dvorak went to town on in his column.

And for teaching us that it's true - startup founders really don't give a toss for their customers if they can get a sweet deal and a plum job with one of the heavyweights instead.

And for once again propelling Facebook into the privacy-conspiracy-theory limelight. Sure, "no data will be transferred to Facebook", but they put you out of business and bought "most of [your] technology and assets", right? So will we be surprised when Facebook takes aim to lure it's unsuspecting users into sharing pretty much anything and everything - private, commercially confidential, and otherwise - using Facebook?

Well, I guess drop.io does really deserve our thanks for that last point, if anyone cares to notice.

The very best news—for anyone who can't imagine life without drop.io—is that there is another exceptional product out there called Dropbox that can handle most team sharing needs in addition to looking after your personal documents.

That's not a paid advertisement or anything. I simply use Dropbox everyday and just love it. I wouldn't be exaggerating to say it's probably improved the way I work more than anything even the folks in Redmond or Cupertino have shipped in recent memory.

Blogarhythm: Rock Rock (till you drop) .. Def Leppard

The Ultimate Steampunk Project needs $10

I heard John Graham-Cumming on TWiT #269 talk about the project he has started to build - 173 years later - a full scale realization of Charles Babbage's Analytical Engine. Amazingly, it's never been done (only partial models exist).

Now, we are talking about a truck-sized, steam-powered machine that is Turing-complete and features (without silicon or electricity) "modern" ideas like instruction pipelining. The ultimate steampunk project. It also has a serious educational and academic aspect (including to digitize all of Babbage's plans and notes).

Due to significant private support coming forth, the pledge target has apparently been reduced from 50,000 to just 10,000 signatories. At the time of writing, John only needed another 6358 pledges of $10/£10/€10 each to get the project moving.

Now I don't often get behind fundraisers and campaigns, but this strikes me as one of those once-in-a-lifetime follies you cannot help but support. And all for about the price of the cheapest bottle of wine in the shop around the corner.

Blogarhythm: L.O.V.E. Machine WASP

12 Things Every Programmer Should Know

Samnang Chhun posted his neat little presentation from BarCamp Phnom Penh 2010. It's a good summary of the leading memes of the moment..

Blogarhythm: everybody wants the same thing - scissor sisters

DHH, Lars, and the Quality of Water

Just for the record:

• David Heinemeier Hansson: born in Denmark 1979. Partner at 37signals


• Lars Ulrich: born in Denmark 1963. Drummer for Metallica


• DHH: outspoken proponent for building businesses from revenue.


• Lars: outspoken proponent for exploiting copyright for money.

I wonder what they added to the drinking water in Denmark back in the 70's?

Blogarhythm: Smoke on the Water - Metallica covering Deep Purple.

The third-party authentication dilemma: does Facebook pwn my site?

I've argued for some time that it is crazy for most websites to have their own authentication (username/password) system these days.

• We the users have no patience for yet another registration process, validation email flow, and password to remember


• Security is too easy to get wrong, unless you truly have security professionals on staff


• Designing sites with a registration process, issuing credentials etc is a legacy holdover from the days when we had no choice. OpenID, OAuth (in particular) have long since changed the game.

And the shift is well underway. More sites these days are offering the ability to authenticate using twitter, facebook, google or other credentials. Janrain chief executive Brian Kissel has said that

..publishers are jumping on-board as they realize it’s valuable to know who their readers are and that it’s much easier to convince them to sign in with an existing account than to create a new one

Perhaps like many sites, you integrated with Facebook Connect to let users sign into your site with their Facebook account. Which all sounds great, until you wake up one day, and are caught you off guard by two bits of news:

• Facebook Connect brand will be deprecated as part of the launch of Open Graph


• There's a movement of disaffected Facebook users concerned with privacy and trust threatening to quit

Jason Calacanis was one of the high-profile Facebook quitters who got "caught" sneaking back in. He explained the reason on a This Week in Startups .. to (temporarily) regain control over all the third-party applications he'd forgotten were using his Facebook account for authentication.

Suddenly, you are feeling the downside of depending on a third-party authentication service:

• The amount of engineering required to "keep up" with the evolving identity management space is unpredicatable since someone else is calling the shots


• Your site and brand is totally exposed to a user backlash over something that you have have no control over and has nothing to do with you

So is there better way?

If your site is directly linked to the third-party service (e.g. a tool for twitter, or a Facebook application) then the answer is no, and the question doesn't even make sense.

But for most cases, we are basically outsourcing the identity management and authentication, and want to avoid getting caught down a blind alley.

Pure OpenID is one approach: it is not controlled by any single vendor, and there are capabilities such as delegation which allow users to pick and choose their provider. The unfortunate fact is that OpenID is far from mainstream, and will likely remain a mystery for most users (even if it is hard at work under the covers of their Google or Yahoo! sign in).

Personally, I think the best approach is to disentangle ourselves from directly dealing with identity providers. By outsourcing the identity management and authentication process to an intermediary that aggregates the services of many identity providers we get a nice compromise:

• Someone else to take on the burden of securing the system and keeping up to date with the improvements made by the various identity providers


• We get to offer the convenience to our users of signing in with a wide range of identity providers


• And I am making my site directly dependent on only one service provider, and one that specializes in identity not other business interests which may potentially bring us into conflict

The best solution I have found so far is Janrain Engage (formerly RPX). I've used this on a number of sites (e.g. CloudJetty - my directory of cloud/SaaS applications), and released a gem (authlogic_rpx) for easily using the service with Ruby on Rails.


If you are concerned about your website getting locked in to a particular authentication provider (whether it is Facebook, twitter or anything else) then I would certainly recommend you check out Janrain Engage.

Now I realise this may come across as an unabashed plug for Janrain, but the truth of the matter is that (a) it works, and (b) I haven't really been able to find any fully baked alternatives. If you do know of other similar services or ways of approaching this problem I'd be really interested to hear about them.

Blogarhythm for this post: IDentity - 玉置成実 Tamaki Nami

The light will shine on me allowing me to make progress and start on the road to my identity

Open Innovation

A provocative comment by Jason on This Week In Startups had me stop and think about the open innovation "fad".

He said something to the effect that all the open feedback and idea suggestion sites like UserVoice and GetSatisfaction were nothing but a great way for your competition to sponge on your success and out-innovate you by just pilfering all the good ideas. And you'd be a muppet to use one for your business.

The automatic reaction is that this makes logical sense. It is similar to the classic objection by the insecure and IP-obsessed to justify a closed innovation processes.

Certainly, innovating in public does expose you to some risk of IP leakage. That's undeniable. But maybe it's not so black and white: it's whether on balance you will gain more through greater engagement of an interested and motivated audience than you lose from competitors looking over your shoulder.

Personally, I think this is a false conundrum, for two reasons:

• Good ideas are not hard to find, it's what you do with them that matters


• Open Innovation is not just about the ideas

Good ideas are not hard to find, it's what you do with them

As Scott Berkun writes, it is a myth that "good ideas are hard to find".

So what if a competitor can look at all the ideas suggested and rated by your users? Who has the skill and determination to sort the wheat from the chaff and execute? Unless you have the balls to believe you can out-execute your competition, you should probably think twice about running an open innovation process.

And if you are up against a company that is running an open innovation process, Dilbert has the best advice for you.

Open Innovation is not just about the ideas

So you put up a site soliciting ideas and feedback, sit back and just implement whatever comes in. Really?

Unfortunately that is plain fantasy, perhaps with a certain appeal to (a) those who don't really like dealing with people, (b) the lazy, and (c) epic procrastinators.

Opening up to your customer base and inviting them to participate in improving your products or service is not just a cheap way to downsize the R&D group.

First, it may not be that cheap, and second, you may not get many new ideas you haven't at least considered before. But done well, what you are building is a genuine relationship with your organization's most important constituents: real and potential customers. You are giving them some power over your process, engendering ownership and loyalty.

It is also not a one way street. People will soon give up on submitting new ideas and lose any warm and fuzzy feeling if it appears their suggestions just disappear into a black hole.

In other words, closing the innovation loop with feedback is critical.

It doesn't take much effort either - just commitment. Dell use a simple blog (Ideas In Action) to showcase how IdeaStorm submissions have wormed their way into actual product and service innovations at Dell. Simple and effective, and reinforces the value of participation (hopefully accelerating the innovation process in turn). Contrast the success of IdeaStorm with other innovation forums that do not have an closed-loop process (Oracle's Mix for example).

A competitor looking over the fence into your garden may be able to steal ideas, but they can't steal the community you are building, and can't replace your role in the virtuous feedback cycle.

They can however steal your business if you screw up on execution, or treat your own customers with disdain. But if that's the case, they would have crushed you whether you ran an open innovation site or not, right?

Soundtrack for this post: With A Little Help From My Friends - Joe Cocker

#Amazon, #Audible: can you get your global act together?

I bitched about Audible for not doing a good job of serving the global audience.

Well. I just got an email today that reminded me not to forget lambasting Amazon (now audible's parent company).

Over 800 Albums for $5 Each..

..from the Amazon mp3 store. Or so it said. It was a lie and grand deception.

I so want to buy from Amazon's mp3 store - heaven save me from even considering the Apple iTunes Store - but guess what? I can't. Not authorized outside the US (even though I can buy the exact same thing on a bit of plastic and have it shipped to me).

Now, I know it is not Audible and Amazon that set these policies. It's the RIAA and the rest of the old-fashioned publishing industry (be it books or music). And judging by The Washington Post's recent article "E-books spark battle inside the publishing industry", it seems things may get worse before they get better.

But I wish Audible and Amazon were a little more aggressive in championing consumer rights. In particular, take close aim at the notion of regional distribution deals.

Once upon a time, it was reasonable to ink regional deals. After all, someone needed to provide the warehouse, retail frontage and so on. In far off, foreign lands. But in the digital age, we have global retail frontage. Local distribution deals (and all their attendant evils such as DVD region coding) are an anachronism.

To put it simply: When Amazon, Audible or any other internet distributor puts a product in their stores, it should be available (and have been sold on) a global basis. If publishers are not able to make such a deal, don't stock their stuff. Send them packing and tell them to come back when they've got a deal that works for a global audience.

But is there an incentive for Amazon, Audible and the like to take such a stand against the publishers? Well here's one: the other 80% of the world market. I loo-ve Audible (props @jason), and Amazon has been a favoured source for years. But if you keep jilting me under the control of US-centric publishers, I'll be the first to jump to a regional/truly-global competitor. Your future growth will be limited to the shores of the continental US.



Soundtrack for this post: Can't Take Me Home - Pink

Watching people shop

I've been a long time Amazon customer, but a while ago I stumbled upon The Book Depository in the UK. Not only are their prices competitive with Amazon (especially when you consider the free shipping), but I was totally sucked in by their live "Watch people shop" widget - a very cool Google maps mashup.

..although it does look a bit strange when all the book buyers in Australia seems to be based in Alice Springs;-)

Soundtrack for this post: Someone To Watch Over Me - Blossom Dearie

FREE: The Future of Intense Irony

@audible_com please can you do more to convince your audio book publishers that you are an internet company, and by definition operating in a global marketplace.

Does Chris Anderson (@chr1sa) know that FREE is not FREE (contrary to his intent I believe), but it is completely UNAVAILABLE in the audio form for large parts of the world. What is this crap!


As @jason says "We LOVE audible", but the love get a little tougher when we get dissed and discriminated by @audible_com based on where we live.

Free offers to people following @audible_com? Great PR you would think...


.. but that turns into real bummer for a lot of us - actively poisonous PR. Couldn't you simply check to make sure that any freebie you want to offer is one that you can do globally?



Bah humbug!

Project Nimbus: Gov.sg 2.0 gaining momentum!

I was excited to hear about the Project Nimbus initiative at last night's SRB meetup (Jason's the great Gladwellian connector)

When I wrote my opinion piece "Could Open Government initiatives help drive innovation in Singapore?", I had in mind a key proposition that it would be really smart for Government to push open data initiatives, as any costs or concerns associated would be repaid many times over by the resulting stimulus to local innovation and economic development.

With that in mind, it's really heartening to see that some cool cookies have gone beyond just talk, and established Project Nimbus with the goals:

• To unite the voices of Singapore Innovators and identify data sets and services we as Innovators want


• To work with content owner and government entities for the appropriate release of these data sets and services to Singapore Innovators

The main engagement point is the UserVoice page they have setup to collect and filter ideas (through the voting process). This is a great way of first making sure you are dealing with ideas that have real support and interest.

Once you have qualified ideas, the next steps are where Project Nimbus could make the difference from every other idea that ever got sent up only to have its wings fold on launch: make sure you have the idea packaged in a Government/agency-friendly way, and then ensure the message gets through to the right people (who care, and have appropriate authority).

As we were discussing yesterday, good ideas without execution are .. nothing but wishful thinking really. It seems like Project Nimbus has all the right bases covered. It will be really exciting to see the first successes start to come through (they already have two ideas progressed to the stage of taking to the agency concerned).

This could be a really interesting year;-)

Could Open Government initiatives help drive innovation in Singapore?

A few recent stories got me thinking about the status of open data in government, how that translates in Singapore, and in particular the importance of:

• open web publishing standards


• giving priority to open when developing web/data services

First, there was an interesting discussion on open government with Silona Bonewald, founder of the US League of Technical Voters, on the IT Conversations Network. Then the storm-in-a-teacup over a prematurely leaked LTA OPC announcement.

Tim O'Reilly made a convincing summary of the state of play and call for action in his recent O'Reilly Radar presentation at OSCON (and blog post Gov 2.0: It’s All About The Platform). Don't just use our voices to "shake the vending machine"; as technologists we should lend our hands to help prove that open is indeed a better strategy for Government.

And last but not least, Anil Dash posted a great review of the recent initiatives launched by the executive branch of the federal government of the United States in response to President Obama's Open Government Directive. Two notable achievements:

• Whitehouse.gov now publishes exclusively under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License


• data.gov is providing public access to high value, machine readable datasets generated by the Executive Branch of the Federal Government, and I believe is the driver behind some incredibly useful services such as usaspending.gov

The President's CIO Vivek Kundra has since even outlined a vision where the default setting for information created by the government should be public, not secret.

President Obama is racking up some serious credibility for being able to push innovation and adoption in government, and raising the stakes for Governments the world over.

Getting traction in Singapore

As someone who has adopted Singapore as their home, my first reaction was: "it could have been us". It chaffs to see Singapore's world-leading ICT adoption not always translating into world-leading technology innovation and service enhancement.

To be fair, Singapore's iDA Infocomm Adoption Programme and the iGov2010 Strategic Plan encapsulate many of the right sentiments. The issue is timing and rate of change. But for that, Prime Minister Lee Hsien Long could easily have stolen President Obama's thunder.

But I guess the glory of being first isn't the point. Each government must run it's own race, with the focus being on sensible, timely initiatives to improve citizen engagement and stimulate innovation, the economy, and civil society in general.

There are two areas I personally believe deserve priority in Singapore, and are well within reach under the auspices of established strategies:

• Promote citizen engagement by adopting an open publishing standard for Government web sites


• Promote local innovation and technology development by giving priority to "Open" in all Government data initiatives.

Promote citizen engagement by adopting an open publishing standard for Government web sites

Case in point: Did you know that you cannot hyperlink to most government sites without first obtaining explicit permission?

I didn't believe it either until I started checking all the "Terms of Use" statements. This means, for example, that you can't post a link to the MOM list of Public Holidays on your corporate intranet without approval. To say that this flies in the face of how the web is intended to work is putting it mildly (remember what the H in HTML stands for).

mrbrown says it best in relation to the LTA brouhaha:

OPC scheme leaks online before Minister announces it. The internet is here, embargoes don't work. Tough.

Embergoes don't work, neither do attempts to prevent people from linking to a published, public internet website.

While trawling the various government Terms of Use statements, I was also struck by how widely they differ across all the government web properties.

Together, these failures to bring published government websites under some semblance of rational information rights cannot fail to hinder a real engagement of the intended consumers of the information.

Fortunately, the way forwarded has been mapped out clearly: with the example set by Whitehouse.gov, and the brave souls who have laboured over the production of the Singapore adaptation of Creative Commons.

I would dearly love to see the Government adopt a Creative Commons License (perhaps: attribution, no derivative works) as the standard for web site publishing and doing away with all the divergent and restrictive legalese in existing Terms of Use statements.

Why is this important? True citizen engagement and transparency (of the kind attempted by www.reach.gov.sg) will not succeed while Government terms of use still attempt to restrict access and use of information openly published on the web.

The results of my Terms of Use survey? 12 ministries prohibit unauthorised hyperlinking, 4 accept linking (at your own risk). I didn't count stat boards, but they typically have the more restrictive terms.

12 Ministries that prohibit Hyperlinking without Permission - 75% FAIL!

Wording varies, but generally you may only hyperlink to the homepage upon notifying in writing, and for other pages you must make a specific request and secure permission before making a hyperlink. Note that many statutory boards use similar terms. In case you think this may just be a holdover from the internet dark ages, note that all claim to have been "last updated" in the past 3 years, many in 2009.

www.gov.sg
www.mcys.gov.sg
www.mewr.gov.sg
www.mfa.gov.sg
www.mha.gov.sg
www.mica.gov.sg
www.mlaw.gov.sg
www.mof.gov.sg
www.moh.gov.sg
www.mom.gov.sg
www.mot.gov.sg
www.pmo.gov.sg

4 Ministries that are Hyperlink-friendly - 25% win

The heroes;-)

www.mindef.gov.sg
www.mnd.gov.sg
www.moe.gov.sgw
www.mti.gov.sg

Promote local innovation and technology development by giving priority to "Open" in all Government data initiatives

Earlier in August, I saw the latest press release from the Singapore Land Authority and Infocomm Development Authority concerning SG-Space (I would link to SLA's own press release from earlier in the year, but - you guessed it - according to their terms of use, I cannot without prior written permission. Here instead is the non-hyperlinked URL: http://www.sla.gov.sg/htm/new/new2009/new1002.htm)

The goals of SG-Space are laudible - "..to provide an infrastructure, mechanism and policies to allow convenient access to quality geospatial information.." and "..creating a transparent and collaborative environment.." - however it seems to be a good example of how closed, proprietary approaches to innovation still dominate:

• initial rollout will be limited to government agencies, this may mean for years given that this is now a $27m project over 5 years


• the scope seems not only limited to provision of data services, but also includes the provision of applications


• the intent is to extend to the private sector, and to the individual, but the timeframe and commercial basis for this are not clear

The approach has all the hallmarks of the traditional attempt to control and manage innovation through a series of government pilots, before gradually opening up a "fully baked" infrastructure for wider use. Valid, maybe, but one that ignores the lessons from successful API/service innovations such as flickr, google maps and amazon and so on. The open innovation route promises better results, faster:

• going open early drammatically accelerates innovation due to the network effect (a key theme of Patricia Seybold's Outside Innovation


• going open creates the opportunity for unexpected, unplanned innovation (who could have imagined a site like gothere.sg even 5 years ago?).


• by engaging a broader community in the open, much more can be achieved for less (an good example being how gothere.sg allow everyone to contribute missing or new location details)

As Tim O'Reilly put it: DIY on a civic scale (he since adopted a more civic-minded "Do It Ourselves" as suggested by Scott Heiferman)

Although SLA talk about wanting to "Start with pilot projects and be quick to scale up" (Mr Lam Joon Khoi, Chief Executive, SLA), by choosing a closed route there is the distinct possibility that quick just isn't quick enough. Rather than harness the collective energies of the technology community in Singapore, it's more likely to see private efforts stalled completely, or diverted into "Do It Ourselves" initiatives (e.g. OpenStreetMap).

A largely unsung example of how "open" can work very successfully in Singapore is BookJetty. By opening up it's information services, the National Library Board has provided the opportunity for an individual entrepreneur and technologist to combine government and non-government information and create an amazingly compelling service that is not only relevant in Singapore, but also has a global audience.

BookJetty is an example of service innovation that the NLB itself could not have attempted. Since the needs that BookJetty serves are at least one step removed from the core mission of the NLB, I doubt they would even be in the position to officially identify and imagine such a service. But by opening their information services to the private sector and individuals, they paved the way for others to innovate in unimagined ways.

Imagine what possibilities there would be for improving the efficiency and level of service if a similar approach was taken to Government Procurement by GeBIZ? http://www.gebiz.gov.sg (sigh, another site that prohibits hyperlinks)

I think it's worthwhile pausing to consider the restrictions imposed by data.gov:

data accessed through Data.gov do not, and should not, include controls over its end use.

This is fundamental to the idea of Government as a Platform. It recognises that government does not have a monopoly on creativity and innovation, and that promoting private sector innovation and entrepreneurship is a priority.

Here is an opportunity for Singapore to greatly boost innovation and ecomomic development by giving early priority to openness in all Government data and service initiatives. The community is certainly brimming with ideas (see what was discussed at a recent WebSG meeting for example).

Singapore seriously does have a small, but vibrant, technology "startup" community. The Government does a great deal to try and stimulate entrepreneurship in this sector, but I would say the results have been middling at best. The main support is in terms of grants and programs (offered by MDA, iDA, Spring and EDB for example), and the opportunity to secure standard government contracts to work directly for the public sector.

Why is this important? I think the time has come to seriously consider how Government can significantly accelerate local technology innovation and economic development by giving serious, strategic priority to opening up it's data and service platform. The iDA Web Services adoption strategy has in fact already lit the path, but it seems to miss the high level push it needs, and a recognition that it most definitely does not mean that Government needs to "Do It All Themselves":

..the programme targets government agencies encouraging them to make available information or services via Web Services. The end result would be citizens making use of richer services via their preferred access points.

Conclusion (or Hypothesis?)

I guess it boils down to a belief that "Open is Better" when applied to government data and services: both for the benefit of civic dialogue and engagement; and to maximise the stimulus for economic development in the local technology sector.

But I wonder if my thoughts are just "outliers"? I'd be very interested to hear more real examples from people of:

• successful innovations that have been enabled through the use of existing open data/services offered by the public sector


• areas you desperately would like to innovate in, but are being held back by closed or inaccessible services

Whether you agree with the priorities I am suggesting or not, I hope most would think that this is an important subject to be discussing.

Launched: I Tweet My Way - Getting things done for the twitter generation

I Tweet My Way is a twitter application to help you to set goals and get things done with the support of your friends and followers.

It's an application I've had in stealth for a while, but decided it is about time to let it out in the wild.

Do you have a goal you really want to work on? Quitting smoking, losing weight, paying off the credit card, or learning a new skill - these (and anything else you can imagine) are all suitable objectives to set yourself with I Tweet My Way.

I've had a long-standing interest in goal setting and tracking, but I must admit it was the advent of the "twitter-application" fad that got me thinking about how you could do a "getting things done" style personal trainer with Twitter. Now I'm looking forward to see how it gets used for real. I'm very interested in any feedback you may have. Did it help? Does it work? Why didn't it help or fit your needs?

Technically, it was built with rails and uses the Twitter OAuth support for authentication (you can read more about that here). I have it hosted at heroku (my favourite rails hosting service, although I am a bit leary about performance in the Asian region at the moment).

NB: the site currently comes without soundtrack, but think "mbube, the lion sleeps tonight";-)

Rocket Ship Galileo - Apollo 11 40th Anniversary

Houston, Tranquillity Base here. The Eagle has landed -- 20 July 1969 The 40th anniversary of the Apollo 11 landing has been getting quite a bit of coverage, but the coolest initiative has got to be the addition of the Moon in Google Earth. Quite coincidentally, I just read Robert A. Heinlein's "Rocket Ship Galileo" (well, actually listened to the audio version brilliantly narrated by Spider Robinson ).

Heinlein packs this atomic moonshot adventure with just about every Boy's Own plot twist possible and tells a rollicking ripping yarn. What's amazing is the detail of the hard science throughout the book - especially given the fact it was written in 1947.

All the shucks, gee willikins is quaintly pre-baby boom, while the embracing of atomic power with such wild abandon is frightening in retrospect. Altogether, it's a great - if dated - story; a true testament to Heinlein's genius and imagination.

On atomics: it is possible the tide of opinion may be swinging back to nuclear. The ABC Science show just featured a story on the safer and cheaper generations of reactors coming online (transcript, audio). Today's generation III reactors, and the generation IV on the horizon offer even cheaper, safer and cleaner power (literally eating the waste products of earlier designs). All well and good, but it would be a concern if "new atomics" became the quick and easy fix that sabotages the head of steam building up behind the true clean, green renewables (like solar nanopillars).



Originally posted on It's a PrataLife