Archive for November, 2008

The Open Web Foundation and Open Specifications

Published by Ross Gardler on November 5, 2008 in Discussion and Community. 1 Comment

 Brian Kelly suggests:

rather than seeking a formal definition of open standards, we needed a more flexible approach based on an understanding of the characteristics of open standards.

People interested in the idea that standards can be defined in ways other than through formal standards bodies will be interested in the keynote address at ApacheCon US08 by David Recordon of the Open Web Foundation and Six Apart. This keynote (see videocast), titled “Learning from Apache to Create Open Specifications”, examined how many of the important specifications today were developed in an ad-hoc way outside of the usual standards body, often with a new foundation being created to manage the specification.

David then went on to explore how this process could be formalised in the way that the Apache Software Foundation has formalised the process for creating and managing open source software. David argued that by focusing on licensing, copyright management, community development and incubation we can better manage the creation of clear and flexible open specifications.

The Open Web Foundation is a new initiative, modeled on the Apache Software Foundation, which focuses on the community definition of open specifications. It’s early days for the foundation at present. They are currently working on the licensing issues with lawyers and the general structure of the foundation. If you are at all interested in the future of open specifications join the community and help forge the future.

Experiences with Replay

Published by Ross Gardler on November 4, 2008 in Development, Software and Community. 2 Comments

Replay is an open solution developed in java to integrate, index, archive, and distribute audiovisual lecture recordings on a large scale. It’s being considered as the initial code to support the OpenCast community. The Opencast community is a collaboration of higher education institutions working together to explore, define, and document podcasting best practices and technologies.

As I’m currently at ApacheCon I am in geek mode, so I figured I’d have a play with the 0.4.1 release of Replay. I tried to install it before I left for the airport but the installer failed. I had time to check out the Replay issue tracker and found that this was a known issue and there was a hint in there as to how to solve the problem. However, this required me to download a 1Gb file from Apple. Since my taxi was due to arrive I had to give up on the idea of getting it installed. So I updated the issue with my findings and started my journey.

Over the last few days I’ve been working on this in the odd five minute here and there - how many conferences do you have sufficient bandwidth to download a 1Gb file in a reasonable amount of time?

I discovered that there were two other issues that would prevent things working - both appeared in the FAQ, but I can be pretty sure that both of these issues will apply to the majority of Mac users (as opposed to Mac developers), so I hope these make it into the install documentation. Furthermore one of the issues, relating to proxies, was not correct (if you care I had to remove both entries in the proxy settings, not just the one identified in the FAQ).

I was now able to upload new content to the system - cool.

The idea of Replay is that the system does speech and text recognition to make the video searchable. However, it didn’t look like this was working, searches didn’t produce any results. So I decided to go for lunch, a shrimp and oyster Po Boy from the excellent Acme Oyster House (I’ve eaten so much shrimp whilst here in New Orleans - this town knows how to cook shrimp!)

When I returned from lunch I sat down to have another go and discovered that  the search page was now showing a tag cloud. It seems the indexing had worked, it’s just that the UI didn’t tell me it was in progress earlier on.

Very early impressions of the system are that it is very promising - I love the fact that my podcasts can now bew indexed automatically. But I haven’t actually played with Replay enough to see if it works that way.

Although I had some problems getting it running I was, with a little work, able to find the information I needed. It’s perfectly acceptable for a 0.4 release to have teething issues like these, hopefully this feedback will help the team iron them out. It’s always hard for developers to know which issues users will hit and feedback like this is vital (note without the feedback of previous users I would not have been able to get this install working).

I’m going to be playing with adding content over the next few days and will report further in the future.

Open Source Media Training

Published by Ross Gardler on November 4, 2008 in Strategy and Policy and Community. 0 Comments

ApacheCon starts on Wednesday, but Monday and Tuesday are filled with the Hackathon, Apache Barcamp and training sessions. Today I attended the Media and Analyst Training run by Sally Khudairi of Halo Worldwide. Sally has a very impressive list of clients and is a member of the ASF, so when the opportunity arose to attend one of her training sessions I jumped at it.

I was lucky enough to meet Sally at the ApacheCon EU planning meetings so I already had a feel for what to expect from her. I was excited when I arrived for the training at 10am.

It wasn’t long before I decided that the decision to miss out on the Hackathon in order to attend this training session was the right one. Not only would this training benefit my work within the ASF, but it was clearly going to help my work with OSS Watch. In fact I quickly decided to use OSS Watch as my test case during the training, rather than the two top level and two incubating ASF projects which get attention from me.

The highlight of the training, for me, was the chance to have a short briefing with Michael Coté of RedMonk, the open source analyst firm. Having the opportunity to bring all the mornings hints and tips to bear on delivering a real (if slightly artificial) briefing for a highly respected analyst like Coté was extremely useful. Now that I’ve met him I know I will be ensuring that he receives all relevant information from UK HE and FE open source as well as the ASF projects I work with.

The afternoon was taken up with writing some press materials and then having these critiqued by Sally and the group. This was a really useful exercise, I’ve written press releases before, indeed I’ve had many taken up by the press. However, this was the first time that I’ve had immediate, clear and concise feedback - invaluable!

Thanks to the ASF and to Sally for giving me this opportunity to learn further develop my skills.

ApacheCon Keynotes Are Being Streamed

Published by Ross Gardler on November 4, 2008 in Business, Discussion, Software and Strategy and Policy. 0 Comments

I guess the vast majority of the readers of this blog will not be attending ApacheCon US, so you may be interested to hear that the opening plenary and the keynotes are being streamed live and from the archives after the event. These, along with lots of other paid for streams, are being provided by Linux Magazine.

The free sessions are:

  • Open Plenary & State of the Feather Shane Curcuru, Jim Jagielski
  • Learning from Apache to create Open Specifications, David Recordon
  • Standing on the shoulders of giants, Shahani Markus Weerawarana
  • struct.new(”future”, :open, :microsoft), Sam Ramji

If you are here in New Orleans please be sure to look me up, if your not here maybe you’ll enjoy the streams.

ApacheCon US 2008

Published by Ross Gardler on November 3, 2008 in Discussion and Community. 0 Comments

Dracula in the New Orleans Halloween Parade

Like most major software foundations The Apache Software Foundation runs its own conference each year. In the case of Apache it actually runs two a year, one in the US and one in Europe. I’ve been a member of the ASF for 5 years now (and a committer for many years more) but in that time I only ever managed to make it to one ApacheCon, in Europe 2005. This is a real shame because it is always good to put a face to the names on mailing lists (not to mention enjoying good food and other leisurely pursuits). For this reason, I’m thrilled to be in New Orleans to attend ApacheCon US 2008.

I’ve actually been here since Friday as I’ve volunteered to help organise ApacheCon EU 2009 and we’ve had a two day long planning meeting over the weekend. I’m hoping that my presence on the ApacheCon team will not only help ApacheCon in some small way, but also that the experience I gain assisting in the organisation of a major international open source conference will significantly help OSS Watch put on a great show in 2010 (we’re planning an open source conference in the UK - if you are interested in helping with the organisation get in touch).

However, it’s not all been hard work. Halloween in New Orleans is something very special.

New Orleans Halloween Parade