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- Moving to Wordpress (finally)September 1 2008
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I've been meaning to move this blow to Wordpress for a while now. Labour Day weekends being good for such things, I have finally done it. For future postings, you should go to:
If you are following me using a feed reader, use this link:
The reasons for moving are many and mostly feature related. Pop up previews. Shortcodes. Nicer editing interface. And people like Helen keep berating me. So, it's done now.
PS. Most of my posts imported perfectly on Wordpress, but a few didn't. Most of these have been fixed. I will get to still broken ones soon. Feel free to email me if you find broken stuff.
- Under the Hood: Open Source @ gov.zaAugust 25 2008
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As he wrapped up, Aslam Raffee reflected: "We've done very well in terms of setting policy, but very poorly at implementation. We've got to fix that." Aslam is one of three people leading to roll out of South Africa's government-wide commitment to open source. And he's willing to admit: making it work ain't easy.
At Open Everything Cape Town, Aslam spent an hour talking with Matt Buckland and Steve Song about how the open source policy roll out is going. The policy basically states that all systems used to run the Government of South Africa must be based on open standards and should use open source software wherever possible. As you can hear the podcast below, he was at once honest about the challenges of making this idea real and optimistic about the future ...
- Cape Town: Rebooting the Open Everything IntroAugust 25 2008
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The vibe and ideas at Friday's Open Everything Cape Town were super sparky. A nice mix of well known open source projects (South African gov't open source policy) and novel new ideas (Free Culture House). A good balance of techie and non-techie, with a bias of creative media and open education types. And amazing food, service and atmosphere from Bird's Cafe. Fun and learning all around.
One of the weaknesses of the Toronto event was the set up. People said they wanted a bit more of 'what's open really mean?' and 'why is it interesting?' to set the stage. Philipp and I took at this by introing the Cape Town event with this slide show ...
Open Everything Cape TownView SlideShare - How We Work Remix: Notes From a Small FoundationAugust 20 2008
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If you've been following this blog, you'll know that one of my Shuttleworth open philanthropy experiments was the 'How We Work' club. This is basically a quarterly pizza lunch where the whole organization reflects on an important aspect of how we function as a foundation (e.g. making sure everything is under an open license). The conversations focus on what's working, what's not and how things could be better. I then write up a blog posting and an article so that the rest of the world can learn from the discussion.
This week's pie noshing chat focused on a highly recursive topic: how is the How We Work club working? Somewhat surprisingly to me, the answer was a unanimous 'it's working well' ... or, at least, 'it's quite useful'.
The first thing that people seem to appreciate is checking our rhetoric against reality. Our discussions on open licensing are a case in point. We'd been saying 'we're doing a better job on open licensing' for while. Sitting down
- Moving to MozillaAugust 18 2008
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It's official: I will be joining the Mozilla Foundation in late September to take on the role of executive director.
I am totally psyched about this. Mozilla is a new kind of foundation, one with with participation, transparency and innovation at its very roots. It's not just about giving out grants or making bold statements (although these are useful things to do), but also about getting large numbers of people involved in making things. In particular, things that make the Internet more open. For someone obsessed with reinventing how foundations work, there could be no more exciting job than this.
Of course, I am also a wee bit sad. Moving to Mozilla means leaving my Shuttleworth Foundation and telecentre.org work behind. The people at these two organizations have inspired and challenged me in the most wonderful ways possible. More importantly, they've proven to me that little changes to the way we work – like blogging about stuff that normally gets stuck in internal reports – can really help to open up the work of grant making and world ch