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Photos from Digital Britain - Lord Carter at NESTA

Lord Carter gave his first major speech since the publication of his interim report, Digital Britain at NESTA today, (24th February 2009). Making up the panel were CEO of Virgin Media, Neil Berkett and Media Expert, Peter Bazalgette. The panel was chaired by CEO of NESTA, Jonathan Kestenbaum:

www.flickr.com

France - Open Source Paradise

According to an article in IDG's Info World, entitled Open source: What you should learn from the French, the Government in France is backing Open Source software as a national competitive advantage:

Today, France is arguably the most fertile ground for open source development in the world. The well-known and respected OW2 Consortium for open source middleware has its roots there. Giant corporations, such as France Télécom, have embraced open source whole-heartedly.

The fruits of this labor reveal a lesson that U.S. developers would do well to take note: Everyone prospers when working together under a single, shared technology vision.

Benefit 1: A focus from the outset
France's future grip on open source looks particularly strong, as it courts the next generation of open source developers. French authorities, for instance, handed out 175,000 open-source-software-equipped memory sticks to high school students last year. Technical universities have made open source their top priority, and some offer advanced degrees.

BBC Parliament Video/Hansard Match-up

The magnificent TheyWorkForYou.com, the website run by MySociety which makes it infinitely more simple for UK citizens to keep track of the work being done on their behalf by their representatives in Parliament, are looking for help matching Hansard records with video taken from BBC Parliament. As Etienne Pollard writes on the MySociety site:

We’re very excited to announce that our Parliamentary website TheyWorkForYou.com now includes video of debates in the House of Commons - but we need your help to match up each speech with the video footage.

It’s really easy to help out.  We’ve built a really simple, rather addictive system that lets anyone with a few spare minutes match up a randomly-selected speech from Hansard against the correct snippet of video. You just listen out for a certain speech, and when you hear it you hit the big red ‘now’ button. Your clip will then immediately go live on TheyWorkForYou next to the relevent speech, improving the site for everyone. Yay!

You can start matching up speeches with video snippets right away, but if you take 30 seconds to register a username then we’ll log every speech that you match up and recognise your contribution on our “top timestampers” league table. We’ll send out mySociety hoodies to the top timestampers - they’re reserved exclusively for our volunteers as a badge of honour.

Microsoft deal in Bulgaria

Two civil organizations will approach the prosecutor’s office today. The reason is the new contract, prepared by the Ministry of State Administration, for software purchase, which is going to be signed with Microsoft. This was announced yesterday by Open Projects Foundation and the civil initiative Spravedlivost (Justice).

The signal to the Prosecutor is instigated by the Ministry’s call for tender, which seeks a supplier of 60 000 Microsoft licenses for the needs of the state administration. According to the lawyer of the two organizations, Mr Ivan Gruykin, the announced procedure may be interpreted as a criminal breach of trust, aiming to favour one of the world’s richest people – Bill Gates and his company.

Apart from the Prosecutor, the organizations will approach other authorities as well, namely the Public Internal Financial Control Agency, which according to the Public Tenders Act possesses the power to stop the procedure.

The two organizations are considering how to approach the Commission for Protection of Competition, which is also a controlling authority, but only a participant in the tender has the right to make an appeal.

The order value is about 90 millions of leva, and that makes 1500 per software package - a price which exceeds the market price several times. When announcing the tender Minister Nikolay Vasilev said that he was going to organize a press conference to find out if the officials were able to use free open source software and if he was convinced, he would stop the tender. The deadline for submission of the offers is the 10th of December.

More info here.

OpenDoc Society - The Hague, October 23rd 2007

Kris Buytaert writes:

Next week, October 23th, the official founding meeting of OpenDoc Society will take place in The Netherlands Royal Library in The Hague.

OpenDoc Society aims to bring together individuals and organisations with a stake or interest in the openness and future of documents to learn from each other and share knowledge, both from technical, legal, practical or even political background.

An increasing number of governments - such as the Netherlands, Belgium, Norway, Brazil and Denmark - are moving away from such single vendor-based file formats and have started using ODF.

Join them there!

A second meeting will be announced later to take place in Gent, Belgium.

The founding meeting of OpenDoc Society will be held on Tuesday October 23rd 2007 in the aula of the Royal Library in The Hague, The Netherlands between 15.00 and 17.00 o'clock (doors open at 14.30). The programme includes prominent speakers such as Frank Heemskerk (minister of Foreign Economic Affairs of The Netherlands), dr. Karel de Vriendt (Head of IDABC, European Commission) and Patrick Durusau (chair of INCITS V1 and one of the editors of the Open Document Format standard). Afterwards we will celebrate with drinks and some fine food.
You are invited!

KGB's cold war maps of UK now online

It transpires that during the Cold War, the Russians spent a huge amount of time and resources into mapping large areas of the world, including the UK's major cities. These maps include secret military installations, quarries and warehouses that were purposefully left off Ordinance Survey maps and would prove invaluable (presumably) should the superpowers ever go to overt war.

Luckily for us, these maps were acquired by Landmark and are now available from Envirocheck. As the Envirocheck website tells us:

Every Soviet leader from Stalin to Gorbachev knew not only where you lived but how to get there by tank.

Cool.

Open Rights Group - Interview with Glyn Wintle Part 3

The third and final part of our three-part audio interview with Glyn Wintle of the Open Rights Group, which took place at the O'Reilly office in Farnham in Surrey in the UK.

Glyn talks about the ORG's issues with digital rights management, the Gower Report and Software Patents.

Download mp3, Download ogg Listen to all three parts rolled into one ...

Download mp3, Download ogg

Open Rights Group - Interview with Glyn Wintle Part 2

Part 2 of our audio interview with Glyn Wintle of the Open Rights Group, (Part 1 appeared on the 27th March). Glyn talks about the ORG's issues with electronic and online voting.

The Open Rights Group are looking for volunteers to oversee the elections on May 3rd in the UK: contact them through the contact page of their website.

Download mp3, Download ogg

Open Rights Group - Interview with Glyn Wintle Part 1

The Open Rights Group are a UK-based advocacy group campaigning on our behalf on issues of digital rights. Their aim is:

• To raise awareness in the media of digital rights abuses
• To provide a media clearinghouse, connecting journalists with experts and activists
• To preserve and extend traditional civil liberties in the digital world
• To collaborate with other digital rights and related organisations
• To nurture a community of campaigning volunteers, from grassroots activists to technical and legal experts

We asked volunteer Glyn Wintle to the O'Reilly offices to explain more. Here's the first part of our interview, where Glyn talked about the Open Rights Group's background and how they work, and went on to talk about the worrying trait of children being fingerprinted in UK schools. The second part will follow on the 30th March and the final part on the 3rd April:

Download mp3, Download ogg

Microsoft Bows to EU, Makes Comm Protocols Public

Redmond News has news that Microsoft has given into EU demands to make proprietary communication protocols public:

Microsoft is making key communications protocols available for license, so that third parties, including competitors, can link into the company's newest enterprise products. Some are available immediately.

The list of available protocols, XML schemas and application programming interfaces (APIs) include transport protocols for communications between Office Outlook 2007 and Exchange Server 2007.

"[With the license,] other companies can implement the Outlook-Exchange Transport Protocol specification in their own products or use it to enhance their existing products," company statements said.

The Outlook-Exchange Transport Protocol supports personal information management features such as e-mail, calendar, contacts and task functionality in Office Outlook 2007, including shared calendars and scheduling capabilities. The protocol is available for licensing now, although Microsoft will continue to tinker with the specifications until June or so.

(via Slashdot)