Step 1: I listened to IT Conversations with Owen Davis of Identity Commons.
Step 2: I read this NewsForge article.
Step 3: I acquired my i-name: =gotze.
Author: administrator
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Architektura korporacyjna
The Polish eGov.pl’s featured “topic of the week” is enterprise architecture, and they have translated my EA for eGov gig in the IDA newsletter. The Polish translation goes: Zastosowanie architektury korporacyjnej na potrzeby eGovernment.
Thanks Andrzej!
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Interoperable Europe
EPAN, the network of European Directors-General responsible for public administration, has released a resolution from their 43th meeting. From the resolution:
4. The Directors General are of the opinion that transformation requires an integral approach, taking into account organizational, HRM, legal and financial aspects, as well as an adequate information infrastructure (including e.g. authentication mechanisms and basic registers) and interoperability frameworks based on open standards.
On the last bit, it is also worth noting related recent news: The Final version 1.0 of the European Interoperability Framework was released the other week after a long process. A few updates since the consultation draft have been made, so even if you know the EIF, read the official version!
I am not sure how many member states have “implemented” EIF’s main recommendation (creation of national interopframeworks). UK. France (where?). Germany. Denmark. There must be more.
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He’s a rocket scientist!
Martin hosted a small event with David Brin tonight. I’ve never actually read any of his work, neither The Transparent Society nor any of his scifi books nor Star Trek scripts.
I enjoyed his talk, and will certainly read some of his work. I noticed a link to a Government Technology interview, Transparent Privacy.
Brin certainly has a refreshing perspective on things. And a very wise one too, in his own “crazy” fashion.
I was reminded of my own PhD. I too wrote about transparency, but also about participation, which I didn’t hear Brin come to (must check). In fact, while I concentrate on transparency in relation to public life, Brin is talking more about the relation to private life, and privacy. Allow me to quote myself:
The Benthamite idea of transparency is in normative terms complementary to Rousseau’s idea of a ‘transparent society’, in that both ideas express a relationship between the ‘comrade’ and the ‘overseer’, but doing so with opposite normative orientation: Bentham arguing that ‘each comrade becomes an overseer’, and Rousseau arguing vice versa. There is, apparently, an asymmetry between the concepts of ‘power through transparency’ and ’emancipation through transparency’. The term ‘transparency’ is not only ambiguous, it is ambivalent. On the one hand, transparency has to do with power structures and the exercise of power, and can, as in the case of Panopticon, be a threat to the individual integrity and autonomy, but it can also function as a means for shaping the individual’s own life agenda if the transparency (and therefore the power) is ‘possessed’ by the individual. On the other hand, transparency has to do with mutual intersubjective transcendence and relations of mutuality and reciprocity, making sharing between individuals possible.
Oh, Phil Windley blogged Brin’s book long ago. I just heard from Phil that Phil’s own book is coming very soon.
Anyway, why not join me and buy some of Brin’s books via his website or here (both leads to Amazon).
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Architecture Astronauts
I recently found an old essay by Joel Spolsky, Don’t Let Architecture Astronauts Scare You, which I keep returning to:
When great thinkers think about problems, they start to see patterns. They look at the problem of people sending each other word-processor files, and then they look at the problem of people sending each other spreadsheets, and they realize that there’s a general pattern: sending files. That’s one level of abstraction already. Then they go up one more level: people send files, but web browsers also “send” requests for web pages. And when you think about it, calling a method on an object is like sending a message to an object! It’s the same thing again! Those are all sending operations, so our clever thinker invents a new, higher, broader abstraction called messaging, but now it’s getting really vague and nobody really knows what they’re talking about any more. Blah.
Is there an Architecture Astronauts Anonymous??
Another quote:
Remember that the architecture people are solving problems that they think they can solve, not problems which are useful to solve. Soap + WSDL may be the Hot New Thing, but it doesn’t really let you do anything you couldn’t do before using other technologies — if you had a reason to. All that Distributed Services Nirvana the architecture astronauts are blathering about was promised to us in the past, if we used DCOM, or JavaBeans, or OSF DCE, or CORBA.”
Written in 2001. Still an issue.
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Government and gifts?
This week’s accord on Denmark’s national budget (explained in an animation here) reminded us that we are closing in on election time here in Denmark. The budget agreement included a good number of “gifts” to the public, especially to important electoral segments.
There is an interesting article about Gifting technologies by Kevin McGee and Jörgen Skågeby in First Monday. The conclusion:
… the research to date suggests that there are good reasons to begin looking at technology design “from the gifter’s perspective.” There seem to be fundamentally different technology needs and design problems that appear when a designer looks at the world from the perspective of someone who wants to gift — and to gift more easily, effectively, and meaningfully. To echo the beginning of this paper, it seems possible that even the creation of powerful, comprehensive, intuitive, and economically viable services for acquiring digital goods may not answer all the strong needs expressed in sharing phenomena. In fact, it may be that when the current legal and economic controversies surrounding file sharing have been resolved, powerful and intuitive mechanisms for gifting may be one of the ways that successful services and applications distinguish themselves. And the same could hold true for technology in general; perhaps gifting technologies can be for the benefit of all.
In his recent Hans Christian Andersen Academy lecture, professor Lawrence Lessig makes some good points, for examples that the architecture of the net is in principle based on a concept of Free Culture.
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An Inspirational Day
The Danish eBusiness Association, Foreningen for Dansk Internet Handel, arranges an inspirational day, a blogger seminar on 7 December. I’ve been invited to speak about blogging in organisations. Should be fun.
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The War on Spam
While we normally refer to our mailboxes when talking about spam, the blogger community is experiencing the next stage of the war on spam: The spambots, that attacks blogs and their commentary systems, and pollutes them with the usual crap.
Spambots have forced me to close down for comments in our Danish blog Afkalkeren. Which is really a pity, because there have been some good debates now and then.
Here in this blog, I ask commenters to use a TypeKey, the proprietary system from SixApart, that comes with MovableType. Some day when I have some time to kill, I’ll probably connect my blog to my community.
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The Canadian way
Finally, Gary and the other good people at the Treasury Board Secretariat in Canada have published the updated Business Transformation Enablement Program (BTEP). This is world-class work on enterprise architecture in government.
My thoughts goes to James Macphee and his beloved. James is one of the architects in the BTEP-team. He had a strong allergic reaction to a bee sting, and is not well.
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Wikipediation
Wikipedia is an interesting experiment. In many ways.
The Wikipedizer is a web service to which one can pass a URL, and get back a list of related Wikipedia entries in XML. Example. Neat idea.
In the Danish wikipedia, there is a category about it-arkitektur (IT architecture), but I find very little on this in the English version.
Another interesting thing with Wikipedia is that the underlying engine, MediaWiki, is open sourced.