Gotze.eu

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  • Lazy is good

    LazyWeb is coming on as a strong candidate for what will come in the new year. Yesterday, Shelly Powers made a beautiful statement about what it’s all about:
    I think we’re seeing a new form of open source development, based on technology developed for the community and its immediate, expressed needs. A case of community searching for technology rather than technology on the hunt for a users.

    According to LazyWebwiki, the term was coined by Matt “blackbeltjones”, who said “if you wait long enough, someone will write/build/design what you were thinking about”. As Ben Hammersley learned (and taught?), the lazyweb is a rather perfect match with current developments in the blogging community, where we see so much creativity and peer-collaboration.

    It’s tempting to start trackback pinging Ben’s “giftshop” with various ideas. I’m not a coder, but have code ideas, so watch out, Ben 😉

    To be continued …

  • 2002 – the year blogging took on

    Alan Mather’s e-Government @large blog turned one year old the other day. (Late) Happy Birthday, Alan!

    Simon Moores’ Thought for Christmas was about the year that was. He writes: “When you go to Mather’s innocuous sounding DiverDiver Blog, you’ll see that he has added links to other blogs written by many of the leading independent thinkers on e-government. Where else would one find that kind of debate, I wonder? So blogging has my vote as one of the more important conceptual developments of 2002.”

    I’ve personally been blogging for about two-and-a-half years now, but must say that the past year has been something special. Much thanks to Alan, Simon, and the many other newcomers to blogging. Honourable mention goes to the Utah govbloggers Phil Windley and David Fletcher, who runs two of the best new blogs around. I hope Phil keeps blogging after tomorrow (his last day on the job), and I also hope that David and the others in the Utah govblogroll will continue their blogging in the new year. The Utah govblogroll is IMHO the best thing that has happened in e-government this year. There are a number of worthy contesters to that prize, among them Alan’s blog, but Utah takes the prize.

    2002 has been an interesting year in e-government. At least in Denmark, where we have started implementing an e-government strategy for the nation. In January, the National E-government Board said: “The e-government vision is to systematically use digital technologies to introduce new ways of thinking and transform organisations and work processes to improve the quality of service and efficiency” in their Towards e-government – vision and strategy for the public sector in Denmark.

    Shamelessly, I will argue that the white paper my group has been working on, and released internally just before we went on holidays, has been the highlight of Danish e-government strategy implementation in 2002. It’ll be a bit into 2003 before the white paper will be published, but the work was done in 2002. I hope that’s not wishfull thinking … I know from friends and collegues around the world that setting dates for white papers is dangerous business. After we in September launched our green paper on these issues, we have probably raised expectations to the white paper. So, let’s see what will be said about it, when people see it. I guess some will be disappointed, but that will be because they don’t understand the context, in which the white paper is no less than a revolution, even if it will be “softened” in the process.

    The white paper, which I will ask my boss for money to translate in full, is about what they in North America calls Federal Enterprise Arhcitecture. In Denmark, we talk about a national/government-wide architecture framework for e-government, and have not just copied the American way of doing it. We have looked at their work, even talked with them, and are inspired by them. Perhaps more by Canada than the US, BTW, mainly because our insourced coach Allan Bo Rasmussen from META Group brought in Brian Burke, who were deeply involved in making Canada’s Federated Architecture Program (FAP) a few years ago.

    Our white paper basically argues that we need a government-wide (national, regional, and local) architecture framework, which involves three activity areas: 1. Governance framework, “the architecture”, 2. Principles, e.g., Reference Profiles (what UK/NZ/AUS calls e-GIF), and 3. Services, and collaborative such too.

    Speaking of services: Come 2003, the service community for geodata will open its services. Gotta check them out, and see if I can make a few web services with them.

  • Code vs. data

    Mark Pilgrim‘s play with the cite tag was a good demonstration of the power of semantic markup, or Million dollar markup, as he calls it in a follow-up.

    He referes back to Jon Udell’s post about Google’s co-founder, Sergey Brin, who at a conference talked about RDF and the Semantic Web, and there said, “Look, putting angle brackets around things is not a technology, by itself. I’d rather make progress by having computers understand what humans write, than by forcing humans to write in ways computers can understand.”.

    Google is using a code-centric approach, Mark argues: “Google doesn’t really have a choice. It’s their code, but it’s not their markup. So of course they’re going to invest money in code. It’s far more cost-effective to throw money at your own code than to try to get millions of independent developers to change their ways just to make your life a little easier.”

    Mark’s own cite tag experiment is data-centric.
    “This is the point: if you have million-dollar markup, you don’t need million-dollar code, and vice versa. But they’re not mutually exclusive, either; it’s a spectrum, and where you fall depends on what you need. Neither Sam’s code-centric approach nor my data-centric approach is inherently better. They both accomplish the same short-term result. Which approach is better in the long run depends on whether you are more likely to re-use the content or the code that parses the content.”

    Good point, Mark.

  • Get creative

    Get Creative. Skip the intermediaries. So says Creative Commons, which aims at making a digital rights language that is lawyer-readable, human-readable and computer-readable. No small challenge – two of the three is enough of a challenge in my experience.

    Back in 1997, when I started working for the Swedish government, one of my first projects was to help create a new legal information system, for lawyers, humans (citizens) and machines. When we in 1998 published a green paper about the system, we laid the foundation for what has become Lagrummet. The project was never able to please both lawyers, humans and machines, and still isn’t. Critics, of which we had many, would say it pleases neither. Of course, the original idea – basing it all on XML – is still just a dream, and far from practice. We were on to it early on, at the time when neither lawyers, humans nor machines knew what XML is. Some of these groups have caught up since then, of course.

    Ah, word of the day: cobloggaration.

  • Really Simple Discoverability

    XMLifying my site, take 5: Really Simple Discoverability (RSD) is “a way to help client software find the services needed to read, edit, or “work with” weblogging software….The goal is simple. To reduce the information required to UserName, Password, and homepage URL.”

    The RFC was made by Daniel Berlinger less than two months ago, and already meets support from a number of blogging tools (first Archipelago, for which it was designed, then Radio, and then Ben Hammersley brought it to Movable Type).

    As I understand from reading various blogs, RSD does for blogs what WSIL does for web services in general. WSIL, or WS-Inspection, is one of the (several) parts of the web services technology stack. Timothy Appnel has an excellent introduction to WSIL. He writes:

    “While similar in scope to the Universal Description Discovery and Integration (UDDI) specification, WSIL is a complementary, rather than a competitive, model to service discovery…

    WSIL documents are located using a few simple conventions using existing Web infrastructure. In many ways, WSIL is like a business card — it represents a specific entity, its services, and contact info, and is typically delivered directly by whom it represents.”

    So, why RSD? I think the answer may be, that it is built for purpose and immediate implementation, just like RSS was. So, let’s give it a chance. It will be easy to migrate to WSIL, if that will be necessary, but for now, the developers seem to be doing wonders with stuff like RSD and RSS. I don’t know how many WSIL-files there are out there already. Not a lot, I think, and my prediction for 2003 is that we’ll see far more RSD-files than WSIL-files.

    Read Sam Ruby‘s comments, and all the comments to the comments for more information on RSD.

    So, Slashdemocracy Blogging Networks now supports auto-discóvery of the RSD. Besides being yet another XML-file here, which is good to the extend I measure value by numbers, I have no real use for the file. Yet.

    Previous XMLify Slashdemocracy takes: 1, 2, 3, and 4.

  • A web of libraries

    Yesterday, I created a bookmarklet which is now featured (as of of many implementations) on Jon Udell’s LibraryLookup (Innovative Interfaces libraries). Thanks Jon.

    The bookmarklet is rather special. If you are on any webpage about a book, and the URL has the ISBN number somewhere in it, clicking on the bookmarklet will bring up a window with a message about whether the book is available in a public library.

    In Udell’s and others implementations, the bookmarklet interacts with one library’s database. In the Danish case, it is a bit more advanced. Because we have bibliotek.dk which is not a library, but a database of holdings in all danish libraries, the bookmarklet searches all public libraries at once. Via bibliotek.dk, you can send an order to your local library (regardless of which library owns the material) and after a few days pick up the material from your own library.

    I have no affiliation to bibliotek.dk, and just went to their site and played around with the URLs (badly designed? or is there an idea?). Danish Bibliographic Centre runs the site. library.dk is an English language interface to the database.

    I searched for some info about the technology behind bibliotek.dk. It seems they use some old Z39.50 technology, but are adding XML.

  • Making history

    A few hours ago, a few kilometers from my home, the Copenhagen European Council’s Presidency Conclusions were announced by the Danish Prime Minister, and marks the conclusion of the accession negotiations with Cyprus, the Czech Republic, Estonia, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Malta, Poland, the Slovak Republic and Slovenia. These will be new members of EU from 1 May 2004, if they want to (there has to be referendums in all countries).

    The top meeting has brought thousands of politicians, journalists and and not least activists to Copenhagen. In the largest police action Denmark has seen, the police has practically occupied Copenhagen. The Bella Center area, where the meetings were held, has been a barricaded fortress these days, as so has the Parliament. And lots of areas in Copenhagen were closed down.

    There have been a number of peaceful demonstrations, but nothing like the situation we saw last you in Sweden, with the riots in Gothenburg around the top meeting. I happened to be in Gothenburg at that time, and it was not a pretty sight.

    The Danish EU Presidency’s official website, eu2002.dk, is running fine, it seems. One site that is not running is disobidience.dk, one of the activist sites. It has been DoS-attacked, after it itself called for people to attack the EU-site, under the slogan “Electronic civil disobedience… It rocks!”. The police went after the ISP that hosted disobidience.dk.

  • Bookfinder bookmarklet

    Phil Windley points to Jon Udell’s Library Lookup bookmarklets, which is a genious small piece of software.

    I’ve long been a fan of bookmarklets (no pun intended). I use my MovableType-bookmarklet a lot. I use my home-made directory bookmarklet for publishing links in my GotzeLinked-service. And the good old Google bookmarklet, as well as a few other more or less useful bookmarklets.

    Danes can now use
    Bibliotek.dk

    Does it work?? It works for me.

    Long ago, I alse created a bookmarklet for the official Danish Book of Spelling (what’s such called?). It still works:
    Retskrivning

  • METAPredictions

    Reuters: META Predicts Microsoft Will Offer Linux Software

    The Register: MS un-denial leaves Linux option open

    META Groups think that by 2006/07, Linux on Intel (“Lintel”) will be on 45% of new servers (Intel will be on 95%+ of new servers). They also think Microsoft will enter this market, especially via .NET.

    META’s Bottom Line: Linux will have significant public-sector acceptance (especially overseas), which will encourage further commercial developments. By 2005/06, public-sector deployments (typically overseas) will provide the basis for accelerated Linux (and other open source) implementations.

    In related news, The Register brings another interesting story about how Microsoft brings together Office 11 and .NET. This is important and expected news. It is adding to the ongoing debates about open document formats in interesting new ways. If our office applications used open standard-based web services, the interoperability between brands would be eased. Then we’re not sharing documents, but services. Cool. Maybe. Let’s see.

  • Patterns of governance, Part 1

    What should a government policy for the architecture of e-government in Denmark involve? Some central keywords are, I think, bleeding edge technologies (XML, web services, etc), open standards, governance, service communities, sourcing strategies, schema/pattern communities, and communities of practice.

    eGov architecture policy is (at least) about ‘architecting’ or designing an architectural framework, not unlike the US model (FEA), where focus is put on getting business to drive the technological development. But it also involves taking on a governing role concerning technological standards. Here, we’ll work on an e-GIF as well as infrastructural patterns.

    It is also about community building. We’re building a platform for government-wide communities of practice for various practitioners, who will participate in a semiformal process of standardisation, schema development, pattern language development, metadata user groups, etc.