FLOSS

The NZ SSC has rejected Microsoft's offers for a new licensing contract. This is a big loss for Microsoft (Though I'm sure MS would have you believe otherwise and try to paint the picture back to front) and big win for NZ Government and NZ's IT industry.

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I'm proud to announce that I'm participating in the Season of Usability programme. SoU is similar to Google's Summer of Code, but is sponsored by Open Usability and has a focus on usability, not code, in Free/Libre/Open-Source Software. The goal of my SoU project is to improve the usability of drupal. As part of the programme I need a technical mentor (a drupal developer) and a usability mentor (usability expert). Mentors help to maintain the direction of the project. Zoey and Ron, information architects at CivicActions, have offered to be the usability mentors. Now I'm seeking a technical mentor. The technical mentor will help to ensure that the results and deliverables will be valuable to the drupal community and integrated into the Drupal project.

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This is a very interesting article from IBM. They have published a series where you can "follow along as the IBM Internet Technology Group team designs, develops, and deploys a closed community Web site using a suite of software that is freely available".

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Today The Free Software Foundation and CivicActions launched the Campaign in Seattle at the Microsoft WinHEC conference. We had a great time with about 20 local Free Software and privacy advocates. We all dressed up in hazmat suits and handed out leaflets warning of the dangers of DRM to attendees of theWinHEC2006 conference.

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Gunner of Aspiration Tech, founder of Penguin Day and co-creator of SpeedGeeking shows us how it is done!

I have been thinking about how i would improve Mozilla Thunderbird and calendar since before the GooToDo demonstration at BarcampNYC, but that really got my ideas swirling. Just yesterday, Hope and I were talking about email and productivity and the 800 messages in her inbox. So I started thinking a bit more about what I want from my email client and calendar tool. Email:

• I want to be able to tag (think del.icio.us, flickr, web2.0) my incoming email. I don't want to have to move it into folders, and then remember where i put it it. I just want to tag it with the relevant keywords, and then be able to easily filter and search based on tags.
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(read in booming announcer voice) "Good evening ladies and gentlement. Tonight, for your blood thirsty viewing pleasure, we have a death match of epic proportions! in one corner, hailing from the Pacific North West, ONE/Northwest's Jon Stahl! In the other corner from Saaaaaaan Fraaaaaanciiiiisssscoooooo.... CivicSpaceLab's ZAAAAAACKKKKKK ROSEN!!!!"

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I have just gotten back to Seattle from the Open Source CMS Summit / Drupal Con. My head is bursting with ideas. And it is going to take a few days to get all the ideas in order, but here is a quick list of interesting things that I will come back to in later blog posts:

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Rich and I took a minute to talk to Eric Gundersen of DevelopmentSeed

Rich and I took a minute to talk with Jarah from FresnoFamous.com. I could tell you what it is, but I'll let Jarah do that!