Category: Topics
ResRap 3, 2, 1, Go!
Two weeks ago the #resrap 2009-2010 project kicked off at the Dutch Ministry of Foreign Affairs: the biannual reporting of results of Dutch international development aid. It’s the second time the Ministry works together with civil society (this time at a more ambitious level through Partos 1) to report on our joint Dutch contributions to the Millennium Development Goals as completely as possible.
Earlier, I used the 6-minute film “ A Case For Open Data In Transit” to illustrate my drive as member of the #resrap web advisory group, to not just collect data for analysis, but also make it available as raw data. Using the approach presented by Joshua Robin at the Gov 2.0 Expo 2010, last May: Focus on 3-2-1.
“A Case For Open Data”
Yesterday, Adam DuVander wrote on ProgrammableWeb about “A Case For Open Data In Transit”, a 6-minute film about public transit agencies opening up their data. The Streetfilm production provides some excellent examples and quotes to also make the case for (more) open data in international development aid. As Tim O’Reilly puts it: government should be a platform for society to build on.
All hands on deck: building civil society 2.0
I’ve been invited to talk at the World Congress on IT 2010, in the eGovernment track. Together with Beth Noveck, Ivo Gormley, and Greg Clark, we’ll have a session and panel called “Hey gov, can you hear me?”, moderated by Dom Sagolla. Arnout Ponsioen invited me to present a case from the perspective of civil society, and I chose to illustrate the possibilities of people all over the world working together in a moment of crisis: the Haiti earthquake. Here is what I had to say.
Rolf 
pelleaardema Creating wire frames and mockups
Communicating web concepts for user experience and site structure is a challenge. Wire frames and interactive prototypes are great for this, and over the years, I have been using those with many designers and developers in a variety of web projects. But creating and sharing such mockups still is a laborious task, so I went around the web again to look for a tool that truly makes that task easier. Pidoco seems to offer the best way forward for me.
Clay Shirky as my Sound Byte Hero
I haven’t managed to write (publicly) for some time: new projects kept me busy, either launching, or preparing. But thanks to a tweet by Planspark, I read (yet another) piece by someone who is becoming my personal “Sound Byte Hero”: Clay Shirky. At the moment, Siegfried Woldhek and I are preparing a position paper on how International Development Cooperation will change, as part of a series of debates with existing organisations and the Minister for Development Cooperation here in The Netherlands. So when my friend Tim Bonnemann send out a tweet today “Must-read of the day: Clay Shirky’s “Newspapers and Thinking the Unthinkable”, I summarised the take-away quotes for me.
A framework for “online social network models”
Aldo de Moor and I are rapidly approaching the end of our mid-week work retreat. The fresh sea breeze and the occasional glass of wine have helped us divide our attention between Real Work, and Serious Study. It resulted in an emerging framework or meta-model, with a few purposes:
- Advance our earlier modelling work with new insights, and assess where we think things are by now.
- Enable us to combine our years of experience in talking about various parts of the puzzle in a common structure.
- Provide an overarching framework to look at the various models we have come to use or see over time.
It’s very much still a work in progress, but while twittering about our progress, I got into a conversation (via Facebook) with John Bywater of the Appropriate Software Foundation, which helped me clarify a bit of my thinking. I met John just over five years ago at Summer Source, where he introduced me to the concept of pattern languages. At that time, it was still too abstract for me to apply in my actual work, but over the years, patterns have become more common-place, for instance in PHP programming and in wikis.