kerrieannesfridgemagnets’s posterous

amazing what you can do with Posterous via Googlewave's app bots http://ow.ly/xRWt

Great explanation at Posterous

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A quiet Friday night in Wollongong after a busy week  - the pizza finally delivered  - footy is on TV (husband is a long time St George tragic) & a glass or two of red wine. Hardly intending to think about a serious novel like "1984".

"1984", of course has always been a provocative text for high school students - along with Animal Farm, Brave New World & Lord of the Flies etc - enjoyed reading it years ago, then left it behind and buried it

So to be honest, initially I found the latest furore over Amazon deleting "1984" from Kindle just too much Twitter and RSS hype ... until @RossDawson "tweeted" on a legal action by a Michigan teenager midway through Friday night footy.

Justin Gawronski had saved notes on Kindle - which he'd obtained

"because he knew he’d be reading a lot of books for his Advanced Placement English class. “If there’s something that catches my eye as I am reading, I just place a note there” using the Kindle’s keyboard, he said. Those notes are useful, he said, because “every 100 pages we have to write a 1-page summary and reflection of everything that we read,” he said.

But on July 20, when Gawronski turned on his Kindle, he watched his copy of “Nineteen Eighty-Four” disappear right before his eyes. “It was a bit ironic,” he said.

Amazon didn’t delete the file containing Gawronski’s notes on the Kindle device. But since the book text “no longer exists, all my notes refer back to nothing,” he said. “I can’t really use it for much.”

When he e-mailed Amazon’s customer service department for help, he received a message from the company saying they were sorry, but there was a copyright issue with the original book."

Then there was Michel Bauwen's provocative post - "Is Cloud Computing Dangerous for Innovation ?" where he quoted Jonathan Zittrain :

"This freedom is at risk in the cloud, where the vendor of a platform has much more control over whether and how to let others write new software. Facebook allows outsiders to add functionality to the site but reserves the right to change that policy at any time, to charge a fee for applications, or to de-emphasize or eliminate apps that court controversy or that they simply don’t like....

If the market settles into a handful of gated cloud communities whose proprietors control the availability of new code, the time may come to ensure that their platforms do not discriminate. Such a demand could take many forms, from an outright regulatory requirement to a more subtle set of incentives — tax breaks or liability relief — that nudge companies to maintain the kind of openness that earlier allowed them a level playing field on which they could lure users from competing, mighty incumbents.”

eek ... I had started to ponder Cloud type apps last November - finally pulling my head out of the sand ... now I even have Cloud metadata'd in my GoogleReader and Delicious social bookmarks.  I'd quizzed my IT geek husband (manages a PMO & develops virtual private clouds when he's not doing WOW in his "downtime"). David filled in few gaps for me back then - and basically it is still a very dry Records Management issue. But then look at the furore over whether Barak Obama was born in Hawaii or Kenya - then the implications of Records Management begins to crystallise ... imagine the implications of records like that disappearing in a Cloud "oops" ?

So when I quoted a few lines from Justin Gawronski's "1984" Kindle debacle - distracting him from Friday night Footy'n' Pizza ..  a few terse IT Geek comments followed ....

"Always make sure you have your own downloaded copy of data (information /reports etc) - because you never never know ..." interesting from a guy who is often more "don't you worry about .. it'll be all ok".

Couldn't agree more ... and some of my fellow engineering types thought I was overreacting to environment monitoring data being stored on a 4th party Cloud site. However my org's IT folks were a little more cautious.

But I guess that sadly we are going to need a few more Justin Gawronski's, before Digital Rights (DRM) associated with the "Cloud" get fully sorted. And some folk are going to have heads in the sand like I used to ... but then maybe it's an ISTJ vs INTJ thing ?

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So sad. Friday night - home from work - opened the daily mail ... a pleading letter and petition from residents in the village of Stanwell Park - in Ward 1 area of Wollongong City Council, NSW, Australia. 

I used to get hundreds of such letters each year, if not thousands, in my nearly 20 years in the public eye. They finally stopped about 6 months after I retired as an Independent Ward 1 City Councillor at the March 2004 elections.

The highly controversial Wollongong Council proposes to sell what residents claim to be a "rare pocket of rainforest vegetation...  in a steep valley". Residents cite existing flooding issues - further exacerbated by adverse impacts from ocean level rise due to global warming.

The residents ask "why were we not advised of this proposed sale which will have such a large impact on our properties and the amenity of our immediate neighbourhood?" Prior to the 2004 elections, I and my then fellow councillors, inlcluding ALP members, would have made sure the community were listened to by the Wollongong Council bureaucrats. However a lot changed after ex Councillors Kerrie Christian, Vicky King, Ian Hunt and Trevor Mott retired in 2004.

And now Wollongong's people have been without democratically elected councillors for over a year - with possibly another 3 years before the community gets to choose who should represent them. Other ALP members were equally outraged along with the broader community by the gobsmacking activities revealed at the ICAC hearings from February 2008.

So this is what happens after the decent, democratically elected councillors who were committed to their local communities, suddenly found themselves dismissed. Why ? Because of findings against some ALP Wollongong councillors by the NSW ICAC (Independent Commission Against Corruption). The decent Majority were punished because of the alleged sins of the Minority.

Now the Wollongong community are subject to rule by a Triumvirate of ALP State Government appointed Administrators. They share this with the Shellharbour community, who are ruled over by a lone ALP State Government appointed Administrator. How could this ALP State Government appointed Shellharbour Administrator decimate the community's access to public swimming pools by literally months every year - and in the warm months, not the depths of winter ??

The hard part is that sometimes communities have to lose a few serious battles before there is sufficient anger to create change.

State ALP Government representatives would be wise to consider this potential anger - as they will have to carry the can for the decisions to deny local government democracy in its long term loyal heartland of the Illawarra.

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I really enjoyed Matt Crozier's review of Web 2.0 afficianado Oz PM  self styled "KRudd", as I enjoy reading most of the "Bang the Table" crew's social media postings. Overall positive, but Matt Crozier did provide a critique of the PM's blog being "moderated."

It's easy to criticise the "moderation" of Prime Minister Kevin Rudd's blog, which sees a delay in comments being posted, rather than in "real time".

However some federal government authorities with public social media interfaces have to do a daily cleanup.

Why? Not necessarily censoring comments critical of the PM's actions and authority.

No - rather it's the clean up of the daily "porn spamming" contingent - which so many of us involved in social media are only too well aware every day.

So maybe PM KRudd's blog could be done better - but imagine what it would be like if there wasn't moderation ? Now that's a worry.

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So many people are really keen on Crowdsourcing - harnessing the Wisdom of the Crowd. But is it the right approach for all problems ? When I dissented, I found myself up against GroupThink, for daring to question Crowdsourcing applicability in all circumstances.

The June issue of PMI's "PM Network" has a good article which tackles Crowdsourcing. I liked their comment "Crowdsourcing doesn't work for everything. Crowds won't organize into complex structures, but they will respond efficiently with simple tasks and motivation" - sourced from Chris Townsend, I-Nova Software, Lyon, France. He believes that "companies should carefully choose which project tasks are appropriate and determine how they'll manage the process .... Project teams must also have a strategy for evaluating crowdsourced results and incorporating them into the project." 

 I have found many references to "crowdsourcing" via the RSS feeds in my Google Reader

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I find it amazing the way social media tools like Twitter, also Facebook are being used so spontaneously by young people around the world as a way of expressing their views, eg  against terrorism & being heard democratically.

Within 24 hours it was possible to add a red & white stripe to your avatar on Twitter to support #IndonesiaUnite in its push for peace - "KAMI TIDAK TAKUT" - over terrorism.

The young people of Indonesia so focused in wanting to tell the world how great their country is on Twitter and Facebook - getting support from Good Charlotte's @JoelMadden and seeking support from @MrsKutcher.

Sometimes the stats tend to suggest that Twitter is an English language focused social media tool. However the crises in Moldova, followed by Iran and Indonesia show the incredible global reach & influence of social media tools like Twitter.

Several decades ago folks like Professor Brian Martin of University of Wollongong in Australia, began writing of Schweik Action processes - ie use of peaceful ICT tools in times of crisis.

And then following crisis events such as Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans generated highly emotive community civil society collapsing stories. However in July 2008 Wikinomics reported that Web 2.0 Social Networking tools were used by citizens, to ensure that rebuilding of their city was done in ways that made sense. Gurus such as Alan Gutierrez ran crash courses in social networking. They used tools such as Flickr, WordPress, Yahoo Groups, and Google Maps to prioritise rebuilding, ie occurred in the right areas soonest. Governments do not always have the right knowledge at hand in such crises to get the prioritisation right. In fact this was recognised in the 1980's, when the concepts of community empowerment & development were being explored. Gartner also observed similar community use of social networking with Hurricane Gustav .. "For example, as Gustav approached, Ning created a hosted wiki. Within 24 hours, volunteers copied useful emergency management information, such as links and feeds from Katrina Web sites, and updated them. These citizens also provided neighborhood and regional updates."

And as reported in Geoff Brown's yes!andspace blog, even prior to Australia's tragic February 2009 Victorian Bushfires, an enthusiastic volunteer has directed the Victorian Country Fire Authority's Incident Summary RSS's feeds to a Twitterfeed - saving Bandwidth for the CFA's website. Others are retweeting the message, to provide an even wider contact list. It seems like the 21st Century version of the "phone tree" approach, which communities have used for years to get out urgent messages. The enthusiastic volunteer is hoping that the CFA will set up their own Twitterfeed. There have been suggestions of using phone systems to spread emergency warning messages. Twitterfeed via mobile phones might be one way to spread disaster alert messages as more people become users.

 

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Great message - who needs 1000's of words ?

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