Weblog: Archive

It has to be said the Ukrainian political advertising scena has changed quite a bit from what I saw during the Orange Revolution.

These are allegedly real photos of the pre-election posters for Yulia Tymoshenko - nicknamed "the Orange Princess" - one of the leaders of the Orange revolution in Ukraine. Her party came in second in the recent general election with ~22.4% of votes.

Via Boing Boing.

During the revolution the streets were mostly filled with orange banners and stickers saying "Tak, Yushchenko" (Yes, Yushchenko). And Yulia's new campaign has apparently worked:

Tymoshenko re-energized her Bloc and entered the parliamentary elections of March 2006 as its leader, earning an estimated 130 seats, causing speculation that Yushchenko's Our Ukraine party and Bloc Yulia Tymoshenko may unite in coalition (with the Socialist Party of Ukraine) in order to keep the Party of Regions from gaining power. She again stated her desire to become Prime Minister in such a coalition. Her party would be the biggest party in a reformed "Orange Coalition".

Via Wikipedia.

We just ported a portal containing tens of thousands of documents from Abako Stato to Midgard CMS. Content conversion was done using Exorcist as usual.

Because the site included a biggish public discussion forum we decided to start right away from the current PEAR-packaged MidCOM site interface. MidCOM 2.4 had been causing severe performance issues on personalized sites, and we were a bit worried, especially as latest MidCOMs don't include the output caching system.

However, the new MidCOM 2.5 infrastructure proved to perform really well, getting us back to the MidCOM 2.2 branch performance levels where most sites really don't need any caches.

Here are the quick tips on how to make MidCOM 2.5 really fly:

• Don't use MidCOM template, instead utilize static start-up
• Move layout images and CSS from database to Apache DocumentRoot
• Use only components refactored to the MidCOM 2.5 architecture. These include
  • All net.nehmer components
  • net.nemein.wiki
  • net.nemein.discussion
  • All org.openpsa components
  • ...
  • This list will grow as we keep porting things
• Install memcached if you're using lots of ACLs

Using the upcoming Midgard 1.8 release will make MidCOM faster yet by about 5-10%.

The Midgard mailing lists have been offline for a while because their hosting provider has been having some issues. To fix the problem we decided to move from regular email lists to an online forum powered by the net.nemein.discussion component.

Currently the forums are publicly readable, but posting requires registration and logging in.

Switching from mailing lists to online forums is a big cultural change for the community. To make the change easier, we will soon be adding alternative access options to the forum contents including RSS and email subscription.

In addition to the email subscription system I'm working on, new software coming from this migration was a mbox-to-forum converter to the Exorcist package.

Updated 14:14Z: There are now RSS feeds available for the user forum and the developer forum.

A couple days ago the world was full of snow, but now the weather has cleared and we can ride again!

Finland for Thought continues criticizing the welfare state:

After three and a half years in Finland I think I’ve finally realized the true meaning of [modern day] ’sisu’: It’s when you work 60 hour weeks, often on weekends, for little pay, and most of your earnings eventually wind up in the hands of the state, every year they take more from your pockets, you live in a little apartment, drive a little rusty car, you can barely make ends meet, your family life and personal life suffers and you get “burned out” - Yet you still trudge on. THAT’s sisu.

It has to be admitted, the Finnish system is designed for keeping everybody on relatively equal state of living. But then again, that is in any case the brand promise of the country. Even the national anthem, Maamme states so (roughly translated):

Our land is poor, and shall be left,
if you crave for gold.
Foreigners do abandon it,
but for us it is most precious,
its forests, islands and continents
for us they're golden.

And personally I buy into this idea. I feel the social stability and relative equality is much preferable over the consumeristic and cutthroat ideals of some other countries.

But still, I also have to agree with Phil that Finland is definitely spending too much money on bloated government agencies, and keeps too lax conditions for the long-term unemployed:

If you’re lazy, irresponsible, careless, incompetent, and don’t want to work - there’s no better place to be than Finland, cause if you act like that in the U.S….you’ll be out on your ass.

This year's GUADEC will be held in Catalonia on Jun 24th - 30th. We've left a proposal with Tuomas, so I hope I will be able to attend.

Summary: Web applications, collaboration, information accessible from different devices. How could we integrate web based tools better with our desktop?

I was talking about Open Source Content Management in the Dublin GUADEC and was already trying to get people interested in these things. If Open Source is to succeed, we need integration between collaborative server systems and desktop applications.

Updated 2006-04-19: Our talk has been scheduled for Tuesday June 27th in the preliminary schedule, but it also says:

BEING LISTED HERE DOESN'T IMPLY THAT A SESSION IS ACCEPTED, nor that it will be held the day it has been placed.

Updated 2006-05-05: Our talk has been approved!

Thanks to Jyrki Wahlstedt there is now a new way to install Midgard CMS on a Mac: DarwinPorts.

I'm now testing his packages and will update the installation instructions as soon as I'm done.

Updated 2006-04-21: I've got the DarwinPorts Midgard now running on my PowerBook G4. At first look, it is a lot faster than the Fink packages, possibly due to using MySQL 5.

Unfortunately the installation procedure is not as smooth as it could be, mostly because the PHP and Apache packages lack decent default configurations. I hope we'll be able to resolve that later.

After a 24 hour trip from Helsinki I arrived yesterday to Porto Alegre, where the 7th International Free Software Forum will be held. I have to say I'm happy to be again in sunny Brazil. The people are very friendly, and the Free Software community here is amazing.

My Digital Business Ecosystem talk will be tomorrow at 10am in the Babbage room and is the first talk of the day. I'll post the slides and session notes after it...

I just finished my Digital Business Ecosystem talk in the 7th International Free Software Forum, Porto Alegre.

Here are the slides, and the transcript of the talk:

Digital Business Ecosystem

• Good morning, everybody! I'm here to talk about Digital Business Ecosystem
• My name is Henri Bergius, I'm from Finland and I've been a Free Software developer since 1997
  • I've been involved in several projects like the Midgard CMS and OpenPsa, a free management software suite. Before these "serious" projects I was also working on some Quake total conversions
• In 2001 I became an entrepreneur when we started Nemein, a Free Software development consultancy
  • We've worked with both clients in Europe, and done several development aid projects in Africa and Eastern Europe

HEL/POA

• I'm really happy to be again here in Brazil. Not only because of the reasons apparent from these two photos, but also because you have such an interesting and energetic Free Software community here
• I have been to Brazil once before, when I attended the Forum GNOME event in Curitiba and OpenBeach in Floripa last November
• I would like to thank the organizers of FISL, and also Izabel Valverde for letting me speak here today

DBE in a nutshell

• Digital Business Ecosystem, or DBE in short is a huge Free Software project funded by the European Union
• There are dozens of companies and universities participating. For example, IBM, Sun and Intel have all assigned full-time developers to work on the project
• In addition to the big players, several small companies working on Free Software business applications have been funded to integrate their applications
• DBE project was started couple years ago, and the first running version of the software was released in summer 2005 through Sourceforge
• The reason why European Union started this project is to make local small business more efficient through providing tools for companies to work with each other

DBE components

• The Digital Business Ecosystem software comes in three parts, some of which are running in the background of evere DBE installation, and some that only software developers use
• First of all, there is the Execution Environment, the heart of every DBE installation. It provides a Java Server-Client for running the installed DBE services
• The Execution Environment is based on the Fada network. Fada is a scale-free Peer-to-Peer network for connecting business applications that was originally developed for the tourist industry in Spain
• In addition to the Execution Environment, there is the Evolutionary Environment which provides tools for connecting different services, and analyzing the health of the network
• There are grand plans for the Evolutionary Environment, including automatically finding best suitable business partners and services, but much of this is still experimental artificial intelligence stuff under work
• For developers, there is the Service Factory, a suite of tools built on top of the Eclipse IDE for building services and defining business models and terminologies

Business Ecosystem example

• Ok, so what exactly is a business ecosystem?
• Here I'm showing a simple example of a business ecosystem: the connections between a car rental company and its partners
• White lines are services offered by a business, and red lines are services used by a business
• The car rental company provides services like car rental and valet parking to hotels
• And it consumes services like repairs from mechanics, advertising services, and accounting services
• So as you can see, even a relatively simple small business has connections with many different services and companies

Why do we need a Digital Ecosystem?

• So why is DBE needed. Why do we need a digital ecosystem anyway?

Connections1

• All business is connections between people. It is connections between different companies
• Now most of these connections happen over telephone, in meetings and especially using the big business integrator: email
• Now, how many of you receive too much email?

Connections2

• But the big issue is that business software doesn't connect. You can't take your CRM system and share a client contact with your partners, or automatically collect bids from ten print shops in Porto Alegre for these conference t-shirts
• So, you're left with browsing web sites, sending lots of email, faxes and making telephone calls. This is time consuming if you're trying to find the best suitable partner from a collection of dozens of different companies
• DBE could help here by providing a common infrastructure for different business applications to communicate with

Laptop1

• In the past there have been several initiatives for enabling business software to connect. EDI, Web Services and BizTalk come to mind.
• None of these have really taken off yet. The big problem is that they all rely on statically defined connections and interfaces between companies
• Static connections work well when you're doing the same, well-defined things with same partners all the time over years
• But they don't work so well in a constantly changing business environment where partners and procedures and terminologies change

Laptop2

• However, most of the business done in the world is done by small businesses. These are businesses that don't have IT departments, don't have server infrastructure, and might actually be constantly on the move, changing from network to another, from supplier to another, and from business procedure to another
• For them the statically defined world of Web Services isn't enough. They need to be able to set up connections quickly and automatically with partners using different technologies, different levels of infrastructure, and different terminology
• Here DBE can again help. The Fada network used in DBE can set up connections between companies automatically regardless on what network they're on at the moment. And the ontology system of DBE's evolution environment helps to connect different terminologies with each other.

Free Software opportunity

• Fixing these problems could be a major opportunity for the Free Software movement
• The big proprietary software vendors with their established business models have hard time collaborating with each others
• But for us, collaboration is the natural way of working. No Free Software project can be successful without collaboration
• If we make our software talk with each other, we can easily leapfrog the competition, and provide a benefit proprietary software will have difficulties to beat. But this means different projects must talk with each other.
• Initiatives like the Freedesktop.org project have proven cross-project collaboration is possible

DBE in Brazil

• So how can you get started with DBE here in Brazil?
• First of all, it would be important to find the local business cases, find the "low hanging fruit" that would really benefit from more efficient connections and communications
• Then recognize what Free Software applications they are or could be using, and find out how those could be integrated. And then simply integrate them to the DBE network
• Of course, training would probably be needed. We've been running some training sessions for software developers interested in integrating their applications with DBE in Finland
• In Europe the initial such efforts have been funded by the European Union to get the ball rolling.
• Here in Brazil it could happen with regular funding from customers, or the government could get involved

Microenterprise and globalization

• The reason for government to get involved is to support the local small business, or "microenterprise"
• In globalizing world, huge corporations can move their operations easily to wherever it is most beneficial at the moment. To China, to India, to Vietnam, causing huge problems with unemployment.
• But small businesses are relatively local, and loyal to the area they're working in. Their revenues stay in the local economy, boosting it, and they generate local employment

Small companies adapt faster

• In addition to keeping the money closer to home, an ecosystem of small companies also boosts the economy by being faster to adapt to changes than big corporations can be.
• And big number of small businesses is much safer than few huge ones. Sometimes a business fails, but if it only employs some dozen people it doesn't yet ruin an economy. And if the local business ecosystem is strong, these people will quickly find new employment or start companies of their own

WSIS 2005

• Here's a picture I received just before my previous DBE presentation in Curitiba last November
• It seems that the Brazilian government is at least aware of the DBE project to some degree, and seems supportive of its goals
• So maybe government support is coming. But even then, if I were you, I'd start looking for potential applications and businesses to integrate with the Digital Business Ecosystem
• It can be a challenging project, but it can also bring good money, and be lots of fun too

Finally

• So, finally...

Try DBE in practice

• If you want to try out DBE in practice, there is an application called OpenPsa
• It is a Free Software project management and CRM suite that enables consultants to share tasks and work reports across the DBE network

Networked project management

• With OpenPsa you can easily collaborate with your partners and subcontractors. Each can use their own servers, their own management tools, but still have access to all the status and billing information about the project
• If you're interested in OpenPsa, you can get the latest beta release from http://www.openpsa.org

DBE resources

• I'll be more than happy to talk more about DBE possibilities and OpenPsa after this session
• Here are some links for finding more information about the project
• In the bottom you'll also find my email address if you have any questions afterwards

Updated 2006-04-21: The Portland Project is another interesting example of cross-project cooperation.

Today I went to see Tim Ney's talk about Free Software Innovation in the 7th FISL conference here in Brazil. The talk started with a birthday greeting for Queen Elizabeth II.

Brazil has some connections to the Maemo development, and there is quite a bit of buzz about the Nokia 770 here. For example, the Python port to Maemo was done in a Nokia-funded research center in Recife.

Learning the Free Software model

Nokia was a relatively late mover into the Linux space, giving them the advantage to watch how other companies were doing with their Open Source initiatives. 770 was also an excellent place to experiment with the Free Software model of working, as it is not a mobile phone, the Nokia staple.

One interesting way of working Nokia used in the Maemo project was to contract parts of the work to small consultancies abroad that were already active in their respective Open Source projects. This enabled Nokia to keep its own engineers working mainly on the device itself, and have the software infrastructure still come up.

An important difference in Free Software development is that it follows a more evolutionary model where different ideas are experimented with, and the strong ones survive, than the traditional waterfall model of software development. I'm not sure how much Nokia allows this evolution to happen purposefully, for example with the different browser alternatives.

Infrastructure is important

Of course, Free Software requires an infrastructure to work with. For a project, there must at least be:

• A project website
• Email lists
• Version control repository
• Bug tracker
• And some kind of real-time chat

And all of these must be available to every potential contributor to the project. This is something where corporation-led projects like Maemo still have a lot to improve. Some of the lack of openness in the project probably comes from the initial secrecy of the Maemo project.

In the other news, there is a good review of 770 on Guardian. And later today Richard Stallman will be talking about GPL v3.