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	<title>Shuttleworth Foundation</title>
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	<description>Supporting exceptional people to change the world</description>
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		<title>Creative Commons on the tech highway</title>
		<link>https://www.shuttleworthfoundation.org/creative-commons-on-the-tech-highway/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=creative-commons-on-the-tech-highway</link>
		<comments>https://www.shuttleworthfoundation.org/creative-commons-on-the-tech-highway/#respond</comments>
		<pubDate>Tue, 29 Jul 2014 16:54:32 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Jonas Öberg]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Free Culture]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Jonas Oberg]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[metadata]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[technology]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[creative commons]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Culture]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[dan mills]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[elog.io]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Photos]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://commonsmachinery.se/?p=1133</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[<p>Photo by Kevin Dooley on Flickr, via photopin Two years ago, Creative Commons was looking for its next director of product strategy to take charge of levelling up the organisation&#8217;s technical...</p>
<p>The post <a rel="nofollow" href="/creative-commons-on-the-tech-highway/">Creative Commons on the tech highway</a> appeared first on <a rel="nofollow" href="/">Shuttleworth Foundation</a>.</p>
]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<div id="attachment_1134" style="width: 310px" class="wp-caption alignleft"><a href="http://commonsmachinery.se/wp-content/uploads/2014/07/medium_4370352638.jpg"><img class="size-medium wp-image-1134 " alt="Photo by Kevin Dooley on Flickr, via photopin" src="http://commonsmachinery.se/wp-content/uploads/2014/07/medium_4370352638-300x300.jpg" width="300" height="300" /></a>
<p class="wp-caption-text">Photo by Kevin Dooley on Flickr, via photopin</p>
</div>
<p>Two years ago, Creative Commons was looking for its next director of product strategy to take charge of levelling up the organisation&#8217;s technical offerings. Dan Mills, formerly with Mozilla, took the plunge and enthusiastically worked to bring some of his experience and knowledge to Creative Commons. Sadly for Creative Commons, Dan left the organisation some time ago and went on to launch his own startup business (in a <a href="http://56degre.es/menu.html">rather unrelated field</a>). Prior to him joining Creative Commons in the first place, I also applied for the same position, but first got a chance from the Shuttleworth Foundation to explore my ideas through a Fellowship with them.</p>
<p>Why is technology so important that both Dan and I were enthusiastic about it in Creative Commons? Ever since its founding, Creative Commons has had technology at its core. The licenses exist not only in a human-readable format and a legal code, but also in a machine-readable form, with the intent that these licenses would provide the oil needed for the machinery of the commons to function. With it, we could automatically attribute accurately, we could do license checks more seamlessly, and so on.</p>
<p>But there are more reasons why technology is important. With technology, we can change the way people think about and use open licenses. We can influence people and develop strategies for improving the way in which the commons work. Some of these things are already being done. If you look at the <a href="https://creativecommons.org/choose/">license chooser</a> of Creative Commons today, you&#8217;ll see that if you decide on a NoDerivatives or NonCommercial license, you&#8217;ll be notified that those licenses are not Free Culture licenses. It gives you an option to explore further to learn more about what Free Culture licenses are and why you might consider selecting a license that lights up the green Free Culture logo.</p>
<p>That&#8217;s just one example of how the technology we develop helps influence the choices that people make, and we can do a lot more. With the right tools in place, and the right infrastructure to power them, we could drive the development towards more open licenses. We could encourage openness without restricting or limiting people&#8217;s choice, but simply offering reasonable defaults – and telling people what they mean. We don&#8217;t want to restrict people: if someone feels that a non-open license is the right choice for them, we&#8217;ll support that, but we&#8217;ll support those that do open licensing even more.</p>
<p>Technology, especially retaining metadata as works are passed around the Internet, is also critical to our understanding of how works are being re-used and re-mixed. We could have a lot more information about what happens to creative works after they&#8217;re released if we could encourage a wider use and retention of metadata.</p>
<p>For an organisation like Creative Commons, it&#8217;s not enough to understand technology, you also need to be in the driver&#8217;s seat. And while we can&#8217;t all drive the same vehicle forward, we can share the same lanes, and hopefully reach the same destinations. As we&#8217;re just entering the highway with Commons Machinery, accelerating our efforts to develop the machines needed to facilitate a working commons, I hope that you&#8217;ll take the trip with us, and sign up to <a href="http://elog.io/">Elog.io</a>, our new service platform where we&#8217;ll be experimenting with tools for attribution and remixing.</p>
<p>photo credit: <a href="https://www.flickr.com/photos/pagedooley/4370352638/">kevin dooley</a> via <a href="http://photopin.com/">photopin</a> <a href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/">cc</a></p>

<p class="syndicated-attribution"><a href="http://commonsmachinery.se/2014/07/creative-commons-on-the-tech-highway/" class="button" style="margin:-3px 6px 0 0;"><span>read original post </span></a> on <a href="/author/jonas-oberg/" title="Read other posts by Jonas Öberg">Jonas Öberg</a>'s Site</p><p>The post <a rel="nofollow" href="/creative-commons-on-the-tech-highway/">Creative Commons on the tech highway</a> appeared first on <a rel="nofollow" href="/">Shuttleworth Foundation</a>.</p>
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		<title>Powerpoints are boring: Elog.io solves the problem</title>
		<link>https://www.shuttleworthfoundation.org/powerpoints-are-boring-elog-io-solves-the-problem/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=powerpoints-are-boring-elog-io-solves-the-problem</link>
		<comments>https://www.shuttleworthfoundation.org/powerpoints-are-boring-elog-io-solves-the-problem/#respond</comments>
		<pubDate>Fri, 25 Jul 2014 15:57:02 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[commonsmachine]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Jonas Oberg]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Academia]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[academics]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[attribution]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Culture]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[elog.io]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[images]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[powerpoints]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Presentations]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://commonsmachinery.se/?p=1140</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[<p>Photo by Flickr user russel davies, via photopin Powerpoints are really horrible. At best they are still dull and the worst ones could suck the will to live out of anyone. You know the type. A white...</p>
<p>The post <a rel="nofollow" href="/powerpoints-are-boring-elog-io-solves-the-problem/">Powerpoints are boring: Elog.io solves the problem</a> appeared first on <a rel="nofollow" href="/">Shuttleworth Foundation</a>.</p>
]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<div id="attachment_1141" style="width: 310px" class="wp-caption alignleft"><a href="http://commonsmachinery.se/wp-content/uploads/2014/07/medium_5866133580.jpg"><img class="size-medium wp-image-1141 " alt="Photo by Flickr user russel davies, via photopin" src="http://commonsmachinery.se/wp-content/uploads/2014/07/medium_5866133580-300x225.jpg" width="300" height="225" /></a>
<p class="wp-caption-text">Photo by Flickr user russel davies, via photopin</p>
</div>
<p>Powerpoints are really horrible. At best they are still dull and the worst ones could suck the will to live out of anyone. You know the type. A white slide covered in more bullet points than a SWAT team&#8217;s armory. The tedium of listening to someone reading the text is only marginally better than a pounding toothache or a summer migraine (pick your own poison).</p>
<p>So what to do if you are a presenter? I give plenty of talks and I really want my slides to do two things: 1) I want them to mildly entertain and increase the general well being among the audience, and 2) I want them to remind me to stay on track in the message I am building – all this, naturally, without alienating or sedating the audience.</p>
<p>My technique is to use LOTS of images; each slide is a new – and striking – image, while at the same time keeping the text to a minimum. No more than 6 words on a slide. Less if possible. The image can complement the message, or not; if it doesn&#8217;t, at least the image entertains and helps the audience stay alert to my message.</p>
<p>Finding images could have been a problem but thanks to Flickr and Creative Commons licenses there are millions to choose from. The challenge is picking the right image for the right slide – but I see this as an artistic choice.</p>
<p>Since all the images I use are published under Creative Commons licenses, I need to give credit where credit is due. I write the name of the photographer, photo, license and repository. This may not sound like much, but when I use 60 images in one presentation, this is a challenge.</p>
<p>As part of the process, I save images I like so I can use them in future presentations. This means I have a folder on my laptop with over 1300 saved images, each of them marked with the photographer and licensing information. See: this is getting a bit more complex, annoying and time consuming.</p>
<p>So what I want is a tool that does all this work for me. I want it to remember where the pictures are from, who took them, what licenses are used and more basic stuff like that. I would also love if the tool could also remember additional information such as where the image was taken, when it was used in presentations and online, and basically anything else of relevance now and in the future.</p>
<p>At first glance this seems overwhelming. But the same can be said of many of the tools in our life. The Elog.io web service with tool applications is far in the lead for cracking this problem. I can take an image from Flickr and paste it into a document – magically all the licensing information just appears. Problem solving at its best.</p>
<p>photo credit: <a href="https://www.flickr.com/photos/russelldavies/5866133580/">russelldavies</a> via <a href="http://photopin.com/">photopin</a> <a href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/2.0/">cc</a></p>

<p class="syndicated-attribution"><a href="http://commonsmachinery.se/2014/07/powerpoints-are-boring-elog-io-solves-the-problem/" class="button" style="margin:-3px 6px 0 0;"><span>read original post </span></a> on <a href="/author/commonsmachine/" title="Read other posts by commonsmachine">commonsmachine</a>'s Site</p><p>The post <a rel="nofollow" href="/powerpoints-are-boring-elog-io-solves-the-problem/">Powerpoints are boring: Elog.io solves the problem</a> appeared first on <a rel="nofollow" href="/">Shuttleworth Foundation</a>.</p>
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		<title>Mapping BP (3): Building a global network one affiliate at a time</title>
		<link>https://www.shuttleworthfoundation.org/mapping-bp-3-building-a-global-network-one-affiliate-at-a-time/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=mapping-bp-3-building-a-global-network-one-affiliate-at-a-time</link>
		<comments>https://www.shuttleworthfoundation.org/mapping-bp-3-building-a-global-network-one-affiliate-at-a-time/#respond</comments>
		<pubDate>Wed, 23 Jul 2014 15:31:20 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Open Oil]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Blogs]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[BP]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Companies]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Johnny West]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[OpenOil blogs]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://openoil.net/?p=4115</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[<p>The decision to try and map BP’s global network was based on the fact that the company makes many public filings. We didn’t really appreciate quite how many until we had finished. In the UK...</p>
<p>The post <a rel="nofollow" href="/mapping-bp-3-building-a-global-network-one-affiliate-at-a-time/">Mapping BP (3): Building a global network one affiliate at a time</a> appeared first on <a rel="nofollow" href="/">Shuttleworth Foundation</a>.</p>
]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p>The decision to try and map <strong><a href="https://openoil.iilab.org/#bp_map">BP’s global network</a></strong> was based on the fact that the company makes many public filings. We didn’t really appreciate quite how many until we had finished.</p>
<p>In the UK jurisdiction alone, the BP network we constructed shows 182 affiliate companies. Of these, the 26 which were second tier companies made 157 filings in 2012 and 143 in 2011. The group probably then submits something in the region of 600 to 800 filings a year in the United Kingdom alone. Then we were able to access filings in probably a dozen other jurisdictions.</p>
<p>All in all, the BP group probably averages between 50 and 100 A4 pages of public disclosures per day to public authorities around the world, under normal conditions. That is, not counting investigations, legal proceedings, or any other event-driven process.</p>
<p>We didn’t know that when we started because we were at the start of the learning curve. So we signed up to the Companies House filings service, at a pound a time, and started pulling records.</p>
<p>We had come to the project ever so slightly armed with some ideas of where to look. Because of its profile, there are stacks of books about BP. We set ourselves a BP Primer out of three of them: Tom Bergin’s Spills and Spin, John Browne’s autobiography Beyond Business, clearly the founding declaration of the man to rehabilitate his reputation after his 2007 downfall, and the Evolution of a Corporate Idealist, by Christine Bader, mostly an account of her time at BP working on corporate social responsibility.</p>
<p>Through these we understood broad trends within the company in the past twenty years which we hoped to find traces of in the corporate hierarchies. Bergin, who had held the energy beat at Thomson Reuters for years and had huge experience and clearly great access, offered several major themes. Browne’s rampant acquisition strategy of the 1990s and all the Amoco and Castrol entities that must have adhered to the group. Since BP had moved aggressively into commodity trading suggested there should be prominent corporate investment and trading vehicles. As to individual theatres of operations, would there be any affiliates clearly linked to BP’s play with TNK in Russia, for example, or its expanded presence in Libya post rehabilitation of Muammar Gaddafi in 2004-5? Also, given that many of the vertically integrated companies seemed to manage retail operations in very atomised fashion, would we see companies that were essentially a group of petrol stations in Dorset, and another one for Cumbria?</p>
<p>We quickly found a huge variation of size and activity between one company and another. Some seemed not to have any turnover at all, while others, such as BP Exploration Company, reported a profit of 840 million pounds in 2012. So we began to identify which affiliates seemed to be the “monsters” &#8211; BP Global Investments, BP International, BP Holdings North America &#8211; and home in on them.</p>
<p>Each of these companies were showing direct subsidiaries in a list at the end of their annual accounts. So we began to build lists of these affiliates and, if they were in a jurisdiction we could reach online, to pull their filings too, to see if they in turn had any subsidiaries. As we found each new company, we recorded its jurisdiction of incorporation, full legal name and number of incorporation, and then stored all documents in directories which combined these into one string.</p>
<p>This was a key understanding from OpenCorporates &#8211; the need to identify individual company structures. Not “BP”, or “BP Global Investments” but “BP Global Investments Limited, incorporated in the UK on March 4th, 1932, company number 00263889”.</p>
<p>The entire play in the way multinationals operate is in the interplay between the group as a co-ordinated whole, making a decision about how to invest in exploration in the Arctic, how to react to the US shale gas boom, or how to allocate this year’s profits, on the one hand, and the fact that this unified strategy is played out across over a thousand affiliate companies who each exist as a separate legal “person”. The company naturally seeks to maximise advantage across jurisdictions by combining these different legal persons in the most profitable and least liable way for any given business problem. But even if the group does act with one mind, the price of being able to maintain the affiliate structure as separate legal persons is a bare minimum of autonomous reporting by each of them.</p>
<p>It was as if the BP group is a superorganism and its affiliates were the constituent organisms included in the whole, like individual ants or coral. None of those companies had any purpose or would even survive without being integrated into the colony. Nevertheless, each of them has a unique footprint and what we were doing was studying the traces of their uniqueness, their “genetic code”, to see if significant information was stored there which could tell us something about the internal functioning of the colony.</p>
<p>We kept tabs day by day on this grinding process of building the network by attrition. By the end of the first week we had found about 400 companies. That seemed like a lot of companies, although we knew from an earlier study that in 2010 BP was thought to have had about 1500 companies. So we thought, gosh, well since we understand which files to pull down and where to look within them, it might only take another two weeks, three weeks max.</p>
<p>The team was made up of smart people with no domain experience. Part necessity and part choice. The necessity was that we were on a tight budget and couldn’t afford people who had experience of corporate accounting, for example, or international tax structures, even if we could have persuaded them to stare at annual accounts until they went cross-eyed. The choice was, this was an ideal group for the proposition that anyone with some brains and determination to rub together could grok enough of the basics to build these corporate maps. As well as Anton Rühling and myself, who belong to OpenOil, Claire, Avner and Miguel were grad students based in Berlin. They were intrigued by the hypothesis, clearly had a solid basis of research skills and it didn’t harm that two of them came from countries where hydrocarbons were either already a major feature of the political economy (Venezuela) or might shortly be about to become one (Israel).</p>
<p>Then we had a couple of breakthroughs.</p>

<p class="syndicated-attribution"><a href="http://openoil.net/2014/07/23/mapping-bp-3-building-a-global-network-one-affiliate-at-a-time/" class="button" style="margin:-3px 6px 0 0;"><span>read original post </span></a> on <a href="/author/openoil/" title="Read other posts by Open Oil">Open Oil</a>'s Site</p><p>The post <a rel="nofollow" href="/mapping-bp-3-building-a-global-network-one-affiliate-at-a-time/">Mapping BP (3): Building a global network one affiliate at a time</a> appeared first on <a rel="nofollow" href="/">Shuttleworth Foundation</a>.</p>
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		<title>Experimentation with Wikimedia Commons</title>
		<link>https://www.shuttleworthfoundation.org/experimentation-with-wikimedia-commons/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=experimentation-with-wikimedia-commons</link>
		<comments>https://www.shuttleworthfoundation.org/experimentation-with-wikimedia-commons/#respond</comments>
		<pubDate>Tue, 22 Jul 2014 16:23:43 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Jonas Öberg]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Jonas Oberg]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[PyBossa]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[software]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[databases]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[image search]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[reverse lookup]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[standards]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Tech]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[wikimedia commons]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://commonsmachinery.se/?p=1137</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[<p>Photo by See-ming Lee, on Flickr, via photopin One of the challenges that exists when trying to find contextual information about specific images is that even if you publish such information in a...</p>
<p>The post <a rel="nofollow" href="/experimentation-with-wikimedia-commons/">Experimentation with Wikimedia Commons</a> appeared first on <a rel="nofollow" href="/">Shuttleworth Foundation</a>.</p>
]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<div id="attachment_1138" style="width: 310px" class="wp-caption alignright"><a href="http://commonsmachinery.se/wp-content/uploads/2014/07/medium_4148064629.jpg"><img class="size-medium wp-image-1138" alt="Photo by See-ming Lee, on Flickr, via photopin" src="http://commonsmachinery.se/wp-content/uploads/2014/07/medium_4148064629-300x211.jpg" width="300" height="211" /></a>
<p class="wp-caption-text">Photo by See-ming Lee, on Flickr, via photopin</p>
</div>
<p>One of the challenges that exists when trying to find contextual information about specific images is that even if you publish such information in a database, it&#8217;s difficult to match an image in a database against an image found on the Internet. The image may have been cropped, resized, or otherwise changed so that it no longer matches 1-to-1 with the original.</p>
<p>A way to approach this – even if it wouldn&#8217;t work for all images – is to use algorithms that mathematically try to detect the similarity between two different images. There are a few such algorithms available, with the most promising one being SIFT (<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scale-invariant_feature_transform">Scale-invariant feature transform</a>). While patented, and therefore legally unusable, I&#8217;ve a hunch that it may be technically usable, and I want to test this hypothesis.</p>
<p>In order to test it, I need a set of images, some of which are copies of each other and others which are not. And I need to know which ones are which, ideally with real world data. What I&#8217;ve been planning to do is to retrieve a number of images from a well known source (I&#8217;m thinking about Wikimedia Commons) and use <a href="https://www.tineye.com/">TinEye</a> and/or <a href="http://images.google.com/imghp?hl=en">Google</a> to do a reverse lookup of those images, to find other occurrences of the same image elsewhere on the Internet.</p>
<p>Neither Google nor TinEye produces 100% valid results. Some of the images returned are bound to be mismatches, images that are thought to be similar but in reality are not. Or images that aren&#8217;t true copies, but are obviously based on another image (such as a photo from Wikimedia Commons being used on a book cover that the image search finds).</p>
<p>Feeding this list of images into a crowdsourcing platform like <a href="http://pybossa.com/">PyBossa</a> and using the visual perception of humans – not machines – would (with some bias) result in a list of known values for the relations between each pair of images (identical, derivative of, or not at all related). I can then run SIFT as well as other algorithms against the same set of images and simply see which algorithm and parameters return the most accurate results.</p>
<p>I&#8217;m hoping for an accuracy of about 50-75% here. It would probably be difficult to get a higher degree of accuracy, and we&#8217;ll undoubtedly end up with a number of edge cases where the algorithms can&#8217;t reliably determine which are copies or not. But if we can at least clear away those pairs which we definitely can determine are copies with the algorithms, that reduces the burden of manual checking.</p>
<p>To get images from Wikimedia Commons, I reached out to Brian Wolff whom my colleague Mathias Klang met at WikiConference USA earlier this year. Brian has a keen understanding of the data in Wikimedia Commons and quickly wired up a script to output a list of files from the Commons that have the most uses outside of Commons itself.</p>
<p>My theory was that the images most used outside of the Commons are most likely to be images that we can find “in the wild” on the Internet, and so would be useful images to do a reverse image search on for the initial database. Unfortunately, it turns out that the most used images include a whole lot of flags, the logotype of Wikimedia Commons itself, and the wiki letter W. Icons, more than photographs.</p>
<p>In retrospect, I should have anticipated this. Since Wikimedia Commons contains not only photographs but also icons used within Wikipedia articles, it&#8217;s natural that those icons would head the list.</p>
<p>Brian suggested using the list of pictures which have been featured on Wikimedia Commons, and indeed, I think this is what I should do: it seems to produce much more useful results on a cursory glance. Expect more to follow.</p>
<p>photo credit: <a href="https://www.flickr.com/photos/seeminglee/4148064629/">See-ming Lee 李思明 SML</a> via <a href="http://photopin.com/">photopin</a> <a href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0/">cc</a></p>

<p class="syndicated-attribution"><a href="http://commonsmachinery.se/2014/07/experimentation-with-wikimedia-commons/" class="button" style="margin:-3px 6px 0 0;"><span>read original post </span></a> on <a href="/author/jonas-oberg/" title="Read other posts by Jonas Öberg">Jonas Öberg</a>'s Site</p><p>The post <a rel="nofollow" href="/experimentation-with-wikimedia-commons/">Experimentation with Wikimedia Commons</a> appeared first on <a rel="nofollow" href="/">Shuttleworth Foundation</a>.</p>
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		<title>Design files for free and open-source collapsable communications tower</title>
		<link>https://www.shuttleworthfoundation.org/design-files-for-free-and-open-source-collapsable-communications-tower-2/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=design-files-for-free-and-open-source-collapsable-communications-tower-2</link>
		<comments>https://www.shuttleworthfoundation.org/design-files-for-free-and-open-source-collapsable-communications-tower-2/#respond</comments>
		<pubDate>Tue, 22 Jul 2014 06:45:00 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Dr. Paul Gardner-Stephen]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Fellows Blogs]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Paul Gardner-Stephen]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.shuttleworthfoundation.org/?guid=6611b7e5474444658233dd1aa08cbc53</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[<p>After rather a long time, we finally have the design files for the communications tower online at:https://github.com/servalproject/foss-comms-towerWe also have a paper that we will present at the...</p>
<p>The post <a rel="nofollow" href="/design-files-for-free-and-open-source-collapsable-communications-tower-2/">Design files for free and open-source collapsable communications tower</a> appeared first on <a rel="nofollow" href="/">Shuttleworth Foundation</a>.</p>
]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p>After rather a long time, we finally have the design files for the communications tower online at:</p>
<p><a href="https://github.com/servalproject/foss-comms-tower">https://github.com/servalproject/foss-comms-tower</a></p>
<p>We also have a paper that we will present at the <a href="http://www.ieeeghtc.org/">IEEE Global Humanitarian Technology Conference in San Jose in October 2014</a>.</p>
<p>Once the conference has been held, we will post a link to an open-access copy of the paper. &nbsp;However, you can already get more detail from the thesis of Greg, the lead student on the project. &nbsp;His thesis is included as a PDF in the GitHub repository mentioned above.</p>

<p class="syndicated-attribution"><a href="http://servalpaul.blogspot.com/2014/07/design-files-for-free-and-open-source.html" class="button" style="margin:-3px 6px 0 0;"><span>read original post </span></a> on <a href="/author/dr-paul-gardner-stephen/" title="Read other posts by Dr. Paul Gardner-Stephen">Dr. Paul Gardner-Stephen</a>'s Site</p><p>The post <a rel="nofollow" href="/design-files-for-free-and-open-source-collapsable-communications-tower-2/">Design files for free and open-source collapsable communications tower</a> appeared first on <a rel="nofollow" href="/">Shuttleworth Foundation</a>.</p>
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		<title>Design files for free and open-source collapsable communications tower</title>
		<link>https://www.shuttleworthfoundation.org/design-files-for-free-and-open-source-collapsable-communications-tower/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=design-files-for-free-and-open-source-collapsable-communications-tower</link>
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		<pubDate>Tue, 22 Jul 2014 06:45:00 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Dr. Paul Gardner-Stephen]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Fellows Blogs]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Paul Gardner-Stephen]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">https://www.shuttleworthfoundation.org/?guid=6611b7e5474444658233dd1aa08cbc53</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[<p>After rather a long time, we finally have the design files for the communications tower online at:https://github.com/servalproject/foss-comms-towerWe also have a paper that we will present at the...</p>
<p>The post <a rel="nofollow" href="/design-files-for-free-and-open-source-collapsable-communications-tower/">Design files for free and open-source collapsable communications tower</a> appeared first on <a rel="nofollow" href="/">Shuttleworth Foundation</a>.</p>
]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p>After rather a long time, we finally have the design files for the communications tower online at:</p>
<p><a href="https://github.com/servalproject/foss-comms-tower">https://github.com/servalproject/foss-comms-tower</a></p>
<p>We also have a paper that we will present at the <a href="http://www.ieeeghtc.org/">IEEE Global Humanitarian Technology Conference in San Jose in October 2014</a>.</p>
<p>Once the conference has been held, we will post a link to an open-access copy of the paper. &nbsp;However, you can already get more detail from the thesis of Greg, the lead student on the project. &nbsp;His thesis is included as a PDF in the GitHub repository mentioned above.</p>

<p class="syndicated-attribution"><a href="http://servalpaul.blogspot.com/2014/07/design-files-for-free-and-open-source.html" class="button" style="margin:-3px 6px 0 0;"><span>read original post </span></a> on <a href="/author/dr-paul-gardner-stephen/" title="Read other posts by Dr. Paul Gardner-Stephen">Dr. Paul Gardner-Stephen</a>'s Site</p><p>The post <a rel="nofollow" href="/design-files-for-free-and-open-source-collapsable-communications-tower/">Design files for free and open-source collapsable communications tower</a> appeared first on <a rel="nofollow" href="/">Shuttleworth Foundation</a>.</p>
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		<title>Mapping BP (2): of Bad Guys and Sharp Accountants</title>
		<link>https://www.shuttleworthfoundation.org/mapping-bp-2-of-bad-guys-and-sharp-accountants/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=mapping-bp-2-of-bad-guys-and-sharp-accountants</link>
		<comments>https://www.shuttleworthfoundation.org/mapping-bp-2-of-bad-guys-and-sharp-accountants/#respond</comments>
		<pubDate>Tue, 22 Jul 2014 04:51:53 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Open Oil]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Johnny West]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Uncategorized]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://openoil.net/?p=4108</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[<p>As I mentioned before, we had no particular reason to seek to map BP in particular. We were simply conducting an experiment into how much could be known about a major multinational from its own...</p>
<p>The post <a rel="nofollow" href="/mapping-bp-2-of-bad-guys-and-sharp-accountants/">Mapping BP (2): of Bad Guys and Sharp Accountants</a> appeared first on <a rel="nofollow" href="/">Shuttleworth Foundation</a>.</p>
]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p>As I mentioned before, we had no particular reason to seek to <strong><a href="https://openoil.iilab.org/#bp_map">map BP</a></strong> in particular. We were simply conducting an experiment into how much could be known about a major multinational from its own public filings.</p>
<p>In trying to keep track of oil and mining industries, there are two particular issues that could be addressed by corporate network maps.</p>
<p>The first issue is corrupt access to natural resources: when dodgy companies muscle in on lucrative oil and mining concessions because they are politically connected. This has happened in many African countries, Nigeria and Angola for example. But such companies are normally identified because they lack any serious industry profile or access to capital. Whatever anyone might think about BP, it clearly does not fall into that category.</p>
<p>But there is a second issue: whether complex corporate structures allow multinationals to engage in “aggressive” tax planning and use a technique known as transfer pricing to shift profits from, countries where they are operating, to low or no tax jurisdictions such as Mauritius or the Cayman Islands. This might be completely legal or at least open to interpretation. The question here is more whether, if governments in say, Africa, were able to see the whole corporate chain of the companies operating they might adjust their own taxation policies in light of that, or subject billions of dollars of tax-deductible costs submitted to their tax authorities to audit, or at least more rigorous examination.</p>
<p>That might sound abstract but I recently spent a morning in the headquarters of a national mining agency of a small African country meeting a “tax task force” from several different ministries and government agencies. Their job was to see if they could get more tax out of existing mining contracts and one thing that puzzled them was why the royalties they were seeing from iron ore production were so low. Even on paper, the government was only due 3% of the value of the iron ore. But what confounded them was why the company was submitting payments which seemed to be considerably less than 3% of the world market price. Well who are they selling it to, we asked. It turned out to be a processing company in China they were affiliated to. Oil, gas and mining operations need to buy in hundreds of millions of dollars worth of goods and services to make the oil flow. What if they buy services in high from affiliated companies? And sell their commodities low, to other affiliated companies? Any tax stream sitting in the middle, such as a royalty or profit tax imposed by in a small corner of Africa for example, will be squeezed because the base from which it is calculated has just been eroded.</p>
<p>These are the issues which lay behind the stories about Starbucks and Google not having paid any profit taxes in the United Kingdom because they haven’t earned any profits there, despite operating sizeable businesses for over a decade. In these cases it seems as though profits shifted to Ireland, with a 12 percent corporate tax rate, because the UK operations were paying extensively for intellectual property provided by Starbucks and Google affiliates in Ireland. The nature of goods and services being swapped between oil and mining companies might be very different but the principle is the same. Make as little profit as possible in high tax jurisdictions and as much as possible in low tax jurisdictions.</p>
<p>In this sense, the idea that we live in a global free market is a myth. According to the best estimates more than half of the goods and services that pass across international borders every day are between affiliated companies &#8211; who may or may not be swapping those goods at market prices. Because it is such a major feature of world trade, transfer pricing is supposed to be regulated and there are complex agreements and pre-agreements and systems in place around the world, sometimes down to the level of individual enterprises reaching a specific understanding with a tax authority on how it will report its own transfer pricing. But it was clear that morning in that rainy West African capital that very little of the knowledge and techniques to capture exactly who was doing business with who was available even to senior civil servants.</p>
<p>And they are not alone. The auditor-general’s office of a southern African country conducting its first audit of national agencies and state-owned companies in the mining sector also did not know who they were doing business with &#8211; as in, the precise legal entities who held contracts. The line ministry of a Central Asian country wondered about how to read accounts for costs submitted by a multinational from dozens of different suppliers. If you want to nerd out on the complexity of oil cost accounting, an Ernst and Young audit commissioned by the government of Uganda <strong><a href="http://www.platformlondon.org/carbonweb/documents/uganda/090407_Heritage_Oil_Audit_MEMD_Ernst&amp;Young.pdf">made it on to the Internet</a></strong>. It lists over 200 local and international companies supplying Woodside Petroleum, the concessionaire. But the thing to understand is that this is atypically simple: the contracts were for very early stage costs in developing a field that was not going to produce for at least another decade and the sums under review were less than $100 million, which might almost be counted as peanuts in early stage oil and gas development these days.</p>
<p>Of these two issues, <em>the Bad Guy issue</em> and <em>the Sharp Accounting issue</em>, the Bad Guy issue is the best known and the most directly emotive.</p>
<p>It could in fact be called the founding paradigm of the transparency movement. It’s the African president’s son who walks into a branch of Riggs Bank in Washington DC with two million dollars in cash. Or who has 15 Rolls Royces in Paris or 17 apartments in Monaco registered in other people’s names. The people who, if there were an underworld edition of Hello!, would dominate the multi-page spreads.</p>
<p>The Sharp Accounting issue on the other hand is grey and mundane &#8211; and involves much, much bigger sums of money. Raymond Baker, who founded the US watchdog Global Financial Integrity, estimates that illicit financial flows out of the developing countries into the rich world total perhaps a trillion dollars a year. But of this maybe only five percent is bribe money and corruption associated with government officials. Another 30 percent might be criminal funds. But the other two thirds is money earned in standard business operations to make, buy and sell standard goods. It’s just that the money is not reported, or not reported for what it is, capital flight hidden in the terms of trade. Kofi Annan’s Africa Progress Panel estimated that Africa missed out on about $40 billion in taxes from these flows each year &#8211; roughly equal to the in-flow of aid to the continent.</p>
<p>And Sharp Accounting is an issue we might expect to be connected to the legal structures of the multinationals. After all, at some level one assumes the point of corporate accountants, the high fliers at least, not the amiable plodders who approve your and my expenses or tell us off for our sloppy paperwork, but who only think in millions and can make money evanesce around the world faster than you can say Thomas Piketty is that they are sharp. And occasionally the mask slips. A colleague, for instance, was recently poring through job ads for corporate accounting (because that’s the kind of thing we do) and found one which listed as a job responsibility “maximise tax deductible cost recovery”. Not “maximise the accuracy of cost recovery” as in, make sure everyone gets receipts, but just make the figure as big as possible.</p>

<p class="syndicated-attribution"><a href="http://openoil.net/2014/07/22/mapping-bp-2-of-bad-guys-and-sharp-accountants/" class="button" style="margin:-3px 6px 0 0;"><span>read original post </span></a> on <a href="/author/openoil/" title="Read other posts by Open Oil">Open Oil</a>'s Site</p><p>The post <a rel="nofollow" href="/mapping-bp-2-of-bad-guys-and-sharp-accountants/">Mapping BP (2): of Bad Guys and Sharp Accountants</a> appeared first on <a rel="nofollow" href="/">Shuttleworth Foundation</a>.</p>
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		<title>Responses to Personalization and Monopolies</title>
		<link>https://www.shuttleworthfoundation.org/responses-to-personalization-and-monopolies/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=responses-to-personalization-and-monopolies</link>
		<comments>https://www.shuttleworthfoundation.org/responses-to-personalization-and-monopolies/#respond</comments>
		<pubDate>Mon, 21 Jul 2014 22:29:04 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Open Content]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[David Wiley]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[open content]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://opencontent.org/blog/?p=3428</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[<p>There are several things I&#8217;ve read / heard recently that have provoked a response in me but I&#8217;ve been negligent in responding publicly. Dumping some of those thoughts out...</p>
<p>The post <a rel="nofollow" href="/responses-to-personalization-and-monopolies/">Responses to Personalization and Monopolies</a> appeared first on <a rel="nofollow" href="/">Shuttleworth Foundation</a>.</p>
]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p>There are several things I&#8217;ve read / heard recently that have provoked a response in me but I&#8217;ve been negligent in responding publicly. Dumping some of those thoughts out here.</p>
<p><strong>Personalization</strong></p>
<p>Audrey Watters provides the <a href="http://hackeducation.com/2014/07/02/personalization-teaching-machines/">best summary</a> of a recent conversation on personalization in education. A lot of the conversation is around what personalization means and, given any specific definition, should we even be attempting to personalize learning. Obviously, the answer to the latter question depends on how you address the former.</p>
<p>For me, personalization comes down to being interesting. You have successfully personalized learning when a learner finds it <em>genuinely interesting</em>. Providing me with an adaptive, customized pathway through educational materials that bore me out of my mind is <em>not</em> personalized learning. It may be better than forcing me through the same pathway that everyone else takes, but I wouldn&#8217;t call it personalized.</p>
<p>In my imagination I have this notion of &#8220;Netflix Hell&#8221; related to personalized learning (did I hear this example from someone else?). Imagine if your only option for watching movies was to login to Netflix and watch the movies it recommended to you, in the order it recommend them. Who wants that? Who would <em>pay</em> for that? This is essentially where the current &#8220;vision&#8221; of personalization is taking us. But that vision aims too low &#8211; we need to help students find their learning <em>interesting</em>. If making learning interesting is what we mean by personalizing learning, we should absolutely be doing that. </p>
<p><strong>Monopolies</strong></p>
<p>On a different note, Fred Wilson wrote a great post recently about <a href="http://avc.com/2014/07/platform-monopolies/">Platform Monopolies</a> that does a terrific job of making an argument for OER. You should read the whole post, but this quote summarizes it nicely:</p>
<blockquote><p>So, as an investor, when you see a dominant market power emerge, you should start asking yourself &#8220;what will undo that market power?&#8221; And you should start investing in that.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>If higher education textbook publishers have not emerged as a dominant market power, I don&#8217;t know who has. And of course I think OER are what will undo that market power. As high quality OER continue to expand into additional subject matter areas, and as efficacy research continues to show that learners using OER learn just as much or more than students using publisher materials, this will likely mean trouble for publishers. Very quickly, what today are their competitive advantages &#8211; their huge authoring, publishing, and sales machineries &#8211; will transform into gigantic liabilities.</p>

<p class="syndicated-attribution"><a href="http://opencontent.org/blog/archives/3428" class="button" style="margin:-3px 6px 0 0;"><span>read original post </span></a> on <a href="/author/opencontent/" title="Read other posts by Open Content">Open Content</a>'s Site</p><p>The post <a rel="nofollow" href="/responses-to-personalization-and-monopolies/">Responses to Personalization and Monopolies</a> appeared first on <a rel="nofollow" href="/">Shuttleworth Foundation</a>.</p>
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		<title>Quick thoughts from Kenya</title>
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		<pubDate>Fri, 18 Jul 2014 20:36:04 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[msurman]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Fellows Blogs]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Mark Surman]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[mozilla]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[webmakers]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://commonspace.wordpress.com/?p=3583</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[<p>Going anywhere in Africa always energizes me. It surprises me. Challenges my assumptions. Gives me new ideas. And makes me smile. The week I just spent in Nairobi did all these things. The main goal...</p>
<p>The post <a rel="nofollow" href="/quick-thoughts-from-kenya/">Quick thoughts from Kenya</a> appeared first on <a rel="nofollow" href="/">Shuttleworth Foundation</a>.</p>
]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p>Going anywhere in Africa always energizes me. It surprises me. Challenges my assumptions. Gives me new ideas. And makes me smile. The week I just spent in Nairobi did all these things.</p>
<p><img class="alignnone size-large wp-image-3585" src="https://commonspace.files.wordpress.com/2014/07/img_20140716_1703552.jpg?w=480&#038;h=360" alt="Airtel top up agenda in Nairobi" width="480" height="360" /></p>
<p>The main goal of my trip was to talk to people about the <a title="The Instagram Effect: can we make app making easy?" href="http://commonspace.wordpress.com/2014/07/14/the-instagram-effect-making-app-making-easy/">local content and simple appmaking</a> work Mozilla is doing. I spent an evening talking with Mozilla community members, a day and a bit with people at <a href="http://www.equitybank.co.ke/index.php/about/our-history">Equity Bank</a> and a bunch of time with people from <a href="http://www.ihub.co.ke/">iHub</a>. Here are three of the many thoughts I had while reflecting on the flight home:</p>
<p><strong>Microbusiness is our biggest opportunity for AppMaker</strong></p>
<p>I talked to ALOT of people about the idea of non-techie smartphone users being able to make their own apps.</p>
<p>My main question was: who would want to make their own app rather than just use Facebook? Most of the good answers had to with someone running a very small business. A person selling juice to office workers who wastes alot of travel time taking orders. An up and coming musician who wants a way to pre-sell tickets to loyal fans using mobile money. A chicken farmer outside Nairobi who is always on the phone with the hotels she sells to <em>(pic below, met her and her husband while on a trip with Equity Bank folks)</em>. The common thread: simple to make and remix apps could be very useful to very small real world businesses that would benefit from better communications, record keeping and transaction processing via mobile phone.</p>
<p><img class="alignnone size-large wp-image-3588" src="https://commonspace.files.wordpress.com/2014/07/img_20140717_0857312.jpg?w=480&#038;h=360" alt="IMG_20140717_085731~2" width="480" height="360" /></p>
<p>Our main priority with <a href="https://apps.webmaker.org/designer">AppMaker</a> (or whatever we call it) right now is to get a first cut at on device authoring out there. In the background, we also really need to be pushing on use cases like these — and the kind of app templates that would enable them. Some people at the iHub in Nairobi have offered to help with prototyping template apps specific to Kenya over the next few months, which will help with figuring this out.</p>
<p><strong>Even online is offline in much of Africa</strong></p>
<p>As I was reminded at MozFest East Africa, even online is offline in much of Africa (and many other parts of the world). In the city, the cost of data for high bandwidth applications like media streaming — or running a Webmaker workshop — is expensive. And, outside the city, huge areas have connections that are spotty or non-existent.</p>
<p><img class="alignnone size-large wp-image-3589" src="https://commonspace.files.wordpress.com/2014/07/brck-in-use.jpg?w=480&#038;h=358" alt="BRCK-in-use" width="480" height="358" /></p>
<p>It was great to meet the <a href="http://www.brck.com/">BRCK</a> people who are building products to address issues like this. Specifically: BRCK is a ruggedized wifi router with a SIM card, useful I/O ports and local storage. Brainstorming with <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Juliana_Rotich">Juliana</a> and Erik from iHub, it quickly became clear that it could be useful for things like Webmaker workshops in places where connectivity is expensive, slow or even non-existent. If you popped a <a href="http://www.raspberrypi.org/">Raspberry Pi</a> on the side, you might even be able create a working version of Webmaker tools like Thimble and Appmaker that people could use locally — with published web pages and apps trickling back or syncing once the BRCK had a connection. The Kenyan Mozillians I talked to were very excited about this idea. Worth exploring.</p>
<p><strong>People buy brands</strong></p>
<p>During a dinner with local Mozillians, a question was raised: ‘what will it take for Firefox OS to succeed in Kenya?’ A debate ensued. “Price,” said one person, “you can’t get a $30 smartphone like the one Mozilla is going to sell.” “Yes you can!”, said another. “But those are China phones,” said someone else. “People want real phones backed by a real brand. If people believe Firefox phones are authentic, they will buy them.”</p>
<p><img class="alignnone size-large wp-image-3587" src="https://commonspace.files.wordpress.com/2014/07/img_20140717_1034514.jpg?w=480&#038;h=640" alt="IMG_20140717_103451~4" width="480" height="640" /></p>
<p>Essentially, they were talking about the tension between brand / authenticity / price in commodity markets like smartphones. The contention was: young Kenyan’s are aspiring to move up in the world. An affordable phone backed by a global brand like Mozilla stands for this. Of course, we know this. But it’s a good reminder from the people who care most about Mozilla (our community, pic below of Mozillians from Kenya) that the Firefox brand really needs to shine through on our devices and in the product experience as we roll out phones in more parts of the world.</p>
<p><img class="alignnone size-large wp-image-3586" src="https://commonspace.files.wordpress.com/2014/07/img_20140716_2230332.jpg?w=480&#038;h=252" alt="Mozillians from Nairobi" width="480" height="252" /></p>
<p>I’ve got alot more than this rumbling around in my head, of course. My week in Uganda and Kenya really has my mind spinning. In a good way. It&#8217;s all a good reminder that the diverse perspectives of our community and our partners are one of our greatest strengths. As an organization, we need to tap into that even more than we already do. I truly believe that the big brain that is the Mozilla Community will be a key factor in winning the next round in our efforts to stand up for the web.</p>
<p>Filed under: <a href='http://commonspace.wordpress.com/category/mozilla/'>mozilla</a>, <a href='http://commonspace.wordpress.com/category/webmakers/'>webmakers</a>  <a rel="nofollow" href="http://feeds.wordpress.com/1.0/gocomments/commonspace.wordpress.com/3583/"><img alt="" border="0" src="https://feeds.wordpress.com/1.0/comments/commonspace.wordpress.com/3583/" /></a> <img alt="" border="0" src="https://pixel.wp.com/b.gif?host=commonspace.wordpress.com&#038;blog=336759&#038;%23038;post=3583&#038;%23038;subd=commonspace&#038;%23038;ref=&#038;%23038;feed=1" width="1" height="1" /></p>

<p class="syndicated-attribution"><a href="http://commonspace.wordpress.com/2014/07/18/quick-thoughts-from-kenya/" class="button" style="margin:-3px 6px 0 0;"><span>read original post </span></a> on <a href="/author/msurman/" title="Read other posts by msurman">msurman</a>'s Site</p><p>The post <a rel="nofollow" href="/quick-thoughts-from-kenya/">Quick thoughts from Kenya</a> appeared first on <a rel="nofollow" href="/">Shuttleworth Foundation</a>.</p>
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		<title>Smashing windows and explaining metadata</title>
		<link>https://www.shuttleworthfoundation.org/smashing-windows-and-explaining-metadata/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=smashing-windows-and-explaining-metadata</link>
		<comments>https://www.shuttleworthfoundation.org/smashing-windows-and-explaining-metadata/#respond</comments>
		<pubDate>Fri, 18 Jul 2014 14:45:16 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[commonsmachine]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Awareness]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Jonas Oberg]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[metadata]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[context]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Culture]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[suffragettes]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[victoria lidiard]]></category>

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		<description><![CDATA[<p>Wikipedia is correct but maybe a tad boring: Metadata is &#8220;data about data&#8221;. The term is ambiguous, as it is used for two fundamentally different concepts. Structural metadata is about the...</p>
<p>The post <a rel="nofollow" href="/smashing-windows-and-explaining-metadata/">Smashing windows and explaining metadata</a> appeared first on <a rel="nofollow" href="/">Shuttleworth Foundation</a>.</p>
]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p>Wikipedia is correct but maybe a tad boring: <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metadata">Metadata is &#8220;data about data&#8221;</a>. The term is ambiguous, as it is used for two fundamentally different concepts. Structural metadata is about the design and specification of data structures and is more properly called &#8220;data about the containers of data&#8221;; descriptive metadata, on the other hand, is about individual instances of application data, the data content.</p>
<p>Did I lose you yet? Let me try to explain it in a more interesting way…</p>
<p>The town of Hove (England) seems to be constantly struggling to make sure it isn’t mixed up with its larger and more famous neighbour Brighton. The town is unremarkable. Nothing special. Lots of Victorian and Regency houses line the streets, the residential areas are filled with parked cars and occasional trees… you know, nice.</p>
<p>Palmeira Avenue in Hove is a typical such street. I’m sure it&#8217;s pleasant to live there but nothing special to see. But walk past nr 14 and you see the sign. A round plaque in three colors bearing the text: <a href="https://www.flickr.com/photos/jnicho02/3500737490/in/photolist-6kmchW-ff2czP-583vEy-583oxh-57YdaR-e5M9r6-e5Mavi-e5McxD-e5SLD7-e5M9Ht-jjoQWY-9DP3tb-4BQSN4-38fywS-jZykPz-jZzbnz-jZATL5-dD59Tr-7aJ23Z-erZAaC-csbyn3-csbx5Q-4uEVuK-aJN4Cr-9bKPsX-5C5Yfe-7W97Gf">Victoria Lidiard (1889-1992) suffragette and campaigner</a>.</p>
<p>The sign is a perfect example of metadata. It is information about the information we can see in the street. It indicates that there may be something more interesting happening on the suburban street that what is on the surface. It’s a breath of history while walking in the present.</p>
<p>With the help of metadata, I can discover more about the information I already have. In other words: boring residential streets in a nice English town – but THE Victoria Lidiard lived here! Who the hell was Victoria anyway?</p>
<p>Thanks to the initial metadata I can continue my search – unfortunately not automated – I go to Wikipedia, the source of all knowledge, and I find: nothing! This is not a sign that Victoria was a non-entity, but probably further proof of the gender bias on that great site. (read more: <a href="http://ijoc.org/index.php/ijoc/article/view/777">Reagle &amp; Rhue Gender Bias</a> in Wikipedia and Britannica)</p>
<p>After finding an <a href="http://www.independent.co.uk/news/people/obituary-victoria-lidiard-1558302.html">online obituary</a>, I discover the following:</p>
<blockquote><p>“THE LAST living suffragette, Victoria Lidiard, has died at the age of 102. She had been a vegetarian since 1899; was one of the first women opticians, in 1927; a campaigner for animal welfare and charities; and for the last 10 years worked for the ordination of women priests.”</p>
</blockquote>
<p>In 1912 she protested the government&#8217;s failure to give women the vote by smashing windows at the War Office. She was sentenced to 2 months in prison and was among the 200 suffragettes jailed for this protest. This did not stop her; in her home town, “she chalked pavements; sold Votes For Women (and was spat on by a local clergyman for so doing); addressed meetings at Bristol Docks from the back of a lorry; and was told by a docker to get back to the kitchen and the bedroom where she belonged.” At the age of 99 she published her first book and a second one when she was 100.</p>
<p>This unremarkable street was the home of a very remarkable human. The street gains so much from us knowing that Victoria lived there and hopefully this illustration helps to understand the importance and usefulness of metadata. (More info on <a href="http://spartacus-educational.com/Wlidiard.htm">Victoria is here</a>)</p>
<p><a href="http://commonsmachinery.se/wp-content/uploads/2014/07/Wlidiard.jpg"><img class="alignnone size-full wp-image-1144" alt="Wlidiard" src="http://commonsmachinery.se/wp-content/uploads/2014/07/Wlidiard.jpg" width="149" height="202" /></a></p>

<p class="syndicated-attribution"><a href="http://commonsmachinery.se/2014/07/smashing-windows-and-explaining-metadata/" class="button" style="margin:-3px 6px 0 0;"><span>read original post </span></a> on <a href="/author/commonsmachine/" title="Read other posts by commonsmachine">commonsmachine</a>'s Site</p><p>The post <a rel="nofollow" href="/smashing-windows-and-explaining-metadata/">Smashing windows and explaining metadata</a> appeared first on <a rel="nofollow" href="/">Shuttleworth Foundation</a>.</p>
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