I just supported one such project running under the Kickstarter program. Not surpising, the project I supported deals with books. eBooks, actually. I posted an image of the project on my sidebar, but it is a bit tiny, so I’m reposting it in this blog post.

What is the project?

I’ll quote from the site:

This year the Rural Design Collective is making an eBook on how to make eBooks! We will be participating in a collaborative book with software developer James Simmons, creator of notable Activities for working with eBooks on the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) XO. Our primary audience for this manual is teachers and the goal is to make this an important learning tool in the classroom. In this volume, best practices in digitization techniques will be emphasized. The manual will be developed throughout the program using the open authoring platform at FLOSS Manuals. In addition, we will be offering a hands-on three month program on-site at our headquarters where many of our experiments will be used as case studies for the book.

Teaching teachers? Wow. You hit a big audience that way. What’s not to like?

Who’s the Rural Design Collective?

They are a “not-for-profit professional mentoring program which furthers the education and experience of residents of rural Southern Coastal Oregon who are interested in working with web and/or media technology by involving them in real development projects.”

Read this next sentence carefully.

We are located in Curry County which is one of the economically poorest in rural Oregon, yet home to many resourceful residents and progressive creative people. We focus on work that advances important social causes and/or helps make a difference in our local community.

This reminds me of current discussions in Denmark about the economic balance (rather imbalance) in the distribution of resources in the country. People probably have a tendency to think “rural = poor” per default. Perhaps this is because there are fewer factories or shopping centers or other visible displays of money. RDC shows an awareness that the resources are in the people. This community is actually rich, but not everyone has that perspective. I like the way RDC thnks, and I like their passion. Such love and passion for their local community deserves support.

Visit them on the web at ruraldesigncollective.org.

Do you want to support this project, too? Go click on the image – it is hyperlinked to take you straight to the support page.

As for Kickstarter? Read about them at kickstarter.com. They’re “a new way to fund creative ideas and ambitious endeavors.”

That’s what Jacob Nordfalk did. He was the first speaker at today’s session of Talk IT at Copenhagen Business School.

Apertium

Jacob talked about working with Apertium, a free and open-source machine-translation platform. Don’t worry, translator friends, this was not a push to replace the human element! The value here is a machine translation tool that is open source and free. Participation in Apertium does require XML knowledge as well as knowledge of the languages used in the corpus, the body of electronic texts that provides the translation foundation. Jacob has even received stipends from Google Summer of Code for projects to build the corpus for Nordic languages.

Apertium does a rule-based type of translation, making it more reliable, but more boring. Jacob calls it “shallow translation”. If you enter “see the dog run”, then Apertium translates those four individual words, whereas Google Translate looks at the entire phrase as a unit. (The amount of calculation that Google Translate uses is quite mind-boggling and impressive.)

Jacob walked us through Apertium’s approach to translation, showing us how rules are applied for a simple translation from English to Esperanto. (Most languages in Apertium are Indo-European – and now Nepali – but that can change as more people contribute to this tool.)

A Pen is a Pen is a Pen

A lot of discussion came out of his simple phrase “He saw a pen”. The first step was determining what pen was – a noun or a verb. Because of its position in the phrase, it was considered a noun. Esperanto had only “plumo” as the word for pen – a writing instrument. It did not have the word for a place to hold animals and it did not have the slang word that was an abbreviation for penitentiary. Realizing how much effort had to go into calculations for such a simple phrase highlighted the overall intricacies of translation.

One person in the audience asked whether Apertium could handle irony. My personal opinion was – that’s where the human enters the equation! Jacob’s response was somewhat the same. It all depends on the context, and the human brain is needed for that.

Mozilla with a Mobile Twist

The second speaker of the day was Mike Kristoffersen fra Mozilla. Unfortunately, our many discussions during Jacob’s presentation ate into Mike’s time, so the talk was short and sweet. Mike came to tell us about Firefox for Mobile. I saw a presentation on Fennec (the code name for the project) at Reboot 11 in June 2009, so it was interesting to see how the project had developed since then.

Mike also told us about other Mozilla activities to emphasize that Mozilla was not just Firefox! He opened with Mozilla’s declaration that

We believe in the power and potential of the Internet and want to see it thrive for everyone, everywhere.

He then walked us through several of the projects Mozilla runs to promote an open internet, such as Drumbeat.

Mozilla’s Drumbeat

My favorite Drumbeat project is the Universal Subtitles project. This can help build text needed for the deaf (captioning) and translations for those who do not speak the language of the orginal recording. In light of this project, it was appropriate that an entire slide was dedicated to mentioning Mozilla’s support of accessibility in a statement that echoed Tim Berners-Lee. You know. This quote:

The power of the Web is in its universality. Access by everyone regardless of disability is an essential aspect.

P2PU – Peer to Peer University – is about teaching the latest open web technologies to young people and helping them to develop an attitude to succeed in open collaborative projects. P2PU made me think about the overlap with both Scrunch Up magazine for young designers and developers and WaSP InterACT. They’re not quite the same, but I think they should know about each other. Web standards and open source should be kissing cousins.

When Mike mentioned Mozilla grants, I was happy to see their support of the Ushahidi project in Chile. Ushahidi cannot get enough recognition, in my opinion. I think it is just the beginning of the great potential we will see coming from Africa in the coming decade.

I was surprised to hear that Denmark ranked lowest in the Nordic region for adopting Firefox. It goes to show how wrapped up you can become in your community. I know nerds and creative types who use Firefox, Opera, Chrome, and Safari – and all love to hate Internet Explorer. However, Internet Explorer has saturated the Danish workplace. Outside the world of geeks, people probably don’t care about browsers and are probably not even conscious of what a browser is! They just want to book a ticket, pay a bill, read the news, and so on, and they are not thinking “I am doing this thanks to my browser”. I took this bit of information as yet another reminder to never ever ever make any assumptions about how other people use computers and software! We had a nice little discussion on this point.

A mention of Mozilla Labs, where they experiment with crazy and not-so-crazy ideas, wrapped up Mike’s talk and this season of Talk IT. I look forward to the new season next Fall.

Kudos to Jesper, Rikke, and David for a second successful year of Talk IT at Copenhagen Business School.

My 2010 Ada Lovelace tribute goes to two women – Jessamyn West and Jenny Engstrom. They recently displayed their magic skills at the South by Southwest Interactive conference, which I did not attend. @marks did, and he sent me a tweet saying I’d love the panel and that they were very funny. The title of the panel made my heart go pitter-patter:

How the Other Half Lives – Touring the Digital Divide.

Awestruck, I immediately started following @jennylish and @jessamyn. I viewed the slides and some follow-up material as soon as they were available, but I have not yet listened to the MP3 audio file of the talk (SO bogged down in work to do for my project management class). @marks was spot on. As was @AustinChronicle, who tweeted

Possibly the most important panel of #SXSW – what tech heads don’t know about the #digitaldivide”.

(Tweet comes from @jennylish’s blog along with a link to the paper’s recap of the panel.)

I am passionate about accessibility, but accessibility covers a huge territory. Digital divide is a part of that, and I confess that my dream job would be working with this sort of topic somehow, some way. I think Jessamyn West and Jenny Engstrom are quite deserving of their Ada Lovelace tribute. They go where the “tech heads” fail to go!!

This post is mostly fan mail exhorting you, dear reader, to read something that I have hardly read! There is a sign here to the Holy Grail. I am convinced of that. Librarians have superpowers. Prior to the news about this digital divide panel, I stumbled across an amazing book, thanks to @krug95. The book has the most awesome title: This Book is Overdue. (Getting a notice from the library that this book was now available for pickup threw me for a moment. “What book is overdue?” I thought. Oh, wait…)

The rest of the title is the kicker: How Librarians and Cybrarians can SAVE US ALL. Yup. Nothing less! I snapped a photo of the book the moment I brought it home. I knew I had to post that photo to this blog.

I have only had time to read one chapter. Marilyn Johnson’s writing is delightful and I will review it when I finish reading it. It also looks like a book I will buy just for the joy of having it nearby.

The moral of my tale? Don’t mess with librarians and cybrarians! They are part of the front line for getting more young girls (young kids) excited about tech.

PS Despite the great title, there is no music involved in this post. Every time I think of “rock band”, I think of the Henriette Weber kind of rock band. Follow that link and read to find out what I mean.

OK. Happy Ada Lovelace Day everyone. It’s back to homework time!

Many years ago, when I worked at Computer Associates, they produced a product called CA-7/OLC. (I think that was the abbreviation.) It was an enhancement to their CA-7 software, which is still used for scheduling jobs on big old mainframe computers. The interface for CA-7 was, of course, the good old green screen – green text on a black background. The software came on – are you ready, kiddies – magnetic tapes.

CA-7/OLC was different. The demo included a large piece of hardware that played a 12-inch laserdisk. (Gee, I forget the names of all the parts after all these years.) The product was on a PC using 3.5-inch diskettes, and the laserdisk had some additional magic not possible on the PC back then.

When you ran the program, you saw the usual green-screen interface. Slightly boring, with a lot of numbers and the command line. The difference was in the Help section. You could look up something in the Help section – and bookmark relevant passages. That was revolutionary!

The real jaw-dropper was the video. You triggered the video somehow while researching some topic in the Help section. A video appeared in the upper-right corner of the monitor. This was in color! It had a talking head! The video showed a recording of a real person speaking to you about your selected topic! I think this was in the early 90s, so this was rather revolutionary, especially for a mainframe product.

CA had fun with the demo. When discussing the length of a data field, the woman in the video held out her hands to show the desired length. She smirked! To demonstrate the fact that you needed information in different languages, they had the same instructions in different languages, one of which was Valley Speak – Valspeak, as it is called in Wikipedia. OMG, it was, like, totally, amazing, you know, like? I was the only American in a room full of Danes watching this demo. I was in hysterics watching this part. It was so out of character for the usual dry, geeky mainframe products. It was a breath of fresh air.

The product was never sold. I think the main reason was that the setup was too expensive. Technology continued to develop and made the 12-inch laserdisk a dinosaur.

However, it showed us the future. It showed us interaction with a product. It showed up possible ways to use new technology. I am bit vague on some specifics, but I do remember the overall excitement so many years later. It was someone’s imagination brought to life. Breathing life into impossible or impractical projects stimulates us to make breakthroughs.

Watching the video in Alan’s blog post about our augmented future revived the memory of a demo, which is probably 20 years old. It reminds me that although there can be issues with these visions, those issues bring something tangible into the discussion that we can begin to analyse and test and evaluate. It helps us create our future.

Alan closes with this sentence:

Technical documentation is not just about the written word, it is about the communication of ideas and knowledge.

If we think like this, we will always be prepared for the future.

As a member of the reboot book crew, I took notes on all the speakers presenting in the main hall. It didn’t take long to see a pattern emerging – there was actually a sequence to the topics. Speakers were referring to topics already raised – and building on or enhancing those topics. It was stunning to watch this happen right before me.

I asked Thomas Madsen-Mygdal, the driving force behind Reboot, whether he had planned it that way when lining up the speakers. He said that if I saw it that way, then that was my contribution – interpreting the pieces brought together at Reboot.

Here is what I saw emerge at the end of Day 1 of Reboot11.

The Meditation

We Reboot11 activists need the superpowers that let the body become all eyes. Anything we see can be touched. We can see where we are and where we can be – the macroscope. It shows us where we can see and point and trigger the action that is needed.
With such superpowers, it will take very little effort to effect change.

100 hours.

100 hours, or 8 hours a week for the next 12 weeks, can be a simple contribution to a project that can solve problems and invent culture! (1)

Do we need tools for our world-changing project? The world is becoming increasingly complex – more complex than our skills can handle. We cannot work alone. We must connect with others for a collective and scalable effort to make change. We shape the tools we need for our task, but the tools are also shaping us. We co-exist and co-evolve as we shape our digital habitat. (2)

We reach out and connect with others – finding them and conversing with them via our technology. We harness that technology so that it can be shared and used by everyone. Out of the depths of corporations and into simple, everyday devices. We seek, map, find, and connect with each other. We can act on our own time. We own the data. (3)

Our tools have a huge effect on us, and we know it. Reflection, response, reflection, response – that is what we need when we shape our world. Together, we can build our habitat, our cities from the bottom up and up and up. Not necessarily up in height, but up in increased participation from the individuals inhabiting the cities, up in inclusiveness, up in liveability, up in community. (4)

We are linked in our communities. They, too, shape us as we share them. They, too, touch everything and anything! They point AND they fetch, bringing us what we desire, building a cycle of sharing and giving. Generosity. We share a world of different people, throughout our geographical and virtual communities. We have a moral imperative to act and draw upon our deepest hopes for this world of ours. (5)

But how do we achieve and maintain those cities, those communities? Let’s go open source. Our language and comprehension varies and fluctuates. We must begin with transparency and openness. Our collaboration leads to skill sharing and learning. Visibility becomes the norm, participation increases, and … we grow. (6)

As we grow, we work toward common goals and principles through our many layers of communities. Our place shapes and enables our action. Our community is our self-identification. It is how we control our future. It is our macroscope. (7)

Our efforts catch on. We no longer have one-way communication channels shaping the way we think. We are all drawn into the conversation. It is two-way, three-ways, many ways. We control the conversation, the news, the dissemination of knowledge. We share. (8)

We develop our own ecosystem where everything serves some purpose and does not go to waste. We link and we flow. Our civilization dawns. (9)

The Sources

Each of these sections was inspired by a specific speaker. The words are a combination of phrases or words from that person and my own words and thoughts. The sections are also in the order that the talks were given. Those speakers are

1. Matt Webb
2. Matthias Müller-Prove
3. Steve Coast
4. Francesca Birks
5. David Weinberger
6. Leisa Reichelt
7. Andrew Turner
8. Dave Winer
9. Tor Nørretranders

I will post notes from these speakers over the coming days and weeks. My first blog posts from Reboot11 were from Day 2 (Euan Semple and Niels Hartvig). Who says Day 1 should be written up before Day 2?

By the way, Reboot11 was held in June 2009. The thoughts shared then are still very fresh and strong.

Unless you have been living under a rock the past few days, you should know that Haiti requires a massive humanitarian effort in the wake of the 7.0 earthquake on January 12. We cannot all rush to Haiti to clear away rubble to help find survivors. However, you can help through the Ushahidi and Crisis Mapping Network projects.

How you – or your friends – can help

The Crisis Mapping Network is defined as “Leveraging mobile platforms, computational linguistics, geospatial technologies, and visual analytics to power effective early warning for rapid response to complex humanitarian emergencies.” Ushahidi is the Swahili word for “testimony”. (Re-read the title of my blog post with that in mind.)

In other words: rapid-response crisis communication.

• Who is alive or dead?
• What is needed and Where?
• How to get to the Who and Where?
• When? Yesterday, preferably, but some prioritizing can be estimated.
• Why? For human decency.

This information is coordinated through technology. Hands and minds are needed to put that technology to work. That’s where you come in.

Do you have the skills needed? Find out by reading the latest blog post from the Ushahidi team, the virtual situation room for Ushahidi developers, or the OpenStreetMap’s Haiti page. There are also useful resources to explore on the Crisis Commons wiki.

Talk about these projects with your friends. Please. If you don’t have the skills, maybe they do – or maybe they know someone who does. Those skills are needed now, but they also need to be evaluated for the future. This is communication at its finest – raising awareness and bringing humanitarian aid to where it is so urgently needed.

PS For more information about the Ushahidi project, read the news articles from Technology Review and the Washington Post. An excellent source of news from Haiti is Global Voices Online.

Why did I write this blog post?

All this talk about Ushahidi is my way of taking the Help Haiti Blog Challenge.

I have no services that I can offer to you at a discount so that I can donate to humanitarian organizations (the challenge). I can only give you my trust, dear reader of this post. I trust you to tell a friend or two about ways they can contribute to relief efforts.

My own monetary donations have already gone to Partners in Health, an organization that has been on the ground in Haiti for 20 years and knows what to do, as well as the Red Cross and Médicins Sans Frontières.

This post is also an expression of love for Kenya. I lived in Kenya from 1980 to 1985, and there was no internet back in those old days! I rediscovered Kenya when Ushahidi first launched. What really struck me then were the voices of people who were totos (the Swahili word for children) or not born when I lived there. Here they were as young adults who cared about their country and its future. Ushahidi is part of the hope for the future. Now, they have crossed an ocean to help another country. The word “awesome” is very appropriate here. I had to blog about Ushahidi as a sign of my respect for them. This is harambee at its finest!

The movie in question is Avatar. If you haven’t seen the movie and want to see it, stop here. Keep your mind open and free of any influence to make your movie experience your own. That’s how I like my movies!

After watching the movie, I read the reviews in The New York Times, the Marginal Utility’s blog on PopMatters called “Avatar and Invisible Republic”, and Jan Karlsbjerg’s blog.

These reviews surprised me because I had not seen the movie from their point of view. For example, I rarely think about the practical side of science fiction movies anymore. I go in to be entertained, and I park any remnants of logic I may have in my brain outside the door. I was aware of gender issues and stereotypes, but I didn’t think about “white man’s guilt”.

What I saw was a message about the environment – about being more in tune with the environment. I saw a holistic view of the environment. That’s what I saw. I know it was a big Hollywood movie. I went in to be entertained. I also enjoyed the visuals, both because I love eye-candy, but also in admiration for the artists telling a story visually and the technology used to do so. I loved the Pandora concept – the making of a language and a history – fleshing out the characters. I had fun at the movies, and the message I took away was the environmental one.

In other words, the perceptions or mindset you have influence your perception of the movie.

You see, I saw it on the last day of the Copenhagen Climate Conference. I had been working as a volunteer at the Fresh Air Center listening to talk about the environment for 10 days. Of course, the environment was on my mind all the time. While I was watching the movie, I was very conscious that people were struggling over the issues in Bella Center. To get to the cinema, I walked past a giant display on the Copenhagen Town Hall Square called Hopenhagen that was set up to involve the general public in debate about the conference.

Inside the cinema, I was getting a message about the environment in a two-and-a-half-hour Hollywood film. That fascinated me. For all the Hollywood bashing that goes on, it does help when important topics are delivered to the general public along with all the glitter. The general public might otherwise miss them. (A quick side note: Jake Scully’s disability is also an issue that I have yet to see anyone mention. Tiny scenes show prejudice toward his need for a wheelchair, and there is the overlying message that health care is available, but not to him in his financial state. I leave it to more qualified bloggers to comment on the important topic of disability and disabled characters in films.)

Having these different mindsets is what is making the discussion so interesting. And we can still agree to disagree! For example, the Eywa concept in Avatar is that we are all interconnected. Here is where I disgree with a comment from the Marginal Utility blog post. I quote:

Weaver’s character tries to counter the already confusing insistence on resource extraction with a non sequitur about how the “real value” of the planet the humans are pillaging lies in the fact that the trees are networked together to form a giant bio-Internet. (Great. The last thing we need is metaphors that glorify and naturalize digital, mediatized interconnectedness.) What is valuable about that? It’s regarded as unimportant by the film’s producers.

This is probably where I am getting some of my key environmental messages. In my opinion, many terms used with computers and digital concepts come from our biological world. Look at our brains. Look at our bodies. Their construction is what we feebly try to emulate in our technology. After all, we don’t think outside the box – we tend to copy what we know! We take the language, the representative systems that we know and apply them to the new things we encounter, and I think that is common. For me, the tree is not a metaphor. It is doing what it has always done. Our digital world just takes its terms from the organic world.

The big corporation just wants “unobtainium”; Weaver sees the true treasure in the way the tree and planet function. I don’t know that the film producers ignore that. Again, from my point of view, I think that is one of their messages to the audience.

I see an environmental message. Others see gender issues. It all comes down to our mindsets. You might say that it is just a movie and will be forgotten in the not-so-distant future, so who cares about mindsets. Lighten up, Karen. Well, I thought it was an interesting example of how we do view the world using our mindsets. Humans are funny creatures that way….

What is crucial is that we acknowledge the existence of these mindsets and stay open to learning from other people’s mindsets, or points of view. Since I started this post, I came across two more reviews, and I found them fascinating because they brought new ideas (to me) to the discussion.

In Kel Smith’s review, he writes

Since James Cameron’s Avatar hit the screens, it seems that there is no lack of discussion about the role virtual worlds play within the greater consciousness. What does this mean for user experience and accessibility professionals?

Then, thanks to @musingvirtual, I came across this Avatar review on why critics are missing the point. This view was new to me because I don’t normally think along these lines, but it made sense and provided yet another fascinating aspect of the film. These two reviews take the entire discussion in a very exciting, and possibly uncharted, direction, which should be very exciting for user experience and accessibility professionals to explore. I feel my mindset being enhanced …

You know, the fact that Avatar is sparking all these conversations is what I find truly valuable. For that, I say congratulations – and thank you – to James Cameron.

PS For those who love spoofs, watch Avatar The Bootleg.

What can I do with this?

• Discipline – it seems easy enough now, but it might be easy to forget to take at least one picture a day at some point. Training the habit consciously at first is my way to tackle that issue.
• Practice – I need to test my camera a lot more. I have had it for two years now, and I still haven’t understood all its features. Not that it is complex, but I don’t know how to switch between options quickly when the situation calls for it. I am also uncertain about the ideal method for certain situations. I end up with pictures that I discard because they are blurry in a bad way, not an artistic way!
• Storytelling – I plan to tell a story of some kind with each picture, but the entire string of pictures will tell a story, or two or three. I’d like to learn about the visual aspect of storytelling because I tend to focus on the written word of storytelling. While I take the pictures, I’d like to think about the image from the perspective of someone who is visually impaired. That might sound bizarre, but my interest in accessibility makes me work to develop an awareness of other means of perception.

Follow my experiments and experiences on Flickr in My Project 365 – 2010.

There are so many people who made 2009 a wonderful year. I want to thank all of them. I will do so over time in 2010. I want to make the thanks personal and meaningful. For now, know that I am thinking kind thoughts of all of you!

Two turning points for me in 2009 were my mom’s death March 9th and my decision to walk away from a full-time job November 30th in the middle of a world-wide financial crisis.

There is a connection. I am rediscovering who am I and what my values are. You can sense the direction I am going in from this posting on my quickie blog at Tumblr. I feel very good about 2010. I have no clue what will happen, but I feel good.

I am wishing a happy, healthy, and peaceful 2010 to everyone I know and to everyone they know and to…

People in North America can use Goodwill to recycle “e-waste” responsibly. It looks like there is something similar in the UK. What’s a person in Denmark to do?

In Denmark, waste is handled in each municipality. The explanation of what you can and cannot do is too text-heavy as illustrated by this one example. Who wants to wade through piles of words like that? With the sensitivity of getting rid of waste in a responsible fashion, you must have clear explanations. You are presenting important information to people who have different approaches to reading. Don’t scare them off, and in this case, dump toxic material in their ordinary household trash. If recycling is the way to go, it must be explained in terms that everyone can understand. It must also be made easy to do. Reading long lists of what-not-to-do is not the right way to approach this issue.

The thought crosses my mind – approach the municipalities and offer my services to clean up their text. I cannot do it alone, however. A team would be required. I’m not giving up – I choose not to pursue this opportunity today. Taking on a government-type authority is not for the faint-hearted!

Recycle, reuse, rediscover

While I’m talking about recycling… I need to clear out other items, too. Unfortunately, some recycling centers do not update their sites with the location of their collection bins. Two were removed in my neighborhood, but they are still listed on the Red Cross site. Tracking down a collection bin is on my to-do list for January.

In the meantime, CuriousBunny introduced me to Glove Love. Excellent! Who says gloves have to match? We can start a new fashion trend. I started to poke around this site and thought, “Hey – Do the Green Thing is a rather nifty site.” I subscribed to the RSS feed so I could keep up their sustainability ideas. I’ll never be a millionaire in money terms, so tips for savings are always welcome, especially when I can “be green” at the same time.

Go poke around the site yourself. Do read the entire Nothing (TM) page. I also recommend the very sweet “Huddle” video on the Human Heat page.

Have a green 2010!