18 Days in Egypt is “a collaborative documentary project about the revolution.” The co-founder of this project, Jigar Mehta, was in Copenhagen June 14th, and I was one of a handful of people who was privileged to hear him speak at Politiken’s Hus. I was sad that so few attended this talk. He did tell his tale to a much larger audience the next day at another conference, but he had a valuable tale that deserved more listeners of the journalist variety. (News of this talk was circulated in journalist circles.) Here are my brief notes from his lessons learned about crowdsourcing “an interactive documentary of the events in Egypt” that occurred from January 25th to February 11th 2011. My notes from the talk Mehta describes how he watched the tale unfold on television. He noticed that many, many people were holding up their mobile phones to record the events.…
1 CommentTag: open source
What do you do when your wife gets a job in Nepal and you tag along? You help to build the foundation for machine translation between Esperanto and Nepali, of course! 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,…
1 CommentUmbraco‘s Niels Hartvig called his Reboot 11 presentation “How to start an open source project with and without code”. It wasn’t just about the technology of open source, however; it was about the mind set of open source. The tips given here have lingered in my mind since Reboot 11. I have seen how they are suitable for organizations who need to adapt to the changing attitudes, perceptions, and demands of their members. There is a resonance with some content strategy pointers from Richard Sheffield‘s The Web Content Strategist’s Bible and Kristina Halvorson‘s Content Strategy for the Web. These strategies for open source can also be used succcessfully in many of the projects unfolding in the alternate climate conference in Copenhagen these days. I repeat: open source is not about technology; it is about a mind set. You can use these tips for any project, not just software. This is…
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