Text of notes for a talk given at the 50th Anniversary Conference of the New Zealand Computer Society in Rotorua, 17 September 2010. I will link to video when it’s posted by the conference organizers.
Hello everyone. Thank you for the kind introduction, and thank you to the New Zealand Computer Society for having me here.
Let’s get nostalgic for a bit. It’s the 50th anniversary, we can afford to be nostalgic a little.
Our local newspaper, Mahurangi Matters, had this great piece of short news (sadly not online yet):
Local firemen recently responded to a 3.30am call “power causing concern”. The homeowner could hear a humming sound seemingly coming from her bathroom wall. The firemen were all set to knock down walls to find the source when the officer in charge found a “personal item” vibrating in a stainless steel dish on the vanity. Not realising what it was, he picked it up and took it out to an ultimately “very embarrassed” lady.
Last month I was honoured to join Silverstripe as a director. Silverstripe makes an open source Content Management System backed by Sapphire, an elegant PHP framework, builds websites for NZ and international customers, and has a new performance monitoring product that’s rapidly gaining traction. I was on their advisory board as they hired their first external CEO, made the Deloitte Fast 50, expanded internationally, launched the developer programme, and built their product, and I love how they’ve approached opportunities and challenges with the same thoughtful equanimity. I’m joining a group of experienced and knowledgeable folks on the board, and look forward to learning a lot from them. Most importantly, though, Silverstripe is great people: smart, thoughtful, caring, and passionate about employees, customers, and open source. I couldn’t ask to work with a smarter company and I’m delighted to join them on their fantastic trajectory.
The Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA) is an agreement between countries around IP rights and enforcement. The negotiations have been happening in secret, with every country saying “well, we’d love to reveal what we’re talking about but those other countries just won’t let us”. Fortunately there have been leaks, and the latest is a fascinating glimpse at how these things are put together and where the parties stand.
It seems bizarre at first, but the draft is laid out like a spreadsheet: one article per row and with three columns, one each for the US/Japan version, the EU version, and comments. Inside each sentence square brackets mark the attributed proposed alternatives for language. From this we can tell some very interesting things about the New Zealand position:
I had a good time a few weeks ago with Russell Brown, Vaughn Davis, and Ms Behaviour talking about social media on the Media 7 show. You can watch it online.
I used LGOIMA, the local government equivalent of the Official Information Act, to request details on how much revenue Auckland City council and the Auckland-area collective geospatial body made from geodata sales. Today I got the PDF of their response. Neither Auckland City nor ALGGi have made much from the sales, and I suspect the opportunity cost of the paywalled data far exceeds all their revenue to date.
NZICT is an industry lobby group, representing the NZ ICT industry (software, hardware, services, networks, education, and training). They’ve just released a “Near Future Digital Priorities” paper. Here are my first thoughts.
First, I have to applaud the industry getting together to try and figure out how it can help the rest of NZ grow. The most exciting conversation at the short-lived Digital Development Council was when agriculture and manufacturing and other industries had an honest conversation with representatives of the ICT industry without being sidetracked into the failures or benefits of particular products or vendors.
Citing growth in photo-sharing and social media sites, Telecom have announced they won’t charge for upstream traffic. That is to say, upload photos and movies all you like until the end of January when such traffic counts again toward your monthly bill. I’ve long believed that symmetric bandwidth is critical if we don’t want to be a nation of passive consumers, so I’m chuffed to see a big telco support this. Fingers crossed for my ISP, Orcon, to do the same!
If you’re in Wellington on the week of October 19, check out Victoria University’s Open Access events. There are a pile of events and talks planned on the campus for that week as part of International Open Access Week. Check it out on the Creative Commons New Zealand page for the week.
Not the solution to the world’s problems, just my agenda this week. Mon-Wed was in Christchurch for the LIANZA conference. Wednesday night, a HISAC dinner. Thursday is a HISAC meeting, the last with the current membership. Friday is an InternetNZ council meeting.