Software Cooperative News

Doing Business the Co-operatives 2010 Way
Budget 2010: take 2 (IT, Co-ops and Community edition)
Koha in Book Industry Communication
Talks: RMS Kosovo, MJR Plymouth
Hello Oslo, This is Emacs Calling
TravelWatch SouthWest General Meeting
General Election 2010
Day Against DRM, 4 May 2010
Samsung N150 Netbook and Ubuntu Netbook Remix
Debian Project Leader Election Campaign Round-up

Updates seen at the co-operative for Software (This description last updated 2010-06-27T12:12:49Z)

Warning: may contain unconsidered opinions and stuff I've just plain not thought through properly.

Doing Business the Co-operatives 2010 Way

Co-operatives 2010

On Friday, I was at this event in Plymouth. The basics of it are pretty well covered by John Atherton’s blog post. I led one of open surgeries on use of Social Media, which I’m going to try to summarise and expand into an interactive briefing note on the website of our co-op. If you’ve hints and tips, or questions you feel I should cover, please leave me a comment here.

Other than that, I was trying to help support the event (as I’m one of the steering group for co-sponsors Co-operatives SW), so I was carrying some kit around and videoed the Question Time. That and some other clips should find their way online next week, along with some other thoughts triggered by the presentations. It was a pretty interesting and productive day, worth the ticket price in my opinion.

Happily, we launched the new Co-operatives SW website from a train at 9am Friday because of some unforeseen events and it seems to be working fairly smoothly. Please be gentle with it. I like the Members News section, but then I would, wouldn’t I?

Posted/permalink: 2010-06-27T12:12:49Z

Budget 2010: take 2 (IT, Co-ops and Community edition)

I’ve been watching the June budget and pondering its effects on me, our co-op, co-ops in general and the wider community.

IT Taxes: I just want to flag this one up as a special interest: the telephone tax is killed off before it starts. Yippee! But now we get to wait and see how “the government will support private investment” to get universal provision of fast broadband. I’ve no problem with tax relief for the video games industry being scrapped - why should any type of software get special treatment?
VAT up 2.5% to 20% from 4 January 2011: This seems bad for everyone. It’s a bit less bad for our co-op because we have some international suppliers, whose sales tax rates won’t change, but we buy a lot from the UK too and it hurts all our workers.
Personal Taxes: The basic income tax allowance rise of £1,000 is welcome, as is restoring the pension-earnings links. More widely, the freezes in various things, increase in Capital Gains Tax and drop in cider tax all seem broadly good ideas. The housing benefit £400 maximum is a bit mixed - how bad it is may depend how lenders react when borrowers get into difficulty.
Business Taxes: At a time when a VAT increase is called “unavoidable”, it stinks a bit to cut corporation tax, extend the 10% capital gains tax allowance and raise the employers’ National Insurance threshold. Of course, our co-op pays none of those, so it also hurts us by giving our competitors an advantage.
Business Incentives: George Osborne said he wants to tackle regional economic differences, but the big change in this budget is bad for all existing businesses outside London, the South-East and East: National Insurance exemptions for new businesses. Once again, existing co-ops take it in the neck from another government obsessed with capitalism and employment instead of businesses and work. Meanwhile, increasing the Enterprise Finance Guarantee props up debt-laden business and a new Growth Capital Fund encourages capitalist businesses, while both appear useless to good co-ops at first glance. I don’t mind being ignored, but could we please elect a government which doesn’t actively hinder co-ops? Where’s the fabled “commitment to fairness”? Promises around the Green Investment Bank and Green Deal sound good, but are in the future.
Council Tax: Council Tax will be frozen for a year. I wonder if that applies to parish councils, because our village planned a cut after a one-year project-based increase last year. The Budget Document has pretty much no detail.

So, how was it for you? Have I missed some friendly changes?

Posted/permalink: 2010-06-22T13:48:51Z

Koha in Book Industry Communication

Our co-op has joined Book Industry Communication as an associate member, mainly in order to voice experiences of the Koha community and ourselves about RFID tag standardisation and related sustainable development. I want us to give the Free and Open Source Software library world and our charity and academic clients more input in developing this big change to libraries.

Even so, it wasn’t an easy decision to join. I still believe that RFID standards development would be better done in an open forum, but there doesn’t seem to be a perfect choice and I don’t think we can create one. BIC already has cross-sector support and seems much more open than the so-called “RFID Alliance”. Pragmatism was enough, this time, and so far BIC seems friendly and welcoming. I see that a larger service provider co-operative, OCLC (UK), is also a member, so hopefully that means it’s safe for co-ops.

I think most of the readers of this will be free software developers, koha users and/or members of other co-ops. So, I ask you, what do you think of this move? Leave me a comment on our blog – or email me if you prefer to keep it private.

Posted/permalink: 2010-06-11T12:24:49Z

Talks: RMS Kosovo, MJR Plymouth

RMS will be visiting Kosovo today to speak at the national library. There is no entrance fee, however the number of seats is limited to 250, so please register by writing to register@flossk.org.

Less illustriously, MJR will be visiting Plymouth to run a social media surgery as part of Doing business the co-operative way on Friday 25 June (tickets £25 or £75 – email now). I’ve a few good ideas for what to cover if people are interested but don’t have specific questions (and I’ll post a few of them here later), but what tip would you give to a new social media user?

Posted/permalink: 2010-06-04T06:24:19Z

Hello Oslo, This is Emacs Calling

The Eurovision Song Contest has been and gone with a better-than-usual winner and much of the snarkiness was on microblog sites like identi.ca this year. Search for #ESC, #eurovision or incomprehensibly-to-me #eurovison (no second i – is it spelt like that in some language, or can thousands not spell?). Anyway, enough of the title, on with the message…

I’ve been irritated by my linphone SIP internet phone (Skype without lock-in, with standards) taking up my screen space for a while. I’ve been meaning to upgrade to one of the recent versions that includes the linphonecsh shell and write some client that only displays windows when it’s needed, but I’ve been writing programs for work so much that I’ve not even found time to write blog posts recently, much less fun code, so that’s not happened.

So I’m quite happy to find linphone.el for my GNU Emacs text editor and find it mostly works. I changed one line at the end to (define-key global-map [menu-bar tools linphone] '("Linphone" . linphone)) to put it on the tools menu, but other than that, it just worked. Well, the Mute doesn’t, but that’s probably my phone headset being a different ALSA device. I don’t care: I use the hardware mute button.

In previous times, I would have added the link to the venerable EmacsWiki too, but it has the evil bad wrong Google reCaptcha on the edit page to stop disabled users, so screw it. Google’s reCaptcha seems to be spreading again, obstructing more people when accessing more websites. Is there a reason for that? The re in reCaptcha stands for replace with real anti-spam, please!

Anyway, now I’m controlling phone calls from Emacs. Whatever next? Voice recognition, M-x doctor and a speech synth?

Posted/permalink: 2010-06-01T06:20:46Z

TravelWatch SouthWest General Meeting

Weeks ago, I was at a TravelWatchSW meeting in Taunton for Cooperatives-SW. The Chair’s theme for the meeting was “the journey was going so well, but is there trouble ahead?” contemplating cuts due to the debt crisis and possible change of government. Lots of good people were present, so it was quite an illuminating meeting.

First, we listened to Dr Gabriel Scally, Director of Public Health for the South West NHS, as he spoke on fat, exercise and transport… He’s a keen cyclist, so I asked for suggestions of how to get better parking at health centres and hospitals. Sadly, he had no easy answer. One tip: Primary Care Trusts control most money, so they’re probably the best ones to persuade.

The second keynote address was First Great Western’s Projects and Planning Director Matthew Golton. He spoke about railway development, unsurprisingly. Rail is vital for co-operatives in the South West, as it’s a greener way to travel the 250 miles length of this peninsula and avoids our poor congested roads.

The big news is that class 150s (Sprinters) will replace the Exeter area 142s (Pacers/Railbuses) and there will be grade-seperated junctions at Reading by 2016 to reduce congestion between the various routes that converge at that point. There’s bad news on the Intercity Express Programme and HST2 being delayed until after the election, but the original High Speed Train fleet should continue as reliably as ever.

After lunch, there were a series of “Just a minute” comments on topics including: west country commuter services, staffing, Taunton nhs parking, axminster peak times, a TransWilts meeting.

Finally before the reports and forum came the third and final keynote from Mike Lambden, head of corporate affairs for National Express Group. He outlined their plans including longer coaches, but asked for better coach stations. One strange mistake had been increasing the leg room on some coaches so much that they got complaints from shorter passengers that they couldn’t reach the footrest any more – oops!

The forum was a scary discussion of rail under-provision planned in our region. Even if we only continue to grow rail use at the last decade’s rates, overcrowding will increase.

The forum ended with applause for all the hard work done by TWSW and the next meetings will be 9 October 2010 in Taunton, 5 March 2011, 1 October 2011.

Posted/permalink: 2010-05-11T06:00:54Z

General Election 2010

You may have noticed that the UK votes in a General Election tomorrow. It looks like the closest for at least 18 years and maybe more. Happily, all the major parties are saying nice things about cooperatives, but I wonder how much of that will translate into policies that are practical for co-ops like mine.

Our national body Cooperatives UK has gathered the commitments from 18 manifestos and summarised them in a PDF. The first 7 pages deal with the five biggest English parties.

One striking thing is how many gaps there are in the Labour, LibDem and UKIP policies, while it’s not really clear to me that the Conservatives or LibDems really understand cooperatives. The Conservatives seem to suggest council-controlled co-ops (which wouldn’t normally be co-ops if they lack autonomy), while the LibDems mention employee trusts more often than worker co-ops.

I’m sulking at Labour after several recent schemes that subsidised private competitors and excluded worker co-ops – and I don’t believe Labour can win in Weston-super-Mare. That would leave the Greens, who probably can’t win but do seem to get it, except that there’s no Green candidate where I live because he stood aside and recommended the LibDems (as I understand it). Drat.

So, only a few hours to go before the start of the ballot and I’m still an undecided voter.

Posted/permalink: 2010-05-05T21:32:26Z

Day Against DRM, 4 May 2010

Today is the Day Against DRM, working against Digital Restrictions Management or Technological Protection Measures (TPM). I’ve two tips to help with our public disservice British Broadcasting Corporation which has consistently failed to act in the public interest and reject DRM:

If you want to link to a BBC radio show like Global Business, you can often get mp3 and avoid Flash-forcing DRM-wannabe iPlayer (and cool toys like get_iplayer) by using BBC Mobile’s Podcasts Index.
Satellite TV broadcasts can be captured as MP2 by MythTV or even 50-quid black box home entertainment devices. The DRM-free file can be played back on a computer with mplayer -demuxer +mpegts filename.dvr or re-encoded for other devices with mencoder.

What DRM-avoiding tips would you give?

Posted/permalink: 2010-05-04T08:23:27Z

Samsung N150 Netbook and Ubuntu Netbook Remix

That was a pretty good weekend. I set up someone’s new Samsung N150 netbook with Ubuntu Netbook Remix.

If you like Windows, you might want to skip this long paragraph: the N150 came with Microsoft Windows 7 Starter. When I realised what that was, I thought it was some sort of joke. It’s more like an advert for Windows than a proper operating system. They even removed the option to replace the branded backdrop image, which gives you an idea of the pettiness of that distribution. I read that Win7 Starter used to have a 3 simultaneous application limit but an update removed it because of the sheer volume of complaints and rumblings about court cases to get money back. Microsoft justify all the limits with the argument that it’s optimised for low-power netbooks, but the N150 goes like stink compared to my own (7-year-old) work laptop and how much power is saved by loading the Windows logo backdrop instead of a nice picture anyway?

What did that make me want to do? Well this:

But I’d read that Samsung view nuking Win7 Starter from orbit as voiding the warranty and I couldn’t see anything to confirm or reject that in the paperwork, so I made it dual-boot with Ubuntu netbook remix. If it ever has to go back to the shop, I’ll hide the boot menu. I had enough trouble installing it that I did contemplate get.debian.net with some of the Debian Eee PC things, but I wasn’t sure what I needed and I didn’t have that much time.

There were two big gotchas when installing:

When you switch between Ubuntu and Windows, it won’t boot the first time. Second and subsequent boots are fine, but the first one just reboots immediately. I suspect this would be the same for all GNU/Linux distributions.
I didn’t realise that the current ndisgtk (or the underlying ndiswrapper?) couldn’t use Win7 drivers. Once I downloaded some XP drivers, it worked. There are some native drivers for the rtl8192 but I didn’t have time to go compiling on it yet.

After figuring those out, Ubuntu seems to work fine. Better than the Windows.

I got particularly appreciative comments about the large clickable spaces on the launcher that netbook remix uses (which is what I’d expect from Fitts’s Law). Debian probably has a similar launcher, but I don’t know what it’s called yet. It looks like some Gnome window or file manager and I’m a GNUstep throwback.

Setting up the mobile phone for internet access was also a breeze. It’s a later model than my old k608i, so it supports PANU, so after the Bluetooth pairing, it appeared in the networking menu on the top panel bar and it just worked.

On Sunday, I cycled to Clevedon (7 miles away as the crow flies, but 12 by bike because of a missing river crossing). Pretty good weekend.

Posted/permalink: 2010-04-19T10:06:08Z

Debian Project Leader Election Campaign Round-up

I’ve been AWOL for most of the debian project leader election campaigns this year, but I still want to vote, so I’ve been dredging the emails on the last day. Maybe someone still has to vote and reads this, or maybe it’ll help someone to interpret the result.

What I’ve done this year is to make a quick tally of platform points and campaign answers that I liked and disliked for each candidate, then total them up to get an order. If anyone gets a negative (more dislikes than likes), then I’ll rank them below NOTA.

Platforms: Margarita Manterola, Stefano Zacchiroli, Wouter Verhelst, Charles Plessy.

Some of the questions:

Do you plan on taking on a “2IC” or a team? No – SZ, WV, CP, MM
What do you think are valid goals to spend donated money on? How would you think is a valid way to thank (hardware) contributors? What qualifies a “Debian Partner”? Spend on what we cannot receive by donation – CP. Partner is defined on website – CP. Spend on maintenance, development, contributions, use – MM. Spend on keeping the project running and emergency reserve – SZ. Partnership programs usually require an yearly subscription fee – SZ. No specific spending list – WV. No formal list of partners – WV
How much time do you currently/would you devote to Debian? Couple of evenings per week and a couple of days per month – CP. A daily hour, more in future – MM. 1-2 hours/day + 2-4 hours/week – SZ. Varies – WV.
infrastructure to finance Debian related projects? Why not use other infrastructure? – CP, MM. Don’t – SZ, WV.
Please finish “In ten years I’d like Debian….”to still be thriving as the Universal OS – MM. to be *THE* renowned distribution in terms of freeness and democracy – SZ. to be mainstream – CP. to still be the distribution I consider to be the best one out there – WV
Do you think current frequency/amount of heated discussions is acceptable for the Debian project? What would you do to reduce those? too agressive, use social pressure – MM. Acceptable? No. Normal? To some extent, yes. DPL must set a good example – SZ. Stricter policies – CP. No amount of ad-hominem attacks is acceptable, see platform – WV.
Which project and external Debian-related communications media do you follow? and contribute to? lists, IRC, planet – MM, WV. lists, Planet – CP. lists, IRC, planet, DN, identi.ca – SZ.
How, as DPL, you would (or even could) address the social issues around releasing? add manpower – MM. status reports – SZ. public disappoval of bad behaviour – WV. reshape the archive – CP
should we try to coordinate our release process with Ubuntu’s? Yes – MM, SZ. Why not – WV. More info – CP
Will you withdraw delegations of DD not behaving correctly? On recurrence – MM, CP. No(?) – SZ. No – WV.
Is there any part of Debian that should be restricted to a small subset of developers? Yes – WV, CP, MM. No except security reasons – SZ.
Personal mentoring? Good idea – MM. Recycle NM process – CP. Use teams – SZ. NM already is mentoring – WV.
Standardization, large scale changes, innovations – valuable questions, but the responses are too complex to summarise here, sorry.
How would you enforce Debian Community Guidelines? wouldn’t – SZ, MM, WV. No clear answer from CP.
is planet.d.o a good thing? Not necessarily – WV. No clear answer from SZ, MM. No reply from CP.
How do we face the challenge to do more every year? improve our way of working and get more people to help us do our jobs – MM. open Debian’s door wider – CP. have enough people to work on Debian – WV. use our communication media – SZ

Make of that what you will. It surprised me which way the scores came out, but there was one answer with such a massive problem (in my opinion) that I ranked its giver equal with the next candidate down anyway.

If you’re a debian developer (DD), have you voted yet?

Posted/permalink: 2010-04-15T07:43:30Z

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