[ Home | Articles | Account | People | Projects | FAQ ] Friday Opinion Request: Shaping the Future of Social Enterprise
As you may know, our webmaster cooperative is classed as a Social Enterprise by gov.uk because it has social primary aims and isn’t run for shareholder benefit - we have neither shareholders nor employees, which screws up lots of surveys. Although its workers make a little money from it, I think it’s better than many Social Enterprises because it’s in common ownership rather than private ownership (which means, as I understand it, if we kill the company for whatever reason, its copyrights and so on would go to other common-ownership organisations, else fall into the public domain - the ultimate free software guarantee).
Social Enterprise seems very popular at the moment. We keep getting asked our opinion by both government (public sector) and other social enterprises. I think this is because most public sector bodies seem to struggle to get enough input from the third sector and most third sector bodies want to make sure they’re not squashing other bits of the third sector.
Next Thursday, I’m going to a “consultation to identify priorities for support for the South West’s social enterprises” but I’m really not sure what to say. I’m going to ask my cooperatives for suggestions, but I’d welcome suggestions from anyone else interested in social enterprise too. Any ideas?
Syndicated 2008-08-29 15:07:06 from Software Cooperative News
More Free Software for Libraries
Two interesting nearly-free-software articles about Free Software for Libraries:-
Four more libraries upgrading to free software systems:-
Syndicated 2008-08-28 07:27:32 from Software Cooperative News
Why I Didn?t Buy Some Online Courses
I was just looking to buy some online classes. I haven’t bought one yet and here’s three ideas I think online course sellers should follow to get more customers:-
Are there any good online course providers out there which do all of the above?
Syndicated 2008-08-28 06:23:00 from Software Cooperative News
Forthcoming Attractions: Software Cooperative Events for Late 2008
Some interesting events that I’ve heard about recently, with a bit of a focus on software, cooperatives and the South-West:-
I’m pretty sure I’ll go to the *d ones - which others do you think I should go to? Will you be at any of these? Any comments to make on/to any of them? Any more to add to the list?
Syndicated 2008-08-27 07:34:18 from Software Cooperative News
Solved but Why? Belkin F5D7630 to Realtek 8139 Drop-outs
I’d been having problems connecting my laptop to my router to the Phone Coop using a new network cable that I laid under the floor just after the new heating system was installed. It’s a 1970s building - cat-5 wasn’t installed with the original wiring and mains homeplug networking is tricky on this wiring layout. The growing number of people with WiFi and video senders on my hillside seems to be causing more interference and slow-downs, so it seemed worth installing a wired connection while the floors were up.
The connection seemed to work fine, but then kept stopping for 20 seconds at a time - that’s just long enough to break network connections, but barely long enough to start up debugging tools, let alone get useful output.
I was pretty sure the cable wasn’t at fault - Paul tested it with his fancy test gear when he completed the wiring for me. That left the hardware: my much-hated Belkin F5D7630 and the Realtek 8139 in the bizarre Compaq Evo N1015v. I’ve still not got around to replacing that Belkin and it’s been behaving itself well enough recently, while the Compaq has run smoothly once I actually got Linux onto it.
I found the end of this Ubuntu Forums thread which pointed to this archlinux bulletin board thread which suggested pnpbios=off pnpacpi=off in the boot options. After adding that, the 20-second network pauses have stopped. But why? The ACPI and BIOS in this laptop are generally troublesome (and it looks like this also happens on some Presarios), but what in particular is going wrong this time? Will I suffer ill effects from switching off PNP options? Time will tell, I guess.
Syndicated 2008-08-26 14:15:40 from Software Cooperative News
Bristol and Bath LUG Meeting 23 August 2008
Apparently the LUG’s website is still off-line and there’s no idea when it will return, so let me use this site to help announce that the LUG’s regular meeting at the Knights Templar public house, near Isambard Walk, Bristol, will happen tomorrow Saturday 23 August from noon-ish until whenever people drift away.
Software Freedom Day happens between this meeting and the next one. Is anyone interested in running a Bristol-area event and do you know of a suitable/available venue? I’m finding the SFD official site somewhat dysfunctional (I’m not in the Northern Caucasus, damnit), so I’ve not found a nearby team registered yet…
Syndicated 2008-08-22 13:59:50 from Software Cooperative News
USB Charging: Greener or Not?
I’ve ordered some USB charging leads for various portable devices, mainly because I’ve already got mains-USB and car-USB power adapters (they came with a bluetooth headset that charges from USB) and I agree with things like this:
“management of an individual charger for each device is becoming a pain in the backside. Since the USB power form specification is a standard, ANY charger with sufficient load capability should be able to charge ANY device.” (from USB As A Power Source)
but I’ve also heard that charging from USB is greener - or more precisely that because your computer’s power supply is running anyway, it uses less electricity to plug battery chargers onto the Universal Serial Bus than to plug in “wall-wart” DC adapters. But is this claim true?
Claims from USB recharging product sellers concentrate on the obvious “less waste compared to disposable batteries” strength, although some smarter chargers cut power to charged devices - it’s not clear whether the mass-market USB battery chargers do this, but the reasons and the electronics don’t look that complicated. China (not famous for environmental protection yet) now requires USB-charging of mobile phones while a mobile phone industry body has recommended the same approach in general.
However, there are concerns about whether Power over Ethernet is making networks less green, which might be true for USB if devices demand more high-power sockets and device makers don’t include intelligent control electronics (which people generally don’t want to pay for).
Is USB charging greener than mains charging? I’m not sure and I haven’t found any great answers - can you?
I guess in the worst case, I can try some tests with a power meter later…
Syndicated 2008-08-22 07:29:45 from Software Cooperative News
How To Avoid 6 Common Website Mistakes That Cost Money
According to a recent article, 6 Common Website Mistakes That Cost Money are:
This one is best avoided at design-time, by including Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 1.0 Level A in the design brief, but if you’ve ended up with JavaScript-based navigation on your site (check by doing “View Source” and searching for the code for your home page link and so on - if you can find it, then it’s probably not javascript) and it’s based on some template system, a webmaster can probably do a whole-site edit to put the navigation links in the page properly - or at least add a useful <noscript> tag.
The structure of the website’s files and the structure of the link menus do not need to match, so if there’s a page that you feel is important, get your webmaster to add it to the navigation links across the whole site.
This usually happens for one of two reasons: one is inappropriately-parked domains, which is mistake 6 below and often fairly easy to fix; the other is a misbehaving web application, which you’ll need to get a programmer to fix.
You can do a simple test of your web application by starting at your homepage and following links to a particular page; then open a new browser window and try to reach the same page by different links (or a site search) and compare the address bars (the bit of your browser showing http://) - do they match? If not, you’ve got this problem.
You can use a good word-counter on the text to see how common different keywords and keyphrases, or use the “webmaster tools” section of some search engines to see what they’re focusing on.
Keyword-stuffing can be fairly easy to see. If you “View Source” on a page and there’s a large block of keyword-intensive text somewhere in it that doesn’t appear it when viewed in a browser, then it’s probably stuffing. Many sites regard stuffing as a sort of spam, so you don’t want to be found doing this.
To fix these problems, rewrite the page text appropriately.
Repeat your checks from problem 4 on a few pages other than the home page to discover whether you suffer from this. Also, see whether your website statistics show search engine visitors arriving at a variety of different pages (these are sometimes called “Entry Page” statistics).
If you usually use .co.uk, but you also have a .com domain, try visiting a random page on your website, then click in the address bar and replace the .co.uk with .com - what happens?
If the page is Not Found, then your domains aren’t properly redirected and you need a Redirect adding to the second one.
If the page displays but the address doesn’t change itself back, then your domains are probably pointing at the same webspace but aren’t properly redirected, which will mean you’re probably making mistake 3 above. Usually, the simplest way to fix this is with a conditional redirect. On Apache webservers, you can add a .htaccess file containing something like:-
RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^www\.yourdomain\.co\.uk$ [NC]
RewriteRule (.*) http://www.yourdomain.co.uk/$1 [R=permanent,L]
That even works on BT Business web hosting, by the way. If it doesn’t work, try asking your web hosting provider to enable mod_rewrite for you or ask them to suggest how to achieve the same result.
The above list of mistakes was published on Search Engine Land last week. The correction methods are all things used by my webmaster cooperative.
Syndicated 2008-08-21 12:58:56 from Software Cooperative News
Would Debian Lists Send Scunthorpe to Coventry?
I had a small chuckle at the delay to Debian Project news because the listserver filter treated it as if an event was on Free Ando Penis Land. Parties in Scunthorpe and Penistone may have a similar problem.
At least it got through eventually. If only Yahoo was as responsive as debian listmasters…
Incidentally, while trying a web search for “the Scunthorpe Problem”, I got an intermediate screen warning me that the results may contain “adult content” but none of the results looked like they were more than 18 years old.
Syndicated 2008-08-21 07:40:39 from Software Cooperative News
Would a Real Free Software Developer Group Bite Apple Like FSF Did?
I’ve been installing free software for library cataloguing onto Apples recently. It’s not been great (GNU/Linux is still easier and faster, in my opinion) but it has worked much better than older Macs.
As well as making servers that are finally getting easier, Apple lead the way in locked-down portable players, with their iPod and iPhone devices and iTunes service. Quite rightly, free software users campaign against Apple’s use of DRM/TPM (Technical Protection Measures). One of the rallying points has been Defective by Design (DbD), an FSF initiative since 2006. Long-time readers may remember that I took part in a DbD protest at an Apple Store in September 2006:-
“I noticed the huge till queue, which was attractive for three reasons: it had no security (I guess shoplifters rarely queue for the till), most of them are standing around waiting for something to read and they are almost certainly Apple customers, so who better to inform? After I rejoined the back of the queue a few times, a security man was watching it, so I moved off and chatted to people waiting to do hands-on tests on the upper floor for a bit [...] then I moved back to leaflet the till queue again. [...] Then, I got a bit bored and started putting the leaflets into Apple’s product leaflet dispensers (in front of Apple’s - no leaflets were removed), which soon got me rumbled.”
To me, that was fine: I dislike that type of store, which tries to look like public space, but is actually privatised and controlled. My resource use was minimal (one security man escorting me out and some Saturday kid probably “cleaned” the leaflet racks) but I passed information to many Apple customers, who are one of only two groups Apple must keep happy, ultimately.
Popey is a bit upset by the latest protest idea, which he describes as:-
“urging people to book slots at the Apple in-store “Genius Bar” to ask probing questions which they already know the answer to about their company policy on DRM and Free software. The ‘Genius Bar’ is an official Apple support avenue for their customers, and is a service provided inside many of their stores.”
It’s also been criticised by neuro and Pete along similar lines.
I agree. It’s wasting both side’s resources. Apple don’t really need to keep their staff happy (they can hire new staff) and it offends Apple customers and shareholders. It’s not even efficient: each unit of Apple employee time wasted costs a unit of DbyD worker time and who’s got the most resources there? What are FSF thinking? It’s stupid, even without the bad press it’s had.
So, this brings me in a roundabout way to answering
“I am aware of the Linux Foundation and the FSF and others, but how does SPI differentiate itself and its goals from those organizations?”
from why people don’t join SPI. In my opinion, a key difference of Software in the Public Interest is that it is managed by free software developers in a more-or-less democratic fashion. Even though I’ve failed in two elections, I still think it’s better than the alternatives. No project as unpopular as wasting Apple Store helpdesk time would never get backed by SPI, would it?
Syndicated 2008-08-20 07:31:55 from Software Cooperative News
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