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Meeting with some very important people, and using Four Communications‘ super-fast wireless hotspot. Brr, it’s a little bit chilly though …

Blackboard’s patent is being reconsidered. The prior art built up following the original lawsuit and presumably cited in this request is not inconsiderable, so this is good news for Moodle and the like. I’d be very surprised if the patent wasn’t withdrawn.

Of course, software patents as a whole are probably unviable. This is a wider issue than VLEs, and not one that’s going to lie down quietly considering the amount of money involved. Consider the argument ongoing – but this is another example in a long line of patents that can’t be adequately defended.

As an aside, Groklaw is an excellent site for keeping track of software-related legal issues. Check out the Hallowe’en memo, verified authentic at last!

http://theinternetispeople.com/2007/01/29/hillary-clinton-asks-yahoo-wealthy-middle-class-americans-reply/

As reported over at Bokardo, a couple of days ago Hillary Clinton posted the following question to Yahoo Answers:

“Based on your own family’s experience, what do you think we should do to improve health care in America?”

At the time of writing there are over 37,000 replies to this – something I find both troubling and gratifying. (Search Engine Journal notes that this volume of replies makes Yahoo Answers an excellent platform.)

I find it gratifying because, quite honestly, when was the last time you saw a politican ask so openly about a major issue? This is a great way to both poll for opinions and to make a show that she will listen to voters – something that bodes well for the next national election (although I don’t, alas, think she could win).

I find it troubling because of the Internet usage demographics in the United States. Although it also notes that the digital divide is slowly closing, this article notes that not everyone is represented on the Internet.

Differences along income and education lines are also large. Those in urban areas, those who earn more money and those with more education are far more likely to own computers and have Internet access. One study found that 70 percent of households headed by someone with a post-graduate education had Internet access, compared to only 30 percent of households headed by someone with only a high school education.

When Hillary Clinton asks the userbase of Yahoo Answers about healthcare, she’s largely excluding the people medical policies affect the most: people who can’t afford to get on the Internet. It’s a nice idea, but it’s worth remembering that while technically the web is a democratic medium, it’s not a socially democratic medium until everyone’s on it. Will that ever happen? Probably not. She would be better off getting opinions from the street.

We made a decision today to scrap the email groupware software we’d been using – SproutIt Mailroom – and move over to something hosted on our own servers. We’d struggled with some of their features in the past, but the straw that broke the camel’s back turned out to be an upgrade to an AJAX-based system yesterday; in an effort to make it fancy (it auto-detected whether you were on or offline and acted accordingly) the developers appeared to forget basic principles of usability. Or functionality. In fact, it refused to send any email at all.

Luckily, we kept a backup of all our support email, and it turns out a number of emails slipped through the cracks and weren’t replied to at all. Not a massive number, but any at all is more than we’d like. We would like to apologise to anyone who’s been waiting for a reply from us, reassure everyone that we’re now using a much more robust system that we have full control over, and warn anyone else from using SproutIt Mailroom.

The problem with AJAX is that it isn’t actually completely reliable; sometimes the asynchronous messages that power the technology never reach their intended destination, and the Javascript and server-side scripting needs to be able to deal with that. There are also countless usability, browser and functionality issues – how do you link to something on an AJAX system that never reloads the page? We would never, ever build an entire system that depended on it – there always needs to be a fallback to traditional web processes. And we would certainly never launch a system that wasn’t fully tested on paying customers. Free betas are one thing; a level of flux is expected. A paid service, particularly something like group mail, is mission critical and should be treated as such.

Meanwhile, I’ve been running Kubuntu using VMware Player for a couple of weeks, and I love it. It’s a really useful testing environment (the KDE web browser, Konqueror, has the same engine as Safari, which allows us to ensure everything works great for Mac and Linux users at the same time). Because only the VMware Player is free, I needed to create my own configuration file; luckily, John Bokma has written this great tutorial, and has even kindly shared a selection of empty virtual machine disks to play with. I now keep Linux in the background and flip back and forth between operating systems many times a day. If only I could get the same thing running with Mac OS …

After an easy upgrade process, Elgg.net is back online. We’ve recoded the way the front page works on the backend – which won’t make much difference to you, but makes maintaining the site much easier for us.

So what can you expect from this upgrade?

The first thing you’ll probably notice is the new toolbar, which remains constant across everybody’s themes. We’ve received a lot of comments over the years that the old-style tabs were confusing; the toolbar replaces these. It’s yours: clicking the buttons at the top of the screen will always bring you back to your pages. You can trust links below there to belong to whoever owns the page you’re currently looking at.

We’ve expanded our codebase to allow for all kinds of different file folders. Currently we’ve enabled the default (the one you’ve always used) and a photo gallery. You can create new photo gallery folders in the usual way, or convert your existing folders into photo galleries – just select ‘photo gallery’ under ‘folder type’ when creating or editing. We think this is a much better way to showcase photographs, diagrams or other images you might have lying around. Of course, this being Elgg, you can also upload any other type of files to your photogallery; they’ll be displayed underneath. (See my photo galleries for examples.) There will also be more folders added over time – podcast jukebox, anyone?

If you enjoy writing your own themes, you’ll be pleased to see that the template structure has been dramatically simplified. Documentation will be released shortly on our forthcoming support site, which will be out soon. We’ll also be quietly releasing a number of themes over time – and would love to see some that you’ve designed. If you’ve made a great theme that you’d like other people to be able to use, let us know!

Because we’ve changed the template system, we’ve disabled your current ones. We’re aware this is a drag, and have left them online (albeit in a renamed form) so you can adapt them if you like, or retrieve any links etc you may have hardcoded into your sidebar. You shouldn’t switch back to them; they probably won’t work at all, and will definitely look very odd indeed. This was a hard decision to make, but it needed to be done, and we decided we’d rather do this now than later down the line.

There are plenty of other changes under the hood that make things more efficient, with more to come. We hope you enjoy them; as always, let us know if you have any feedback or potential improvements. Cheers!

Paul Allison has uploaded a couple of really fascinating videos of K-12 students using the Elgg site on Youthvoices.net over at Youtube.

Here’s the latest. Students are creating podcasts, embedding videos, writing blog posts and more.

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Exciting stuff!

Economic impact of open source software on innovation and the competitiveness of the Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) sector in the EU (PDF link) is worth a read, particularly for page 216:

The reason it seems desirable to promote the use of FLOSS [Free/Libre/Open Source Software] in education (ICT education and more generally all educational activities that have a bearing on the cultural relationship with information technology) is threefold:

1. It is obviously likely to have a strong impact on the future usage of FLOSS products and the build-up of the related skills.

2. It builds up essential ICT skills rather than the knowledge of specific applications from specific vendors (leading to the current locked-in-for-life situation, where vendor lock-in applies not only to organisations but to individuals who have typically not chosen their software but been provided it for free by schools).

3. It is likely to install an attitude towards information technology that favours the ability to create and actively participate rather than just consume – i.e. the scenarios under which FLOSS is most likely to deliver a strong positive economic and societal impact, by encouraging collaborative prosumer usage and a reflexive attitude on usage and the technology that supports it.

The report goes on to suggest that an active open source policy in educational institutions will encourage students to be proactive in the software community, and critical about the tools they use.

As ICT becomes more and more important in all aspects of our lives, this is very important. Users have to know a little bit about what they’re using, and be able to pick and choose their tools; these skills will make them more useful and desirable in a technology-dependent economy. Open source is the only mechanism that allows users to get directly involved and see how a product is developed, as well as to influence its development according to their requirements and skills. This collaboration – a more solid connection between users and developers – is going to directly lead to better software.

The codebase of FLOSS applications with “reasonable quality control and distribution” has been doubling every two years for the past eight years, and is projected to continue. By 2010, 32% of all IT services could be open source related, which is a huge number, particularly when you consider the large market share currently held by the likes of Microsoft. Already, 20% of software investment is into open source.

But in many ways, education is lagging behind. It was interesting to see BECTA’s list of approved providers for UK schools, none of which provide open source solutions, or last year’s advice that Leicestershire schools don’t use Moodle. When will policymakers learn to look beyond their contributors and the commercial software vendors who court them, and do some due diligence on the technology itself? Open source is here to stay, and it’s the future of software development.

I’m really happy with the way the Elgg development mailing list has been shaping up lately – so far this month we’ve had lots of discussion of everything from how we do the Elgg.net front page through LaTeX plugins and speed enhancement.

You can sign up or look at the archives over here.

Apple has some of the least forward thinking environmental policies in the industry – whereas manufacturers like Dell offer recycling schemes and have reduced usage of known toxins, the folks in Cupertino continue regardless. Computers are becoming one of the bigger polluters, and it’s nice to see that Greenpeace are calling them up on this.

Hopefully Steve’s reality distortion field won’t lay this one to waste. Via Amy Allcock.

Over at the Yahoo Developer Network, they’re asking members what’s on their wishlist for 2007. Some people are asking for better or limitless APIs; some are asking for how-to screencasts; others for free T-shirts. My request would be for a standard, open API developed in conjunction with the wider web community in order to turn it into a truly interchangable environment that operates more like the desktop software model. (But more on that later.)

In a similar vein, I have a number of questions for you to answer in your own blog. Call it a meme.

What’s on your Elgg wishlist for 2007?

My answer to this is obvious; see the roadmap. Ultimately, I want it to become an extensible, customisable framework for social networking applications both in and out of education. In doing so, I want to remain true to our roots and ideals (while recognising that this isn’t an act of charity).

Dave and I are also seriously talking about the next iteration of the main Elgg site, which will be a big improvement for anyone wanting to get involved with the development community. Making this as vibrant and collaborative as possible is my main goal for 2007.

What’s on your Web wishlist for 2007?

Perhaps because money is flowing again, the Web has actually stalled in terms of conceptual development of late. There are lots of cool sites out there, but that’s all they are: cool sites. Some of the most interesting ideas are coming out of the larger corporations, which don’t have to compete for vencap money; think Adobe’s Apollo Project, which blurs the barriers between the web and the desktop. Most smaller players have their minds set on becoming the next Youtube rather than thinking outside the box and creating something truly innovative.

The Web itself may turn into what a host of technologies, most recently Java, failed to be: the standard that unites people worldwide through a unified, but adaptable, interface. It’s not there yet, but things like OLPC bring it closer. The one thing that could really scupper it is legislation introduced by politicians who either don’t understand or actually fear it. This year net neutrality will play out; I hope the right decision is made.

What’s on your life wishlist for 2007?

I’m trying for a better balance this year, which should both benefit my personal and work lives. Unfortunately, Christmas has taken its toll, so I’ve also got a stone of weight to lose. And it’d perhaps be handy if my hair would stop slowly falling out …

What’s on your world wishlist for 2007?

Peace and tolerance. Hey, I can hope.