We like guidelines. In our work, things like the Debian Free Software Guidelines, pep8 and Koha Coding Guidelines are quite useful. I follow guidelines for how I work, too. In addition to the financial reports required by government, our co-op produces an annual social report which we share with our members and other key stakeholders. Since 2007, the backbone of it is The Worker Co operative Code of Governance published by our national federation. In 2012, the Worker Co-op Council updated the code. I don t remember why an update was felt necessary, but as a side-effect of producing of our 2013 social report, I ve made a list of the changes:

1. Principle 1 is reordered, with information becoming the first point and membership offered to all becoming the last item.
2. Principle 2 sees democratic processes drop down the order, plus it loses the item on long-term planning.
3. Principle 3 has the point about reserves clarified and gains a last item about distributing surplus fairly.
4. Principle 4 loses its first item about regular reviews, the skills assessment point moves to principle 5 and it gains a build capability point.
5. Principle 5 gains items on replacing key members and skills assessment (from the previous section), while most points seem rephrased.
6. Principle 6 is reordered, active co-operation is split into distinct points about referring and collaborating and the point about actively sharing good practice is deleted.
7. Principle 7 is unchanged.

Are these good changes? Much of it seems like tinkering and maybe shifting emphasis the reorderings add little and make it harder to spot the changes while the lost points on long-term planning and sharing good practice are surprising. I would have preferred to see the items that seem mainly to promote the code itself and its publisher Co-operatives UK deleted instead. The additions and clarifications about surplus are good, though, and there s nothing new that I think should stop us adopting it. What do you think? Should all business behave this way?

The BBC coverage of the UCI Women Road Race World Championship wasn t starting until 3pm, BBC Radio 5 Live had football and Sports Extra was playing an advert loop (really BBC?), Eurosport wasn t covering the race at all, RAI Sport 2 had coverage which was fine while I was watching the TV, but my Italian isn t good enough to follow the commentary and I wanted to get some other stuff done. So the obvious thing is to have the computer watch for changes to the great http://live.cyclingnews.com/ ticker and read them out, right? Well, it was to me. Here s the script I used:

#!/usr/bin/rc
# Send updates to live cycling news reports to the speech synth
# initialise
url=http://live.cyclingnews.com/
if (~ $1 *:*)  
  url=$1
 
last=""
while (true)  
    # download the update and strip html - if you don't have html2text try
    # sed -e '1,/<ol/d;s/<br[^>]*>/n/g;s/<[^>]*>//g;s/ / /g;s/[[:space:]]*$//'
    next= () curl -s $url   html2text -width 9999   sed -e 's/^ *[0-9]*. //'  
    # look for some added lines in the update section - timezone will need changing for non-European races
    say= () diff -u < echo $last  < echo $next  
        sed -ne '/^+/!d;s///;s/**//g;/ CES*T/,/^ *$/p'   head -9  
    # feed them to the speech synth in reverse order
    echo $say '
      Race Update'   tac   spd-say -e
    # update variables, pause and loop
    last=$next
    # set this to a prime number over 60, like 61, 67, 71, 73, 79, 83, 89
    sleep 67
 

Any questions, comments or improvements? I could have done more, like not saying Race Update even when there was no update, but I wanted to start listening as soon as possible!

So I have upgraded my main workstation at last, but there are a few things I wanted to figure out. Some of these I found an answer to, but others I haven t and some answers open more questions: Where did debian-menu.menu go and why doesn t lxlauncher have the Debian menu by default anyway? Answer: It seems this is a combination of debian bug 333848 and bug 722563 which I reported yesterday in that lxlauncher doesn t use the debian menus. Workaround for now: install menu-xdg and hack the lxlauncher menu file. Why don t my xterm shells load .profile any more? Did I bodge that before without making a note? How do I stop kernel or initrd or whatever it is configuring the network with the dhcp settings at boot time instead of the better wicd ones that are available once the system is up? Continuing with networking, how did network-manager (which doesn t cope with my network configuration) get installed again? Answer: debian bug 645656 explains that debian is simply following a silly decision taken upstream and refers to attempts to make network-manager optional as the Crusade . Workaround: remove gnome and install its dependencies like gnome-core directly instead. Drawback: any new dependencies of gnome will have to be installed manually. Why is the audio capture volume at 10% by default and what s the best way to change that? I suspect this might be 682731 but that bug is untouched in over a year. I m tempted to remove pulseaudio, but gnome-core Depends pulseaudio so this is yet more hardware-breaking caused by gnome dependency changes and the only way out of this one would be to remove gnome-core and install its dependencies. Or maybe I should just give up and finally remove gnome because its packages have jumped the shark. I installed gnome to make the system easier to use and it s broken it in at least two ways now. One question that makes me hesitate is: why is gdm3 faster to start than lightdm?

There s been some media coverage at the start of this week about blocking child porn. Except it s not about child porn that s a trojan horse. People who want to access pornography that is already illegal (Protection of Children Act 1978) are probably already using security tools to hide their downloading and will be unaffected by this unless they re pretty stupid. And the announcement, about the same time as the predicted birth of a royal baby, third in line to the throne, seems like a cynical attempt to bury bad news taken straight from the Blair Government. That would almost be enough reason to oppose it: they don t want the media to look at this too closely for some reason. So what s this actually about? It looks like a way to force through widespread acceptance of the ability to censor most UK internet users by shouting won t somebody think of the children? If you doubt it, take a look at the list of filtered topics:

• Dating
• Drugs, Alcohol and Tobacco
• File Sharing Sites
• Gambling
• Games
• Pornography
• Social Networking
• Suicide and Self-Harm
• Weapons and Violence

So if they get away with this censorship, you won t be able to use Twitter or contact the Samaritans until you deactivate it. Except I suspect you will because they re pretty big and the Cameron Government won t want to pick a fight with them: it ll be the next Twitter and the next Samaritans, currently much smaller and unable to defend themselves, who get shut out of UK homes. So what can we do, besides explaining this and writing to our MPs? Are we better off joining parties who oppose this censorship, like the Pirate Party, or joining existing parties and trying to overturn their stupid support for it?

Cooperatives Fortnight 2013 starts tomorrow. Our co-op is taking part in a few activities this year. Come along and meet us, or find other events on the national website. This Sunday, I ll be riding 50 miles in support of Leonard Cheshire. Some of it is familiar roads, some of it new. I ll also be riding 12 miles just to get to the start line. If you re a UK resident and would like to guess my time and make a small donation, please give it a try on guess2give. Next Thursday 27 June, I ll be at Somerset Cooperative Services AGM in Taunton. See their site for further news. There might be something on Monday 1 July. To be announced later maybe. On Thursday 4July, mjkaye will be at Building Our Co-ops in Liverpool. See the national event listing for details. So what will you be doing for co-ops fortnight?

One of our co-op s clients asked me what I use for anti-virus at the moment and tips for what they should use on their Windows system. Well, flame me now, but I don t actually use any anti-virus at the moment: I rely on system security, firewalling and intrusion detection. The diversity of GNU/Linux software and I use some pretty odd stuff probably helps too. Even if I did want to run antivirus software, most of what s available for GNU is actually aimed at detecting and preventing transmission of Windows viruses. There are few real-world GNU viruses and fewer attack opportunities left open. Also, I prefer firewalling and fairly paranoid security settings because, like an antibiotic, an antivirus is only effective once the virus is already on your system somehow hopefully held in quarantine by the browser or email client and not actively malignant in the processor. There s quite a list at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_antivirus_software#Microsoft_Windows but I expect most of the purchase-free proprietary ones (labelled as Free or Freemium but you usually pay by watching adverts) will try to sell you upgrades, as that s how their production is funded. If you don t mind doing such things, you can disable the ads in at least one of them The only very free ones I found were Immunet (also funded by upgrades not sure if it s actually Free and Open Source Software) and ClamWin (donation-funded) which both use the same scanning engine. If I had to use Microsoft Windows, I think I d probably use and donate to ClamWin, install the (altruism-funded I think) Clam Sentinel alongside it and be rather cautious about what I downloaded or used online. I m a bit worried that it doesn t do great in reviews, though. What do/would you do? I don t really know about paying for security. The only paid product I ve really seen has been Norton and that seemed no better than the ad-funded ones, still getting in the way and always trying to sell upgrades. It also irks me that there s this huge market just to fix fundamental defects in Microsoft s product. There s a Microsoft Security Essentials add-on listed on Wikipedia, but it does fairly badly in this PC Magazine review and do any of them do intrusion detection? And finally, if you do decide to download something new, I strongly suggest getting it from a trusted source and/or triple-checking the link with wikipedia, a magazine review like CNET and a search engine. Don t just trust a search engine, because fake antivirus software is a big way of getting viruses and worse onto computers: there s even one calling itself Microsoft Security Essentials 2011 !

This Clevo laptop is a new machine and like a lot of new machines, not all of its hardware has drivers in the current stable release of debian. Happily, there is a driver for its rtl8723ae wireless networking device in the later 3.8 Linux kernel versions. So it s just a case of installing the package called kernel-package and following the instructions in it, to make a new linux-image package with the latest drivers in it. One small thing which tripped me up is that you usually need to write make-kpkg rootcmd fakeroot initrd kernel-image now. I forgot the initrd option at first.

After one week of campaign on -vote@, many subjects have been mentioned already. I m trying here to list the concrete, actionable ideas I found interesting (does not necessarily mean that I agree with all of them) and that may be worth further discussion at a less busy time. There s obviously some amount of subjectivity in such a list, and I m also slightly biased ;) . Feel free to point to missing ideas or references (when an idea appeared in several emails, I ve generally tried to use the first reference). On the campaign itself, and having general discussions inside Debian:

• have those discussions on a more regular basis, outside DPL elections (from lucas)
• use polls to measure consensus (from lucas, question from mjr)
• use a pre-arranged questionnaire that DPL candidates would fill in (from algernon)

On getting new users and contributors to Debian:

• discussion on the various steps: Debian user first contribution regular contributor DM/DD (from lucas)
• maintain a single list of paths in (from moray and lucas)
• have some neutral people to ask about tasks, and to get suggestions from in response to explaining their current skills and experience (e.g. http://www.debian.org/women/mentoring) (from moray)
• more local meetings, compile list of regional contacts (moray)
• increase Debian presence at local meetings. Advertise the Debian Events initiative that facilitates that (from lucas)
• provide Debian ambassador title for students, similar to what is done by Google or Microsoft (from moray)
• re-work on advertising gift tags (bugs suitable for new contributors) (from lucas)
• make sure teams have list of easy tasks in their wiki pages (from lucas)
• discussion on student projects involving Debian (from lucas)
• do mentoring inside teams, like DebianMed s MoM (from moray)
• participate in other internship-like programs, like Outreach Program for Women (link from lucas), or organize our own, which would also avoid some restrictions from GSoC (northern hemisphere only (point made by moray), restricted to students (ana))
• extend internship-like programs to other kinds of work (packaging, documentation, etc.)
• localize -mentors@ (mailing lists + IRC channels for DE, FR, ES contributors) (from lucas)
• organize IRC schools/seminars about e.g. packaging (from lucas)
• introduce more gamification in mentoring (from rra)

Infrastructure, processes, releases:

• improve infrastructure to help with team maintenance (e.g. PET) (from lucas)
• authorize NMUs for archive-wide changeovers such as /usr/doc -> /usr/share/doc (from moray)
• increase visibility of RC bugs squashers by listing them in Debian Project News (from lucas)
• provide inexpensive non-monetary gifts (free t-shirts?) to RC bug squashers (from lucas)
• re-open discussion on gradual freezes (from lucas), focus attention on more important packages by improving tools (from lucas) and removing packages earlier (from moray and lucas)
• involve upstreams and downstreams in RC bug fixing (from algernon)

Relationships with upstreams/downstreams:

• use Debian money to sponsor maintainers to attend upstream events (from lucas)

This list could be moved to wiki.d.o if others find sufficiently useful to help maintaining it.

This is basically a link-post to the Debian Project Leader election email discussions on GMANE s blog-style interface to debian-vote. After only 3 days of the 21, there s already a pageful, so if I don t start collecting links now, I ll probably miss some. Right or wrong, I ve grouped these into three topics: The Job

1. Why do you think you are a good candidate for DPL (10 Mar 2013)
2. How do you plan to represent Debian externally? (10 Mar 2013)
3. about a DPL board (12 Mar 2013)
4. DPL term duration (12 Mar 2013)
5. Work balance and traveling (12 Mar 2013)
6. trying to do awesome and risking to fail (11 Mar 2013)
7. To Lucas: how do you plan to push your ideas (12 Mar 2013)
8. All candidates quotes for the press if you win (13 Mar 2013)

Money

1. using debian funds for Debian s hardware infrastru (12 Mar 2013)
2. Usage of Debian s Money (12 Mar 2013)
3. Debian s relationship with money and the economy (12 Mar 2013)

Project Management

1. getting new people to Debian (10 Mar 2013)
2. Free Software challenges and Debian role (11 Mar 2013)
3. Development and technical issues and challenges (10 Mar 2013)
4. Are there problematic infrastructure or processes in Debian? (12 Mar 2013)
5. to Moray: encourage teams to take interns (11 Mar 2013)

So, what do you think are the key points or differences? Leave me a comment, or get involved in the discussions. Campaigning ends and voting begins 30/31 March.

The constitution of the debian operating system project says things like consistent with the consensus of the opinions of the Developers at various points but doesn t say how strong a consensus or how the project will test for consensus. I think those were mistakes, breaking a couple of the conditions for consensus. Wikipedia s understanding of consensus is even worse. Wikipedia seems to treat consensus as a synonym for unanimity. Its testing methods allow an infinite loop to form where the casual observer can t differentiate between a controversial proposal and consensus. I think those were mistakes. These famous-but-imperfect implementations frequently lead to misdirected rants which seem to misunderstand consensus as requiring perpetual bikeshedding. Apache s implementation is rather better and it may surprise you to learn that our co-op is mostly run by consensus. There are two key differences which I feel makes consensus work for us: we ve set limits beforehand on some decisions where we need to act fast where not making a decision would usually be the same as making a bad decision and our methods of testing for consensus are better. We test for consensus with secret-at-vote-time-but-published-after straw polls, or using Crowd Wise by email. I summarise Crowd Wise as follows: gather all ideas plus option 0 (do nothing) if possible, carry out a de Borda (preference) voting round 1, merge/amend/consolidate ideas, voting round 2 if needed. It does still work better if participants put their ego aside a little and co-operate, but it does put limits on non-co-operators. Anyway, as described in Xana/ xana2/ bamamba/ Why Russ is wrong, debian isn t exactly using consensus much at the moment, anyway. Should we try to fix its bugs? Do you know other projects where consensus is working?

My trusty Asus seems to have succumbed to graphic fault. I got an OS-free Zoostorm as its replacement, to avoid paying the MS tax. Zoostorm is one brand that Clevo laptops are sold under. It was actually a Clevo 7872-9040/A built Jan 13. I installed Debian 6 on it. The download button was easy to spot on the front page, but I actually used mini.iso so I could use a smaller usb stick. The first larger stick I tried was a dud and I m not sure where other sticks went in the move. The base installation went fine and most things went well, but the wireless networking and sound required an upgrade, but more on that next tech post.

Interesting stuff is happening again and I m doing a bit of travelling where I m not driving much, so I can write some blog posts. If this train stops bouncing quite so much! I think most readers are interested in technology and collaborative work, so it makes sense to alternate those two themes most of the time. So that s what I ll aim for, probably a few posts each week for the next few weeks. Let me know in the comments or our co-op s contract form if there s anything in particular you d like us to cover, else I ll start with my recent experiences installing Debian 6 on a new laptop and the fun of running a business at tax return time.

With immediate effect, our co-op is now at: 384 Lynn Road, Setchey, Norfolk PE33 0PD Please send any official post there instead of Somerset or London, because the forwarding is slow and I expect it to miss a few items. Our telephone numbers and email addresses remain the same, of course. It s still best to use the contact form on our website.

Contrary to http://blog.einval.com/2012/11/13, I ve just been and voted (four times, or 2 2 one for me, one as a proxy) for a police and crime commissioner. I agree with much of what Steve writes and more besides. It s a very bad election. But I voted for three main reasons: Firstly, parties I don t like will get their core vote out anyway. If we don t turn put, the election becomes more about party structures, less the popular wish. Secondly, democracy is imperfect, but it s the best we ve got. I ve interacted with two appointed police authorities and they re rubbish and they re untouchable/unaccountable. Thirdly, I expect policing to be a hot topic here if the government do actually try to build the incinerator that 65,000 people/90+% voted against. Best try to get a non-gov commissioner now, I think. So that s why I ve voted and encouraged other members of our co-op to vote.

Sometimes I felt at home at Cooperatives United, like at the wonderful fringe dinner at Eighth Day last Thursday night. Sometimes I felt overwhelmed by the flood, like at the cooperative party workshop on Friday morning. The workshop addressed the key questions: why do we want cooperative politicians, what could they do and what are the needs and challenges facing them? Personally, I felt the first is obvious and the answer is all the second. It s both frustrating (few ask why other movements want to influence politicians) and reassuring (no taboo topics) that the first question is asked. There were many fascinating answers to the other two questions from around the world. As so often with workshops, few hard conclusions were reached, but I think some interesting conversations were started there, which we might hear again in the future. What would I call the top challenge? Persuading open and transparent co-op members to join the party. I ve written about my difficulty with joining political parties in the past, as some forms of collective responsibility are against my beliefs and I m not sure that joining a small party will help anyone much, but I think I ll take another look at the cooperative party, all the same. The picture above is of the Welney washes, some miles south-west of Lynn. It s a stunning wetland environment, and it surprises me every time the train crosses the floods, as it did on the way to Manchester. And yes, I ve shoehorned a picture I liked into this article!

I sometimes ask other co-ops and social enterprises to publish things as web pages, PDFs, ODFs or basically any standard format instead of Microsoft Word Doc files. Doc files have the practical problem that they look different even in different versions of Microsoft Word, but also, Microsoft is not a co-operative (a private-sector firm oft accused of bring a monopolist, in fact!), whereas PDF, ODF and so on are more co-operatively developed, so I feel that we should support the better alternatives. The usual first move is to PDFs. I don t like them as much as web pages (it s a file to download and open in an app or plugin, rather than something I can just read without interrupting my flow), but the process is basically the same. Just upload a PDF where you would have uploaded a Doc. Occasionally, I get a reply saying that PDF is no better than Word because Adobe are also a private-sector supplier and therefore not much different from Microsoft (not as big, though?), while doc files are an ISO standard too. I m careful to suggest using ISO PDFs rather than Adobe PDFs. Although PDF started with Adobe, it was given to an independent ISO process (currently co-chaired by someone from Microsoft, which amuses me) and so software to read it has been developed by a wide range of people, including our co-op in a small part. You can find some non-Adobe software for reading PDFs at http://pdfreaders.org there is also alternative PDF creation software, such as that built-in to libreoffice, but I don t know of a good similar listing for them. Microsoft have only given part of Doc (called Docx) to the ISO process and there is a limited range of other readers for it, which suffer the same different on every version problem as Word as far as I ve seen. There s also the added complication that Microsoft Office reportedly won t comply with the Strict standard before Office 2013 More widely, Microsoft are so un-cooperative that they don t seem to want to share a marketplace with anyone else and have been hauled in front of regulators numerous times for monopoly offences. They seem to be on their way there again. So Adobe is not great (does its best to continue marketing and extending PDF as if it had sole control), but Microsoft is much worse. ISO ODF and web pages are other possibilities. The ODF standards are mainly developed by the democratic non-profit Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards, while web standards are mainly developed by an unincorporated trade consortium, the W3C. While they are not themselves co-operatives, co-operatives can be members of both of those. So, whatever the problem, please prefer to publish web pages, PDF or ODF files, rather than Microsoft Word Doc files.

So when I arrived on Thursday (ten minutes early despite a cancelled train, thanks to help from the cooperative fellow traveller mentioned last post), I was in time to go to a workshop on media cooperatives led by @theBoyler. It wasn t what I expected. It seemed to concentrate on the opportunity presented by the current awful state of news media companies in many countries and the technology-driven changes to their businesses. For example, WordPress is a viable way to start online first, then move into print later. There are already news co-ops in places where there would be no local news media. The challenge well be how to overcome what I d call spoiling or scorched earth tactics from departing media companies. Some local news media owners are looking for a way out. One obvious one is to turn a local title into a minor variation on a regional-or-worse service or publication, maybe by selling it to a bigger media business. That loses some audience but many will put up with it, so it avoids creating an obvious gap in the market for more truly local reporting. Much else was covered and the audience suggested tons of examples. I m not sure we reached many firm conclusions, but there seem quite a few examples to learn from (Morning Star, taz, ) and Dave Boyle s work is continuing

I m on my way back from Cooperatives United. I haven t quite posted as much as I planned (just a few microblogs/tweets) because the event was so much bigger and busier than I expected! So I m writing this on my (6 hour) journey home. We ve attended Congress before and it was nothing like that. I was expecting something maybe 50% larger than last time and this seemed more like 300%. I wonder if Cooperatives UK have some numbers Maybe it reflects the growing strength of the cooperative economy that they reported in the summer just gone. Anyway, I was pleasantly surprised on the journey from Norfolk. I made a brief informal travellers co-op with an actor from Micawber Theatre company (tickets on sale now for shows in Ipswich and London) to overcome the challenge of East Midlands Trains. Unprompted by me, he blamed the shocking service on the big train businesses being unaccountable to passengers. Maybe that s it. Cooperatives are accountable and people are ready for more responsible post-capitalist businesses. That s why coops are doing well now and Cooperatives United was such a lively event. I ll write more tomorrow. Now if you ll excuse me, we ve got to get off and change carriages because East Midlands Trains couldn t be bothered to tell us the train divides at Nottingham until long after we boarded!

Credit Unions are financial co-operatives where a community s savings are used to fund other community borrowing and both savers and borrowers can become members. Thursday 18 October 2012 is International Credit Union Day, as well as being in the United Nations International Year of Co-operatives. This year s theme is Members Matter Most which was suggested from Ireland. In the UK, there will be events including one at Westminster with speeches from Damian Hind MP, Chair of All Party Parliamentary Group on Credit Unions and Simon Hughes MP, its Vice Chair. I m a member of my local credit union. I can pay in at my bank or any PayPoint and withdraw by bank transfer. If you re fed up with the fat cat plc bankers, there s no better time to Move Your Money in general and Find Your Credit Union (international visitors, start at WOCCU) in particular, is there?

So you ve got lots of shiny spam-detection software (not eyetests or similar rubbish) installed but are still getting some spam on your email and your website? Why aren t your spam detectors and preventative measures effective at dealing with it? Basically, the spam detectors are pretty effective, but it s a problem of scale. The underlying problem is that there s so much spam now something like 73% of email is spam just now (I suspect the web is worse). I expect much of the rest is legitimate robots too, like newsletters, automated billing, or notifications about social network activity. So, we want to trap the spam, while letting humans and good robots through. We can t use physical ability tests because there are both human spammers who are paid to spam trickier sites manually, and people like me who fail things like Google s human test because we use technology to overcome our physical limitations: there are now robots that are better than me at voice recognition or passing eyetests! We try to design websites so that the return on investment for spammers is too low (don t give untrusted users outgoing links automatically, basically). Even so, when we re using some popular software like WordPress, our site settings don t give them a return, but most stupid automatic spammers don t bother to check and still have a go. After that, the main things we re trying are rules of thumb to trap spammers (which is usually enough to filter out 90% or so) and to group sites together in informal co-operative spam-fighting networks like blogspam.net, so that once a spammer is spotted, they should get blocked on lots of sites (which blocks a bit over half of the remaining 10%). Sadly, the rest gets shown to humans for decision. Real comments are so few and far between now that we really don t want to risk turning real people away and killing discussions. We used to go after spammers who got shown to humans, but there are now too many spammers and too many service providers who won t kick spammers off their services: the spammers pay them and we don t: all we could do was waste their money in support, so they stopped offering any support to non-customers. Is that a flaw in the co-operative nature of the Internet? Can we overcome it? Wish I knew