Thank you to the co-operative group Cambridge and East Anglia area for electing me as their member delegate to the national half-yearly meeting and annual general meeting. Please tell me what you d like me to do (such as comment here or there s a private contact form on my website), else I ll do what seems best at the time.
Thanks also to our co-op for allowing me the time to do this and for helping with the process. Co-ops do different. 
Here s a summary of what happened at this conference. Opening address. Keynote from Nick Hurd MP, @minforcivsoc. Lot less money around. Called canals and rivers trust the biggest social enterprise. Blames lack of large social enterprises on culture, leadership and access to capital. First Big Society Capital investments announced tomorrow. Questions (and responses) about what had changed in commissioning (determination?), something about accountability in health I think but I didn t hear (more public scrutiny), other models besides worker-led (gov is agnostic, but that s just the type of mutuals so far), and capital renewal (gov is challenging the banks with Big Society Bank).
This is going to get a bit long, so click through to our site to read what the other the speakers had to say and what that block of flats in the picture has to do with it
Still here? Good! Harriet Hounsell from John Lewis Partnership was next. What s the Right level of profit? Structure of the partnership. The registry seems like the member services function and a bit more. Partner suggestions make a real difference. Beliefs have been tested. Recession hit us.
Vivian Woodall, the co-operative phone, back to how it started. He knew people working for NGOs with high international phone bills. Bulk buy. Solid steady growth. Paid all tax. Living our cooperative values. Employee council and profit-shared. Adoption of new brand.
Questions to both on redundancies (debate openly, try to redeploy, ultimately division of responsibilities: managers manage staff levels, not members), and being rejected as too small to help other social enterprises (ask why? Try local level instead of head office?), plus praise for John Lewis.
Then there was coffee, workshops, lunch, workshops and coffee. I don t think I should report all of that, so a quick comment on the venue at Anglia Ruskin Uni Cambridge: is the Lord Ashcroft it s named after the same one who said it was legal to attack Iraq? Anyway Based on the workshops, I don t think our co-op will do SROI accounting any time soon (needs too much people time) and I m little the wiser on leadership. Some people are intrigued by collective management and cooperative working, though.
The closing keynote was Wayne Hemingway, formerly of Red or Dead and now of Hemingway Design. He gave a quick history of himself and of those two enterprises and a bit of an entertaining ramble around. He seemed very much from the business end and how to use business to benefit society, but I ve not really looked at his companies before. I probably should do, as they ve a regeneration project in Lynn (pictured: before Wayne).
Then it was the closing address, the thanks (yes, thanks to the workers and sponsors) and then time to head for the exit. It s a shame that some people who made good points during the keynotes (coop party!) left quickly instead of staying to chat.
Well this isn t Edinburgh. This is London calling. More from kohacon later.
Today I was at OKFN s bibliohack . There were several interesting projects there and it was a good opportunity to get back into coding, metadata and APIs after thinking about conference practicalities for too long.
BibSoup and its biblioserver software was my chosen hack. I didn t really make the most of it because I had to workaround broken wifi drivers that I hadn t noticed before, and I had to fix a broken java install that I did know about. BibSoup is mostly python and I think web.py, but it uses elasticsearch which is java. Oh and it s python 2.7 with virtualenv which is, erm, entertaining to get working on debian 6.0, as far as I can tell: I installed python2.7 from testing, backport python-virtualenv and I don t think anything broke.
The approach to a hackfest was very different to kohacon s. Whereas people at kohacon hackfest were gathered around tables, moving to the talks table(s) when there was a talk they wanted, bibliohack started off classroom-style and didn t gather into workgroups until after coffee. The so-called non-coders were shunted off elsewhere after the welcome to do I-don t-know-what (maybe Library Co-op will write about it) and weren t seen again until the day s end.
There were some nudging comments about being able to hack late into the night, which I m not sure is healthy if you ve done a full day. I left feeling a bit unsettled and disconnected from reality, although I got what I wanted from it playing with some new tech that we can maybe do good things with: thanks OKFN!
Probably by the time you read this, I ll be on the road to kohacon12. It s been a fun week or so with the final arrangements on top of our other planned work and some unexpected work too, but I think we ve done enough and it will all come together. (There are still a few places left if you d like to register, but not lots.)
The most nerve-wracking bit has been the sponsorship. Kohacons are free to attend and funded entirely by sponsors, which is great in so many ways. It s a bit scary for the host organisation(s), but I think the community has helped so much that it ll break even. We won t know for sure until the final reckoning in a month or so. One unneeded worry was Paypal freezing our account for a couple of weeks and sending us contradictory and absurd demands for information. Why isn t there an easier way to get money out of the USA (and Australia and NZ, actually) that isn t either slow (cheques) or expensive (wire)? Once again, I m left feeling that banks are being a big problem for business.
The best bit has been the spirit of the volunteers. Our co-op couldn t have done this without them. Some of them have gone a really long way to help metaphorically, bailing us out while Paypal was chewing up our time, and sometimes physically, flying around the world I ll be raising a glass to all of them, whether they re in Edinburgh or not.
So, next update should be from Edinburgh!
Stop using CAPTCHAs. It s time to switch to DLT: Design, Limit and Trapdoor.
[a certain website] 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!I wrote the above about two years ago and it s not getting any better. I ve written similar things over the last ten years, as have many others, and I ve always sought to avoid using physical ability tests as a way to cut down spammers. Why do people keep reaching for the reCaptcha non-captcha or things that use similar bad eyetests like Mollom? So most online messages may be spam, but those physical ability tests do nothing to test for spam. They re trying to detect computer submissions (the TCHA in CAPTCHA is meant to be Telling Computers and Humans Apart), but that s really bad when the computer is helping someone with a disability to access the internet. People from the home of the CAPTCHA describe access for sight and hearing-impaired users as an important open problem for the project (Luis von Ahn, Manuel Blum and John Langford. Telling Humans and Computers Apart Automatically. In Communications of the ACM). Until that problem is closed, CAPTCHAs should be considered defective and removed whenever possible. What webmasters should do instead is DLT:
Voting is open in the Debian Project Leader Elections 2012
So now I need to figure out who to vote for. This year I didn t take part in the discussions (all my spare time was bought, basically). The platforms are linked from the Debian Project Leader Elections 2012 page above and the key discussions were:
We, the undersigned, hereby state that we expressly and unequivocally oppose the advertising of proprietary software products on government websites. Such advertising breaches impartiality and encourages citizens to employ technologies that unnecessarily restrict their freedom. The role of government is not to support certain market participants and not others, particularly when doing so works to maintain the monopolies of global software companies. In explanations of how to use digital resources that they provide, government agencies should clarify that multiple methods are available, and favour technologies which do not restrict users digital rights; by linking to PDFreaders.org, for example. Free Software guarantees the users right to use (for any purpose), study (without secrets), share (with anyone), and improve the software that they use. Public institutions should publish their documents in formats that can be read with Free Software. Indeed, many Free Software applications exist for reading such documents. Governments should lead citizens to freedom, and encourage them to make use of these applications. Sincerely,Our co-op and 56 other businesses, 69 organisations and over 2200 individuals so far. How about adding your signature? Surely it s time for our governments to stop giving free adverts to Adobe? It was particularly annoying in the Digital Britain report, I thought.
Last week I went along to the food co-ops networking event at the Southville Centre in Bristol. It was a useful event and very inspiring and informative to meet people from so many other co-ops, as well as attend some useful workshops: the two I went to were Good meetings and communication and Starting and developing a food co-op, while there were also ones on funding and Simply Legal available.
There was some time for networking, as well as a relaxed end to the day which let me catch up with a few more people. I would have preferred a little more time for the workshops and a little less on case studies (every food co-op is different and I don t think any of the featured ones were quite what I was looking for), but that s a very minor thing and didn t really reduce the usefulness of the whole day.
Our co-op is a tech worker co-op and not a food co-op, so I didn t know that much about how to start one before the event. Now I ve got a much better idea of what I need to do when I eventually move back out to what may be a co-op desert in King s Lynn.
Are you a member of a food co-op or buying group? If so, what would you say about it? Were you involved in its start-up?
Readers who look at our blog itself (rather than one of the lovely sites that reprint our articles) may have noticed that you can now comment in either the usual WordPress way (Name/Email/Link) or by logging in with a social media profile from one of a large range of providers, including WordPress, Livejournal, Yahoo, Google and many more.
This uses the broadly-cooperative openID system. If you run a website that accepts reader contributions, you should allow comments with openid because it helps people to use their existing social media membership without you having to surrender any control to facebook, twitter, or anyone else (unless you choose to). You also don t have to ask your readers to weaken their security settings like with disqus (which requires javascript and third-party cookies).
The comment form on our site is powered by the openid plugin, together with our co-op s version of the comments-with-openid plugin which can be downloaded from our site. Please download them if you d find them useful for your WordPress site. (I d love to adopt the official comments-with-openid at wordpress.org because the previous maintainer doesn t answer anyone know how to do that? I m surprised it s not in the FAQ.)
Do you use some other platform? What tools have let you add openid logins to it? For example, Drupal has some openID support in its core distribution: what else is out there?
Software in the Public Interest, the mass-membership association that supports some great Free and Open Source Software projects, will hold a public board of directors meeting today, Thursday 9th February 2012 at 21:00 UTC. The day and time of SPI meetings has changed recently, so maybe different people can get to them now.
They re held online, on irc.spi-inc.org (the OFTC network). The agenda for the meeting is open and available at http://www.spi-inc.org/meetings/agendas/2012/2012-02-09/ and there s been a bit of discussion of back office support on the SPI email list.
I ll link to a meeting summary from the comments in this blog post after it happens.
Further to last week s blog post that mentioned this Saturday s (11 Feb) London Stop ACTA march, there s a map of anti-ACTA marches on Google s website (thanks to Martin Houston for the link).
There s also been a new Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement factsheet from European Digital RIghts (EDRI), as apparently there are a lot of misconceptions about ACTA. I don t feel that has been helped by some spectacular misdirection from the European Commission in its latest 10 Myths paper (linked from the EDRI factsheet) which is almost as interesting for what it doesn t mention (like sneaking ACTA through the parliament fisheries committee), what it misunderstands (like the near-uselessness of a non-commercial exemption to Free and Open Source Software or Creative Commons users), and the way it fails to rebut the final point that ACTA was done this way to avoid the oversight of the World Trade Organisation! I mean, if they can t even get it past the usually very pro-enforcement WTO, surely that should tell you something?
If you can, would you please go along and join your nearest march? Recent marchers seem to have been wearing stylised Guy Fawkes masks, but how would that be viewed in London?
Sometimes two campaigns that I care about a lot pick the same day to hold an awareness-raising drive. It happened again on Tuesday.
The one I took part in was advertising the Stop ACTA London Protest on Sat 11 Feb. The Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (#ACTA) is a plurilateral international agreement on enforcement of so-called intellectual property rights copyrights, trademarks and so on. It ll have major implications for freedom of expression, access to culture and privacy. It will also harm international trade and stifle cooperation. (More background at EDRI or a fairly large AJE page thanks to Occupy Bristol for the AJE link.)
So the one I didn t support at the time was the Move Your Money UK launch day. That s a great idea too, suggesting that if we, the 99%, are actually unhappy with the big banks and their titled leaders, we should move as much as possible out of those banks and into financial institutions that we control. As you might expect for someone whose first memory of mutuals is a trust account at the local building society, I support that too. I still have building society accounts, as well as banking with the co-op bank and recently joining my local credit union. I ve moved my money. Why don t you?
I didn t try to support both campaigns simultaneously on social networks because I thought it would reduce the number of people who saw my message. I backed the ACTA protest because a lot of my networks were already discussing Move Your Money and I thought Stop ACTA would benefit more. Was that the right decision? Who can tell? What would you have done?
And now a slightly longer than usual rant: The problem with the o2 network disclosing mobile browsers phone numbers that I repeated 2 days ago (and it appeared on our co-op website) snowballed yesterday to the point that it was on the short bulletins from ITN, BBC, IRN and probably many more. And then o2 fixed it. Good!
The reply claims that it s only since 10th January which is rather at odds with other claims that it has been happening since at least March 2010 in some situations.
I started buying from o2 in December. I was using Three, but their network where I stay in Norfolk isn t reliable and you can t just buy a device in a shop for The Phone Co-op. The dongle from o2 is a recent Huawei USB device that just worked in debian and was fairly easy for me to get working in Ubuntu. There s space in it for a memory card, so maybe I could boot from it but that s an idea for later.
The o2 deal is OK but not great, and the included wifi is nowhere near as good as it looked: when it says it includes BT Openzone that doesn t include any of the BT Openzone-H hotspots that are much more common. You re only allowed to register one device for wifi, so no using your phone, tablet and laptop at different times!
I can t believe it s legal to advertise that as unlimited wifi , but o2 is still a better offer than access to BT Openzone-H hotspots at 39/month (yes, that s the price for wifi-only ).
Ultimately, I think the problem is that there s a rubbish choice of mobile (wifi or 3G) internet access providers in the UK. It s a completely and utterly failed market, so you need to use Virtual Private Networks and similar tricks to protect yourself from the dysfunctional networks. My VPN meant my mobile number was safe: how about yours?
As luck would have it, I had already proposed a resolution about protecting customer privacy to The Phone Co-op (affiliate link) for our AGM on Saturday 4 February (if you re a member, let me know). We were trying to find a compromise wording and I don t think this little o2 scandal has hurt my proposal at all!
At least the phone co-op s mobile service is based on Orange s network, which wasn t affected. How does your network perform? There s an Internet Service Provider evilness test which might tell you.
I ve given my reaction to yesterday s announcement by the prime minister in my blog on the Co-operatives UK website. If you want to comment and can t do so there, comments can be left on this article too.
Once again, lawmakers are considering a stupid protectionist measure and this time it s the US, so it has some effects outside the US too.
Once again, some websites have taken themselves offline and caused great inconvenience to their supporters.
This is really annoying. Protesting about threats to take websites offline by taking websites offline is as stupid as protesting against a ban on kissing by not kissing. It just demonstrates that you can do without your websites/kisses if you must.
I feel it s much better to use websites to distribute information and call people to action, like this epetition for UK citizens and residents, or by asking your associations and suppliers to oppose these measures and their supporters.
Wikipedia is probably a bit to blame. Although it called its action a blackout, it wasn t one and there were still many ways to access its information. In fact, if you use NoScript, the banner didn t even display and there s only a line on the front page to say anything is happening.
The one that really annoyed me was identi.ca, which even turned off its API so clients just started spewing errors everywhere (I returned to my desk to a stack of retry questions). That stopped some of my websites from distributing a link to the anti-SOPA epetition because they read from my identi.ca stream how much other anti-SOPA activism was hindered?
I ve been told that Evan held a vote, but I didn t see it, so I didn t vote and I don t know the turnout or anything. How many people voted for the blackout because they use other sites like twitter more anyway?
Banners: yes; Blackouts: no.
Eli Sarre from Essential Trading speaking at C-SW Annual Conference
UWE Frenchay, Bristol: Venue of the RISE EGM
It s been busy at our co-op but I m never too busy to support calls for the freedom to install debian (or any other Free and Open Source Software Operating System) so I ve signed the FSF-led public statement on so-called Secure Boot .
This could be a feature deserving of the name, as long as the user is able to authorize the programs she wants to use, so she can run free software written and modified by herself or people she trusts. However, we are concerned that Microsoft and hardware manufacturers will implement these boot restrictions in a way that will prevent users from booting anything other than Windows.So please, read the full thing and consider signing it yourself. If you want to watch for further news on this topic, Matthew Garrett s Journal seems to be the bomb. Right, well, it s another busy week this week, so it might be the weekend before I find time to blog again, but posts will be a bit more frequent next week: watch this space!
Our co-op has put in a bid to bring KohaCon to Edinburgh in 2012. Edinburgh is a great Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) conference city, with libraries of national and international importance, a huge choice of hotels, restaurants and entertainments and good international transport links.
2012 is also a great time for our co-op to host, because it ll be the International Year of Co-operatives and our co-op s tenth anniversary.
So please, if you d like a library FOSS conference here next year, head over to KohaCon2012 voting straight away. I ll announce the result after the vote closes on Saturday 1st October.
I m listening to quite a few podcasts recently. Here are my current favourites:
Next.