I wish Nokia sold laptops. I really liked my Nokia 770, that I bought in December 2005. It’s running mostly free software, and is very Debianic. I wasn’t traveling with a laptop then, and it was a nice (and often cheap) way to get online. I also read a lot of books with the excellent FBReader. And I created MaemoDict, which never really worked very well I must admit. But, silly enough I was more focused on working on the CouchSurfing code base once I finally bought a laptop (that is seriously broken now).
I saw the announcements of the N810 a couple of weeks ago, and I was just in time to apply for Nokia’s developer program, which gives developers the possibility to buy the device for 99 euros instead of the usual price. So I’m very happy to receive that they accepted my application (”I want to have many dictionaries and encyclopedias in my pocket”). Now I’m actually reading Nokia’s entire announcement, and it’s friggin great! The N800 already had a faster CPU, a webcam, much more memory and a normal SD card, but the N810 is totally awesome, it comes with GPS and a real mini-keyboard! And, it’s great to see that Nokia has moved away from the proprietary Opera to a Mozilla based browser.
Because of the GPS it could be interesting for Citizen Logistics, and I’m really looking forward to see if it’s possible to get maps.hitchwiki.org on it!
Last year I did a BoF at Wikimania 2006 about The Wiki Party, the idea to start a political party. Today Anu sent me a link to a Facebook group with this same title. I jokingly told people “when I’m 40 years old I will start this party if no one else did before then”. Fortunately I won’t have to, anymore. Of course, it’s happenning in Finland. Olli Sirén was considering to run a campaign to the Helsinki City Council. From the main page of wikiparty.net:
Wikiparty is bringing new ways to do politics. It´s based on the idea of open politics. This site will be the international basis for this new party. The movement has started in Finland and will spread around the world in one form or another. Democracy is grown weak around the world. Voting percentages are in a steady decline.
Let’s put together a Wikiparty. A party that creates its political opinions in the same way that Wikipedia forms its articles. Let’s try to think ways to systematically create political force. This party could vote for its representatives to different political parliaments. These “agents” of Wikiparty would interpret the ideas of Wikiparty to real voting situations and pass the ideas of the community to the parliament.
This way we could challenge the traditional parties to a debate between weak and strong democracy. This kind of virtual community that aims to a real life political chance, could reach over national borders and grasp problems caused by for example globalization or climate change.
And yesterday I learned about Kaltura, a social-networky video editing tool, kind-of-a crossbred between wiki, and youtube with the promise to release their software under the GNU General Public license.
amylin and I have been crashing at Morgan’s (6 1/2) in Montreal since Thursday. We hitchhiked here from Northampshire, MA, where we stayed with Joe. We had left a bit later than planned so it was not easy to get to Montreal. There are hardly any cars driving from the US to Canada these days, not even Canadians, even though the CAN$ is almost exactly worth as much as the US$ these days. I booked progress in many projects, and it even looks as if Paolo and I might be able to finish our first paper next week. I also added some wiki integration to Morgan’s Crash project.
Tomorrow we’ll be leaving for Boston again.
Here’s another picture, actually taken without my presence, but it’s appropriate…
Last week I found a list of books available under Creative Commons licenses on the Creative Commons wiki. You can find some great titles, such as Wall Street, Capitalism 3.0 and Asterisk: The Future of Telephony. Some of my favorites were already on the list (Free Culture and Down and Out of the Magic Kingdom and We the Media) but I had to add Everyone in Silico and Producing Open Source Software.
I was also pleased to find out that the Semantic MediaWiki plugin is successfully used on the wiki. And that they use OpenID. Of course I couldn’t refrain myself from doing some structural improvements on the CC wiki. And yesterday I was promptly made sysop.
I have been a contributor on Wikitravel for a long time now. I was not too worried when Wikitravel was bought by Internet Brands (which has already shown interest in buying CouchSurfing). But I have been annoyed by the lack of database dumps at Wikitravel for a long time now. So I was very happy to stumble upon an alternative: Wikivoyage.
The project was set up by disgruntled admins of the German version of Wikitravel. I haven’t gone into the gory details, but it could be more than the lack of database dumps. My wild guess is that there was a cultural misunderstanding between Wikitravel, that was founded with an SF Bay Area Burning Man culture, and the Europeans dealing with policies created by them. It’s funny to see some more parallels here with CouchSurfing but ortunately Wikitravel was already a lot more open (using Creative Commons and mostly open means of communication) than CS so forking was quite easy.
Now let’s see if a little bit more pressure will induce Internet Brands to make the dumps available.
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