Janet Haven

Ron Deibert, director of the Citizen Lab at the University of Toronto, has written a very useful article for the non-technical crowd on country-level internet filtering. "The Geopolitics of Asian Cyberspace", was published in the December issue of the Far Eastern Economic Review. For those who are new to the topic or would like a broad overview of the level of filtering that happens regularly, the corporate players facilitating that filtering, and a few projects that are trying to track censorship around the world, it's a good read.

Professor Deibert also showed up on NPR last week, talking about the Citizen Lab's new circumvention software, Psiphon. Unlike other circumvention tools like Tor or TorPark, Psiphon works by harnessing social networks and establishing individual nodes of "host" computers that allow internet access to known users; Deibert mentions in the interview that they had had 30,000 downloads of the software in the first week.

I wish the interviewer at NPR, Bob Garfield, had asked somewhat more pointed quesitons about specific differences between these tools and the theory of how they work -- there are a number of tools out there, and one may be more appropriate than another depending on geography, political situation, and your access to networks outside your own country.

With perfect timing, a correspondant pointed me to Peacefire founder Bennett Haselton's article on Slashdot last month that does some of that work. Bennett is generally annoyed with the attention the "politically correct" Psiphon has received in the media (as opposed to the more suspicious attention Peacefire's similar circumvention tool, Circumventor, received a few years ago). Beyond that, though, he provides a useful 101 on circumvention tools and how they work, as well as offering some commentary on how useless the tools are if a citizenry is apathetic about using them. He says:

This is not to downplay the enormous good that programs like Tor, Circumventor and Psiphon can do in bringing free speech to the people in censored countries who want it. But it's easy to forget that those often do not comprise a large part of the population....The moral is, no matter how much your movement believes in its efforts to help oppressed people, you can't just assume you'll be greeted as liberators (ahem).

Good to keep in mind.

Update: Professor Deibert pointed out another very useful article on Psiphon, this one which talks about Psiphon's aims -- that is, not a be-all end-all anti-circumvention tool, but a way for individuals to help other individuals through direct, personal connections.

Psiphon is not designed to solve all secure Web browsing dilemmas. Rather, it is a means by which those in uncensored countries can assist specific individuals in censored countries access blocked Web content -- without placing any technical (or personal security) burden on those individuals.

It's important to reiterate the point that, as with all technologies, this is not a one-size-fits-all game. There isn't an "unbreakable" anti-censorship tool; all of them can be defeated in one way or another. The crucial issue is to understand the strengths and weaknesses of the options well enough to choose one that offers the least risk given the environment.

Posted by Janet at 11:44 AM | Permalink | Comments (54)

The O'Reilly gang is putting on a new conference this year called Tools of Change for Publishers. The Civil Society Communications proejct that I run is, of course, very interested in "tools of change" -- although within the non-profit sector rather than in publishing. The incredible pace of change in the technology space means that we face unending difficulty in educating organizations in useful technology solutions; once you step outside the world of tech bloggers, Wired magazine, and conferences where no one will show up unless wifi is provided, you find that most people flinch when you cheerfully mention "web 2.0", or the seemingly more user-friendly "read-write web". I was struck, therefore, by O'Reilly's explanation for throwing the conference:

For publishers, these shifts are taking place so rapidly that it's challenging to keep current--let alone create new, profitable opportunities.

The first O'Reilly Tools of Change for Publishing Conference is being launched to raise the level of technology knowledge and discourse in the publishing industry and to provide a meeting ground for those leading the charge into the future of publishing.

It's nice to know that confusion and frustration over integrating innovative technology solutions are not only limited to the sector I work in; on the other hand, once you extrapolate outwards from a single industry (publishing, or the non-profit world) to all industries, you get a lot of confused people. From there, cube that number to include everyone who isn't yet online, or is only online in the most rudimentary way. We've got a lot of work to do to make this stuff more useful and more understandable.

Posted by Janet at 02:18 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

One more note on communications resources for the developing world -- some useful new publications have hit the stands over the past few months:

IT46+, a consultancy has released The Voip Primer: Building Voice Infrastructure in Developing Regions. Written, edited, reviewed and translated by a crack team of wireless for dev's who's who, the book is useful not only for technologists, but also for people who simply want to have a better sense of what VOIP means in the developing world context.

Our friend the stripey book, aka, Wireless Networking for the Developing World, now in French.

APC's ItrainOnlinewireless networking materials in Arabic.

And finally, an orange stripey book, How to Accelerate Your Internet: A practical guide to Bandwidth Management and Optimization using Open Source Software, from the BMO Booksprint Team.

Really, it's not as geeky as it looks!

Posted by Janet at 02:58 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

As it turns out, if wireless networking on the African continent is one of your favorite things, spending your weekend in the basement of APC’s London partner GreenNet with forty of your closest collaborators (and friends) can be a grand old time. This past weekend, I was lucky enough to join a group of African entrepreneurs, “wireless for dev” geeks and trainers, connectivity-focused civil society organizations and international business folk, along with a sprinkling of donors for a meeting focused on the next steps in rolling out rural wireless networks in Africa.

Much ink has been spilled over why wireless networks are good for African connectivity, so I won’t rehash too much. (For a media-focused brief on this, see Panos London's "What's stopping a wireless revolution?"). Suffice to say that wireless connectivity leapfrogs a lot of the infrastructure issues that plague developing countries, like a lack of fiber that has hastened the adoption of communications technologies in the global north; it also means that a single operator with limited equipment can provide connectivity to many more people on an ad-hoc basis than overland connectivity would allow. Generally, the people I work with believe more connectivity at lower rates is a basic building block of both economic growth and social justice movements.

Despite the good work that many people have done in this area over several years, and the significant support that donors (including my own employer, the Open Society Institute, and others like Canada’s IDRC) have brought to the table, rural wireless is still nascent in Africa. The two-day meeting, organized by the Association for Progressive Communications, sought to come up with concrete answers to the question: what more could this group be doing bring wireless to more communities across the African continent?

As with all technology issues in the developing world, the barriers to rollout of wireless networks are varied and require people with quite different skills to address them. Policy regulations are one issue; in some African countries, it’s illegal to operate a wireless network. In other African countries, there simply isn’t any legislation to deal with the issue; monopoly telecoms control the internet market, and see no advantage in allowing an upstart technology to bring other players to the table.

Beyond policy, though, technical and human issues prevent speedy uptake. This weekend, one group discussed the need for business plans and models for Wireless ISPs (WISPS) and training or partnerships targeted at certain key groups: telecenters, schools, youth groups, and community radio stations.

Another group looked at software issues: if one were to aggregate the technology needed to run a WISP—from mesh networking software to billing systems that worked in a world without credit cards—what would it look like? Building off the Tactical Technology Collective's popular "in-a-box" idea, everyone around this table agreed to work towards a "WISP-in-a-box".

A third group envisioned future book sprints to produce complementary manuals to “the striped book”, the affectionate name for the current bible of the wireless for dev movement: Wireless Networking in the Developing World. Yet another group discussed what a more formalized community of wireless actors focused on experience sharing and project tracking could achieve.

And so on. Other issues we didn’t touch on extensively this weekend prevent wireless networking from taking hold faster: procurement of hardware, for instance, is a huge and costly problem. Not only are the bespoke solutions developed for northern users often missing the robust physical features needed for deployment in a developing world context, but import of hardware can be tremendously expensive. (An African colleague mentioned to me this week, by way of example, that in Malawi assembled computers are taxed at 0%, but hardware parts are levied with an import duty of 55%, a huge amount of money for the DIY set to absorb.)

One thing I really liked about this meeting was the view of Africa as a single continent, rather than two continents: sub-Saharan and North Africa. Participants came from Uganda, Kenya, Nigeria, and South Africa, as well as Egypt, Tunisia, and Morocco.

The other point about this meeting I was glad to see (credit APC and IDRC for this) was a distributed approach to problem solving. Rather than knocking heads together for a weekend to come up with an ambitious (and questionably implementable) Grand Plan, the meeting focused on achievable ideas that individuals could take forward with a small group of like-minded collaborators. I’m almost always a fan of the small-pieces-loosely-joined approach, and this time it produced some excellent ideas. Fortunately, there were some very smart people with us this weekend who are interested in taking up the harder work of making them happen.

Lots of people took pictures this weekend, but I was unfortunately not among them, so as soon as I find the Flickr pool I'll link to it.

Full disclosure: My employer, the Open Society Institute Information Program, provided partial funding for this meeting.

Posted by Janet at 02:06 PM | Permalink | Comments (3)

Our friends over at the Media Development Loan Fund’s Center for Advanced Media Prague (CAMP) have released version 1.1 (“Freetown”) of Campcaster, the long-awaited open source radio station management software. Using Campcaster, community radio stations can manage broadcasts, archives and networking. CAMPer Doug Arellanes is heading to Freetown, Sierra Leone to work with the Cornet network of community radio stations on installing the software and training staff.

And there’s more Campcaster on the horizon…“Kotor”, 1.2, is planned for deployment in Montenegro. In the next version, Campcaster will be integrated with Campsite, the open source online publishing suite developed by (you guessed it) CAMP.

Although Doug and Sava will probably kick me in the shins for saying this, software development is the easy part, relatively speaking. The harder part of software for the non-profit sector is deployment wthin the civil society organizations that needs it, and making sure that staff members have appropriate hardware, training, connectivity, electricity, ongoing support, and access to upgrades and bugfixes. Hats off to CAMP for getting Campcaster to 1.1, and for working in the field with community radio networks to get it in use. Can’t wait to hear how things go in Freetown. Good luck!

Campcaster v. 1.1 press release

Full disclosure: The Open Society Institute Information Program, my employer, is a funder of the the Campcaster software.

Posted by Janet at 07:17 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

For those of you that asked, yes, last week's reinstallation of my Thinkpad's innards was entirely successful. Fabulous Joe did a fabulous job, and it's all running 100x better than it was. Of course, the DRM on my iTunes is screwed up (the punitive measures targeted, for some reason, at the recently purchased Beach Boys album), and I think I'm going to have to pay again to get FeedDemon, my RSS reader, back since I've lost the key to it...but otherwise, all is well.

And of course I'll take this opportunity to wax philosophically about how my small situation reflects a larger issue in the non-profit world. More and more, funders without a specific interest in technology issues are willing to fund technology projects with NGOs, and almost always this includes equipment purchases. This is a great trend -- it means that communications technologies are, in international development slang, being "mainstreamed" into programming, which is a fancy way of saying that both funders and NGOs see that technology often plays a central role in all kinds of projects and NGO work. One of the things that organizations often forget to budget for, or that donors aren't willing to fund, is ongoing tech support. However, as anyone who works in an office knows, life without tech support, if you're expected to use a computer to do your work, is well-neigh impossible. When the computer stops working well, due to viruses, windows registry problems, spyware, or system failures, the average person will simply have to stop working on that computer until an expert shows up. Same thing with software, both on server and client side -- if an organization is hosting their own infrastructure in any way, they're definitely going to need someone available to solve their problems now and again, or they're not going to be very effective.

What most organizations we run across do, particularly those in the developing world, is work with "accidental techies" -- that is, self-taught technologists who are somehow related to the organization, either by blood and friendship ("my brother's girlfriend's cousin's schoolfriend") or by issue interest (a volunteer operating within a community organization, for instance, who lives down the block from their office), or have become the designated "person with some technical know-how" within the organization because they know a little bit (or a lot) more than everyone else. One of the issues we struggle with at the Civil Society Communications initiative is how best to increase the skills and resources of the accidental techies of the world -- because most of them are working for love rather than money (or very little money), and often are helping a number of organizations, accidental techies often don't have the time to keep up with the latest in software for NGOs, localized open source resources in their own languages, web 2.0 tools useful for advocacy, as well as the basics around databases, web-publishing, and so on. Projects like NGO in a Box, the Social Source Commons, and APC's range of skills-building material go a long way towards providing resources for this group, but nothing beats hands-on workshops that put new ideas to use in a real environment. The trick, of course, is both seeking out the accidental techies in a country, and convincing an organization's funders that tech support is much more than a peripheral expense in organizational budget planning.

Posted by Janet at 07:09 AM | Permalink | Comments (63)

My trusty x40 Thinkpad has been acting up recently. Enough to be annoying, not enough to admit there might be seriously wrong and call in the experts. Also, I've been traveling for the past month, and so I tried to solve my problems by cleaning viruses, updating programs, installing security patches, and performing the personal talismanic activities that everyone with a quirky computer works out through trial and error (in my case, it's compacting my inbox in Thunderbird every day or two, only starting up my RSS reader at certain scripted moments, and never, ever opening a PDF if there are other programs running).

Nevertheless, it's gotten bad, and now I'm back in the office. So I called Fabulous Joe this morning to come take a look, and then went out to run an errand. When I got back, I found this note on my computer:

"Janet: Your computer definitely has to be reinstalled. Call me."

This, I think, is the definition of a Post-It note to be avoided. Seems I'll be offline for a day or two this week while my computer gets its appendix removed, hosed off, and then sutured back in place.

Posted by Janet at 02:41 PM | Permalink | Comments (83)

In Kiev today, and I spent an interesting hour with three of the leaders of UAFOSS (Ukrainian Free and Open Source Software). They're involved in the now-familiar struggle to acquaint people with open source software, to convince the government to adopt it (or at least consider it in what are widely thought to be corrupt tendering processes), to encourage use in schools, libraries, and businesses. What's slightly unusual, according to my companions this afternoon, is that there are still laws on the books in Ukraine, holdovers from the still-looming Soviet days, which render use and production of open source software illegal. Apparently, a software developer needs to be able to show that he has been paid for the production of software that he has developed, and a user needs to be able to display a license agreement from a vendor licensed by the state. This would mean that, technically speaking, downloading and installing Firefox or Open Office is a crime in Ukraine, and contributing to an international project would also be out of bounds. A note on accuracy: I've googled this up and down and can't come up with anything concrete because, I suspect, I don't read Ukrainian, but have been assured by numerous Ukrainian colleagues that this is indeed the case. UAFOSS dedicates a significant amount of effort to having this law changed, although the somewhat regular collapse of the Ukrainian government (and the fact that there has only been a caretaker government here since January) has slowed their lobbying efforts considerably.

So far as I can tell, this law is totally obscure and widely ignored. A Google search will turn up a lively open source community in Ukraine, and after narrating the above story today, the UAFOSS guys went on to talk about all the open source work they *are* doing in Kiev, including an exciting-sounding localization project that involves the Ukraine's national language office and an effort to set up a network of help-desk centers around the country. Still, I can certainly understand why UAFOSS are working to change the law. Unfortuantely, unenforced and outdated laws languishing on the books can come back to bite at a later date if they're not cleared off. Further, forcing a discussion on open source licensing could help to break open other discussions on intellectual property issues that still tie the hands of other industries in Ukraine.

Posted by Janet at 09:53 PM | Permalink | Comments (5)

I'm about to leave for a week of vacation in Croatia's golden port city, Dubrovnik. Aside from admiring the beauty of the ancient walls and the blue, blue Adriatic, I also want to eat well -- squid ink risotto, fried calamari, clams in white wine and garlic...all of these top of the list of reasons to head down to seaside Croatia from landlocked Hungary. I've spent this morning scanning the web for restaurant recommendations in Dubrovnik, and I find myself stymied once again by the complications of sifting through online information.

Conventional wisdom tells me that I should be using my trusted online networks to find this information, and indeed, I have turned to the places I normally would for restaurant recommendations, that is, sites that I trust to give me some good reviews. I started with Saveur magazine's online archive, moved on to Chowhound, Gridskipper, and TimeOut. I checked Dubrovnik on Technorati to see if anyone had blogged about restaurants recently, and Dubrovnik/food/restaurants on Flickr to see if anyone had usefully tagged photos.

The result is not that great, an hour later, and has led me to consider (as I often do when I'm looking for travel information) what a hit or miss operation information searches and relying on trusted networks are when, in reality, you don't have a trusted network in place. Here's a quick run-down of what I found:

Saveur, my most exalted, trusted source, is not in any way a member of the read/write web. They publish a dead-tree magazine, and they put those articles online. That said, they are absolutely the best, and have never, every failed me in any of my travels from lobster pasta in Venice to mind-bendingly good tapas in Xerez, Andalusia. Unfortunately, they've never written on Dubrovnik. So cross that one off for this trip.

Chowhound, my next best source for recommendations, troubled me this time around. Chowhound is a site for people who consider themselves "foodies", and the "chowhounders" do their good work by sniffing out small, unknown restaurants. Their very useful discussion forum can sometimes yield epicurean gems. The problem with Chowhound is that it's largely a US-based site; their international discussions are not, in fact, very trustworthy. In a search for Dubrovnik, I found lots of discussion threads, but when I cross-referenced the recommendations on the discussion threads with a guidebook I have (the always-useful but not culinarily-minded Lonely Planet), I found almost 100 percent overlap. That is, the so-called chowhounds who were writing about Dubrovnik were not sniffing out new, unknown local joints, but were in fact commenting on the restaurants already in the guidebook that just about everyone who visits Crotia has in their backpack. There's certainly utility in that, but ... if the users on Chowhound are simply discussing what Lonely Planet has already recommended, I wouldn't rely on them as experts; it's not a trusted network after all. And indeed, there are no Croatians posting on Chowhound that I saw, which is really unfortunate. (The other kind of recommendation on Chowhound for Dubrovnik are the "I went to a great little restaurant down a back street near the port, but I can't remember the name" variety, which are just kind of irritating. Please, don't bother.)

On to Gridskipper, which does list Dubrovnik as one of its cities "on the grid"; however, the only restaurant recommended there is not qualified in any way -- the writer just says it's "one of the city's best". Well, maybe, but when I search online I don't find other information on it or recommendations for it. So that really wasn't so helpful, and I realize that when push comes to shove (am I going to get into a cab and cross the city to go to a specific restaurant) I don't really trust Gridskipper on restaurant issues -- or at least not on this one. Since there's no context for the recommendation, and I don't know who the writer is, I'm skeptical.

TimeOut is semi-useful, but they want us to buy the dead-tree copy so the information is light. I do trust TimeOut, but again -- not really the read/write web. I'm just going by their single writer's recommendations.

The noise on Technorati around Dubrovnik is too difficult to sift through -- lots of link factories or advertising come back, so I give up. Flickr yields, as usual, a wonderland of beautiful pictures of Croatian seafood when I do my search, but there's no associated information with any of the pictures (i.e., where did you eat that gorgeous shrimp?)

The moral of this story is that I've ended up a bit stymied. No online source that I really trust has led me to good restaurant options in Dubrovnik. I'm now planning to call up a friend who's a tour guide and was in Croatia with a group a few weeks back for her insights, and then go out and buy a copy of another friend's book on Croatia, Annabel Barber's Visible Cities Dubrovnik.

I think the reason I find this long tale interesting is because of, well, the theory of the internet's long tail that Wired's Chris Anderson and others have written extensively about over the past two years. The theory, which I largely agree with, is that web 2.0 allows for incredibly rich information geared to very niche markets or demographics (foodies traveling to Dubrovnik, i.e.); related thinking revolves around the idea that trusted communities will form around these niches, and that the read/write web allows everyone to join those communities as both a consumer and producer of information. That's great, again, I largely agree with that.

The problem I see is that some niches which are transitory, and some niches aren't. I am going to care for a long time about data security and human rights organizations, and it's worth it for me to build a community of trust around that issue. I only care this week about good restaurants in Dubrovnik, and it really not worth it for me to build or join a community of trust around that. Nevertheless, I want to be able to dip into online communities who do care about that issue when I need to know more about it -- and yet, I'm not really in a position to evaluate who is a trusted source in a specific network. How do I know that so-and-so poster on Chowhound is reliable? Why should I trust the person who recommended to Gridskipper that X restaurant in Dubrovnik is excellent? So, one of the downsides I see with the beauty of niche information is the inability of an individual to be involved in as many as they want to, or need to, be. I think that what comes out of this is more and more recommendation systems a la Slashdot or Digg that are geared in a very niche way. However, a lot of sites will need to be rebuilt to put those kinds of tools in place....so I still see a long haul ahead of us for making the read/write web truly useful. These kinds of experiences are a good reminder to me that, no matter how fast it seems like we're moving on communications technologies, we're still taking baby steps. And that's why I'm heading out now to buy Annabel's book to take with me this afternoon to Dubrovnik.

PS: If any of my five readers have a suggestion for where to eat in Dubrovnik, leave a comment!

Posted by Janet at 08:44 AM | Permalink | Comments (16)

I have a nasty suspicion this is what I sound like to my colleagues...

Posted by Janet at 02:14 PM | Permalink | Comments (3)

Onfocus has a post on how to secure Google Calendar (and Gmail) automatically. You can do this by hand each time you go to the sites by entering an "s" after the http (i.e., https:), but by installing the user script Onfocus suggests in Mozilla Firefox, you can ensure that your connection is secure each time you visit the sites. Hooray.

Note, though, that this doesn't mean that your calendar and email data is secure from Google: goodness, no. They can peak at it whenever they like. What it does mean is that the man in the middle (between your computer and Google's servers) doesn't have access to your data. While in the West this may not be such a big deal (or it may, regrettably), these kinds of simple-to-install automatic services are increasingly useful for users in countries where surveillance is more likely to be the norm. For those looking for quick-and-dirty information security (imperfect but better than nothing), this is a good thing to keep on tap.

Posted by Janet at 01:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

As patient colleagues and Favorite Husband will attest, I do really love RSS feeds, believe they will largely govern how we receive information in useful ways in the future, and use every opportunity I get to pester hapless compatriots into installing RSS feed readers. Inevitably, the questions are (in this order): what is RSS? And: what RSS reader do you use?

Much has been written on both those questions, and I generally point people to the RSS wikipedia page and tell them I use FeedDemon (yours for only 29.95!). Arguably, having delivered the impassioned pitch that I do about RSS, more is needed than that. Alexandra Samuel has taken things a step further, and set up RSStocracy, complete with site buttons to guide the uninitiated to wisdom:

Perhaps even more useful is a very recent article (last week) by Ryan Stewart and Richard MacManus on Read/Write Web comparing rich RSS readers...if you're in the market for an RSS reader anytime in the next six months, take a look at this article. After that, well...probably out of date. And don't skip the comments at the bottom.

Thanks, Marnie!

Posted by Janet at 10:14 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I'm very happy to see the Sunlight Foundation and the Center for Media and Democracy launch Congresspedia, the "citizen's encyclopedia on Congress that anyone can edit". The happy news is that Congresspedia is easy to use (based on the Wikipedia model), encourages citizen participation, and clearly isn't a joke. Anyone (US citizen or not) can go into any of the hundreds of pages already on Congresspedia and edit information about America's lawmakers...all 535 of them from the House and the Senate. The claim is that the site is non-partisan and encourages the beloved Wikipedian neutral point of view (or n-pov, for those in the know); most likely the major challenge will be whether they'll be able to maintain that. Given the squirmy battles in the regular Wikipedia over politicians' pages, one can't help but wonder.

But this raises a larger question about the offspring of Wikipedia; Congresspedia is essentially a sub-set of Wikipedia, hived off and put under its own name. But there's a bit of a problem of replication here. Richard Burr, the junior Republican senator from North Carolina, has a page on Wikipedia with one set of information. Richard Burr also has a page with a slightly differnt set of information on Congresspedia (and more fleshed out information, by the way, as it's a specialty Wikipedia child). Which one is definitive? Presumably, given that specialization is presumed to be better, Congresspedia's entry on Richard Burr is going to be definitive. But where does that leave the original Wikipedia? My guess is that over time, specialized Wikipedia child sites will become more popular: I've had half a dozen conversations over the past year with organizations about the utility and feasibility of a Wikipedia installation focused on a specific issue: NGOs, public health, and so on. I'm sure there are already others out there. I don't think this necessarily dilutes the utility of Wikipedia as a whole, but I'm wondering whether there will be any effort to synchronize content between Wikipedia children and the main site...either on a volunteer basis (as Wikipedia itself is written) or through some kind of Wikimedia automation. It's also a social question; will Wikipedia contributors get the same satisfaction and sense of community out of working on Wikipedia children, or will the main site continue to be the community draw? As always, the brave new world of wikipedia is worth keeping an eye on. The problems they have to solve now seem pretty clearly to be forerunners of those that a wide range of media will face in the coming years as the participatory becomes the default.

Posted by Janet at 10:06 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

This is cool. Soyapi Mumba, a software developer from Malawi, has created SearchWith, a plugin for the Mozilla family (Firefox, Flock, and Thunderbird). What SearchWith does is allow users to highlight a word on a web page you're reading, and then search for/look up that word in a range of online sources (dictionaries, encyclopedias, the web itself, etc.) For those of us who read widely about technology, this is a great little tool, since new terms come up so often. For the rest of the world, it's pretty darn useful as well.

To use this tool, go to SearchWith website, download the plugin, and install. Easy-peasy.

Thanks, Soyapi! I'm your new biggest fan.

Posted by Janet at 01:42 PM | Permalink | Comments (83)

Declan Butler has written a great piece for Nature on the way scientists are starting to use Google Earth in place of far more complicated GIS software. Because Google Earth is easier to use than most GIS software (although doesn't include GIS analysis tools), scientists are finding they can "effortlessly" overlay mutliple data sets onto Google Earth, and use it as a visualization and live tracking tool. Butler writes that "increasing amounts of scientific data are becoming available, often in real time, in formats that can be displayed by virtual globes."

The good news here is not just for scientists, but also for citizens seeking to inform themselves on issues that are more easily grasped through data visualizations. Geographical display of advocacy data is one of my main interests -- from projects like Forward Track to Human Rights Watch use of maps to illustrate their study, " Off Target: The Conduct of War and Civilian Casualties in Iraq", I find the use of a geographical framework for data sets to be a powerful choice -- and one not employed often enough by advocates seeking to make an impression beyond reams of print. With tools like Google Earth, and an apparently increasing number of researchers interested in using these tools to track and visualize their data, the availability of these kinds of visual arguments is on the rise.

Google Earth is of course not open source, nor are its data formats. Other virtual globes, notably ESRI's coming free globe, will offer an open data format:

As part of the package, ESRI will also release a free visualization tool, ArcGis Explorer, which some GIS professionals are calling a Google-Earth killer. Data in Google Earth need to be in a specific format; ESRI's tool will allow users to view not only data from ESRI's own products, but also information in formats that are being increasingly standardized through the Open Geospatial Consortium. This international body is working to ensure that computers can understand descriptions of the spatial features of anything from highways and postcodes to icebergs.

And for those that are looking for open-source-only, Declan has highlighted (on his blog) a very useful and seemingly exhaustive list (in pdf format) of open source GIS and visualizations tools (this list spans the GRASS to GIMP -- there's a lot there).

Posted by Janet at 12:02 AM | Permalink | Comments (44)

Artist's rendition of me with my iPod

Actually, I'm thinking back to the trip I took to Uganda in January. As readers may remember, I traveled with my friend Stephanie, a woman who firmly occupies a place among the digirati, and one of the prime iPod influencers in my life. While we waited for our flight to leave from Schipol airport in Amsterdam, she bought a new camera -- a film camera. When I expressed my surprise over her retro choice, she said she was sick of using digital cameras...the extra cords, the batteries running out, missing shots, etc. And, she said, she was already overwhlemed with digital detritus -- cell phone and charger, laptop and charger, iPod and cords and earbuds, etc, etc.

Now, looking at the tangle of USB cords, lanyards, earbuds, and other small parts while I will now need to keep track of, I can't help but think that Stephanie was on to something. I remember my first WalkMan, for instance, which didn't need to be charged, and had no accompanying bits and pieces. Of course, one could point out, it's a lot easier to haul around a few cords and an iPod than 100 tapes and a clunky box the size of a wireless router: true, true. But given the iPod flotsam spread across my floor, I don't think that this problem has been solved just yet.

Posted by Janet at 04:23 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Wireless access to the internet makes a lot of sense for much of the developing world: where fiber is controlled by government monopoly, or elderly infrastructure is simply incabaple of responding to the demands placed on it by new internet users, wireless hubs and mesh networking can greatly expand access to connectivity. This is because connectivity can be shared more easily through a wireless cloud than through cables, and can be expanded easily across signficant open distances or thorughout a building, city block, or even broader area.

Tomas Krag of wire.less.dk, along with a number of other organizations, has been looking at this problem for some time. His work, and the work of others, tackles the problem of creating appropriate wireless technology for the developing world, and seeding local expertise to deploy and maintain the technology -- as well as innovate where necessary for the specific environment. A range of projects are trying different methods: wire.less.dk's Wireless Roadshow works with local partners to set up test case wireless infrastructure to attract local policymakers' interest, while at the same time training local partners on the ins and outs of setting up networks. The Association for Progressive Communication is spearheading a collaborative training effort in Africa to run "wireless workshops" in four corners of the continent; their project trains up-and-coming wireless experts, providing them with both hands-on skills and training materials to take back to their home countries and pass the knowledge on. Other organizations including CSIR's Meraka Institute (South Africa), Inveneo (San Francicso), and Geekcorps(US/Canada/Mali) have worked on projects across the continent from setting up wireless mesh for community radio stations to helping to create wireless ISPs.

Tomas now writes of the release of "Wireless Networking in the Developing World: a practical guide to planning and building low-cost telecommunications infrastructure". This is great news for a number of reasons. First and foremost, the book is sorely needed by communities wishing to build their own infrastructure. Second, the book was written collaboratively, with a group of experts who have worked on the issue for some time, both in hands-on set-up and training. Third, the book is released under a Creative Commons attribution share-alike license, which means that it's free to download (via PDF), translate, improve, and redistribute (as long as you share any changes you make under the same license). Indeed, the authors have set up a wiki at the book's website so that others can make editorial suggestions. The book can also be ordered via a print-on-demand option, available through the book's website.

To all who were involved in this project, many thanks! It's a great achievement.

Posted by Janet at 10:22 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Yesterday, I wrote about Google's Summer of Code 2005 as a darn fine way to connect young developers with open source projects and communities. And I still think so, although I have a suggestion for Google for Summer of Code 2006 (assuming they are, in fact, planning to run it again). To refresh, last year's Summer of Code matched up young developers with open source projects that had volunteered to mentor an intern. Young developers applied to the project they were interested in from the list of available mentors, were selected, and then rewarded with a summer of work on the project they chose and 5000 USD from Google for their time (500 of which went to the mentoring organization). Google had committed to funding up to 400 developers, which works out to a heck of a lot of money (2 million USD).

Not suprisingly, the Summer of Code site has a nifty little Google Map geolocating both the mentor projects and the participating students (see the world view above). Notice anything strange? Could it really be that there aren't any up-and-coming young open source developers in sub-saharan Africa, the Middle East/North Africa or Central Asia who would want to participate?

How odd.

(Actually, it appears from the map that two mentoring members of LispNYC, and one Google mentor are based in Kyrgyzstan and Kazakhstan. Right. Strangely, they didn't manage to rustle up any locals in either country for the project.)

Yes, I'm being snarky, but only because I know excellent open source developers in these regions, and it pains me to think that with a few well-placed emails to relevant listservs and some encouragement to truly internationalize from Google to the mentoring organizations, the map above might have looked different. 2 milion dollars is a lot of money to spend on encouraging open source developers, and it's a lot more money in the regions I mention than it is in Europe or the US. 4500 USD to a computer science student in Accra or Almaty could be a year's support -- or several years' school fees. Or it could allow the involvement of a number of students for a summer, instead of just one.

So my modest suggestion to Google is this: if you go ahead with Summer of Code 2006, reach out to the developer communities in less-developed regions, and encourage your mentoring organizations to view the world as flat. Building skills, confidence, and international ties between developer communities across the globe is a fabulous way to do no evil.

Posted by Janet at 02:32 PM | Permalink | Comments (235)

I had a long chat with Ellen Reitmeyer of OpenUsabilty.org on Monday. Ellen's a usability designer, based in Berlin, and was involved in founding OpenUsability because of her company's usability design work on the KDE project. (KDE is a graphical desktop interface for Linux and Unix environments.)

What they noticed were that many open source projects could use the attention that they gave to KDE, but that there was little interaction between the two communities. So OpenUsability was set up as a matchmaker service for designers and open source projects to find each other. The problem that Ellen points to now is not the lack of interest of the open source community (more than 100 projects have signed up on OpenUsability, looking for help), but the too few usability designers. Currently, most of the designers listing themselves on the site are based in Germany (although the site is set up in English), as Ellen is. Most of them, she said, she knows personally.

Working on usabliity on open source projects is not easy, as I wrote about a couple of days ago. Ellen echoed several points, including, perhaps most importantly, the social engineering that goes into implementing usability suggestions from designers. "You need to have a personal relationship with a key person in the development group," Ellen said, which of course means more time and effort on the part of scarce designers. She also emphasized the problem of finding developers in open source projects who are interested in revising design components, rather than adding new functionality to a project.

We ended up talking about ways to get more usability expertise involved in open source projects. After batting around the idea of raiding design schools during the summertime, or running competitions to encourage usablity experts to submit projects, Ellen made what sounded to me like a brilliant suggestion: why not run something like Google's Summer of Code, but for usabliity/design students. The Summer of Code 2005 was a project I missed at the time, but which I love in retrospect:

The Summer of Code is a program in which student developers are provided with a stipend to create new open source programs or to help currently established projects. Google will be working with a variety of open source, free software and technology related groups to identify and fund up to 400 projects over a 3 month time span. Since Google couldn't possibly mentor 400 people working on disparate projects, we felt it would be wise to spread the work out.

Essentially, Google wanted to mentor new open source developers, and it put up 5000 USD a head for the summer for students to work on established open source projects. Lovely. They're planning to do it again in 2006.

Back to usability: Ellen posited that an incentivized summer program like Summer of Code (Summer of Usabliity doesn't really have the same snappy ring, unfortunately) in which usability design students could be matched up with open source projects would do both sides a world of good. She suggested that open source projects could define part of projects that particularly need usability help, and attach a student designer to that part of the development team - thus fostering a relationship within the group, and producing specific improvements by the end of the summer.

I like this idea a lot. I wonder if Google wants to expand its Summer programs to other areas?

Posted by Janet at 02:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (9)

Don't I know you from somewhere?

Seems that the geolocation fun is not going to stop anytime soon. This morning I came across ClustrMaps (beta), a service which maps the visitors to your website. You get a little thumbnail map of world (like the one at right), which clicks through to a bigger map on ClustrMaps' servers; you can also zoom into continent level on the big map. At a glance, you can see the geographical distribution of your readers. Neat-o. The problem right now, as you can see with the image at right, is that a site with frequent visitors from around the world quickly becomes a big red blob in the thumbnail. I'm sure they're sort that out post-beta, though.

The reason I like this tool is because of its useful application to civil society networks. One of the advantages of using onling tools to organize advocacy campaigns is encouraging a sense of broad solidarity around an issue, be it land mine bans, tobacco control, or anti-corruption. More and more international advocacy movements are trying to find ways to demonstrate their reach to their existing constituency, to policy-makers, and to funders who support their work. Simple tools like ClustrMaps provide an un-scientific but still compelling visual for an advocacy site looking to demonstrate its global appeal.

ClustrMaps is free for sites with fewer than 1000 visitors a day, and the company provides a premium product for those with higher traffic.

Posted by Janet at 08:11 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

If the Open Source community wishes to truly prosper and have their tools used by the general public, it is fundamentally necessary for them to recognize that the majority of the users will never know that they happened to invent a particularly clever algorithm for synchronizing the multi–threaded editing of their complex data structure. What the user will see — and what they’ll judge the project based on — is the user interface. If it’s inadequate, no one outside of other geeks will touch the program.

Oh, Michelle, you're so right. I know Michelle through her work as a lead developer of open source solutions at the CitizenLab in Toronto. So while searching around for information on usability and open source software, I was delighted to find her article in First Monday from a couple of years ago that touched so accurately on some of the problems open source software faces.

In my work at the Open Society Institute's Information Program, I've been involved in funding a number of open source software projects aimed at a range of civil society constituencies. The prettiest of the lot, by far, is LiveSupport, developed by the Media Development Loan Fund's CampWare project in Prague. LiveSupport is open source radio station management software "that provides live studio broadcast capabilities as well as remote automation in one integrated system". Not surprisingly, it seems to be enjoying fairly enthusiastic uptake -- part of this is due to the clear definition of the intended audience (community radio stations), as well as the strong network that MDLF has built up over the years. But I also think that the enthusiasm I've heard for the software is due to LiveSupport's excellent set of user interfaces. They're intuitive, restrained but colorful, and make you want to use the software. It shouldn't be a suprise, then, that CampWare worked with the Parson's School of Design on LiveSupport's look and layout.

In The Usability of Open Source Software, David M. Nichols and Michael B. Twidale argue that a number of factors contribute to the lack of focus on usability in open source software. The most obvious problem is the lack of involvement of usability experts in the OSS development process, but Nichols and Twidale point to social/cultural issues as well:

• Developers, they point out, are not typical end users. What seems obvious to a developer is far from obvious to my mother when they look at the same software interface.


• OSS development tends to happen when programmers are "scratching their own itch". Thus, if we accept the point above, functionality is usually prioritized over usability.


• Open source software, the authors theorize, tends even more towards code bloat (and thus confusing and event competing functionality) than proprietary software. They explain further:

  Given the interests and incentives of developers, there is a strong incentive to add functionality and almost no incentive to delete functionality, especially as this can irritate the person who developed the functionality in question. Worse, given that peer esteem is a crucial incentive for participation, deletion of functionality in the interest of benefiting the end user creates a strong disincentive to future participation, perhaps considered worse than having one's code replaced by code that one's peers have deemed superior. The project maintainer, in order to keep volunteer participants happy, is likely to keep functionality even if it is confusing, and on receipt of two similar additional functionalities, keep both, creating options for the user of the software to configure the application to use the one that best fits their needs. In this way as many contributors as possible can gain clear credit for directly contributing to the application.

  Wisely, the authors note that "This suggested tendency to 'pork barrel' design compromise needs further study". Indeed.
• I'd add one more issue to the usability question, based on my work with teams of developers in commercial software. Developers like to do their own thing, and many engage in volunteer OSS projects for that very reason: during the day they're developing banking software to make a living, and volunteering on a project at night or on the weekend provides a creative outlet. The whole point is not to have to code to someone else's spec.

Nichols and Twidale point to two further issues which, for those concerned about software usability, should be most troubling. The first is the thing we all know but ignore anyway: design for usability should take place in advance of any coding.. This is like commenting software code: you always think you can go back and do it later. The truth is, you can't. Or you can, but it'll take a lot of time, and be a big pain, and it still won't be as good as if you'd done it when you should have.

The second point is more subtle, but perhaps the most important: usability problems are more difficult to articulate than functionality problems, and are extremely difficult to distribute for correction to a far-flung group of developers. This is because usability issues are not necessarily neat packages, but may cut across the territory of several different developers, with potentially different styles or approaches.

In poking around online, it seems like there's a lot of writing on the issue of OSS usability, but not a lot of action aside from personal initiative (information architects or usability experts volunteering on OSS projects). One project based in Germany, Open Usability provides an online matchmaking service for usability experts and open source projects. Currently OU has more than 100 open source projects registered looking for usability expertise -- but far too few usability experts signing up on the other side.

Aspiration, one of my favorite techy NGOs, organized a FLOSS Usability sprint last February and a second one in August with Blue Oxen Associates. The August meeting helped to defined the concept of ExtremeUsability, and applied it to three civil society-focused open source projects: Social Source Commons, CiviCRM, and Hallway. I'll be interested in finding out how that experience has shaped the evolution of each of those projects.

No big conclusions here, except that this is an area which clearly needs inventive solutions. It seems that there's a problem from both sides -- somehow, usability experts and information architects need to be pulled into open source projects, and leaders of open source projects need to begin with usability design rather than tacking it on at the end of a project, if at all. I'd certainly welcome thoughts on ways to approach this (and on other projects that are addressing the issue).

Posted by Janet at 07:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

I've been posting over the past few days about my experiences in Uganda at Africa Source II, but haven't given a very good overview of what the event actually is. So:

You wouldn't normally expect to learn about open source software, organizational technology needs, or the finer points of information strategies for advocacy groups while sitting on the shores of Lake Victoria in Uganda. Nor would you normally hope to bring 140 people from all over Africa to Ssese Island, a spot known for its natural beauty, curving white beaches, warm afternoons, and slow pace of life, and expect them to remain excited about those topics for seven days running. But it happened, and this, in a nutshell, is the magic of the Source Camp series that the Tactical Technology Collective has led over the past three years.

The recipe involves a remote and beautiful locale, a group of dedicated and time-tested facilitators, a bunch of refurbished computers running Ubuntu (a Debian-based Linux distribution), and a crush of “technology intermediaries” there to improve their skills. These are not the hard-core geek types that scare users away when they earnestly and helpfully try to explain why Asynchronous JavaScript And XML is really going to rock their world; rather, these are the peacemakers who spend much of their professional (and often personal) lives brokering a gentle understanding between entirely non-technical end users and the technology tools that they either need to use to get their jobs done, or the technology tools they should use to do their jobs better. Africa Source II's intermediaries work in civil society and education, and so their target users tend to be students, teachers, activists, and non-profit staff.

The recipe for a Source Camp is surprisingly successful, and seems to resist derailment by adverse conditions. At Africa Source II, participants traveled over rough roads from Kampala to the island, slept in tents through equatorial rainstorms, and suffered a tragic few days without Nescafe. At the end of the week, the participants left regretfully, hugging each other goodbye, planning to stay in touch, collaborate on projects, post to the mailing list. While people looked forward to returning to their families, comfortable beds, and daily routine, the palpable enthusiasm for their experience was the overriding emotion.

The theory behind the Source Camps' anti-conference approach focuses on building community – that is, on making tangible in a real-time setting the values espoused both by open source software communities and civil society networks. The Source Camps operate on the principle that everyone has something to contribute, and that knowledge is best arrived at through group exploration. Where open source software can be produced in the virtual commons, the Source Camps bring the commons to life as a method of learning.

Jamais Cascio pondered on Worldchanging earlier this week whether the lack of good usability in much open source software would trump its potential as a leap-frog technology for the developing world. I think there is much to be done in terms of usability on OSS (and more on that in a later post), but for the present, events like Africa Source seem to be the best solution for pushing useage forward. These key intermediaries leave with two very important assets: the confidence that comes with hands-on familiarity and a network of other practioners to whom they can turn for advice. The beauty of the Source Camp model is that is brings out each person's strengths -- participants leave knowing who in the group to turn to for expertise on wireless set-ups, on managing bandwidth, on configuring a server.

In terms of nuts and bolts, Africa Source II runs on a split schedule. Mornings were given over to one of three tracks that participants had signed up for on registering. These were:

• NGO Migration: how to migrate an NGO office using proprietary software over to an entirely open source set-up. This involves desktop applications, OSS operating systems, and server software.


• Education Migration: this is similar to NGO migration, but focused on schools and resource centers –so there was an emphasis on linux distributions aimed at education, like OpenLabs (used by the model SchoolNet Namibia project) and the forthcoming Edubuntu, an Ubuntu distro coming out of Mark Shuttleworth's Cannonical.


• Information Handling and Advocacy: this track focused on using open source software within the context of an advocacy campaign. They looked at blogs, wikis, content management systems, and communications technologies like cellphones, podcasts, and community radio management systems.

Morning sessions were followed by a group lunch, and then by a two-hour break. After the break, the group reconvened most days for skillshares. Marek Tuszynski of Tactical Tech descibes them on the Africa Source II wiki like this:

The Africa Source 2 Skillshare will provide a setting for participants to teach their peers, drawing from their areas of expertise and passion. "Skill" will be broadly interpreted, spanning not only systems and software but also strategic know-how, from fundrising to process models to all manner of production techniques. The focus will be on demonstrating "how to" and "how it works" in 30-minute to 1-hour time slots, with audiences ranging from 1 to 10 people.

The afternoon ended fairly late each day (between 7 and 8), and was followed by a group dinner, and an evening activity: music, dancing, talent show, and so on. The best evening activity, by my count, was provided by the staff of the resort: each evening they hauled a pile of firewood down to the beach for a bonfire, which burned late into the night. After dinner, many people brought their chairs down to the circle on the sand, and sat chatting late into the night, nursing bottles Uganda's home-brewed Bell lager.

The Africa Source II blog, a day-by-day account of the camp by Frederick Noronha and others, is here.

Posted by Janet at 09:34 AM | Permalink | Comments (6)

Tomorrow morning I'm heading off to Uganda to attend Africa Source 2, the fourth in a series of week-long technology workshops for NGOs masterminded by the Tactical Technology Collective. If AS2 is anything like its predecessors (India 2005, Namibia 2004, Croatia 2003), I'm expecting the next week will be a mix of sixth grade Scout Camp, a super-condensed semester at a tech university where the teachers are the leaders in their respective fields (and are relentlessly charming to boot), and a cocktail party with 120 very engaging guests, mostly from across Africa. I'm not at all sorry to be piling my malaria pills, international yellow fever innoculatoin certification, raincoat, sandals, sundresses, and bug repellent into a duffel tonight. Bet you wish you were going.

Aside from meeting a whole lot of interesting people and playing around with some new open source tools in the coming week, I'm also looking forward to learning more about Uganda. Looking at a map of the country, it strikes me how many challenging neighbors Uganda has: a landlocked country, Uganda is surrounded by Sudan, DRC, Rwanda, Tanzania, and Kenya. I currently live in a landlocked country surrounded by historically challenging neighbors: Hungary is bordered by Romania, Ukraine, Slovakia, Austria, Slovenia and Serbia. A country landlocked by many neighbors is inevitably a difficult place to be; you're forever looking over your shoulder at the strife brewing on the other side of the border checkpoint. Or, in Uganda's case, in the northern regions of the country as well, where the government's struggle against the Lord's Resistance Army drags on as one of Africa's longest-running conflicts. Other things I know about Uganda are few: the country voted in July last year for a multi-party system, and a presidential election is scheduled for Februrary 23rd. The incumbent president, Yoweri Museveni of the National Resistance Movement, seems to be leading in the polls; he is trailed by the Forum for Democratic Change leader, Kizza Besigye. Not so surprising that Besigye is behind; he's spent most of the last two months in a maximum-security prison on charges of rape and treason. Not surprisingly, his supporters call the charges politically motivated.

These are the kinds of things I know about Uganda from the news. However, two recent reads have cautioned me to, well, write about something else, something below the usual radar of tragedy, war, and corruption. The first, which I came across yesterday via the Velveteen Rabbi, is an intended-to-be-short-lived blog by Teju Cole, a Nigerian American currently visiting family and friends in Africa. The blog itself is beautiful and spare in design, image, and prose. Teju wrote this a few days back:

The most important thing to know about Africa is that it is normal. But no one who depends on American media for information can come away with this impression.

The most powerful lies can be those of omission, and this is the kind of lie the West tells against Africa every day. Africa is all game reserves and refugee camps. When last was a glittering African financial center- of which there are many- broadcast on American television? When was the last time you saw images of a middle-class African family at a shopping mall in their country, or of young people in a university, or in a restaurant, or on a normal city street?

And a few days before that, I came across (via Ethan Zuckerman) a piece in Granta by Binyavanga Wainaina called "How to Write About Africa". The article begins:

Never have a picture of a well-adjusted African on the cover of your book, or in it, unless that African has won the Nobel Prize. An AK-47, prominent ribs, naked breasts: use these.

Read it, it's funny. And cringe-making, if you've ever written a word about a place that you feel is more exotic that your usual locale.

I'm going to try and do some writing from Uganda, depending on connectivity and time. I'll be writing mostly about the technology workshop I'm at and the people I meet there, which I think is both fascinating and admirably normal -- but I'll be keeping the admonishments of Cole and Wainaina in mind as I do.

Posted by Janet at 07:43 PM | Permalink | Comments (100)

The leaves of memory seemed to make
A mournful rustling in the dark.
~Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

I'm not a person who owns life insurance. I have the minimum legal Hungarian coverage on my beat-up Fiat Brava. I've even gone through periods without health insurance, now and again, placing my trust in God/the loving embrace of potential bankruptcy and state-handout health care. However, the one place where I've always been willing to pay for peace of mind is in hard-drive backup -- that is, in backing up all the content and programs on my computer onto separate storage. Considering that I'm one of the few people I know who has never had an unrecoverable hard-drive failure, this may seem like an unlikely obsession. I don't think it is, though. For one, it's entirely inevitable that a person like me who travels with a computer everywhere, who uses a computer every day, will fall victim to loss, theft, mechanical failure, creepy viruses, trip-and-fall disasters, etc. Perhaps more important is that my life is contained on my little IBM x40 -- my photos, email history both personal and professional, documents in progress, etc. The backup, in other words, IS the life-insurance.

Further, part of my job is advising non-profit organizations on how to protect their (sometimes very sensitive) information; my colleagues and I always emphasize the need to back-up any important information, as well as to keep it off-site from their offices -- many human rights organizations, for instance, work in repressive countries where their offices may be under some kind of surveillance, or subject to raids and searches .

At this point, many of the groups we work with use writable CD's and a CD burner, probably the most available technology for major backups. This works acceptably well for a few large files or a group of smaller files, but there are still problems:

• you may have many CD's worth of information to back up, meaning that you have to manually decide how to divide up the backup.
• email files, which many people use as their basic information archive these days, can exceed a CD's memory capacity
• you usually end up with a bunch of CD's that you then have to keep track of, no mean feat unless you are organized to a somewhat creepy degree
• in many parts of the world, read-write CD's (i.e., CD's that you can write to multiple times) aren't the easiest to come by, or are quite expensive. People are more likely to use write-once CD's, which means they throw them away after the next backup -- they aren't reusable. Kind of a waste.

I have always hated backing up to CDs for all the reasons above, and have instead wasted hundreds of dollars over the course of the last ten years on bespoke backup products marketed to memory obsessives like myself. These products inevitably, and usually quickly, become obsolete. Usually they become obsolete because the amount of memory expected/needed in a backup product has expanded so rapidly; others become obsolete because they are either built-in to computers as standard options, or because they are so tragically bad in design/usability that they are quickly and guiltily abandoned.

Here's a brief history of my back-up devices:

• 1.44 MB external floppy drive -- this must have been from the mid-to-late 90's, as I still have a pile of floppies from my graduate school years (97-98) with backups of my MA thesis on Grant Wood. 1.44 MB!
• 100 MB Zip Drive from Iomega -- I brought this with me when I moved to Prague in 1999, also carrying with me a Samsonsite-sized IBM laptop that only had a CD-reader in it. The leap from 1.44 MB to 100 MB on a disk of the same size seemed, well, unbelievable, a conjuring trick. Several months later, when I tried to back up a client's website and realized that I had well over 100 MB of psd's, I started to think that there might be something else over the rainbow.
• External CD drive with read/write functionality -- this came with another IBM laptop I bought, and I quickly filed away my Iomega brand Zip drive disks (100 MB, ha!) and started burning 750 MB CD's, wowing my Prague clients with the hot new technology. A whole website on one little CD! (This was still during the period when CD's were only viewed as repositories for music, and so much confusion ensued in terms of what digital data exactly, er, was.)
• 250MB, 512 MB, 1 GB memory sticks -- The first time I put my whole email file (half a gig and counting) onto a device that looked like a piece of gum and stuck it in my lipstick case was, let's just say it, something like a divine manifestation. And, lo, the rapture has not ended.
• 250 GB external one-touch MAXTOR external hard drive -- Hate it. I idiotically bought two of them in April 2005 (one for me, one for Husband) while in the US and lugged them back to Hungary, defying all good sense (see list above) as well as Hungarian customs import duties (evil VAM, are you reading this?) The whole "one-touch" deal only works if you submit, lamb-like, to MAXTOR's proprietary zip format. If you want to treat it like a regular external drive, where you can, you know, see what you've backed up after you've done the deed, you need to do a by-hand "duplicate" that has taken me and Husband three tries to get right. Further, the thing ships without instruction manuals, diagrams, or any idiot-proofing whatsoever. Thumbs down. Another plot in the graveyard.

Posted by Janet at 01:01 PM | Permalink | Comments (231)