Accountant wanted

Yesterday at a Holland Open meeting, the current status of Open Source and Open Standards was discussed. One of the big issues for for the adoption of freely licensed accountancy software is that there are no accountants willing to do their work when a company is using it.

The message was we need to find an accountant who will work with us and this will drive the adoption of more open practices in Dutch accountancy.
Thanks,
GerardM

Holland Open 2008

This years Holland Open has come and gone. As always conferences are about people. The people that present are obviously in the picture, their message is getting the lime light. The people that present their company are also very much willing to present their products and services.

Simon Brouwer from Open Taal and the Dutch Open Office project promoted the availability of language tools for everyone. Simon discussed the need for Open Source tools to be as good in its support as any other tool. For the Dutch language this has proven to be problematic because of the proprietary nature of contracts for the support of the official Dutch orthography. The "Nederlandse Taalunie" has started to provide certification of a spell checker and this certification has now been issued to spell checkers for Dutch, including the one used by Open Office and Firefox. There is more to this story and, I hope to inform about this in a future post.

Talking with people I have worked with in the past is always nice. I met with the people of Edia, they have a great little tool for people learning the Dutch language. Terminology that is current and of interest is the terminology learned best. In their news reader "Alane", people read small articles about things that are currently in the news. They are combined with excercises that help improve language skills. This is great software. This approach would work with any language. We discussed how we could help each other.

At the conference there was a prominent education track. I was really happy to meet Bob Hofmans from iEARN. When you are in education, and you do not know iEARN, you should! It is an international organisation that helps students become citizens of this world. This conference was great for them because it brought people together and it kicked off new projects and experiments. I will be interested what Second Life will do for them.

With people of companies like SUN and IBM present, it proved an excellent opportunity to pitch some of the issues that I deal with. We talked about standards, the ISO-639-6, localisation and the role of communities, the changed role of companies in the face of Open Source.

Yes I showed what we did for Commons as well. People love the idea of being able to find pictures in multiple languages. The next step is to make the demonstration project a reality in Commons itself.
Thanks,
GerardM

More Anthere at the Holland Open Software Conference

I have been on the lookout for the video registration of Anthere's presentation at the Holland Open Sofware Conference, it has not surfaced yet. What I did find was an exclusive interview that Anthere gave to the ANP. As ANP is a press agency, the same content could be found in several places, for instance here and here.

Several topics that were not covered in her speech can be found in the interview:

• Anthere expressed the wish to adapt our software and improve the accessibility, the visually impaired are specifically mentioned
  
• There is more about promoting our content in developing countries, not only do we want to make our content available as relevant is making their information available in our projects
• With the growth of the Wikimedia staff, it is increasingly important for the WMF to be well organised and not only have finance be the top priority
  
• Quality has a high priority particularly in the bigger projects
• Self promotion is mentioned
• The lack of sources is mentioned as a reason for deletion on some projects
  
• Anthere indicates that she would not follow the Citizendium model where specialists check up on articles, they are fallible too.

Thanks,
GerardM

The day after the Holland Open Software Conference

Anthere gave the keynote speech in Amsterdam at the Holland Open Software Conference. It was a great speech, it was so great because the speech was wholly dedicated to the Wikimedia organisation and its finances. This was possible because there was nobody at the conference that indicated not to know what Wikipedia was. For me there was little that was new, it was however great to hear it put coherently together. Many avenues of funding are closed to the Wikimedia Foundation because of the real or perceived problems that will result from within the community. Many avenues of funding are still very much closed because there is not sufficient staff to deal with acquiring funding. Anthere did a great job, it was a great opener because it put the sustainability of Open/Free projects as an issue very much on the map of the conference.

It was well published on the Dutch Wikimedia projects that the community was invited to attend the conference. It was cool to see Siebrand, Galwaygirl, Effeietsanders, Brabo. It is however a mystery to me where all the others were. This was a high grade conference with many speeches extremely relevant to what we do and there were so few of us.. A missed opportunity..

For me there were several new connections to make. I liked what Erik Duval said about forms to fill in for meta data like IEEE-LOM. He knows that much of this can be done in an automated way. I liked many of the things Massimo Mauro had to say about the European Union; I hope we will be able to cooperate in OmegaWiki. I loved the presentation of Eliane Metni, she connected the spirit of the open and free community with education in a compelling way; it is great that there is so much but it has to be adaptable in order to be useful in the setting of an educational process. A tool may be great but when it does not fit it is useless. There were many more but these are some of the highlights for me.

Next year the Holland Open? I will do my best to be there again :)

Thanks,
GerardM