Seven of Nine : Resistence is Futile

So it is Friday again. That means the week is done. Almost done, just one more day and then the next weeks begins with a Sunday. That gives us a head start and makes Monday less painful. Yes, we violate the ISO 8601 recommendation of starting the week with Monday, but what the heck. To hell with standards.

Lets see. What other lunatic suggestions can we commit to this blog in another futile attempt to lighten up a wrecked herd of workaholics? Lets have another word game for a change: "Friday" is almost the same in German where we say "Freitag". As you will know German allows to link words into chains as in Straßenbahnlinie which is a short three-linker with Straße (street) bahn (rail) and linie (line). Put together this gives us a tramline (see, you can do the same in English). Just a few more characters... "Freitag" is a short two-linker: "Frei" means "free" and "Tag" means "day". So in German we are celebrating the "Free-Day" once a week. No wonder that we are so up-to-speed with Free and Open Source Software... Maybe we can suggest to introduce an "Openday" to replace "Thursday"?

What would we need to do? Well, first we need someone to come up with a request for change (I'd volunteer for that). Then it would be helpful to connect to someone who has a level A liaison with ISO. Anyone around, OGC maybe? Next a work group needs to work out why this would be a good idea. No, wait. That is exactly not how it works! The work group would only describe how to introduce the new term but not explain why. This might be one of the core problems with quite a lot of standards and more so the bodies in them. The INSPIRE guidelines for example never ever say what metadata is. They only say with painstaking exactness what you have to put into them and how to make them available. That is pretty dumb if you ask me. But I digress.

So why is everybody working in Germany if it is the "Freeday"? Because we all feel free at work? That would be good for us! But somehow I doubt it. If I look at people commuting in the morning most all of them look pretty unhappy. Or more like unconcious or even a bit anabiotic. A train full of Zombies. In plain daylight. Pretty scary when you come to think of it this way. We plod on because we have been told to do so for our whole life. Some pityful creature at some place in history must have forgotten the original meaning of "Freitag".


Which is more along the lines of lust and love. Ha. Don't believe? Well, here we go: The name Friday comes from the Old English frīgedæg, meaning the "day of Frige", translating Latin ''dies'' Veneris. Lots of sparely robed chicks for the last day in the work week, what do you think? So while we are at it we can slink over and check out this world's Love goddesses and no - it's not the ones you might think of now. It is "deities" (this gives us several genders by default) and for our women there are also a few guys around. For you women we have Rāgarāja who transforms worldly lust into spiritual awakening. Not bad. And here we also come back to Freyja (Old Norse the "Lady"), who in Norse mythology is a goddess associated with love, beauty, fertility, gold, seiðr, war, and death.Dammit. Seems like we can only get the full package, want love and beauty we get fertility. So far so good but what is all this seiðr, war, and death about? It seems like at one point we have to choose whether we want love or wrath. At least when women are involved...

Whatever, back to Friday. It is very much Freyja's day and etymologically the roots of this name can be traced back to the German word "Frau" which means woman. So this is also the women's day. And not the English wo-man which is a sort of neutralized man or "just a human" but a real female (wtf: this is yet another modified male, a ''fe''male). Either English is highly genderless or really chauvinist. Whatever, I like the tree best, it reminds me of the Borg, which sound a bit like the German Borke which is the skin of the tree, in English bark. But now we are just barking up the tree.

Admittedly, this will not get us anywhere, so lets's wrap up. Where does this get us? It very much depends on you. I will enter that request for change at ISO and then just have a great Friday and weekend. And I wish you lots of lust, love, war or barking, just as best you like and no matter whether you ar fe or male.

Have fun.

Find an expanatory note in English at the bottom

Ich weiss, ich weiss. Ich bin ein Besserwisser und obendrein versaue ich allen möglichen Leuten mit meiner Klugscheißerei den ganzen Sommer. Aber das Sommerloch ist da und irgendwas muss ich ja mal wieder bloggen, also her mit dem Unsinn.

Public Viewing

Die Deutschen gucken ihre WM-Spiele gerne im Freien. Und das nennen sie dann in ihrer gutgläubigen Anglophilie "Public Viewing". Ob sie das auch täten, wenn sie wüssten, dass das aus dem amerikanischen kommt und Ausstellung eines aufgebahrten Leichnams heißt? Oder andersherum; Welcher Leichnam wird wohl morgen öffentlich bestaunt werden? Die deutsche oder die englische National-Elf. Und sind Elfen nicht eigentlich zu zart, um so ein grobes Spiel zu spielen? Versteh's wer will.

Wie dem auch sei, morgen gucken wir alle brav wie die Deutschen eine Tracht Prügel beziehen und dann ist hoffentlich endlich wieder Ruhe im Karton. Ist ja nicht auszuhalten, wie die Irren rasen sie nachts durch die Stadt und hupen alles um was ihnen in den Weg kommt. Wir lassen es etwas ruhig angehen (maximal drei Vuvuzelas und sechs Kinder, die sich drum kloppen) und gestatten allen denen es anderswo zu voll ist im Hof der Heerstraße Asyl. Da mich Fußball nicht die Bohne interessiert kümmere ich mich gerne um die Logistik, es gibt einen Grill und Bier und irgendwo steht sicher auch ein Fernseher rum.

A note in English:
Germans love to watch their soccer games in the public. We have this great invention called Biergarten. But simple minded as we are and being incredibly keen on using English words where ever we can we call this "Public Viewing". It makes a lot of sense to us. We sit in the public and we 'view' a soccer game. 'Viewing' is probably related to the 'vision' in television or some such. Whatever. Nobody seems to know or care that public viewing is a term that is also used when dead folks in their coffins are put on public display. Lets see who will be the dead folks tomorrow. No bets from me, I am agnostic and blissfully ignorant of this whole soccer craze. But I have fun all the same, just watching the game from the other side.

In case you have not heard about it yet: There will be an Open Source Mash-Up workshop at the INSPIRE conference in Kraków, Poland under the motto "biodiversity". All and everybody is invited to take part, be it at the conference or remotely.

• What is going to happen?
• Whatever you can make happen...

How did it come into being? Paul Smits from the JRC approached Andrea Giacomelli and me at the last OGC TC meeting in Frascati, Italy and asked whether we would be interested in helping to organize an Open Source Mash-Up at the upcoming INSPIRE conference in Krakow. We both confirmed that this is an excellent idea and that we would be delighted to help organize it. Andrea suggested that a motto would help to get people interested and came up with "Biodiversity". He started to put together the description of the event and launched a call for participation. Old bad me did not do anything much except talk to people about it wherever I met them because I have business (but that is another story).

Who is organizing this? Currently "we" are the JRC and OSGeo and we try to address a broad group of stakeholders ranging from the lone techie developer through environmental experts with a spatial problem on their hands right up to the business executive of the European NMCAs (National Mapping and Cadastre Agencies), EEA (European Environmental Agency) and whoever else thinks that they can contribute or take away something. It will be interesting to understand what the the motivations of the participants are but that angle of a stakeholder analysis will have to wait until after the event. Lets have a look at the initiating parties.

What is the JRC? It is the "Joint Research Center" and no, they do not research the effects of THC on scientist's brains but they "enable" INSPIRE. They have been tasked by the commission to provide an infrastructure and organizational framework enabling experts, users and managers to design the European (environmental) SDI. Mind me: INSPIRE is not the JRC! INSPIRE is aprocess. Regardless of what this means in detail it has become obvious that the few INSPIRE folks in JRC are hopelessly over tasked. Organizing the design of Europe's spatial data is a Titan's job. No matter how good and industrious the INSPIRE crew is, they are humans, not Titans. Europe's spatial data as a whole is way to large, heterogeneous and non-ingeniously organized to get anywhere fast. It has grown literally over hundreds of years and with IT becoming commonplace a legacy of technological silos emerged. These we have to unite.

I guess that most of those who end up reading this Blog are pretty aware of what OSGeo is. Beyond the task of providing a coding infrastructure, QAing project governance and organizing the FOSS4G conferences OSGeo also supports free and open access to geospatial data. This is where OSGeo should and can hook into INSPIRE. OSGeo's spatial IT know-how can tie into INSPIRE in many different ways. Jo Walsh registered OSGeo as an SDIC (Spatial Data Interest Community) in the INSPIRE process, so "we" have a voice there. But afaik no one is talking (except for the odd complaint on Twitter or standards ML that INSPIRE will never work or is all wrong). This may be one of the core issues with INSPIRE. It is broadly recognized as a legal framework, but it is not seen as a process that is open for participation. It has started as an idea at the end of the last millennium and has grown in many different ways. One is the regular standards based, organized, legally binding sometimes sore process of defining specifications and guidelines. Some of this process and their results have been criticized heavily by "us" (that is the agile, sleek, geek "us"). Some LMOs (the Legally Mandated Organizations in INSPIRE, for example the NMCAs) have bent and obstructed INSPIRE until they succeeded in removing some of the explicit openness that was core to INSPIRE since its inception. That is when the GeoRM layer invaded the architecture diagrams, prominently "protecting" all within. We might get a taste of this during the Mash-Up workshop when we try to access some of the data and map services that are made available through the INSPIRE framework. Even if the only outcome of our Open Source Mash-Up event is that the RM crap prevented anything from getting done, it would still be a good result because it gives us a chance to show whats wrong and not only talk about it.

Remember: INSPIRE is neither a physical thing nor a person nor a single organization. It is but an idea and ideas are worth nothing until they are realized. If policy, GeoRM, crappy service quality or technological excesses prevent INSPIRE from taking off then we will have to remove or steer around GeoRM, improve the service quality and propose alternative technology. I say "we" because I believe that it will involve all parties including NMCAs, JRC, OSGeo, OGC (just to name a few) but also the "broad public".

Yes, INSPIRE also foresees interaction with the "broad public". What is the broad public? Some understand it as a Mass Market as it is addressed by the GoogleBingYahoos of this world. Others believe in more collaborative and inclusive governing by the people themselves and call the broad public "European citizens". Think e-Government not as online forms but as collaborating on governing. There are a few hundred million people around and I guess there should be one or two who are also spatially aware and potentially even technologically savvy enough to get something done. But how to identify and then interact with them?

In the ideal case developers and users will meet in a workshop room and collaborate on Mash-Ups. What could that be? I am pretty sure that a few OpenLayers based applications will pop up and maybe a prototype for the biodiversity folks. We might learn that OpenLayers and GDAL/OGR will need to learn GML 3.2.1 just as deegree has. Maybe we just get a better understanding of what INSPIRE is and what it is not.

So lets actually mess up INSPIRE a bit. Interested? Then go register at the INSPIRE Forum and find out what is already going on. Support in action.

If you have questions, post them here, the OSGeo Discuss mailing list, the INSPIRE forum or hassle me directly. Unfortunately I wont be at the conference myself (because they rejected my submission with the title "How INSPIRE failed on metadata"... . But Paul will be there and Andrea and several other well-known binaries – I mean: folks. And I promise that it will be a productive event - no matter what comes out of it. It will surely be more than what we have achieved so far.

Have fun.

Udpate

Read about the first results of the workshop / mash-up in the INSPIRE forum.

After 12 years of running a business I have come to the conclusion that it was more like having business (like in having flu). Business has become a synonym for busyness. Being busy usually means that we have no time for other things. "Having no time" is a broadly valid misconception all by itself as I have pointed out in "I have no time". But that is another story.

Even although we are busy all the time it seems like we never get all things Done. "Done" meaning in time and to our own satisfaction (ignore all the other people for a moment). The state of being permanently busy is not a healthy one. We can be busy doing something special and focused for some time. But if being busy becomes a fundamental state of mind then something has gone wrong. As currently goes wrong with business in general. The system does not serve the people but exploits them. We need to change that. Doing things should be fun, not busyness.

Lets look at what "ness" means. Loch Ness is the home of a monster... but all the other nesses mean that something is in the general state of whatever-ness. It is stateful or has stateful-ness. An empty bucket is in a state of empty-ness (emptiness). Weird things are in a state of weird-ness. Nothing-ness is something beyond our comprehension but also a state. Just like cheerful-ness is a general state of happy-ness (happiness). So busy-ness (business) must be the state of being busy. And here we go - Tada: I am sick and tired of being in a constant state of being busy.

Because busy typically also means:

• occupied (as in a phone)
• bustling (as in hectic)
• operose (as in exhausting
• taken ( as in Taken
• ...

Proud of your own business? Are you crazy? Wanting more business is like wanting to become a madman.

Let me tell you about a weak analogy that I have learned from moving in space. There are two general terms to describe fast movement. "Speed" means to move fast but not necessarily anywhere in particular. Going *somewhere* fast is better described by velocity which is a directed movement. The analogy that I start to see is that being busy all the time usually ends in the pursuit of industrious activity that leads nowhere in particular. Visualize that hamster in a wheel and you know what I mean. Visualize the velocity of a missile as it homes in on its target and you know that it has found it's meaning. One single purposeful non-busy meaning. Kaboom.

In a world that fundamentally lacks meaning and purpose (as in the German word "Sinn") we have to cater for all meaning and purpose ourselves. Each one of us can only make our own sense. We have to make sense, else we go crazy. If the meaning of your life is senseless speeding like that of the the Ghostrider then being busy is probably fine. But if your self wants to get anywhere sensible, then you should better get yourself some sense.

Speeding ends on the road side. The analogy to where business invariably ends is a burn-out, depression and simple plain old sudden death by heart attackt. Being busy is not healthy and not sane. Purposefully planning for a constant state of being busy is deeply insane.

Thanks for your attention and I wish you all the best for your - well, let's not call it "business" anymore but "commercial activities".

=:-)

Have fun.

Disclaimer: This is no more than a brain dump.


There are some obvious issues with Open Source in the EU and INSPIRE that have been troubling me for some while. For some reason no one inside the commission who I have talked to seems to get this which makes me wonder whether it is me who got it all wrong. So bear with me for a moment and feel free to share your thoughts.


As I understand the INSPIRE process, it should be influenced by three distinct parties: The public administration, private companies with a business interest and the public at large. From all that I can tell this latter group includes grass-roots Open Source projects and those sustained by small businesses. I am not talking about the big funded (and sometimes somewhat bloated) projects, those are another story.


The active participation in the INSPIRE process involves quite a bit of monetary and temporal investment. In most cases this investment will only be done only by two of the three parties. One is the public administration, they are obliged to take part as best as they can and it should be in their best interest. But – we are talking hierarchy and top down processes in legal frameworks – not bottom up processes that would actually work. The second active party are companies with a sizable enough budget to fund up-front investment. They only move if they can expect a return on their investment. This is perfectly in order in our current economic system. But it also means that real input to the INSPIRE process is restricted to two of the three parties. Those who have a motivation to make a profit and the public administration.


Larger profit driven companies are known to miss the point by not listening to their users or going astray with queer technology and building vendor-lock-in. Not much innovation to expect here. The public administration, government institutions are routinely understaffed and – no offense taken – typically undereducated. This is the result of years of privatizing institutions, a process we all support when we vote for governments (but that is another story).


The third group - the public at large - is only theoretically considered but cannot get involved in any noticeable way due to restrictions in time and money. In my typically skewed perspective this is also where innovative Open Source could but does not come into play.


This flaw is a lot more blatantly visible in all EU funded projects - which again makes me wonder why it is not more prominently recognized or discussed. Let me explain, it is a really simple logic: Work packages in EU funded projects typically require private investment of 50%. The return on this investment is supposed to come from selling "something". In the software domain common understanding still seems to generate revenue by charging usage fees for proprietary licenses. This obviously does not work for Open Source because once the work is done, there is no more incentive to pay for it.


Funny enough lately Open Source has become a buzz word in EU grant applications. But no more than that. The result of EU funded projects consequently are so many software hacks in a wild state of incompleteness and lack of real world usage. Again – no offense meant – it is the system that makes us do it this way. The main reason why most "Open Source" projects fail is that they spell "Open Source" in quotes. They fail to follow the Open-Source-way-of-doing-things right from the start (read up on http://producingoss.org to get the gist). Instead in many cases it feels more like a random license has been stuck on top of the project at the last moment before submitting the final report. This is not just a waste of resources but it also damages the reputation of those who implement quality software under an Open Source license.


As already stated at the outset this is nothing but a brain dump and not meant to put anyone off. My guess is that most of these issues simply result from a deep misunderstanding and thorough ignorance as to what makes Open Source projects function successfully. But who on earth will pay someone like me to educate folks before submitting a grant application or talk to the commission in a way "it" understands? Some already do, and there is OSOR for a start, but it is still a long ways to go. Meanwhile INSPIRE goes – well, where exactly? I'll go ask some Borg when I am back in orbit, they should know, they know how to communicate.


Have fun.