PICnet Blog

As big supporters of the Joomla framework, we’re extremely excited to see Joomla 1.5 go out the door. Of course, with any application development project, that unfortunate 80/20 rule comes into effect and finds us spinning our wheels in the mud. We at PICnet would like to see an end to that, and are beginning to ruminate on bug hunting ideas that can pull in a community effort to step-up the pace of the action.

Be it a bounty, paid development, or a few key code sprints, we want to see the 1.5 bugs squashed and are willing to help organize the next steps to seeing it happen. We’re looking to the community for examples of other homestretch coding exercises that have helped push code out the door in the open source community, and are interested in seeing how this process can be managed.

We’ll keep you posted as we learn more, but the challenge is out there: let’s squash these 1.5 bugs with the help of key stakeholders and developers in our Joomlasphere.

During the past few weeks, I’ve been privileged to get a first-hand lesson on the General Public License (GPL). Yes, PICnet is lucky to have quite a bright lawyer on staff, but even he was a little unclear on the GPL, open source, and copyrights. To be honest, I’m not sure there’s many people in the Joomlasphere that have much research knowledge and legal practice in the application of the GPL, so it’s a learning lesson for everyone.

Every once in a while, I get a little morsel of understanding, which I feel is good to share with the community. Today’s installment: who the heck holds the copyright to the Joomla code, and therefore, who has the right to replace Joomla’s GPL license with some other license? Is it the core team? Is it Open Source Matters? Is it free for anyone to change the license as they see fit?

Well, I should say that I’m neither a lawyer nor 100% certain of my following answers, but I believe my thoughts below might help in better understanding this market of ideas.

From my research, and what I’ve learned through listening carefully to the GPL talk at the Joomla!Day USA by James Vasile, Open Source Matters legal counsel and lawyer at the Software Freedom Law Center (you know, the group that actually helped create the GPL!), the copyright holders of the Joomla code are the committers of code to the project. That would mean the people we’d expect, like Johan, Louis, Andrew, and others (maybe even Miro!), own the copyright to their pieces of the code. I should say, they don’t own the copyright to the entire Joomla system, but rather to the code they’ve contributed to the project.

It’s pretty powerful that individuals can give their hard work to the project, still hold copyright, but agree to have it all licensed together under the GPL.

What does this mean? Well, in my mind it means that if Joomla’s license were going to change to another type of license, everyone who has contributed substantially (I use that word without full knowledge of its power) to the code base of Joomla would all need to agree that their copyrighted code could be licensed under some other license other than the GPL. That would seem like a hard feat, since it would require quite a few hands (including people no longer on the core team) to agree together to changing the license.

Moral of this story: based on my ever growing understanding and appreciation of the GPL, significantly changing the license under which Joomla is protected would be quite an effort.

Your thoughts are appreciated, especially from GPL lawyers (anyone, anyone?). I’m here to learn as much as you all are.

We PICnetters have been finding ways to keep busy and stay out of trouble, but in the meantime have left our home on the Internet a little, well, deserted.  While I finally have a chance to catch up on the news that was May 2007 while vacationing (that’s right, a “vacation”!) I’ll spend the next few entries pontificating and discussing the events and news that was May.

I’ll spread these thoughts over multiple entries, so as to save your eyes and your feedreaders from pure exhaustion.

As a frequent flier of JetBlue airlines, I was as disappointed as others to hear the news of the horrible delays, poor customer service, and general lack of strategic planning that the company had during the weather problems of mid-February 2007. One thing that I knew about JetBlue, however, was its roll-up-the-sleeves mentality.

So it wasn’t too big of a surprise to me to see the JetBlue CEO David Neeleman, taking responsibility for these problems in his rather candid video message to JetBlue customers spread out over YouTube. What I thought was very interesting, however, was the following:

1. a corporate CEO of one of the most popular airlines in the US dressed casually in a message to its clients
2. a video message where it’s clear he is talking directly with the clients rather than seeming overly rehearsed and memorized (or teleprompted) message
3. his opening of “Dear JetBlue customers…”

What interests me most is the uncanny notion that our technology community, lead by those that have a strong focus on community building and reputation validation systems, seems to have made a public relations communication piece like this reality. Before YouTube, would Neeleman have had such a candid “speech” with clients in such a casual format?

Maybe the bigger question is this: do we want our leaders, corporate or otherwise, to seem more like us? Is this a good thing? By doing so, are we missing what by definition makes a leader, a leader? Merriam-Webster dictionary defines leader as, “a person who has commanding authority or influence.”

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Joomla Tuesdays are coming back. And for those who continue to doubt that someone with an art history degree can run a web site? We want you there.

When we built Soapbox, PICnet’s low-cost, easy-to-set-up content management system exclusively for Non-Profits, we used the Joomla! content management system as its foundation. There were lots of reasons for that. But the main was that Joomla’s — and, by extension, Soapbox’s — universally acclaimed ease-of-use makes it a great fit for many nonprofits, who often make do without a large technical staff.

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More Google Maps madness. This hint is also courtesy of last month’s Not-for-Profit Webmaster Round Table, hosted by the generous David Milner from the Rainforest Alliance, which is turning out to be quite fertile ground for blog posts.

As Pradeep described earlier, and as has been noted by journalistic entities slightly more reputable than this blog (if such an entity is possible), Google Maps has written an easy-to-use API that lets programmers add information to a Map and implement it on their sites.
As you might expect, the possibilities are endless — and, of course, tend toward the slightly ridiculous:

• Housing Maps overlays Craigslist real estate listings — roomate wanted, apartment available, etc. — on a map of the city where the real estate is located.
• Dig a Deep Hole asks users (in broken English) if they are “concerned about where you go to arrive if you dig a very deep straight infinitous hole on Earth.” It quiets those anxieities by presenting a map of the world upon which users can click — and then shows them where they would end up if they dug in a straight line through all that red hot magma.
• My personal favorite, the New York City Subway Smell Map on Gawker, does exactly what you think it does. So now I know that waiting for the train at the subway stop around the corner from my apartment is “like being inside the bowels of a very sick animal.” Ironically, that’s exactly what my apartment smells like, too.

But I want to talk about something a little easier on the olfactory glands. And hopefully more helpful to our clients, many of whom have more pressing concerrns than where they would end up if they started digging in their backyards. Namely: Contact Us pages.

Many of our clients are national or international nonprofits with offices across the nation or the globe. We’ve all seen the standard static contact us page, with a simple listing of regional offices and the appropriate phone numbers, mailing addresses, and the like. But how about using Google Maps to create a more interesting, visual and informative Contact Us page?

You’re right, I didn’t think of this myself. See: the Rainforest Alliance has used the Google Maps API to create a Contact Us page that shows the location of its offices across the world. Each office is represented by a pin on the map. Click on a pin, and you get contact information.

Check it out. And keep the cool Google Maps ideas coming. Just make sure they smell good.

Next Tuesday, November 7, 2006, the United States of America will conduct its mid-term elections, putting all the seats on the House of Representatives (Lower House) and certain seats on the Senate (Upper House) up for re-election. At this critical juncture, there is a large possibility for the Republican party to loose its majority in these houses to the left-leaning Democratic Party.

Rock the Vote, a non-profit organization, engages in registering Americans to vote and was successful in registering 1.4 million citizens in the 2004. This year, Rock the Vote, worked with Google Inc., to produce the US Election Guide as a layer on Google Earth, showing US Congressional Districts and the candidates running for these seats. It also provides you with “news, web, and photo searches” via Google. Read more on Google’s blog.

Download Google Earth to figure out where you and your friends can go to vote in America.

Image Source: Rock the Vote www.rockthevote.com

Last week, a highly reputable Dutch politician and UN Envoy to Sudan, Jan Pronk posted on his personal blog about the loss of the Sudanese Army against militias in the troubled area of Darfur. Arguably outside his job description, this action resulted in removal of Mr. Pronk from his position in Sudan, thus throwing another blow at the UN’s efforts to restore peace in the region.

For the techies out there, this “blog” was nothing fancy - a series of simple html pages. It was the usage of the technology and not its superiority that really mattered. Within 48 hours of the content going live, a significant diplomat lost his job, insulted the Sudanese Ministry of Defense, and apparently fractured a diplomatic effort. Unlike the typical corporate world, this situation reminds us the importance of tech-developers (companies and/or organizations) in the non-profit sector to engage directly with and adopt the agendas of our clients, mostly non-profits and political clients. It becomes increasingly important to deliver technology that meets their specific needs, not simply as existential tools but as reliable paths to accomplishing one’s agenda.

Image Source: US Department of State

Earlier today, I had the opportunity to meet with a Congressional Office on Capitol Hill to discuss some ideas on renewing their official website. I met with some keen and idealistic staff members in a small office in the Canon House Office Building. During the hour-long meeting, there were many questions at hand - “How to best deliver the Congressman’s services to his constituents?”, “How to make this online effort citizen-centric?”, “How can PICnet help?”.

On my subway ride back to PICnet’s downtown DC office, I realized that PICnet had built a strong and unique reputation on the Hill of being a reputable, reliable, and honest firm. And that we were fortunate to engage in such conversation with in the political hotspot of this country.

While my fellow PICnetters and I find ourselves lost in our cubicles trying to seek goals that are greater than ourselves, it is my job as a project manager, to pause and pat ourselves on the back. Why would I blog otherwise?

As a the newest of the PICnetters, my blog postings are bound to be a little pedestrian, at least until I get up to speed. But one thing has struck me immediately about the Joomla system: its philosophy.

As an internet user — and, in a distant previous life, programmer — I always thought that a web site was a collection of web pages, and that those web pages, as a set, constituted the content. Think about pages, I figured, and the content would flow therefrom.

But Joomla! works better. Forget individual web pages. The internet is about delivering content to users — showing stuff to people — and focusing on the delivery vessel, the page, is wrongheaded. We all know that “form follows function” — or, as Frank Lloyd Wright claimed, “Form follows function — that has been misunderstood. Form and function should be one, joined in a spiritual union.”

Within Joomla!, architecture is driven by content; pages exist because the content does; you decide on what the content should be, and the pages follow naturally. At the risk of sounding overblown, they are “one, joined in a spiritual union.”