Canyon R » Software

I want my A-Space

Canyon — Wed, 03 Dec 2008 15:27:53 +0000

I’ve been reading Mark Drapeau‘s Mashable column and am really excited about the Government 2.0 directions that he is talking about. I’m also frustrated, as he is, at the pace and lack of leadership that these efforts are receiving. But one of the most interesting parts was his description of A-Space.

The big development in IC social networking tools hitting the news recently is A-Space, essentially a mashup of Facebook, LinkedIn, and GoogleDocs designed to be an addictive work environment for analysts with access to sensitive human intelligence (HUMINT). A-Space will have status updates a la Twitter, subscriptions to updates, feeds and friends, activity streams, content management a la Sharepoint, a community grid tag cloud, RSS feeds from outside, drag and drop capability, discussion/question threads, a ’scrapbook,’ and widgets.

But most importantly he finishes with this revelation.

This system – frankly better than anything I know about in the private sector at the moment – should increase collaboration and analytical thinking.

A-Space’s launch is a great opportunity for the internal communications of the government to get a much needed upgrade. And I’m all for the US Government taking advantage of great ideas for social networking. I just want them to share with the rest of us. I know first hand how the lack of internal tools can motivate users to take advantage of public sites or implement their own solutions. I would love to make a resource like A-Space available to my users. Currently we are using an internal Wiki and an IM and IRC server and while these tools have served us well they are limited in scope. I can imagine how a locally hosted service with the above listed features could offer a great opportunity for increased collaboration, especially across different teams and business divisions.

More importantly than the affect that this could have on my own company, I think about all the other small and medium sized companies who could really benefit from an A-Space. Having a centralized, easy to deploy, managed social network that lives within the corporate firewall could quickly open communication channels and build the relationships that most of the actual work at companies is based on. It is the implementation of tools like these that give us IT professionals an opportunity to have a substantial and lasing impact on not only the company but the effectiveness of individual employees.

There are, of course, several commercial options including from tech giants Microsoft and IBM. These solutions are usually best suited for companies that have existing installations that already use these company’s technologies. There are also open source projects working in this direction but they don’t seem to be as feature complete and robust as A-Space sounds.

This leads to the ongoing discussion of open source and government. If the taxpayer’s money was used to create software, the argument goes, then the taxpayers should benefit from that investment. I think the reuse by other departments and the release from vendor lock-in are better reasons for government projects to be created under an open source license. I understand the government’s desire to keep some things out of the public eye and under raps. I know that many security related projects wouldn’t be open sourced for fear of someone finding an exploitable bug. Yet I think that A-Space is a perfect example of the kind of government project that should be open and available to the general public. The value in this system is the content, personal connections it allows, and it’s internal access controls not the code of the system itself. The government could benefit greatly from any outside development done by the open source community that would develop around such a product. I understand that any community code would be meticulously reviewed before use inside any government network. But this code review would still cost less, in developer time, than developing the same features from scratch.

So just as President-Elect Obama has embraced Creative Commons for the Change.gov site, I hope that A-Space is released as an open source project so that others can benefit from and contribute to this resource. In the absence of this unlikely event, I hope that the open source community takes this as an opportunity to step up and create the missing A-Space for me and everyone else.

The Vista Wowersize

Canyon — Thu, 22 Nov 2007 04:21:21 +0000

I have come to confirm my earlier impressions about Vista. I have determined that it has stabilized into a good “Power User” operating system. I still hesitate to endorse it outright, and will caution any prospective users, due to it’s many issues and complications. I don’t think it is justified for most typical users. For power users who will use it’s updated features, and are willing to work past it’s issues, it is functional and even positive.

My friend is definitely a power user. While not a professional Geek, he certainly enjoys the learning and doing parts enough to have grown well beyond casual use. He frequently trouble shoots his own problems, customizes his software configs, and tweaks his system in interesting ways. I know that when I get a call from him, either he needs a sounding board to bounce an idea off of, or he has a real problem that will require more than a reboot or a reinstall.

He has had his share of Vista complications. Foremost of which is Cannon’s decision to support Vista on it’s combo Printer/Scanner/Copier/Fax systems starting with the model directly after his. He was able to get the XP driver installed and he can at least print. Alas, scanning and faxing seem lost to him. His other major issue, which others have repeated, is installing software. His work around to the access issues he has encountered is to use the “Run As” command on the Setup.exe in order to execute it as Administrator. This has resolved the majority of his issues, although it did require several reinstalls of software he has setup before discovering it.

In the end he is genuinely happy with both Vista and his new hardware. I hope that others find Vista as positive an experience as he has. Unfortunately from the reports I have read, he seems to be among the minority.

Supprising shades of Vista

Canyon — Sun, 11 Nov 2007 22:40:27 +0000

I did my first official Windows Vista install on Tuesday night. A good friend wanted to “make the leap” with the new PC he was purchasing. His logic was sound enough. “I’m going to need to upgrade eventually, might as well do it now when the hardware is new and I have to reinstall everything anyway.”

I have just heard the first reports back and he described it as “Blown Away.” He seems to be enjoying Vista itself, beyond the new hardware benefits he is getting. I hope that my cautionary tales of Vista’s successes and failures helped him in having a positive, yet realistic, mindset for the transition. I will gather more in depth information tonight and we’ll see if the initial enthusiasm holds up under scrutiny.