typo(s), tendency and text

And here I would like to have an animated, blinking gif. But I don't. Yes, there is not much more to say. I won NaNoWriMo, not a second to late, but rather a day early. As I am writing this, I am sitting in the Piksel Hut in Bergen, where I and some guys from the HackBergen group meet to do an Open Hack Day. The other three are working on their electronics projects, I was writing. And am now celebrating my big winning moment with them and my many far away friends. This happens not just-in-time, but whenever they read what I have posted on various social web services.

I managed to write 50250 words. There is still a lot to do about the text for it to become a novel: The spaceship in part two has not landed yet. And I haven't even started on writing part three, where my vampire is going to be a space traveller.

I loved this challenge, and I hated it. But I mostly loved it, and want to thank the people who have organized NaNoWriMo for the tenth time in a row. It is an awesome way of getting started with writing of longer texts. I was anxious, and every time I got back to writing after work or daily chores, (or simply slacking) I was anxious again. The challenge to pull off writing so many words in short time, makes the anxiety count less. You have an aim, and you know you can reach it. And you also know, that there are loads of people doing the same thing at the same time.

Now, if this text will become a novel there i still a lot of work to do, research, rewriting, editing, writing more. Planning the plot couldn't hurt, either. But I learned a lot only by doing this. And that was exactly my plan. Now I have more questions that I can ask, topics on the craft that I can explore. Before it would have been a theoretical thing, now its close to something that I have done before. I'd like to thank everybody who encouraged me, and everybody who ignored my tweets about this even though there were really boring.

Today is Ada Lovelace day, and somebody started a pledge to make bloggers of all genders tell their human readers (and all the bots) about the women that made a difference in tech, and more specific in computing/science/communication. Ada Lovelace was the first programmer, and she was a woman. Today with a majority of male people in the computer science field, it is hard to imagine how this environment could not be dominated by men and have the connotation of success, innovation and power. There were times when this was different and it could be different again.

Being in the men/women paradigm, or within the binary system of gender roles, it is natural that many point to successful or important women, where they are not as visible as the men. I think this is an important thing to do.

But I would like to emphasize the many people that I am lucky and happy to know, that try to get over this binary and discrimintating system of gender roles. Those who try to not make it matter. Those who encourage people to do stuff, to think and act in new ways. Regardless of whatever attributes they might have. Those who help each other out, and not make situations of giving or receiving help uncomfortable. Those who are knitting, guerilla gardening, communicating, tinkering with circuits and microcontrollers. Those who do hacking in all sorts of ways and different stages and situations in life. Those who want to make the world better, bit by bit. Those who live to learn.

So this blog post is to all my friends and those who care. Many of them are great minds, others are great tinkerers. Some are both. It is a gift to have met them. And it is a gift to learn from them and share my thoughts with those people. They are girls, grrlz, women, men, ladies, femmes, butches, in-betweens.

Tonight I will hopefully get to know more of these special people, tonight is the first geek girl dinner in Bergen.

Feel free to write about your or my geek friends in the comments.

One viable way of managing multiple cms installs of the same kind would be using version control and distributing the tested new version of updated software to the different locations. Since I have heard of and read up on git recently, I signed up for GitHub. You can find the first repository here, it's for trying out Joomla!.

Norway wants all public service to be accessible to everyone, regardless of disabilities. "Universell utforming" is the term that describes how every aspect of public service should be shaped to meet the needs of a diversity of people. Of course, also the web services in public service have to be accessible to as many people as possible. You can order and download (norwegian) brochures about this topic on the pages of the Norwegian Directorate of Health:

Tilgjengelige nettsteder:

1. Oversikt og innholdsproduksjon

2. Design og koding

3. Anskaffelse og kvalitetskriterier

I couldn't blog every day about the event I am attending in Berlin. There is too much going on, talks to (not) see, all the interesting people in the hallways of the bcc, workshops, parties. So far I have seen talks about designing your own stuff you need and the upcoming (probable) development towards decentralized production of physical objects where design and production proces are open sourced, and people don't necessarily depend on fordistic production method anymore. I have heard a talk about a model and test case of decentralized social software as well, but otherwise I haven't seen many talk, and therefore it makes me really happy, that the filming and encoding process seems to go so much faster this year.

Since I moved to Bergen, Norway in october, I wanted to announce an initiative that I hereby start. Inspired by the Hackerspace movement I am convinced that it is much more fun and much more likely to meet likeminded people and do and make cool stuff, if you have a physical space, where all kinds of human beings can come and meet on equal terms to follow their interests. So far I have lived in a region where there was at least two such places to go to, whereas one of them was a designated Hackerspace. So I startet a wiki page on hackerspaces.org, a mailing list and a website so far. If you are interested, even remotely, please let me hear it.

Right now ideas and actions are needed, and I am very curious how everything will turn out.

A colleague of mine mentioned Plone in a meeting about the on-going project I recently blogged about. He introduced me to Plinkit, a project started in the USA, where small libraries are provided with a Plone-based CMS to suit their web publishing needs. So far it seems to me, that some problems are being solved by that:

• They can easily publish.
• They can integrate a search form of their catalogue into their site.

I have visited some of the sites, and it seemed to me, that there were still some problems remaining, which come naturally to small libraries and which are caused by small money and time budgets:

• Boring default designs
• Few updates
• Few information about the specialties of the libraries.

The last point seems the most important one: Local libraries need stronger profiles. They need to advertise their knowledge and their profound and demanded specialties, be it local history and archives, good knowlegde of local artists and writers - or the like. To stay an important focus point in small local communities, they are most likely toexist further if they develop to an important meeting point and work space for locals who have special information needs. I would like to give some examples. Does your area have:

• Strong tradition of handicrafts? Let the local people get together in the course room of your library, advertise it and let everybody know about it. Ask the group, if they have suggestions for very important learning media about what they are doing. Support them with information about what others do. Take pictures and blog about it on your site. This could be worth a podcast.
• Different groups who like to read books and discuss? Stay in touch and get them what they need. Advertise there meetings at your library. Let them have a closed or open wiki on your site.
• Writers? Let them gather. Let them write. Let them read with the public. Establish a demo place, where people can display their work and check it out from the library. (As done in the Bergen public library in Bergen, Norway. The site is in Norwegian, but you can see a picture here.)

Okay, I could go on and on with this. I think you got the main point. The library could and should evolve from a place where you only gather written knowledge on dead trees on shelves. And develop itself to a place where you gather people to make knowledge while using it. Libraries have a tradition in this, it is not a new thing. But it becomes vital to the existence of libraries - and especially small local libraries - to focus on this kind of service. Or rather than service: This kind of knowledge cooperatives.

Looking at some of the plinkit libraries only made me think. I haven't been looking into plinkit too much, which I will do further on. Until then I'd really like to hear your thoughts. Please comment.

Library Spiderweb by Yvonne Loomis

During my research I got to read about Internet Library Systems (ILS), which seems to be the new term for a new stage of Library systems. As I understood it, they should integrate cataloguing and web publishing for libraries in a better way. As of now, many libraries have the problem that they have implemented expensive library catalogues with huge effort, but that they now with the growing need for better librarian-patron-communication, seem to disturb the image of a whole identity that libraries feel they should create.

I came along two Open Source ILS: Evergreen and KOHA. I can't really say much about them at this point, but the Biblioteklaboratoriet seems to have looked into it. It's rather interesting, that it's being translated into both the norwegian written languages, Nynorsk and Bokmål, and that there is also a discussion going on about the - probably - proprietary data standards.

Open Source formats would be a real ease of the problem of integrating publishing and media search, which are both parts of the duties that libraries have. There are teams working on modules "MARC" and "Z39.50" for Drupal, but I can't say yet, if it is a workaround for the problem.

Due to a new job, I will spend the next eight months thinking and working on better communication solutions for public libraries in the Region Hordaland, Norway. You can find some of my ideas on the site Library & Development. You can follow the postings occuring in this category by subscribing to a category-specific feed as well, if you wish. That way, you can avoid listening to my blabbering about other stuff.

Thats another thing I wanted to say: I will also go on sharing stuff that I am interested in otherwise on my blog, but not on the front page. My posts will probably vary between my native language German, Norwegian (bokmål) and English. I hope, you understand. I will try and make this easier on you when I find a solution for the language problem, that isn't too much of a hassle.

Libraries are a public service, and tend to be very interested in Open Source publishing. Recently I am looking into open source content management systems for small public libraries in the region where I live now. Since the solution has to be usable, stable and sustainable, I try to focus on the three to four most stable communities on this sector. These seem to be:

• Drupal
• Joomla
• Typo3
• Wordpress

My first anticipation is, that Typo3 might be a little overweight for the purpose of building a cost effective and stable solution that will last the next years. And Wordpress might be a little underweight. But could still be viable: There are so many people using it, and there are methods to automate updates of websites, that people within my range have had good experiences with.  My gut feeling says Drupal, though it will be a lot to learn for me. Joomla isn't bad, either. But there are so many modules, themes and plugins that are non-free. And although I totally understand people have to make a living by writing software, I have to make this project reliable for the future. Not for all future, but for the next 3 till 4 years.

Another point is, that I feel that Joomlas administration panel is much more complicated than Drupals. On Drupal you have a lot of functions already build in, and if you simply set them together, the site already after fifteen minutes seems to get more and more structure. And the admin panel is not only easier to look at, it also makes all the built-in functionality visible very soon.

Don't worry, dear Joomla, WP and Typo3 evangelists. I will get into some testing, before I decide. And I will not base the decision on gut feeling. But until then, I have to think and evaluate a lot.