CivicActions Sponsors DrupalCon Szeged 2008

DrupalCon Szeged is fast approaching and though we are a sponsor, I’m sorry I won’t be able to attend. A number of my colleagues from CivicActions will be there though including Doug, Robin, Kevin, Jozef, look for them in sessions and at the Day 1 Exhibition. DrupalCons are a great opportunity for the community to come together and share and move big ideas forward. It seems that everyone comes out of the events with energy and plans to improve the software and further strengthen the community. We’re happy and proud to be able to support these evnts. In addition to sponsoring DrupalCon we are happy to continue our support for DrupalCamps around the world. Having sponsored and participated in camps in New York, Toronto, Vancouver and Seattle earlier this year, we have committed our support for the upcoming DrupalCamp Victoria and DrupalCampNZ. Seeing local communities come together around organizing these camps and helping new people come into the Drupal community is really exciting. Camps offer a wonderful opportunity to grow new talent (we’ve got two people on our team who started out at a camp!) and build local and regional communities. The other exciting thing about camps is that they often involve far less travel and thus are more sustainable on individuals (who don’t have to trek half way around the world with the time cost and travel cost) and the...

Mainstream Media Gets With The Program

Via Noneck The New York Times reports that TV networks including CNN are creating one reporter bureaus to file stories, not only from far flung countries but also American cities. What is interesting to me about this development is the blurring between quality of “professional” news gathering and independent, amateur and freelance news gathering. If what used to distinguish CNN from someone at an Indymedia reporter was an expensive camera, editing equipment and a crew, and now the field is leveled, perhaps other barriers will drop as well. Now what CNN (or other MSM outlets) has is the cable and airwave distribution system. As broadband internet access becomes ubiquitous, and the ease of video distribution (and consumption) over the web (and mobile devices) increases the advantages held by MSM and independent media will erode even further. We are poised to see a democratization of video reporting similar to that of print reporting ushered in by the blogging revolution of just a few years ago. For clients of ours like Witness, these developments are important because they are a distribution network for a particular kind of video and reporting — human rights reporting. It is not unrealistic to think that in the coming months or years MSM will look towards sites like Witness, or Indymedia, or local access channels to round out their reporting. Perhaps such a development will save us from any more hours of Nancy Grace, Wolf Blitzer or other talking heads trying to fill air time in the 24 hour news cycle. We can hope. On a side note, the “Shelf Life” column in the September/October issue...

Captchas I Can Actually Support

I really don’t like Captchas, the squiggly words that many websites use to protect forms from spam bots. Unfortunately, sometimes they are the only thing that can protect a site from clever spammers. Yesterday I heard a great story about reCaptcha, captchas that are used to crowd-source digitizing of old print books and newspapers on NPR. If you have ever tried to use a scanner with OCR, you know that it can be pretty hit or miss. It’s the brainchild of Luis von Ahn, a computer scientist at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, who helped develop another commonly used Web security system. That one, called CAPTCHA, will allow people to access a Web site only if they prove they are human — and not a spammer’s computer — by typing in a sequence of letters or numbers that appear on the screen in a distorted or garbled image. According to the story, 1.3 billion words have been digitized this way! I am willing to put up with the pain of filling out a captcha if I know it is at least helping in some small way. Now at CivicActions we shy away from using captcha due to usability and accessibility issues. Recently we have begun using Mollom on some client sites. Mollom first checks if a post seems spammy before forcing a user to enter a captcha. Mollom does not use reCaptcha though, it would be nice if it...

Customer Service In The Age of Social Media

Last night I was scheduled to fly from New York’s JFK to Seattle on JetBlue. As the storm clouds gathered and a crazy thunderstorm gathered over the NY region I called JetBlue’s automated flight status service and was surprised to hear my flight was still on time. That was at 6:10pm. While in the cab on the way to JFK I went online to get some work done (you know, I can work from anywhere, but more on that later). As we neared the airport I checked the JetBlue website. My flight was now delayed by an hour and twenty minutes. When I arrived at the ticketing area I sent this tweet: I got through security to find a terminal crowded with people, not a seat or outlet available anywhere. Folks sitting on the floor (hundreds of them). I wandered around hopelessly looking for a seat finally finding one near my gate. As 9:55 departure time approached, I went to the gate and over the cacophony of the crowed heard a barely comprehensible PA announcement: my flight was now delayed until 11:05. I still had some battery power left on the laptop, so i downloaded and watched the nightly news (thinking i had another battery fully charged). 11:05 rolls around and another announcement: Equipment still on the ground in atlantic city! No departure until 12:30AM! So now I started tweeting directly to JetBlue. And JetBlue started responding. See the photos of my cell phone below. Back to my ability to work from anywhere: apparently for me crowded, loud airport terminals are not easy places for me to get work...

OpenOffice Training Next Monday

Ethan just sent an email out to the CivicActions team about an upcoming training in using OpenOffice, the Free software desktop office suite that most of us use. I’ve been using OpenOffice (and NeoOffice, the version available for Mac) for a number of years and have recommended it to many friends and clients. oO (as it is sometimes referred to) is a great alternative to MSO, and it can handle MS file formats. So here is your opportunity to learn some tips and tricks from a master: Longtime OpenOffice project volunteer Alexandro Colorado will run a free training session on Monday August 11th, 2008 at 16:00 UTC (12:00pm EST, 10:00am PST): Learn essential tips on migrating to the OpenOffice.org platform. The talk will cover the differences and similarities of the office suite and help you overcome some of the challenges in adopting OpenOffice.org. This is the first of two sessions covering the word processor and the spreadsheet. Sign up now Also, there is an OpenOffice.org User Facebook...