As wave after wave of privacy news arrives, it’s easy to believe that public postings on social media sites are the problem. But I believe we are facing an issue caused not by public sharing but by an encounter with a new kind of “public”. First, a short story. Alice, Bob and Evan Alice doesn’t […]
Filed under: Privacy | Tagged: Facebook | Comments Off on ☆ Beware The “Super-Public”
Who said this? “The Church in its own bubble has become, at best the guardian of the value system of the nation’s grandparents, and at worst a den of religious anoraks defined by defensiveness, esoteric logic and discrimination.” No, it wasn’t Richard Dawkins or indeed any other spokesman for atheism. It was the Bishop of […]
Filed under: Spirituality | Tagged: Christianity | 5 Comments »
It’s been an open secret all month, but two new members have joined the Affiliate scheme at OSI – Spain’s CENATIC (the national open source competency centre that’s been so important to the government adoption of open source in Spain’s regions) and the venerable Debian Project. Both bring a much-needed international flavour to OSI, along […]
Filed under: OSI | 2 Comments »
Today is Document Freedom Day. It’s not the easiest subject to explain. It’s easy to explain why being free to video a police encounter in the USA is important, or why it’s wrong for your eBook to be remotely controlled by a vendor, but many people fail to understand the subtlety of why a document […]
Filed under: LibreOffice, Links, ODF, Standards, Zeitgeist | 6 Comments »
I spent the day yesterday at ORGCon with friends old and new, enjoying talks from a wide range of speakers including of course Cory Doctorow and Lawrence Lessig. There was a film crew recording all the talks; I’ll highlight some of them here over the next week or so. My tweets about the event might […]
Filed under: Open Rights Group | 2 Comments »
The OSI Board held a meeting on Friday to fill three vacancies on the Board. This was the first time we have had Affiliate Members, so we decided to ask them to nominate candidates to fill some of the vacancies. They came up with some great candidates, and we voted to have Eclipse’s Mike Milinkovic […]
Filed under: OSI | Comments Off on ☆ New OSI Directors
The Hobbit is one of our local pubs. It’s a rather seedy student-focussed music venue that serves cheap booze under fanciful names taken from Tolkien’s books. Their web site had (now removed from the pages but still on-site) of publicity material derived from the Lord of the Rings movie stills. I had always wondered how […]
Filed under: Trademarks | Tagged: Lord of the Rings, Southampton, Trademark | 2 Comments »
You may have spotted two posts by me on InfoWorld in the US recently (one about LibreOffice and one about OIN). I’m pleased to say that I was approached by them to take over the widely-read “Open Sources” column. Naturally I accepted their proposal and I hope to write every Friday for them. Thanks to […]
Filed under: InfoWorld, Webmink | Comments Off on ☆ Writing For InfoWorld
Kiva are giving away $25 to anyone who asks today. It’s true. The catch? You have to loan the money to someone who has far, far less money than you do and who will use it to bootstrap their business. Like everything, Kiva has a deeper story, but I am an enthusiastic supporter as I […]
Filed under: Zeitgeist | Tagged: Charity | Comments Off on ☆ Free Money!
Meshed Insights - Open Source Management Consulting
All views expressed on this blog are those of Simon Phipps and do not necessarily reflect the views of any other entity, including current and former employers and clients. See my full disclosure of interests.
© 2010-23, Simon Phipps. All rights reserved, all wrongs righted. Unless otherwise credited all photographs, videos and other media are included in this statement. Some photographs are available for licensing via iStockPhoto. To contact the author, please use the e-mail form.
Wild Webmink 