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Software Freedom Day & New UI

2008-09-14T17:55:00Z

Yesterday we were at the Software Freedom Day kickoff in Baarn, the Netherlands. We gave a presentation there on Freedom on the Brave New Web, and on LogiLogi.org, and a bit on our current efforts to make it usable to the max. It went well, and there also was a nice discussion afterward.

The slides of our presentation can be found here. A video might also become available, and in any case here is already a pre-view of the new UI we’re (Bruno, Wybo & Charles here and there :) making (full size here):

FKFT in Barcelona and Web Freedom & Stallman again

2008-07-22T21:13:00Z

And the FKFT was a great experience too. I’m typing this some days after the conference while waiting during the night at the Airport for my early-morning flight to Amsterdam. A few days after the fact because not just the conference was great: Barcelona also is; I love this city. It’s one of the best of Europe: grandiose architecture; not just Gaudi, but everywhere, public culture, statutes, museums, street-music, a fast and cheap metro sytem, good food & bars, and did I mention the weather ? Hmoah! :)

Anyway, enough about urban paradise: the Free Knowledge, Free Technology conference was organized by the Free Knowledge Institute: the creators of the SELF-platform: a site for collaboratively creating teaching-materials. And this platform was a topic many interesting presentations were on: especially their approach to diffs, and the Gnowledge-system that runs their concept-map are worth a look (had good conversations with both their creators).

Besides our own, which went well again :) (slides are here, sources in svn), another interesting presentation was by the Vibal Foundation (ran by a publishing-house) from the Phillipines. They run a bunch of interesting projects, like a Wikipedia-like site with more relaxed rules, and do this in the spirit of their local needs and circumstances, like being a formerly oral culture. Also the talks by Stephen Downes and Anne Østergaard were interesting.

And last but not least there was a speech of Richard Stallman again, at the beginning of the conference, on the first day. During the question-round he was ehm; quite harsh and sometimes even hostile (must admit that some in the audience were a bit so too). But afterwards we did get a chance to talk a bit: what it comes down to is that while Stallman does see possibilities for freedom in Web-/ Software-as-a-service-communities, he believes this freedom to be a lesser, and thus not a good (or no) freedom to strive for. In this sense he still thinks one should not rely on another’s machine to “do calculations with ones data”, with which, I think we disagree on 2 points:

First of all this “lesser freedom of the web” is not so much less. As we proposed it: all code of the web-app under the Affero GPL, all content under a CC-By-Sa license, and rights for the user-community over the running application. Freedom on these 3 planes allows the community to determine it’s course, and to leave and start anew (exodus/fork) in case this fails or there is no agreement possible. Pretty close to the rights of citizens in good societies I would say.
Secondly the web is good and useful, and can do things desktop pc’s can’t do. For example be accessed on any device and machine, anywhere, give users ease of not having to install and update the software, model social networks that can be collaboratively extended, and allow for all kinds of rating, tagging and sharing. In short the web is not evil, the web is just social, and when the serf-like conditions that many Web2.0 app-users are under now (they’re even being sold wit the app, as serfs were sold with the land in historic times) are replaced by social freedoms, the web will be a better place.

In short: social software requires social freedoms. Discuss it with us on LogiLogi.

RMLL 2008, LL, Web-Freedom, Stallman

2008-07-05T15:00:00Z

The RMLL was a really cool & interesting event. The atmosphere rocked, and there were plenty of good & interesting people around :) Sadly enough I could not speak with many of them, and follow even fewer talks, as the RMLL was French, very French. I did not expect this as they announced it as an international event. But I should have guessed it as they used the word “mondial”, instead of “global” ;) Anyway, their friendliness made up for this, really. Very friendly & caring pplz at the event. Definitely go there if you can, even if you only speak Arabic.

Besides ours on LogiLogi ;), there was one especially interesting presentation, it was on Sophie. It is a desktop app, and meant for creating books. They can contain video’s, be scripted, auto-play through timelines, act like presentation-slides and be exported to the web. Interesting, but no web-app of course…

We gave 2 presentations at the RMLL 2008, the first was on Tuesday the 1st and it was about LogiLogi, our plans to split up LogiLogi into separate webservices, and 2 debates that we were going to have during the week via LogiLogi. The first of the debates was about the future of Free Software on the Web 2.0. And the other about LogiLogi itself. Our second presentation was a short introduction to LogiLogi and a report on the results of the debate. The slides can be downloaded here and here – the second, on the Future of Free Software on the web. The video of our presentations will be available in some weeks, and both our presentations were also broadcasted live in entire France via the Freenews TV-channel! They will be there all summer in their program-loop :-)

Richard Stallman, the founder of the Free Software Foundation was also at the conference. I had a chance to quickly discuss our/my ideas on Free Software on Web2.0 with him. As he thinks very differently about them. According to what seems to be his view, one should only use one’s own computer for one’s own “calculations”. Sad. We think the web is not evil, freedom at the Web-community-level is possible, and that it matters. He told us he would be at our presentation to take part in the live debate, but he could not make it in the end because of an interview.

Hope we can discuss this later, at the FKFT in Barcelona, where Stallman and I will meet again. Freedom on the Web should not be ignored. Currently our views are quite far apart, like on this picture.

The LogiLogi discussion platform is still our main project.

Digital Humanities 2008

2008-07-03T13:50:00Z

The Digital Humanities 2008 conference was the conference to visit! It covered topics ranging from computer linguistics, dialectology, corpora, digital text-editions, and last but not least information- systems for people from the humanities and philosophers. In this last category there were 2 projects presented that we think are are especially interesting; of course besides our own project, LogiLogi :-).

The first was Discovery/Talia. It is a project that comes very close to LogiLogi in terms of what it wants to achieve, but it takes a different approach. It is being developed in 2 stages/environments. The first is a web-platform (in Rails) to be used for multiple sites containing philosophical sources, like the works of Wittgenstein and Hegel. These sites are to be maintained by specialists that function as gatekeepers. The second part is a desktop- application for writing philosophical texts, and for annotating and sharing them. This bit of the project is comparible to LogiLogi in it’s aims. We look forward to it’s development. And we are currently discussing posibillities for cooperation.

The second was PReE, by the Electronical Textual Cultures Lab. Also being developed in Rails, it focuses mainly on making existing texts available, but it also wants to have features like the easy annotation-system that LogiLogi has. Sadly enough PReE is not yet online or available, but we are now also in contact with them.

Our presentation was on saturday, and it went well. We got many good questions and references. The slides of our presentation can be downloaded here. And you can find the tex sources in our repository.

In all it was a great conference, and surely worth the trip to Oulu, Finland. There were quite some cool people around, and after the conference we had an excursion that basically was a long bus-trip on which we had many interesting conversations. By the way, a good thing about the city of Oulu is that they have city-wide free wireless for everyone. Hope it spreads :-)

European Conference on Computing and Philosophy 2008

2008-06-21T10:54:00Z

The ECAP08 was held in Montpellier, France, from 16-18 June. It was a very exciting, fast and inspiring conference, about the cross-roads of philosophy and computer-science/informatics. Talks ranged from the philosophy of information, gender and information- ethics to (ideas about) applications for philosophers.

And in this last category 3 interesting live systems were presented. The first was wiki-debate, the platform affiliated with the conference. While in principle an interesting approach (especially their visualisations are nice), I think the basic commenting feature suffered from a combination overcomplexity and lack of time on the side of the conference participants. The next was co-here. This system is beautifully designed and really looks Web2.0ish, but imho it is too much focused on enforcing simple, linear logical relations, at least for my line of philosophy.

Last but not least there was of course our presentation on LogiLogi Manta. The (classroom-sized) room was packed with people, even some had to stand in the back. We received some good questions and references and many positive reactions. The sheets can be downloaded here. And the video should also become available in some time.

LogiLogi at the Free Knowledge, Free Technology Conference

2008-05-28T12:17:00Z

And the good news just keeps coming: LogiLogi Manta will be, besides at ECAP, at Digital Humanities, and at the RMLL conferences also at the Free Knowledge, Free Technology conference, in Barcelona, Spain, from the 15th till the 17th of July. At this conference we will especially be going into the peergroup-system and into how we think to be able to combine quality and openness.

And for the development: We are currently still fixing the last bugs, and wrapping up the final functionality for now. The coming days we will start to invite more people to the public beta, and add some seeding-texts of our own.

Server been down, now up again

2008-05-20T16:29:00Z

Last weekend our server has been down. It again was due to a broken harddrive (the 3rd in 5 months). No data was lost however (as this time it was only one of the 2 disks in the raid-set that broke down) and everything is working again now.

In the meantime we are looking for possibilities of getting a new, dedicated server, instead of the old, colocated one we have now. We are because managing your own server- hardware may be fun (and it is!) & often a bit cheaper, but it takes quite a bit of time, and can be really troublesome if one is out of town when some sort of breakdown occurs… This is one of those situations in which limiting one’s objectives and riding the wave of specialization into the virtual era is a good thing…

An update of the beta is in the make (will look much better in IE), and should be there soon, just like the help-page and a few example documents to show the power of Manta…

LogiLogi Manta goes Live as Public Beta!

2008-05-06T00:13:00Z

Awaited for days, weeks, and months. Expectations, set-backs, choices, questions, good fun, and now there it is, towards it: LogiLogi Manta, the new version of the software behind LogiLogi.org is live and running, it is in public beta!

LogiLogi is a platform for philosophical and other in-depth, collaborative discussions, that combines openness with self- organizing quality-control. It achieves this through the maximization of easy intertextuality, and a Web 2.0 style system modeled after the useful social processes surrounding academic journals.

In other words, editing, linking, and organizing texts have been made as easy as possible in LogiLogi, and rating and ranking- communities are also part of the game. We hope that this is something that will allow for much better discussions than those on fora and mailing-lists. See this paper for a more in-depth description, or view this (bit old) presentation, if you enjoy video.

The software, LogiLogi Manta, is Libre/Open Source software, worked on for over 2 years, recently with as many as 10 people at the same time, and representing about 4 person-years of work.

This new version is a real milestone. It, for the first time, really enables better, and easier discussions. The earlier version, LogiLogi Plancton, was not much more than a modified wiki, which was basically only used for sharing lecture-notes by a hand full of people… LogiLogi Manta, now that it takes a swim, does bring a substantial improvement! It will make for a beautiful, fun, and interesting site.

Swim, yes, as it is named after the fabulous Manta Ray:

Regardless of our efforts, the success of LogiLogi will depend on you, and other people that might find it useful, and for whom we will and can do more to improve Manta. This release is by no means the end of our development-effort. It’s not that LogiLogi is finished now. No, this is only the beginning, and suggestions and feature-requests are very welcome.

Also please bear with us that while the site should be usable, it is still a beta-release, meaning that there are probably still many bugs and small issues to be fixed. You can help us a lot by reporting them here. Currently only the Firefox/Mozilla and Internet Explorer 7 browsers are supported, with IE6 following in some weeks.

LogiLogi Manta has, so far, been made possible by: (in alphabetical order) Lars Buitinck, Maarten Geraedts, Allan van Hulst, Bart Leusink, Miguel Lezama, Charl Linssen, Steffen Michels, Roel van Rijswijk, Bruno Sarlo, Thierry Stamper, Artyom Syazantsev, Rens van Summeren, Jordy Voesten, Wybo Wiersma (me :), Ilona Wilmont, Andrew Wolters, Feng Zhu, and probably even more!

With special thanks to Bruno, Miguel and Steffen, for their great and enduring work so far!

Big thanks to all!

LogiLogi Manta is Live! Long live LogiLogi Manta!

LogiLogi @RMLL and going live in just 4 days!

2008-05-02T10:42:00Z

It’s there!, almost… LogiLogi Manta will go live as public beta in just 4 days; on the 6th of May, 2008 AD.

The last two and a half week – since we planned the release – we have done a lot of heavy coding and radical refactoring. And we still have four days ahead of – quite intense – preparations, but it’s now really getting there…! We are now mainly tweaking the layout, writing some prelimary help-documentation, and testdriving our installation- scripts… :)

And as the good news just keeps coming, we just received confirmation that we will be presenting LogiLogi Manta also at the RMML conference. From the 1st till the 5th of July we will be there in Mont-de-Marssan, France!

Our presentation there will be especially going into the Free Software side of LogiLogi, and how we try to bring the spirit of Free Software to philosophical and humanities-related discussions. Besides it will also be the most technical of all our talks of this summer.

Our hero!, Steffen the Slayer of Bugs

2008-04-16T00:11:00Z

Steffen Michels is our hero!, the Slayer of Bugs; he is the winner of the glorious Manta bug-hunt! He found 8 different bugs, and he fixed 8 of them, and those were not the least of bugs.

Some were quite a challenge! Luckily we were able to take a picture of him in full fight with one of the most staggering software-bugs ever caught on camera!

Steffen is and was the best bug-squasher of all; the legendary exterminator, killer, crusher, and slayer of bugs with all and every amount of creepy legs, kind and form of gruesome tentacles, degree of sliminess, number, placement, color and shape of disgusting eyes, wings, snouts and not to forget crispy, crunchy, shields in all sizes, &... ...of all bad bugs for Manta’s sake!

Our second-best bug-crusher of was Bart Leusink with 6 finds and 6 fixes in total, and our 3rd-best hunter was Miguel Lezama, with just one find less than Bart…

We are now working towards our release-date, which we have set to the 6th of may. Just 3 more weeks till LogiLogi Manta goes live!

All hail to the Slayers of green Mean Bugs bugging Manta!

And let’s get going towards the release!

Our presentation and LogiLogi @ ECAP 2008!

2008-04-09T19:46:00Z

We have good news again, and this time there is no first of April in sight. Our submission to the European conference on Computing and Philosophy has been accepted! So besides our general presentation at the Digital Humanities 2008 in Oulu, Finland (June 25-29) we will now also be presenting in Montpellier, France (16-18 June). The presentation we give at ECAP will especially be about the philosophy behind Manta.

So if you are from the warm European south you will now also be able to attend a presentation about LogiLogi Manta!

And last weekend we also gave a presentation for the Dutch Linux User Group in Utrecht. It was in – you guessed – Dutch, and not just about LogiLogi Manta, but also about the importance of Free Software for the web. It was quite fun to give a presentation to an audience like this, and for it to be in Dutch for a change :) Anyway, for those capable of reading Dutch, the sheets are online here.

Ya-haha-hoo :)

2008-04-01T20:05:00Z

As Miguel Lezama finally sensed some time early in the evening, the Yippee Yahoo :) news indeed was our (Wybo and Bruno) contribution to April’s fools day, or as we say in Dutch, it was an “first of April” joke ;)

It seems that most of the Nijmegen team, and also at first Miguel, and many others did believe it. Which of course is not all together that strange, as it is quite close to the truth that we are doing something really interesting, potent and maybe even web- revolutionary with LogiLogi Manta…. Still to expect the vision and the goodness on the part of Yahoo to support us at this stage, may indeed be a little bit overstretched after all :)

For now we are and remain a Free Software project driven by the passion of it’s participants, and the fun we have doing it, not by corporate funding or by big salaries. Given it is that the project likely may have a bright future, a future that can fundamentally change our ways of doing deliberation and philosophy, and a future beyond google’s bad ‘ol “Knol”, and a future that may even include modest salaries… but for now it is to us, and no one but all of us together to make it true…!

Sorry Yahoo…

Yippee Yahoo! :)

2008-03-31T23:22:00Z

It just was confirmed by Yahoo that they are willing to sponsor the LogiLogi project! Yoohoohooo! :))

They already contacted us a week ago with their intentions, but today it was confirmed! To what extent and how exactly is still up for negotiation, but they said it is certainly going to be some funds and all the free advertising on the yahoo- network needed for a professional & smooth launch of Manta! And most importantly today they also assured us that Manta can remain Free Software! They will sponsor the foundation, and will not try to buy us out or anything… ;)

We will have a first meeting with a representative this Wednesday in Amsterdam. Yippeee! :)

They did not explain the why of their generous sponsorship in that many words, but it most likely may have something to do with giving us a good start versus Google’s Knol. A “Knol” is a slow, ugly, clumsy, farmers horse in Dutch, and whatever Google’s strength, we are now surely going to gallop straight past the ‘ol knol in style thanks to Yahoo! I already loved Yahoo since I had my first e-mail address with them! :)

Wow, sigh, everything is going so fast! :)))

Yippee Yahoo !!!

The Bughunt is on!

2008-03-10T11:50:00Z

The LogiLogi Manta bughunt is now officially open. The idea is that everyone is invited to find and fix as many bugs as possible in LogiLogi Manta. The one who finds and fixes the most bugs will win a nice prize and of course everlasting glory! What the prize is will be a surprise until the bughunting season closes again, which as it seems now will happen on the 13th of April.

Especially for the students from the University of Nijmegen this is part of their assignment. They work in pairs, so every bug is sent in by a pair, but counts are going to be kept individually (as pairs will rotate). I (Wybo) will be keeping the score, and checking the committed code and bugs. And to ensure a fair game I will not partake in the bughunt myself, so any commits / bug-reports I file will not be counted… (but fixes for them by you are).

The scores will be reported on the mailing-list each week.

Both bugs and bug-fixes will be good for points. A bug and a fix for a bug will each be good for one point. So finding a bug and fixing it will give you 2 points, while just finding one will give you 1 point. Exceptionally hard to find bugs or difficult/big fixes may be rewarded with 3 points each.

Bugs are to be chased without mercy! Manta is to be twisted, turned, squeezed, slapped, jammed, racked, swung, smacked and rocked in all it’s rational and irrational N dimensions to find and kill ‘em all! Those bloody low-life bad bugs! But please go hunting only on your own development-machine, and don’t disturb the peace of the running version of manta… :)

Also make sure you are always using the last svn checkout.

Happy hunting!

Welcome to the Nijmegen Students!

2008-02-21T17:09:00Z

Seven students from the university of Nijmegen have just joined our team. They will be developing LogiLogi Manta with us as part of a course. Meet them: Wybo (me), Rens, Jordy, Roel, Thierry, Steffen, Bart and Feng!

In two weeks they will be set up and ready to rock with Ruby. Then we will have a bug-hunt on the alpha-version until the end of march. During this bug-hunt Manta is tested and twisted extensively as both finding bugs and squashing them are going to be core objectives. And after this LogiLogi Manta finally goes live!

Then we will be improving Manta with the features and into the directions that the users want… To make this more concrete we will also be organizing a usability-test with a focus-group of philosophy-students & humanities people. Here we will test the UI and take note of all opinions and ideas for new features, which we will then implement.

During the whole process we will only be using Agile / Extreme programming techniques. It’s going to be fun and productive!

A big welcome to Roel, Rens, Feng, Steffen, Thierry, Bart and Jordy!