Disruptive Proactivity

I’m struck by the similarity between people who do the best work, and people who doubt that the work they do is that good.
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We don’t have a written constitution, but a tradition and knowledge passed down. With a permanent Civil Service, it is they who are charged with maintaining that, politically neutral, informed service.

The work Puffles has started on twitter to begin join up campaigners with an understanding of the policy process is a start. But it’s a massive job, that needs to be supported from multiple angles.

If you’re based in the US, there’s legal clarity in (almost) all directions. [Carl Malamud][http://public.resource.org] has done fantastic work based on the lack of copyright on US Government work. This is now something that the UK has now made possible with the Open Government Licence.

The new Judgemental.org.uk and the long-running OKFN have been working in areas. But unlike the US, that’s not quite how the UK works. Spotify – possibly apocryphally – launched because the founder went for a pint with the right people who agreed not to shut them down for a while to see what happened and whether they could make it work.

The UK is like that. A dear (partially-)American friend was looking for a good overview of How The UK Works, and didn’t feel she got it until the Queen became involved (as a legal entity, not in the conversation). I’d love to see the writeup of that understanding. I suspect it would fill a number of holes in my assumptions & knowledge of how everything relates to everything else.

But in the absence of that explanation (probably phrased in terms of the Muppet Show), and even when we get it, that’s probably not how it should work.

But as the OGL kicks in, the scope to FoI all the docs for training civil servants (if you’ve ever wondered how thye got that way, you can find out), and then do something interesting with them online becomes greater.

Interesting competition for what to do with 100Drobos?

Apple recently announced the iCloud, which is not about storing your data in the Cloud, but about storing your data via the Cloud. 5Gb of storage isn’t much; it just passes through on its’ way to your devices. Much the same way that real clouds aren’t storage devices for water, they just hold it for a while while it moves from one place to another.

So, taking that analogy further, what would I do with a 100 drobos attached to slow network connections?

Fill them with all the below, and send them to the 100 most (potentially) effective small ngo-training NGOs in the country. Not with the raw content, but mashedup and structured into such that it’s usable by people who haven’t been through the training school for what all the words are used to mean, but who need to know to make their organisations effective.

That’s easy enough to do on the web, but without good internet links (e.g. In a training room attached only over ADSL), that rich immersive experience is difficult online. But as the iCloud implementation shows, it’s not syncing, but caching while the other devices catch up. Push data to the cloud as fast as possible, and then pull it down when it can. While

For home, I’ll get an Apple Time Capsule that can permanently grab a copy of all my iCloud data as soon as they release it, that same method can be used to push data elsewhere for purposes that are much more useful than my pictures of cats.

And a really good use for 100drobos.

Another idea is to lend them to the “unnamed organisation” to move their data, as a practical suggestion of how not to get locked in to a data centre when you have 2Pb of data. Sigh.

OpenTech now has it’s own blog/podcast feed over at http://blog.opentech.org.uk/

While I’ll probably post one announcement here, If you want to follow OpenTech news, you should follow that blog.

It’s interesting how the same themes keep coming out of multiple sessions. If it was remotely true, I’d say we planned it that way, but we didn’t.
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