In the pursuit of collaborative intelligence...

EU donates €660,000 to open source research

The newly approved funding is for the two-year FLOSSWorld project (FLOSS stands for Free/Libre/Open Source Software). It is Europe's first initiative to support international research and policy development on this topic.

The €660,000 grant will be shared by countries including Argentina, Brazil, Bulgaria, China, Croatia, India, Malaysia and South Africa.

The research will focus on three areas: the impact of free and open source software on skills development and its ability to affect economics and generate employment; regional differences in software development; and attitudes of governments and public sector organisations to using open source.

There's also the idea that FLOSSWorld should lead to co-ordinated policies based on the research findings for the countries involved.

Wow!  This is very interesting - I guess what we now see is a big challenge emerging - we have the European Union supposedly representing their people responsibly by funding research into policy - how this balances with the debacle over software intellecutal property rights management in Europe is anyone's guess.

I wonder how Microsoft will bat this ball - will they play straight?  If we have politicians collaborating on open source software policy would Microsoft or other large organisations follow the tactics of Tsun-Tzu?  would they spy on these politicians, would they bribe them - according to Tsun-Tzu the best battles are those where you take over your enemy without losing any resources, i.e. peacefully and without casualties.  I guess we might be looking at some casualties now unless politicians keep up their reputation of being less-than-moral and ethical pillars of our respective communities.

Fascinating development - I especially love the tie-in with China considering current trade disputes.

Fruits of working openly: transLucid (MySQL/PHP)

But then we discovered Lucid Fried Eggs! LFE is basically a number of php scripts that reads and writes a MySQL database and is developed by Stephen Danic as Open Source. It works but not as we envisioned that it should. We hired Andrius Kulikauskas who introduced us to Emad El Deen and together we re-programmed LFE. The outcome of our work is called transLucid. It can be seen, tested and downloaded for install on your own webserver from our website pantha.net.

What can you do with transLucid?

* transLucid can put a PersonalBrain on the web (you still need BrainUtil for making an importable xml file). This can be done during install, but also afterwards. It cannot import Notes yet.

* You can edit your 'lucified' website online: text, images and menu (adding, renaming and deleting of 'thoughts', (un)linking to url, making 'pins', attach files) . In this way transLucid works as an online CMS tool.

* Editing can be done in 'public mode', which means than anybody can do editing, or in 'restricted mode' where only you can edit the contents of your website.

* Layouts and style of your transLucid website can be changed by any HTML editor.

Installation requirements of transLucid

You need a webserver which is php-enabled and has full access to a MySQL database.

Future of transLucid

transLucid is now in beta. For version 1.0 we want to add the following features:

* Wysiwyg editing with built-in FCKeditor.

* Sorting 'pinned' thoughts in any possible order.

* Fixing export to TouchGraph applet.

* Exporting to xml which can be read by BrainUtil

* Fixing all reported outstanding bugs.

Feedback

We welcome any feedback you might have. You can do that by directly mailing one of us (see addresses below), by using the feedback form on http://www.pantha.net/index.php?request=displaypage&NodeID=395 or by becoming a member of the transLucid Yahoogroup on http://groups.yahoo.com/group/translucid/

http://www.pantha.net/transLucid.zip

http://www.pantha.net

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/translucid/

http://sourceforge.net/projects/lucid