Thoughts

I make it a habit not to post community squabbles that often take place in any IT project (whether open source or not).  When people have the best intentions and respect the opinions of others, I don't believe it is right for me or anyone else to publicly exploit discussions that are meant to remain within the community.  However, the conflicts going on at XOOPS.org have been made so public that it's hard for me to put a lot of faith in a project that treats its own people so poorly.

I wonder how OnStar could have made my 4-door 1976 Chevy Nova any slower than it already was?

Will a new anti-theft tool from General Motors and OnStar be enough to make your car not worth the hassle of stealing?

The Stolen Vehicle Slowdown, a new feature added to OnStar, takes away the ability to use a car's gas pedal, while allowing braking and steering controls to work.  More...

By the time my Dad gave me the Nova for college during the second half of the 1980's...the car had already it earned it's nickname, The Rustmobile.  I miss that car...

I am a loyal reader of Andrew McAfee's articles which he posts on his Harvard Business School blog, The Impact of IT on Business and their Leaders.  Andrew McAfee is an associate professor at Harvard and spends a great deal of time on his blog discussing and defining Enterprise 2.0.

While we all talk a lot about about Web 2.0, Collaboration 2.0, and Enterprise 2.0, there is actually not enough formal research on the subject as many in the business and academic world would like.  The lack of concrete research and facts on Enterprise 2.0 can cause managers to be a little concerned that they're bringing toys and not business tools to their worker's computer desktops.  There is enough distraction in the workplace and managers question why they would want to bring Facebook to the office?

Michael Silverman has a great article on The Content Wrangler regarding content management. The full title of the article is "Making The Business Case for Web Content Management: First, Admit You Have A Problem".  The article is a one-stop place for explaining content management, why a business or organization should implement a content management system (CMS), and tips for choosing and implementing a CMS.

I have been struggling to decide what I think about the Wikipedia/WikiScanner episode that played out last week.  Collaboration Loop had some thoughts of their own in the article, The Death of Wikipedia?

But with the release of Wikiscanner we now find that organizations are actively trolling Wikipedia to help themselves, or to hurt others.   We find that our level of trust in Wikipedia has been significantly impugned.  We find that the social computing model is suspect to abuse from those who aren’t playing by the rules.  In effect, our naïve view of the world of wikis is destroyed.

Amy Stephen over at Open Source Community has put together a good summary for how differing open source CMS projects have interpreted the impact the GPL has on third-party extensions/modules/plugins/add-ons.  Movement in the Joomla community ensuring GPL compliance for extensions is what prompted her comparisons of license interpretation between Drupal, Joomla, Plone, Typo3, Wordpress, and XOOPS.

Joomla!'s announcement from June 15, 2007 that began Joomla! is moving to ensure the future of the project by committing to compliance with the GNU/GPL license was a bit shocking to many accustomed to the Mambo proprietary extension licensing exception.

Recently, I read some good posts regarding content management systems (CMS) on a few blogs I visit almost daily.  The posts have had me thinking and reflecting in general about CMS.  However, I won't talk too much about them so you get a chance to go on and read the articles yourself.  The first post comes from OpenSourceCommunity.org and the second post from Gadgetopia.

This is a fantastic article found on ZDNet UK not only about open source content management systems but the issues that traditional publishers are now facing in either competing or adopting with today's Web CMS.  The article is written by Mike Barrett and is titled, "CMS evolution, publishing revolution?".  The author writes:

CMS Watch has a very good article on their site titled, "Question CMS Consolidation". The article serves as a reminder for IT and managers that, although technically feasible, an organization may not want to put everyone on the same content management system (CMS).  Why would an organization want to to consolidate their systems in the first place?  For those at top of the organization there may be some obvious reasons to unify the organization onto a single CMS.

Many organizations are looking at a portfolio of dozens of content management systems running somewhere on their network. From sheer tidiness alone, it’d be nice to have a shorter list. And such tidiness can have real benefits: better negotiating leverage with vendors, reduced overhead to manage contracts, reductions in the number of servers and hence in datacenter space (with attendant power and operational costs), and so on. Finally, increased demands for compliance and control are placing a premium on simplifying information management.

In my own organization, we have had both Internet and intranet servers since the mid 1990's supporting operations and administrators.  While we moved our Internet web servers onto a CMS a few years ago, it is only the past few months that many of our offices and departments have shifted their intranet from static pages to much more dynamic system.  As many of our field offices migrate their servers to utilizing newer Web 2.0 and collaboration applications, IT and management have a strong desire to consolidate those applications and servers.

All I can do is shake my head in the direction education has taken in the United States. I've written about this topic in the past, a little here and on another blog of mine. In one of those blog posts, I wrote the following.

American society as a whole seems to have less value for education, especially in the sciences and math, than when I was growing up. Maybe I’m more sensitive to these numbers since I am a scientist at heart…but isn’t anyone else disturbed by this trend? While I feel there should have been something done to help reverse this downward spiral sooner, I’m glad at least that it is finally getting some some well deserved attention by the Bush administration.

College students in the United States are not showing up in those university programs that are focused on physical science, computer science, math, and engineering. There are a number of politicians, parents, and students that will blame the public school education system for the current state of education in the United States. I have some serious doubts whether fingers should really be pointed in the direction of the teachers or even school system. I think in many ways, those fingers should be pointed right back to the parents and their children. Perhaps life in America is so good that by the time the student becomes a young adult, life hasn't prepared them to face the challenges and disappointments they need to do well in the sciences.