Politics

  • Let Bristol be Bristol

    Steve WoodsBristol, Politics

    Within 2 days last week, we had the latest pair of proposals from a member Bristol’s great and good and a London property developer to try and turn the city into somewhere else.

    On Monday last week Bristol 24/7 carried a story entitled “Bristol… the ‘New Orleans of the UK’?”.

    According to the article, local businesses are being urged to help elevate Bristol to a world-class centre for jazz and blues music as part of Mayor George Ferguson’s ambitions to make the city the ‘New Orleans of the UK’.

    By the end of the week, apparently plans had shifted from trying to turn Bristol into a city founded by French colonists in 1718 on the banks of the Mississippi to property developers and their scheme to convert some of the city into Shoreditch, now an inner city part of London in the borough of Hackney, which was originally named after Edward IV’s mistress, Jane Shore, who was reputedly buried in a ditch in the area.

    This news appeared on Bristol Business News, which reported as follows:

    Verve Properties, the niche developer behind Bristol’s highly-successful Paintworks creative quarter, has started work on the first speculative office refurbishment in the city for five years as the market recovery continues to gathers pace.

    London-based Verve said it saw a gap in the Bristol office market for trendy office workspace of the type now common in the Shoreditch/Tech City area of East London that would appeal to the Bristol’s vibrant creative sector.

    What I like about Bristol is precisely that it is Bristol. It’s quirky, diverse and has its own unique features not found anywhere else, like the centuries of architectural variety on display on Old Market Street and West Street, the City Docks and the wealth of green, open spaces which the public can enjoy, even in the city’s less prosperous parts.

    a Bristol montage
    A Bristol montage: image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons

    Where attempts have been made to turn the city into somewhere else, it’s been a disaster. One only has to look at Bristol’s so-called ‘Shopping Quarter’ – Broadmead, Cabot Circus and the Mall Galleries – to see the result: bland and unedifying. The area is filled mostly with identikit local branches of national retail chains. Rearrange the shops and you could easily in another large UK town or city.

    I like Bristol because it’s Bristol and it should furthermore be left to be itself and not try to be somewhere else.

    One has to ask the question: do those who profess to love the city but want to turn it into somewhere else really love the city; or do they actually hate it?

  • Canaries save money with open source

    Steve WoodsLinux, Open Source, Politics, Tech

    Canary Islands coat of armsCanary Islands news site La Provincia reports that the autonomous government of the Canaries is saving €400,000 per year by backing the use of free and open source operating systems and software and avoiding paying licences to multinational companies for the use of programs and their updates. Apparently the autonomous government annual IT costs have reduced from €1,006,500 to €750,000. Roberto Moreno, the general director for telecommunications and new technologies explains that the migration from proprietary to free and open source software means the government is ridding itself of dependency on one vendor because, in this case “the owner is the one who buys it and can make the changes and modifications needed with his own resources and personnel, which is always much cheaper” than being beholden to an outside company.

    Moreno, who is a professor of Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence at the University of Las Palmas de Gran Canaria (ULPGC), states that the objective is shown by the current legislature’s wishes to introduce these changes to reduce expenditure, given the current economic crisis and the lack of funds in the region’s coffers.

    The next step planned by the Canaries government is to replace the ubiquitous MS Office suite currently used with a free and open source alternative, which is most likely to be Apache OpenOffice. That change will involve some 30,000 desktops and will save the public purse a fair few euros more.

  • Cabinet Office’s open standards consultation extended

    Steve WoodsOpen Source, Open Standards, Politics, Tech

    Cabinet Office logoThe Cabinet Office’s consultation on open standards for document exchange with government departments (posts passim), which was due to end yesterday, 26th February 2014, has now been extended until 5.00 pm on Friday, 28th February 2014.

    According to a Cabinet Office spokesman, the reason for the extension is as follows:

    This is because the Standards Hub server went down last night at about 10pm, as a result of which some people were unable to submit their comments to the proposals.

    The file formats being proposed as standards by the Cabinet Office are:

    • HTML (4.01 or higher, e.g. HTML5);
    • ODF 1.1 (or higher, e.g. ODF 1.2);
    • Plain text (TXT); and
    • Comma-separated values (CSV).

    So far it would appear that most respondents to the consultation are supporting this welcome move to openness by the UK government and Microsoft’s shills are thin on the ground.

    Comment on the consultation.

  • Romania’s Ministry of Education endorses open source

    Steve WoodsLinux, Open Source, Politics, Tech

    Romania coat of armsJust a few days after it was reported that scores of donated Linux laptops were languishing unused in Romania’s schools (posts passim), the country’s Ministry of Education is urging the schools to consider switching to free and open source operating systems and software, according to Joinup, the EU’s public sector open source news website. The Ministry confirmed this will help the schools to avoid legal problems from using unlicensed proprietary software.

    The new policy follows the expiry of an agreement between the Ministry and Microsoft. The Ministry is now urging schools to switch to open source alternatives, revert to earlier versions or buy new licences.

    The Ministry itself is no stranger to free and open source, using Linux and the Nginx web server. Furthermore, it has also published a recommended list (PDF, Romanian) of free and open source software for use in schools, which includes Edubuntu, the educational remix of Ubuntu Linux, desktop applications based on the Gnome window manager and other free and open source favourites, such as the LibreOffice productivity suite, Gimp graphics package and Scribus desktop publishing software.

  • My comments to HMG on open formats

    Steve WoodsOpen Standards, Politics, Tech

    ODF file iconIt may have escaped the notice of most of the country, but the Cabinet Office is currently consulting on the use of open formats, e.g. ODF, HTML, TXT and CSV, for documents when sharing them or collaborating with government on them.

    As an ardent supporter of open standards and open formats, I decided it was my civic duty to support the Cabinet Office’s welcome move to openness, all the more so as Microsoft was asking its pals in an open letter (in closed .docx format. Ed.) to try and water down the move to ODF by having its OOXML format adopted as well.

    My comments on the government’s proposals were as follows:

    I too welcome and wholeheartedly support the move to open standards and file formats and away from vendor lock-in and proprietary file formats, access to which is solely at the whim of software vendors. No single company should have a monopoly on the formats used for official documents and documents of record.

    In particular, I welcome the move to Open Document Format. I have been using ODF for many years in my role as company secretary of an IT co-operative and we have the satisfaction that our successors and future historians will be able to read our online and offline records without accessibility to our records being at the whim of a software supplier with a quasi-monopoly on office productivity products.

    Furthermore, I would advise against any use of OOXML (also known as Office Open XML), which is not a truly open standard and hasn’t even been implemented properly by the company that created it.

    I trust that you will implement open documents standards with all speed, after which you then need to tell other bodies, such as schools, local authorities, the community and voluntary sectors, that there are viable alternatives to proprietary file formats.

    Another thought: in the UK there are various timescales – 30, 50 & 100 years – for the release of documents to the public. This implies that whatever the format, we will still need to be able to read them 100 years from now. There is no reason to suppose that Microsoft will be around then, so using a proprietary format as a standard must surely be an unacceptable risk for the readability of public documents.

    If you wish to support the move to open standards and formats by HM Government, you have one day left as the consultation closes tomorrow.

  • Bristol Post Balls – the invisible Widdecombe

    Steve WoodsBristol, Media, Oddities, Politics

    The Bristol Post has for years given favourable coverage to a North Somerset ‘zoo’ which has an interesting sideline in promoting creationism.

    Today’s edition continues this trend.

    Noah’s Ark ‘Zoo’ Farm has just taken delivery of a new African elephant and former Tory MP Ann Widdecombe was allegedly there to welcome its arrival, according to the photo caption in the report.

    Bristol Post screenshot

    I’d like to congratulate Ann on her choice of camouflage outfit!

    If you can see Ann in the picture, please let me know via the comments below.

  • Cambridgeshire Police spends nothing on linguists

    Steve WoodsLanguage, Media, Politics

    When work restrictions on Bulgarian and Romanian migrants were relaxed at the start of the year, the usual xenophobic elements of the British media stoked fears that every criminal in eastern Europe would make a beeline for the UK and crime would soar.

    Emotive language was (ab)used, with the nation being told Bulgarians and Romanians would ‘flood’ into the country and dear old Blighty would be ‘swamped’ and similar such tosh.

    If crime had increased due to Bulgarian and Romanian migrants, this would have resulted in a massive rise in the criminal justice system’s use of linguists, as suspects and defendants are entitled to understand and follow the proceedings in their mother tongue.

    However, this surge in the use of East European linguists hasn’t actually happened.

    Indeed in response to Freedom of Information (FoI) Act queries, Cambridgeshire Police has revealed its spending on services for Bulgarian and Romanian linguists has actually declined, as revealed by the Cambridge News:

    Data has revealed the force spent just £9.10 on Bulgarian and £1,357.84 on Romanian translators in January last year when the restrictions were in place.

    But after they were lifted at the start of the year, the force spent zero pence on translators for the two languages.

    Read the full article.

    Hat tip: Katya Ford

  • Malta launches new open data site running open source

    Steve WoodsLinux, Open Data, Open Source, Politics, Tech

    Malta’s new open data website is running on open source software, according to Joinup, the EU’s public sector open source news site.

    Screenshot of Malta's new open data site
    Screenshot of Malta’s new open data site

    The site, which is run by the Maltese Local Councils Association, uses Centos Linux as the operating system, the MySQL database management system, the Nginx web server and the WordPress content management system.

    At present it offers a wide number of tourism datasets open for using and reusing as well as useful and interesting information concerning open data.

    The open data portal has been created as a result of the EU’s HOMER project, harmonising open data in the Mediterranean through better access and reuse of public sector information.

    Open Data Malta aims to make available and exploitable Public Sector Information (PSI) related to the tourism sector in order to ensure transparency. By simply opening PSI, citizens can be better informed and participate in the decision making process.

  • 3 things to do on The Day We Fight Back

    Steve WoodsPolitics, Tech

    This Tuesday is a day to fight back against mass surveillance of communications.

    the day we fight back campaign banner

    Mass surveillance is a huge problem, as shown by the Snowden revelations on the communications interception activities of the US’ NSA and the UK’s GCHQ. Governments are spying on us all, endangering the very fabric of democracy. Corporations are asking us to give away our privacy for a little convenience with much the same effect.

    Furthermore, mass surveillance is a hard problem to solve since we are essentially up against a very human fear of dangers hidden somewhere in the dark and we’re being told that surveillance will protect us from those dangers.

    However, surveillance not only fails at protecting us, it also makes everyone worse off in the long run.

    Here are 3 simple ways to do to counter the pervasiveness of surveillance.

    • Make your web browsing more secure by installing the HTTPS Everywhere extension in your browser. This will make it much harder for potential snoopers to intercept your connection with the web sites you look at, and will help to protect any data you send there.
    • Generate a GPG key, and start using it to encrypt your data, especially your email. (There’s help on the web.)
    • Write to one or more of your political representatives. Explain that you are deeply concerned about mass surveillance, and ask them to help end the practice. Be polite, brief and clear.

    By so doing, you have not only made yourself a little more secure, but have also helped others to improve their privacy and have contributed to driving political change.

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