It's worth mentioning Fedora's University Involvement Initiative where part of the ecosystem is Pagure which is their replacement platform for Github. Why? Because it aligns with the Four Foundations:

•     Open-sources: Web-interface for the git repositories
•     Flexibility: Ability to create any project you want
•     One place: Keep your documentation and tickets in pagure
•     Collaboration: Fork a project and make a pull-request
•     Integration: Create pull-request from a fork hosted somewhere else than in pagure
•     Open data: Sources, doc, ticket and pull-requests meta-data are available in the web interface but also in git repos which can thus be cloned and changed locally.
•     Freedom: Pagure is fully Free and Open-Source Software!

Excellent, thanks Viorel! I didn't know about Pagure at all: it looks pretty neat, and a much cleaner bit of software than GitLab, that I have found a bit of a pain to install and configure, especially as it uses a freemium model and not everything is available in the community edition. I've been impressed so far with Phabricator (http://phabricator.org/) that is 'probably' (according to the site - I'm guessing they are basing this on an informed hunch rather than reliable information) being used by Wikimedia, Facebook, Khan, Uber and Dropbox. It bundles a vast range of project management goodies - I love the drag and drop task management, would have helped a lot with the Landing's early development, and the level of detail goes right down to tracking legal documentation - and bug tracking, as well as a decent source control system that can use SVN, Git or Mercurial, including from other repositories, with a similar workflow to pull requests, a good diff tool, and communication tools like wikis, blog, chat, etc, all tightly integrated in one pretty straightforward PHP application. It even has a command line interface for those that need it. Sounds quite like Pagure in general intent, but is much more than a GitHub replacement. My only real reservations about it are that it is trying to do too much - it is, essentially, everything needed to manage large software development projects, so it's unlikely that all the tools are best of breed.

And another one! Apache Allura - used by SourceForge.

I fear the whale might be on West Coast Time, but we can offer a Cherry Blossom Barge!

Before the Japanese developed a taste for whaleburgers, there would be a whole pod of whales not just one.Time for Greenpeace to get back in action.

It wasn't so much the Japanese as Western tastes, mainly for lamp oil and perfume, but to a lesser extent for things like corsets, umbrellas and pet food, that had the biggest effect on the whale population. Nowadays, it's not helped by the tendency for whale-watching cruise ships to occasionally run into and even impale whales on their bows. Nor is it helped by the large amount of noise our ships and boats create in the oceans, let alone the discarded detritus, leaking oil, unkind use of fish nets, and over-fishing that is destroying their habitat and food sources. While most countries eschew actually eating whales (not that most Westerners ever did - carcasses were often discarded once the more valuable bits had been harvested, which makes it it even worse), most are still actively contributing to their demise. Sad. Time for us to reduce our consumption! 

Jon,

Thanks for sharing the presentation. I wish I had been able to attend the conference.

I really enjoyed and appreciated your notion of Web 1.5.

Gerald

One exam I inherited at a certain community college where I taught required the students to bring in a formatted floppy disk to the exam. The idea was they did wrote the exam using the computer  (it was for an Oracle SQL course) and then saved their answers on the floppy, which was turned in to be marked.

You have no doubt already guessed that the "blank formatted floppy" was formatted but not blank entering the exam. After completing the exam, the students would simply erase the "no longer required" files on the floppy and submit the answer disk.

Of course on a few occasions someone would delete their answers and submitted the cheat files by mistake. The other thing was I had an undelete utiltiy and could easily see the erased files.

Mostly I just got a chuckle out of it.

The latest chat feature by YouTube does exactly that, it is trying to lock their users in the "walled gardens" of YouTube:

"The idea is to keep the sharing experience within YouTube instead of switching between other applications, which the company hopes will create a less cumbersome experience."

Not unlike the way FB Messenger and Viber keep offering to use their applications for actual phone calls, instant messaging and also to replace phone's native SMS application.

Sigh - more fragmentation. It will be interesting to see what becomes of this. After dropping its extremely unpopular attempt to tie YouTube comments to Google+ accounts I am a little surprised that Google is attempting something that appears to be even worse, especially given the fact that the company was once admirably committed to supporting standards like OpenSocial that were designed to support such interoperability. As usual, Facebook is much to blame - it has deliberately sucked people from YouTube and hidden what they post, and is now a major video provider in its own right, so I guess Google felt it had to respond. This is not the way to do it, though.

In fairness, realtime chat, video, audio, etc has historically always been prone to proprietary lock in, partly for technical reasons but, I suspect, mainly because ephemeral stuff like that can more easily be locked in: people seldom need to use it or share it beyond the immediate context, so they can (in theory) flit between systems as they please. It's annoying if you do wish to record and refer back to it, but it's not so disruptive if you lose access, on the whole. There's not the long-term investment, nor much need to reify such dialogues. After initially thinking things like Viber etc were a great idea, I am now very much less enamoured, especially since Apple and Google joined the party. Beware what happens should you ever switch from an iPhone to an Android phone or vice versa. As for WhatsApp, words fail me. It's easy to see the appeal, though, to the companies of fragmentation as a business model. I wonder whether there is a business model that makes defragmentation worthwhile? A good book that has much to say on such things is The Master Switch, by Tim Wu, which gives an historical (though very US-centric) account of things like the telephone system, radio regulation, cable TV, etc, and looks at the Internet in the light of that. Few answers, but a great analysis of how (in the US) such things evolved.

ps - for a glimpse of one alternative approach, it might be worth checking out https://landing.athabascau.ca/bookmarks/view/2091933/open-whisper-systems which is open, non-commercial, and free as in speech as well as in beer.

Interesting,

I would agree with the premise of the article. There is a balance that needs to be found between the need for structure and the need for autonomy. Large organizations like Google have found this but they are from a new industry that does not have the legacy management issues as older companies or Governmente organizations.

Interesting Post.

First question, Jon. Is SIS a student information system?

Oops - should have expanded that acronym! Yes, it is.