Show and Tell for Wax from Coko people Jure and Yannis. Using Jitsi open source video for the demo. Will be re-encoded to ogg vorbis video and posted to the Coko blog shortly. We used Youtube (boooo!) to archive this time around since we couldn’t quite get the jitsicon recording working… will get it right for next time.
The Cabbage Tree Method Sessions
Putting some pics together of Cabbage Tree Method Sessions. Will add to it as I go.
Book Sprints Site
Book Sprints has a cool new site 🙂
Designed by Henrik van Leeuwen and put together by the talented Book Sprints team of Kat and Barbara.
Fires, Cars, everything
So, my last few days have had some unusual travel disruptions.
On Monday, there was a fire next door to my place in New Zealand. I was just leaving to rush to the airport at Kerikeri, about an hour and a half away. All was ok, but checking on the fire meant I missed my flight to Auckland, so I rebooked for Tuesday. On Tuesday, the plane was cancelled due to mechanical issues, so I rebooked for Wednesday.
On Wednesday I flew from Auckland to San Francisco, though the flight was delayed 5 hours. Someone had apparently forgotten to switch the body scanner on and so 53 people went through the scanner without actually being scanned. Problem is, they didn’t know which 53 people. So they cleared the entire international airport and rescanned everyone…
17 hrs later I got to San Francisco and had enough time to grab a drink with a friend, pack, and get up at 4am to fly to Los Angeles with Kristen (Coko) for a 2-day Cabbage Tree Method workshop I facilitated. The next day… flights canceled into SFO (San Francisco) due to the fires around the city …so we hired a car and drove back (6 hours). Giving just enough time to sleep, pack, and get a 9am flight to India…. which was delayed 1 hour leaving due to the fires… my stopover is 1.25hrs so it’s going to be tight…let’s see how it goes…
Working with the Worms
Some photos from Cabbage Tree Method sessions with the amazingly cool people from Wormbase (taken this week from a 2 day event in L.A I facilitated).
More pics here – http://piwigo.coko.foundation/
More election hacking… !
Yes, news has it more elections have been hacked…
Seems someone was colluding with the white-faced herons.
Don’t forget to vote!
Off to LA
Hanging at the Auckland airport. Next up San Francisco for a night, LA for a 2 day meeting, and then India for a Shuttleworth meeting… then Berlin, Portugal, Athens, UK, Singapore, and SF.
My Question for Today
So, I went out to Shippies for another surf today. It was awesome. On the way I was pondering a lot of Coko things. One thing in particular is on my mind – how do we change the solutions provision ecosystem in publishing today?
This is actually what Coko is all about – breaking down the legacy, big box, proprietary software lock-in that exists in the scholarly publishing sector today. But there are many things that need to change in order for this to happen and my mind is on one in particular.
The current situation is that publishers ‘buy in’ a solution. This comes with support for the software, hosting, deployment etc. Publishers only have a limited choice when it comes to selecting one of these solutions, each of which has been developed by a vendor and their own internal development staff. Hence, the developer market for publishing is pretty contained. But what if we could change that?
What if we could stimulate the current dev culture (and I’m being expansive with the use of ‘dev’ to include all those involved in the dev process, not just developers) to start working with publishers directly. What if every small town which has a university, which might have a small press or Journal of some description, did not have to look to the big software solution providers but could just ask their local dev shop to help them solve their publishing infrastructure needs…
What if we could decentralise the publishing development sector by empowering a whole lot of dev shops with the tools to build out publishing solutions for their local university?
Essentially, right now, this publisher development sector does not exist…dev shops don’t even know it is ‘a thing’…but if we could let them know and give them the tools to create it…. the change in the publishing sector could be exponential…
So I’m wondering how we could stimulate this to happen. What are the mechanisms we need to put into place to make this work?
Coko and Hindawi
for immediate release…
and
Which means we are partnering with key Open Access publishers eLife and Hindawi…pretty cool!
Surfn, but not with a browser
So, I have been surfing for about 3 months now. Which of course means I’m still really crap. But over that time it seems I have already surfed nice beach breaks in Costa Rica (where I did a one week surf school in July), reef breaks in Hawaii, some nice beach rollers in Linda Mar (down the road from my apartment in San Francisco, California), and a bit of fumbling around on various beaches in New Zealand.
And of course, today I discovered that one of the best point breaks in the world is just north of the Hokianga at Shipwreck Bay, otherwise known as ‘shippies’. A modest day today out there. A 3m swell today created these lovely lines… I think there were about a dozen people surfing…
I drove my car onto the beach and waxed up my new Walden 9ft 6 longboard…an amazing board…
It was an awesome day! Going out again tomorrow!