A year ago, when Google asked for “Big Ideas” to improve the lives of as many people as possible, so they could spend 10 million dollars on good works to celebrate their 10th Birthday, I was seriously impressed. This was one serious philanthrohack! Competitions like this almost always create more value than just spending money on stuff, and now Google has shown that over 150,000 people will compete just to win some kudos, help a lot of people, and see their idea brought to life – without even a promise of cash or contracts to the people with the winning ideas.

I had a couple ideas of my own that I thought might fit the bill, and I managed to get one of them out of my head in sufficient detail to submit*. Amazingly, my idea seems to have ended up in the 16 Idea Themes that over 3000 Googlers distilled from over 150,000 submissions!

My submission was one of the two bundled into this theme (other themes had as many as 6 relevant submissions)

As you might imagine, I’m pretty stoked. Of course, “Enable people to submit bug reports about problems in the real world” is just the first line of a longer submission – not too long – Google wisely required everyone to refine their submission to answering 6 short questions and supplying an optional short video. Good thing, given they got 150,000+ ideas to read through!

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Following up on my previous post about the Christchurch Digital NZ hackfest, I did find the bug in my search plugin script, it was just one of those minor typos that takes ages to find because the error message you got when you tried to use it was completely uninformative. Sigh. However, since I spent most of my time on this during “Mozilla Service Week” I chalked up a few hours there to add to their total. Kudos to Mozilla for organising that and I’ll be sure to take part in a more serious way should they do it again.

Digital NZ has created a Custom Search Builder, and it seems to me that they could add Search Plugin generation to this reasonably easily. All they need to do is take a copy of my sample and use it to create a template the swaps out the content of the ShortName and Description tag, and also the template attribute in the <url> tag – everything else can stay the same. Then they need to add a javascript install link to the search result pages similar to the one here.

Heres what my sample search plugin file looks like (NB: First bit of code I can recall posting in this blog. I promise not to make it a habit.)


<OpenSearchDescription xmlns="http://a9.com/-/spec/opensearch/1.1/"
xmlns:moz="http://www.mozilla.org/2006/browser/search/">
<ShortName>Digital NZ</ShortName>
<Description>Digital NZ Archive Search</Description>
<InputEncoding>UTF-8</InputEncoding>
<Image width="16" height="16" type="image/x-icon">data:image/x-icon;base64,[data string goes here]</Image>
<Url type="text/html" method="get" template="http://search.digitalnz.org/en/search">
<Param name="search_text" value="{searchTerms}"/>
</Url>
</OpenSearchDescription>


The Webserver has to serve up that XML file with a MIME type of application/opensearchdescription+xml

eg using apache, in a directory where .xml isn’t reserved for anything else, one could put this in a .htaccess file:

AddType application/opensearchdescription+xml .xml

It’s also relatively trivial to add something to the headers of a webpage to enable autodiscovery of one or more search plugins. I’ve done that on my example page. Once you’ve done so it’ll appear in the search plugin manager for the browser, like this:

For more details, and how to do other cool things like enabling search completion, see:

OpenSearch Specification
Mozilla article on creating OpenSearch Plugins for Firefox

Ada Lovelace was the world’s first programmer, writing code for a machine that never got finished, the Babbage differential engine. She died far too early at the tender age of 36 – the same age as her Father, Lord Byron. Today is her day, and to celebrate it over 1500 bloggers, including this one, pledged to blog about one of our Tech Heroines on this date[1].

I’ve found it really hard to pick only one Tech Heroine. I know so many of them. But you’re supposed to just pick one for Ada Lovelace Day so I’ll do a follow up post later mentioning several other Tech Heroines I could have written about (and might write about for #ALD10!) Several of my tech Heroines I know personally, but I think for today I’ll play it safe and talk about someone I’ve never met but have always admired: Gina Trapani. As a promoter of how software and technology can improve our lives, she is a first class Technoprogressive, and worthy of great thanks and praise.

Many of you will know her as the founding editor of the uber-famous (well, in tech circles) Lifehacker, a phenomenally successful blog covering tips, tricks, software and sites that offer a multitude of ways to improve your workflow and lifestyle. Sadly, the sheer number of suggestions forced me to stop reading Lifehacker a while ago – chasing up all those potential speed improvements wasn’t helping me get anything done in the short term! I’m looking forward to achieving a somewhat more measured pace of life improvement from reading Gina’s new blog; Smarterware.

The fact that so many of these posts were of good value, and the fact that Gina was churning out a dozen or more every day, day after day after day, is certainly a Heroic feat in my opinion. I don’t think I’ve managed a dozen blog posts inside a single month, let alone in a single day.

While researching Gina’s life (a remarkably easy task, given how much she has written or had written about her in the last decade), I discovered an article that mentioned the genesis of Lifehacker – it turns out she was already working for Nick Denton as a coder when he bought the domain name, and her enthusiasm for the what could be done with it made him offer her the editor job on the spot. Many will realize this was probably one of the best HR decisions Nick made in his life, and it has to be said he’s made some good ones in his time.

“The one blogger I wished we had landed at Weblogs, Inc. was Gina Trapani from LifeHacker. I tried every two months for a year I think… no offer was good enough. Very, very frustrating.” – Jason Calacanis

To go from being a full time professional coder (with a pretty impressive resume) to being a full time professional writer is no small feat. Both involve using a keyboard and your brain – after that the similarities start to die off pretty fast. So that’s another reason Gina is a Tech Heroine.

I was actually aware of Gina well before she started Lifehacker, in that she was one of the few girl geeks who was seriously blogging, and there was a time (pre-2004) when just running your own blog qualified you as being moderately cool. I looked in the WayBackMachine and discovered she’s been blogging since late 2001 – which makes her a serious early adopter. Here’s her first post.

Another reason she’s among my Tech Heroines is that she’s the author of quite a few Firefox Addons, and I would say she’s contributed just as much to the success of Firefox through constantly blogging about Firefox and Firefox add-ons on Lifehacker, and providing early examples of add-ons for people to learn from, as almost anyone who actually works for the Mozilla Foundation. They should give her a medal or something. One of the earliest “Top X Firefox Add-ons” lists features her app “About this site”.

For reasons that may not be immediately apparent, the success of Mozilla ranks up there with the success of Google, Wikipedia, and the W3C as reasons why the web is so damned useful today, as opposed to mired in a morass of crappy over-commercialized portal sites and walled gardens, so Gina’s contributions to the success of Firefox are no small thing in the world of Tech Heroism.

Gina has said that her book is one of the things she’s most proud of, so I really must get around to buying it sometime soon. [2] Her book is called “Lifehacker – 88 Tech Tricks to Turbocharge Your Life”.

If you can’t wait to get the book, or don’t feel like perusing thousands of lifehacker articles for your dose of wisdom from Gina, the interviews she gave to Tim Ferris and The New York Times should at least whet your appetite.

It’s not for nothing that in 2007 she was ranked 7th by Forbes in a list of 25 Web Celebrities, one above Mark Zuckerburg, the founder of Facebook.

Herein endith my tribute to Gina Trapani. To read about more Tech Heroines on Ada Lovelace Day, check out this huge list of posts, which is also available referenced by subject, and the locations of the bloggers writing about them!

[1] “Today” being a somewhat amophorus concept for me. Lets just stay I started this post on the 24th, NZ time, and will finish on the 24th, American time.

[2] My book reading has slowed to a crawl now the internet feeds me pretty much everything I need, but I make exceptions. It doesn’t help that book prices in New Zealand are at least twice what they are in the USA, if we’re lucky. This is another reason the internet is a great leveller – eliminating the edge once enjoyed by readers in large markets with better enconomies of scale. Imagine what it would be like if everything on the internet was priced differentially by where you lived, or you weren’t allowed to watch clips from an upcoming movie because it wasn’t available in your country….ok, bad example. Eventually the creative industries will realise how batshit crazy they are to do this to their international fans.

David Blood (ex Goldman Sachs) and Al Gore (ex Whitehouse) are the founders of a “sustainable investment” firm called “Generation”. Apparently the other partners in Generation Investment Management wouldn’t let them name the firm “Blood and Gore” which is a great pity

I first ran across Generation while watching an interview they gave at the Skoll World Forum (ok, I admit it, I am seriously jealous of Jeff Skoll, not only does the guy run a Movie Studio, but he has a World Forum named after him)

Blood and Gore have this extremely devious plan for making the world a better place. They want to demonstrate to the investment market that an investment strategy which considers the attitude companies have to externalities before investing in them is going to be more profitable in the long term than an investment strategy that doesn’t, hence causing a change in the way major funds invest, hence causing a change in the way companies behave.

“In the end, we hope to be one of many firms in this emerging system that will make sustainable investing mainstream. We believe it is inevitable that the broader capital markets will eventually embrace not just the idea of research into non-traditional factors that impact performance, but also explicitly recognise that the way businesses manage the risks and opportunities related to global social, economic, environmental and political issues fundamentally impact the ability of companies to generate value for their shareholders in an enduring way.” – Al Gore.

Of course, you might say that sort of long term systems thinking is the reason Gore lost in 2000, because it’s utterly opaque to the average swing voter, but ironicly the thinking behind the 4-5 party line vote that really counted was surely even more opaque.

Musing on what might have been we have this great skit from Saturday Night Live.

PS: Check out the new Swicki in my sidebar. Developed by some friends of mine here in Christchurch, they’re pretty neat.

Another of my favourite Philanthrogeeks is Mark Shuttleworth. Mark sold his first business, Thawte, for $575m to Verisign, who thus formed a temporary monopoly on 128bit SSL certificates (vs the more common and less secure 40bit ones). Every ecommerce site needs one of these and they get renewed every year, so you can imagine the potential value, but after not long the tech bubble burst, and not long after that the browsers started accepting other brands of certificate[1] and I’m not sure if Verisign recouped its investment in the end. Versign later bought Network Solutions and thus obtained an actual monopoly on the .com namespace, but that’s another very long story, in which perhaps I will point out the stupidity of giving away extremely valuable worldwide monopolies to private corporations, who then get bought by bigger corporations.

As I recall the story goes that Mark then gave a million Rand to every one of his staff, including the gardener. Good show, I thought. Next I heard anything about him he had paid his way onto a soviet rocket and was going to be the first African in space. Well, lucky for some I thought.

A couple years later I heard he was forming his own Linux Distro. Cool, I thought, that should go well. It certainly did. Ubuntu is now the most popular linux distribution on the planet. That probably makes Mark one of the most important Benevolent Dictators in Open Source, and although not quite as Karma-laden as RMS or Linus Torvalds yet, he has the advantage of having a fortune in the bank and a few other philanthropic projects and foundations up his sleeve, so that definitely puts him in the upper eschalon of open source people who are really making a difference.

I see from his official bio that he’s an Iain Banks fan. I’ll post about Iain soon, who as well as being my favourite author is probably more than anyone responsible for my techoprogressive outlook on life.

Ubunto is apparently an African altruistic ideology of sorts and a word very difficult to translate into English, according to the Wikipedia entry – but frankly, it sounds pretty appealing, and perhaps it’s not a good sign that there isn’t a good English translation for it. English usually just steals any useful works from foreign languages, but at the moment, in English, “Ubuntu” means “popular linux distribution” and it may be a long time before any other meaning could shine through that. Apparently Nelson Mandela baked Ubuntu into the spirit of post-apartheid South Africa, which may have been part of the reason the transition actually sort of worked. Mandela is a pretty amazing statesman, I wish there were more like him on the world stage.

If/when I finally switch to Linux on the desktop (been using it server-side for many years) I’ll probably switch to Ubunto. I like the founder, I like the concept, and I like what I’ve seen of the distro so far. Can’t go wrong really.

[1] I know, I’m simplifying. But a discussion of how SSL certificates really work is way too technical for this blog.

There are rather a lot of people and groups I’m intending to talk about on this blog, the problem is that right now I’m insanely busy so it may take me a while to get around to all of them. So I thought I’d give a brief list, and if anyone wants me to write about any particular one, they can let me know in the comments.

So, not in any particular order, here are some incredibly cool people doing great things for the people of this planet:

Steven Clift whose tireless promotion of e-democracy may shortly be rewarded with an Ashoka fellowship. I have been following his do-wire mailing list for at least 5 years now and I think he’s well worthy of that honour. It’s a bit of a fluke, but the company behind the forum software he’s using for his Issue Forums is run by people here in Christchurch.

Jimmy Wales, the founder of Wikipedia, who recently suggested that we could be a bit smarter about the way we discuss politics online and may be hoping to kickstart another revolution of sorts. Personally this is an area where the idealist and the pragmatist within me have an argument. On the one hand I’d like to see net culture transcend the pathetic sloganeering of broadcast politics, but on the other hand I’m aware that for the moment a fully integrated strategy that bows to the tyranny of the “swing voter” might be necessary in 2006.

The Omidyar Network, who support many worthy causes and have this amazing community of altruists around them.

Jeff Skoll, definitely a philanthropist after my own heart says here : “In my case, I like to support causes where “a lot of good comes from a little bit of good,” or, in other words, where the positive social returns vastly exceed the amount of time and money invested.” – or, in other words, he’s a Philanthohacker. One of the very clever things he’s doing is running Participant Productions, who are harnessing the power of the movie theatre for the sake of good with films like An Inconvenient Truth. and Syriana

Benetech, who I first spotted because they employed Brendan Nyhan who was involved with Spinsanity, an amazing blog I was following that covered the unprecedented level of media spin in the post 9/11 era, right up until they re-elected Bush, after which I guess they decided that the American public wasn’t quite ready for this whole “sanity” concept yet.

Dave Pollard who was Chief Knowledge Officer of Ernst & Young before he decided that he could do more to save the world through blogging. A fantastic blog.

The WorldChanging bloggers, who I wish I had more time to read. They are supported by the above mentioned Omidyar Network (it’s funny how often I discover something amazingly cool and then later discover the Omidyars have started funding it)

Richard Stallman, who more than anyone is responsible for the worldwide open source movement. Met him once at a party here in Christchurch. Nice guy.

The Responsible Wealth network, who definitely have a few clues.

George Monbiot – who mainly draws attention to big problems, but occasionally comes up with some very interesting solutions, unfortunately they often seem to involve the British and/or American Governments behaving responsibly, so don’t expect to see any of those solutions implemented anytime soon.

Aubrey de Grey, who’s somewhat radical proposal is that we could engineer the end of biological ageing within the next 50 years. He’s causing a bit of a stir in the biogerontology world, many of whom think he’s holding out false hopes and probably resent his grabbing all the headlines, but he’s got enough scientists supporting him that I think he has to be taken seriously. Given the acceleration in scientific and medical research that is being driven by the internet and cheap computing power, I find it all remarkably plausible. It’s certainly an amazing time to be alive – the age of possibility.

…and of course I am still yet to discuss the Bill and Melinda Gates foundation in any detail.

Finally here are a few random links from my philanthrogeek bookmarks:

• Center for Inquiry Transnational
• Democracy 2.0
  
• Open The Government
  
• Oligopoly Watch

Please note that this is far from everyone who’s impressed me in a philanthrogeek capacity over the last few years, but it’s enough to talk about for the moment.

Because it’s been a great month for the future of the human race. First we saw Bill Gates deciding he was going to dedicate his collosal energy and brainpower more to his philanthropic pursuits than his technomonopolistic pursuits, and now we see one incredible side effect of this decision – his old friend Warren Buffett, the 2nd richest person on the planet, decides to give the Gates foundation the bulk of his own immense fortune, because he thinks it will be well managed there. So to some extent what we see here is the worlds most successful market competitors deciding that cooperating to help the least competitive (ie, the third world) is the best thing they can do with their fortunes, rather than competing against eachother for the top spot on the rich list, as any decent Robber Baron of old would do.

Pretty good example of how things are changing if you ask me. People are beginning to realise that we’re all in this together. I think now that we’re no longer “connected” in a mediated way via our TV sets and newspapers, but hyperconnected in a more direct fashion by way of the net, the 6 degrees of seperation are reducing to 5. Eventually everyone will be no more than 3-4 “hops” away from someone suffering under 3rd world conditions, and that has got to make a difference I think.

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If I had to pick the one person on the planet who I admire most at the moment, it would probably be George Soros. I was reminded of this when he recently poked his head up and said some intelligent things on Rocketboom – major kudos to Amanda for scoring an interview with one of the planet’s major players. One very appropriate question given her audience – how does he use the net? I was interested to discover that he uses it “through other people” – a pity, I think it’s better to get your feed unfiltered. I guess it all depends on whether your people are paid to give you the truth, or shield you from having to know the truth. ^[1]

Anway, what I admire about Soros as a philanthropist is that he has a great grasp of the complexity of human societies, just how hard it is to effect any significant change, and then he goes ahead and does his best anyway, without fear of the inevitable failures. He isn’t hoping to find easy answers or make flashy gestures, but he knows that there are things that can be done that definitely help – like investing in education and health, and monitoring government activity, that will gradually move a society in the right direction.

I think quoting Soros is the ultimate answer to naive libertarianism and free-market fanatics. It’s obvious that he has a very strong understanding of the world financial markets, from which he has made billions, but he is also very clear that markets are not enough on their own, and can do some serious damage if left unchecked.

“We need to maintain law and order. We need to maintain peace in the world. We need to protect the environment. We need to have some degree of social justice, equality of opportunity. The markets are not designed to take care of those needs. That’s a political process. And the market fundamentalists have managed to reduce providing those public goods.” – George Soros

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I thought about calling this blog “Musings On Technoprogressivism“, because that’s probably the political philosophy that most closely matches my own leanings, but in the end I decided to talk about philanthrogeeking instead so I won’t end up getting into arguments about what technoprogressivism actually means. Like most neologisms, there’s some debate^[1]. I used to call myself a utilitarian transhumanist freethinker, but technoprogressive is shorter

I’m very open to discussion on which parts of the general technoprogressive agenda are good, and which are not. I’m inclined to think they’re mostly all good. Or at least all mostly good.

[1] Don’t even get me started on “Web 2.0″.