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FSFE elects new top officials

22/09/2015 Steve WoodsOpen Source, Tech

Matthias Kirschner and Alessandro Rubini are the new President and Vice-President respectively of the Free Software Foundation Europe (FSFE). They were elected last week in Bucharest during FSFE’s General Assembly, while Reinhard Müller was re-elected as Financial Officer. They will serve FSFE in those capacities for the next 2 years.

Matthias Kirschner has been an FSFE employee since 2009. He started using GNU/Linux in 1999 and realised that software is deeply involved in all aspects of our lives. Matthias is convinced that this technology has to empower society rather than restrict it. While studying Political and Administrative Science, he convinced the FSFE to accept him as its first intern in 2004. Since then he has been helping other organisations, companies and governments to understand how they can benefit from Free Software and how those rights help to support freedom of speech, freedom of the press and privacy.

Alessandro Rubini is an electronic engineer and holds a Ph.D. in computer science. He was an early Linux adopter, installing Linux 0.99.14, is an active Free Software user and developer, and author of the book “Linux Device Drivers”. After his doctorate, he left the university as he did not want to just write academic papers and now works as an independent consultant in the industrial use of GNU/Linux, mainly on device drivers and embedded system as well as on micro-controllers and PCB design. Recently he has been working with CERN within the White Rabbit project, aimed at sub-nanosecond synchronisation of I/O cards. One reason he enjoys working with CERN is the organisation’s policy of releasing all their work as Free Software and Free Hardware.

Alessandro was previously a member of the Free Software Foundation Europe from 2001 to 2006 and recently rejoined. He felt that FSFE is the right place for positive and constructive discussions about Free Software.

“I am happy to welcome both Matthias and Alessandro to their new roles,” says Executive Director Jonas Öberg, “both have been instrumental in shaping the organisation into its current form and I look forward to the expertise they will bring as we go about empowering users to control technology.”

Reposted from Bristol Wireless.
Dump the Mayor

20/09/2015 Steve WoodsBristol, Politics

It would appear that the communities of South Bristol are also getting fed up with fly-tipping too and want the long-promised Hartcliffe recycling centre opened as they believe it could help cure this local environmental blight.

Local campaigners have now made a video to assist their efforts in securing this much-needed facility (at present Bristol has 2 main council-run recycling facilities, both north of the River Avon and miles away from Hartcliffe. Ed.)

However, there is one obstacle in their way: the opposition of Mayor George Ferguson.

One would have thought that with the amount of waste produced by the city increasing and recycling rates declining, Bristol’s most senior elected official would leap at any chance of reversing this during Bristol’s year as the alleged European Green Capital, but it seems like he refuses to do anything at all to help improve the city’s poor, deprived and blighted communities.
Dutch public sector to adopt ODF as standard?

20/09/2015 Steve WoodsOpen Data, Open Standards, Tech
The Dutch Standardisation Board would like to see the mandatory use of Open Document Format (ODF) for the country’s public sector organisations, according to a report on Joinup giving details of a presentation made by Nico Westpalm van Hoorn to the recent ODF Plugfest held in The Hague.

Van Hoorn stated that over 450,000 documents are transferred each day between the Dutch central
government and citizens or companies.

His presentation contained 3 main messages:
- The only way reuse of document content is achievable for open data is by using the ODF format;
- The only way to ensure sustainable access is by using the ODF format; and
- “This format cannot be opened,” as a remark by a public servant is not acceptable when somebody sends an ODF document.
Within the Dutch government, ODF is used as the default format for editable documents that are posted online. Documents are by default shared as HTML, PDF (for archiving) and as ODF. Furthermore, all central government workstations are capable of working with ODF, suggesting that civil servants who cannot open the format need some IT training.

Speaking at the same event, Steven Luitjes, director of Logius – an agency assisting government organisations in building e-government services, admitted that ODF is often ignored by public sector organisations and that a failure to standardise on formats is increasing the cost of public sector IT.

If the Dutch government does adopt ODF as a standard, this would follow on from the recent announcement of the standard’s adoption by the Italian Ministry of Defence (posts passim) and the UK government’s publication of guidance for the introduction of ODF.
Community litter pick in Barton Hill on Saturday 26th

18/09/2015 Steve WoodsBristol, Politics

The last email newsletter from Up Our Street that arrived earlier this week announced that a another community litter pick will be taking place in the very near future.

It will be held on Saturday 26 September from 11am to 1pm and the venue will be Barton Hill’s Urban Park, Strawbridge Road, Bristol, BS5 9XE (map).

The meet-up point will be the grassy area in front of the park.

If the event follows the usual pattern, protective gloves and litter-pickers will be provided.

The news that it will be held in Barton Hill will no doubt go down well in many quarters as Barton Hill is one of those forgotten corners of east Bristol.
Tomorrow is Software Freedom Day 2015

18/09/2015 Steve WoodsOpen Source, Tech

Besides being International Talk Like a Pirate Day, 19th September 2015 is also a date for the diaries of people advocating free and open source software; it’s Software Freedom Day 2015.

The idea of Software Freedom Day (SFD) is for everyone without a vested interest in proprietary software to unite and educate the world about the ideals of Software Freedom and the practical benefits of Free Software. August 28th 2004 was the first ever Software Freedom Day and was initiated group of FOSS believers – Matt Oquist, Henrik Omma and Phil Harper – with the idea of distributing The OpenCD – a collection of free and open source software for Windows – to everyone.

SFD has since extended around the world with events being organised on every continent.

Why is software freedom important?

The United Nations’ Universal Declaration of Human Rights is a set of basic human rights that most people would agree would be a bare minimum. Not often are our basic rights thought of in the context of technology, but as more and more our lives are dependent on technology, it is a rapidly growing concern. Technologies that matter to our freedom are used in our voting systems, our leisure, our work, education, art and our communication. What does this mean to you? It means that the basic human freedoms you take for granted are only as free as the technologies you use.

Transparent and sustainable technologies are vital to ensuring we can protect our freedoms.

Think about any software you use everyday that is proprietary and the consider that you can’t be sure what it is actually doing. Does your email system send copies of your mail to a third party? Is your web browser, logging and automatically sending your browsing history to someone?

As more and more of the world’s population starts using technology, getting online and developing the next major life-changing event of the future (such as the internet was for many of us), ensuring open, transparent and sustainable approaches are considered best practice is important; i.e. important to a future where technology empowers everyone equally, where knowledge is forever and where our basic human freedoms are strengthened, not hampered, by technology.

Reposted, with some edits, from Bristol Wireless.
LibreOffice & ODF to be adopted by Italian military

16/09/2015 Steve WoodsLinux, Open Source, Open Standards, Tech

The Italian military is moving to LibreOffice and Open Document Format (ODF), according to Joinup, the EU’s public sector open source news website. This will be Europe’s second largest migration to a free and open source office suite and open standards since the Italian Defence Ministry will be installing LibreOffice on 150,000 machines.

The migration will begin in October 2015 and is expected to be completed at the end of 2016.

The deployment of LibreOffice will be jointly managed by Libreitalia and the Italian Defence Ministry, with the former providing trainers and the Ministry devising course materials, which will later be released under a Creative Commons licence.

An agreement between the Ministry and LibreItalia was signed on 15th September in Rome by Rear Admiral Ruggiero Di Biase, General Manager of the Italian Ministry of Defence’s Information Systems and LibreItalia president Sonia Montegiove.

The Ministry of Defence is the first Italian central government organisation to migrate to open source software for office productivity. On the other hand, many regional public sector organisations have already made this move, such as the Emilia-Romagna region, the provinces of Perugia, Cremona, Macerata, Bolzano and Trento, the cities of Bologna, Piacenza and Reggio Emilia, the Galliera Hospital in Genoa and healthcare ASL 5 in Veneto, to name but a few.

The Italian Defence Ministry project is also one of Europe’s largest migrations to date to a free and open source office suite. The largest European public sector organisation using free software office suites is currently the French Interior Ministry with some 240,000 desktops. Many French ministries use open source office suites including the Tax Agency, the Finance Ministry, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the Ministry of Agriculture. LibreOffice is deployed on some 72,000 PCs within the French Gendarmerie, which also uses Ubuntu Linux as its operating system of choice.

In June 2014, the autonomous regional government of Extremadura (Spain) confirmed that 10,000 PCs in its healthcare organisation are running open source office applications and that the same is planned for its own 22,000 PCs. In Germany the city of Munich runs also runs LibreOffice on over 17,000 Linux workstations.
Fouling FoI

16/09/2015 Steve WoodsBristol, Politics

One topic which all newly elected local councillors anywhere in the country will encounter in their correspondence is dog fouling, especially as the UK’s dog population was estimated to be 9 million in 2014.

All those dogs have to eat and dispose of the subsequent waste products estimated by Keep Britain Tidy (PDF) to weigh in at a 1,000 tonnes per day.

Local authorities and town and parish councils have a variety of powers called Dog Control Orders to control the handling and behaviour of dogs on areas of land within their jurisdiction; these include an offence of failing to remove dog faeces.

The maximum penalty for committing an offence under a Dog Control Order is £1,000 in a Magistrates Court. However council officers may alternatively issue a Fixed Penalty Notice, usually set at £75.

Dear Bristol City Council,

This is a request for information under the Freedom of Information Act.

Kindly disclose the number of:

a) fixed penalty notices issued
b) prosecutions brought

in the last 5 years for dog fouling

1. within the entire local authority area
2. specifically within Easton & Lawrence Hill wards

Yours, etc.

The answer was received earlier this week.

You sent us a Freedom of Information request on 12/08/2015

Your request number is CRN00017902

Our reply to your request is:

This response should answer your request in full.

a) fixed penalty notices issued in the last 5 years for dog fouling

1. within the entire local authority area – 79
2. specifically within Easton & Lawrence Hill wards – 20

b) prosecutions brought in the last 5 years

1. within the entire local authority area – 32
2. specifically within Easton & Lawrence Hill wards – 4

One striking thing is just how low the overall figures for both fixed penalty notices and prosecutions are for a city of some 430,000 inhabitants, but then again the city council has a very small number of enforcement officers (posts passim) who also have to deal with fly-posting, fly-tipping, litter and other environmental crimes besides dog fouling.

As can also be seen from the statistics, the city’s Easton and Lawrence Hill wards – the areas in which Tidy BS5 campaigners are active – account for about one quarter of fixed penalty notices issued for dog fouling throughout the entire city. Given the city council’s low levels of enforcement in other Easton and Lawrence Hill for enforcement officers’ other areas of responsibility, this figure is quite astounding. This figure could have been influenced by the dog fouling campaign carried out in both wards 2 years ago by Up Our Street.

Dog fouling in Bristol can be reported online to the city council.

In addition, for elsewhere in the UK, the Gov.uk website has a handy dog fouling reporting page.
Robins named stand after folker Fred

10/09/2015 Steve WoodsBristol, Media, Oddities

There’s an astonishing revelation in today’s Bristol Post, the city’s most unreliable source of news: the late Fred Wedlock (pictured right), the local folk singer best known for his UK hit single “The Oldest Swinger In Town”, has had a stand named after him at Bristol City‘s ground at Ashton Gate.

This emerges from a report written by Ian Onions, the Post’s political editor, over a lifelong Robins fan’s wait for the club to honour its pledge over its 1990s ‘Buy-a-Brick’ campaign.

A screenshot of the article is also shown as confirmation of the existence of the Fred Wedlock Stand.

Ian may be a knowledgeable chap when it comes to politics and the skulduggery down at the Counts Louse (Bristolian for “City Hall” © Mayor George Ferguson. Ed.), but when it comes to the beautiful game, he really doesn’t know his onions, since it was dear old Fred’s grandfather Billy (pictured left) who played for and captained the Robins, as well as playing for the England squad and it is after him that the stand is named.

Ashton Gate also has a Williams stand. I wonder if Post reporters believe this was named after Andy of that surname rather than a former player. 😉
Response to fly-posting FoI request

08/09/2015 Steve WoodsBristol, Politics

One of the many irritants and banes of urban life which can be reported online to Bristol City Council is fly-posting (unauthorised advertising).

Fly-posting in St Judes, Bristol reported to council earlier this year

Your correspondent recently submitted a Freedom of Information (FoI) request to Bristol City Council via the excellent WhatDoTheyKnow on fly-posting enforcement in Bristol as a whole and the 2 inner city wards of Lawrence Hill and Easton in particular.

The text of the FoI request reads:

Dear Bristol City Council,

This is a request for information under the Freedom of Information Act.

Kindly disclose the number of:

a) fixed penalty notices issued
b) prosecutions brought

in the last 5 years for fly-posting

1. within the entire local authority area
2. within Easton & Lawrence Hill wards

Yours etc.

The council has now replied. The salient part of the response – minus the copyright notice and procedure for those dissatisfied with the reply – reads as follows:

You sent us a Freedom of Information request on 12/08/2015

Your request number is CRN00017905

Our reply to your request is:

FPNs – 68 with 2x in Easton/Lawrence Hill wards

Pros – 6x with 3x in in Easton/Lawrence Hill wards

This response should answer your request in full.

Considering that Bristol is a city of 430,000 people, these figures do seem rather small, but then again so is the city council’s enforcement team (posts passim) which deals not just with fly-tipping, litter dog fouling and the like, but also fly-posting.

Perhaps consideration should also be given to redeploying the council’s excessive numbers of press and PR staff.
Bing Translator shows its cluelessness again

05/09/2015 Steve WoodsBristol, Language, Oddities, Tech

This blog recently drew attention (posts passim) to the fact that Microsoft’s Bing Translator tool had difficulty distinguishing English from Norwegian.

It now seems this is not the only two languages with which it has trouble since it also cannot differentiate between Dutch and English, as per the following screenshot of a tweet from Hallen FC from my Twitter feed this afternoon.

I wonder if the rest of the Beast of Redmond’s software offerings are as reliable as Bing Translator. 😉

Why is software freedom important?

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