week 49

Back from my trip to amsterdam last week thursday for an interview with a dutch clown for the Service Science Factory I spend  two days on METEOR. The Research School is the central point for PhD students at SBE and handels the application, selection and payments. So they get a new website and I just got the confirmation that some money is available for an Wufoo account. To create an online registration system that allows students to submit the necessary documents and so streamlines the registration process is the goal. And it looks as if this will work. Its a reliable service that plays all the melodies METEOR wants.

It seems to me that many people reinvent the wheel. Nobody would develop a registration form from scratch. First of all there are many free php, ajax, java scripts out there which can be customized to the needs of a specific project. Second there is bunch of services that make the web social; meaning providing a powerful tools that can be used by normal people to do sometimes great things. An example of this is Wufoo. But if need is the mother of all invention than ignorance is the father of reinvention. Strangely enough this episode reminds me of a meeting I had about a project which demanded an 'expert system' and the question was wether we can develop it or not.

Other meetings this week involved mainly the department websites. All revolved around the content that I want to see on the website when it launches. The European Corner facilitates information relevant for the Faculty of Law, European studies and SBE. Many subsites are created by Herman Pijpers or with his support. He is the guy behind UNU MERIT a joint institute founded by Luc Soete. A men with a very good and international network somebody told me. Anyway, after playing around with some design ideas I gave it up and remembered that I need to publish some of my experiences with GX. I awork a bit on the programme page and was also pointed to a website from which I will steal some ideas. Comparing SBE's website with this one shines a brighter light on what can be improved than the one of Hopkins University. After contacting their webdepartment I am not impressed by what I still consider a very inviting and exciting website. But I doubt that SBE nor MU and maybe even province is capable of allocating the financial means that underpins Hopkin's webpresence.


Regarding the personal profiles I am working one hour a day on migrating the existing ones into the system. This works well and the first reaction of Iwan was postive. He visited me as well to discuss the process of the OS website. With Martin I had a longer talk about the world and I am still not convinced that it exists. But he provided me with a still fuzzy but more clear picture of the research activities in ECON. Another service I am not using to make my work more efficient is slideshare. And the reason I do it is because I spend some times in the digital dungeons of fdewb.unimaas.nl in an attempt to get a feel for what institution I really work and find interesting stuff. But it is hidden behind and nobody cares anyway. So I will use this service - once I have some more hands and minds - to make my contribution to what people call distance learning or elearning or whatsoever.


The most exciting event this week was a short discussion on facebook regarding Wikileaks. I had the impression that many people see privacy as a right and even a value to be protected. Privacy has never been a right, as far back as 300 years ago, and for sure not a value based on some second hand moral quibbles. The greek term idiot meant back then a private person as we understand it. Now the meaning is quiet different. Privacy is necessary the functioning of individuals and institutions but only to the extend that every function must conform to environmental facts. Nothing prepares an institution for an attack such as the one wikileaks filed on US's careful crafted identity. Among the most prominant piece of the more than 200.000 documents is a video released in June this year. The documents are food for newspapers, analysts and some other special interest groups but videos have a very different effect on a very different category of people. That the US government lies to the world is not so suprising than the fact that we know it. In fact, we cannot not notice it these days. While the battlefield of the US was Iraq and Afganistan it faces now on the internet the cyberterrorists in a similar war. But like the real world warzones where the civilian population is held hostage (from terrorists on one side and the american invaders on the other) so is everybody who is online. And it is worth mentioning that US is far from 'winning' (if this term has any meaning in that context) the real world war and is unlikely to suffer a different faith in the newly launched cyberwar.