Exciting to (finally) see a freely available Web service for looking up Member of Parliament in Canada based on a postal code.

Historically, the various licensing costs and restrictions on the data required to support this service made it hard to provide as a "free as in free beer" service to organizations that wanted to make use of the data in advocacy applications and so on.

It seems those barriers have been lowered, as Cory Horner from the How'd They Vote team announces the service and speaks to the licensing questions:

I am pleased to present, at long last, a Postal Code to Member of Parliament web service:

http://howdtheyvote.ca/news.php?i=free-postal-code-lookup-service

Sadly the raw data cannot be shared, but fortunately the terms of the licence dictate that its use in a web service is permitted.

Russell McOrmond, a pioneer in this area, pressed Cory about lookups based on geolocation, i.e., enabling an end-user to click on a map and receive information on their Member of Parliament (made difficult by the nature of riding boundaries). And it appears that Cory has added that functionality to the API also, so that latitude and longitude can be used instead of postal code in the API query.

The geeky among you might want to also know that the service using PostGIS as the spatial database.

Exciting times in Canada, as geeks start to put the Web services in place to enable more democracy-enabling technology.

(Thanks to Civic Access for the info.)

This just in from Donald Lobo and the CiviCRM team:

Hey folks:

Just wanted to let you know that we'll be having our very first CiviCon on April 22 at Mitch Kapor Foundation offices. We hope to see all of you at the conference.
Save the date and book your tickets: CiviCon, April 22, 2010

Information and registration is here. Please register as soon as possible :)

Would be great if folks could propose a few sessions here. We'd love to organize the conference into various tracks (fundraising, advocacy/political, membership/association, education). The success of the conference depends on our combined involvement.

We are also having quite a few trainings around that time in Atlanta, GA around NTEN (April 7, 11, 12). There is an affinity group session and panel discussions around CiviCRM during NTEN.

We are also having trainings the day before DrupalCon April 18.

If you are in the area or attending either of those conferences, we could use your help. Please contact us via email.

A complete list of our events is here

lobo

Exciting to see a product evolve so far in such a short timeframe. If I recall correctly, my own introduction to CiviCRM began on the Kleercut campaign in 2005. It's been a reliable friend several times since then and just keeps on improving. Kudos to all the folks that make this open-source software project possible.

This is one event that I might just have to attend. If you're considering CiviCRM for your organization, you might want to think about it too.

Our "Left Coast" friends over at Groundwire (formerly ONE/Northwest) have just posted a great roundup of events in 2010 that any self-respecting "technologist for good" should check out.

There are a lot of conferences on that list that are new to me, so I'm looking forward to digging into the agendas and asking for feedback from folks that have attended in the past.

There are a few events not on Groundwire's list that caught my eye this year. I provide them with the caveat that I haven't personally attended these, and most haven't announce follow-up events yet. Here's to hoping they do:

• Tide's Momentum conference
• Fairsay's eCampaigning Forum in Oxford
• Journalism That Matters
• Organizing 2.0
• A local "Ignite" events
• And, finally, any one of the great events that are run by Aspiration Technology Foundation ever year

There are more, but I'll leave it there.

Know of others? Post a comment over at Groundwire.

I stumbled on the "lifestream" blog of Cory O'Brien today. Being a fan of "lifestreams" (an aggregation of 'actions' taken on various sites) myself, I was interested to find that Cory's site was running on an lifestream aggregation platform called Sweet Cron, which was new to me. Sweet Cron is an open-source PHP-based application developed by "yongfook."

The developer, however, has since moved his own lifestream/blog to the free service called Posterous. Posterous, like Tumblr makes blogging easy, which is great. However, Posterous, like Tumblr, also has a very opaque business plan. Call me cynical: but I can't get my head around relying on "free" hosted Web services for more than transient projects. (I'm even starting to question my own previous musings about a "Software pyramid for a healthy non-profit".)

From the recent purchase of EtherPad by Google -- leaving even their paid customers in the lurch -- to the quiet shut down of free service TwitApps, it seems that hosted services -- paid or not -- can be volatile ground these days. There's a long list of web services that have joined the "dead pool" over the last few years -- I know that I've been bitten more than once (Stikipad, Ma.gnolia, etc.)

If you've read Free by Wired magazine editor Chris Anderson, you'll know that most of these services aren't free by any means; they are simply going for the largest market possible to make it feasible for 5% of users to pay the freight for the other 95%. If they can't reach the mass market necessary to succeed, troubling times lay ahead for the service's users.

Enough of these free services have shut down that I've started moving toward installed software again for my own personal needs. After enough wasted time looking for half-baked free services, I've found it becomes worthwhile to invest in running the service myself on my own infrastructure. Your mileage may vary of course.

All that said, I'm sincerely curious about what others are doing: Are you relying more-and-more on free services like Posterous and Tumblr? Do you think about the day of reckoning when, inevitability, they introduce a premium plan, sell your data, or show ads on your site? Do you back up your data regularly, or just have faith that all will be okay? Or, alternately, are you starting to dust off your old programming books and getting to work on your own solutions?

Cross-posted from the New Internationalist Tech blog.

Okay, here we go — because you’ve all been so anxious for it — the second part of the infamous "Ten things to love (or hate) about Bricolage."

Cross-posted from the New Internationalist Tech blog.

Behinds the scenes at www.newint.org and blog.newint.org is a tireless workhorse -- a system that just keeps giving and giving -- and that system is Bricolage. Bricolage is the open-source enterprise-class content management system (CMS) that greatly simplifies the complex tasks of creating, managing, and publishing New Internationalist's archive of content and media assets. 

Cross-posted from the New Internationalist Tech blog

While asking for input on the New Internationalist redesign process the other day, one of my friends replied (in jest) “Is ‘crowdsourcing’ the new ‘design by committee’?”

It got me thinking about why I’m excited by open and transparent design processes, and how concepts like crowdsourcing are exactly the opposite of design by committee. (Well, sometimes.)

For me, the excitement stems from a passion for learning. I like to “see inside the tent” and to learn about how others approach the same challenges I face in my work, for example: How to build successful online advocacy campaigns, How to produce compelling Web properties, and How to develop impact-filled, sustainable, Web strategies.

(Cross-posted from Phillip Smith’s personal blog)

Okay, maybe stopping greedy capitalism cold is a bit ambitious. But I’m hoping you can spare some time this week to help one of the world’s most recognized social justice publications (outside of the US!) reinvent itself online.

If you’re reading this blog, you’re probably one of the “smartest people in the room,” as far as I’m concerned (cough) and New Internationalist needs all the (free) help it can get to save the world from greedy capitalists.

In pursuit of the Wisdom of Crowds, and similar bottom-up ideas that are redefining how people approach networks, events, campaigns and democracy, New Internationalist is opening the redesign process up to readers, supporters, enthusiasts and — I hope — smart people just like you.

I’ll cut to the chase. The brave person leading the design — CSS evangelist Andy Clarke — is blogging the entire process and I’d be forever indebted if you could check out some of his recent posts and provide thoughtful and critical feedback.

The New Internationalist home page challenge, 23/05/09
http://forabeautifulweb.com/s/249

Designing New Internationalist magazine pages, 24/05/09
http://forabeautifulweb.com/s/252

Did a greedy capitalist steal that page? 25/05/09
http://forabeautifulweb.com/s/253

(Cross-posted from Phillip Smith’s personal blog)

Cross-posted from the New Internationalist Tech blog

A couple of years ago I started looking at options to deliver common “front end” functionality for sites using Bricolage, the content-management system that is used at New Internationalist

Initially, what I had in mind to provide this front-end functionality was a “swarm” of micro-applications, where each little application provided one simple, specific, function, e.g., user registration, comments on content, voting and rating, sharing content, etc. There were other people thinking along these lines too, and – eventually – I came across the MicroApps project, which stated its philosophy as: 

MicroApps are small REST applications that are designed from the ground up to be integrated with other applications. Usually, they are not directly useful on their own, but must be integrated into other applications (this is what differentiates a MicroApp from a regular REST application).

Unfortunately, the project appeared to be at a standstill, and my experience with Python was pretty limited. Most of my experience is with Perl, so my investigation headed in that direction, and eventually lead to the topic of this post: Perl Web frameworks. 

Cross-posted from the New Internationalist Tech blog

After a good banter back-and-forth with my colleague here on the New Internationalist Web Team about CSS frameworks, I thought it would be helpful to jot down the key themes of the debate and possible solutions. Hopefully this will benefit other teams that are managing large collections of inter-linked sites that evolve over long periods of time.

Many of the leading minds of the “semantic Web” movement, like Jeffrey Zeldman and Andy Clarke (full disclosure: Andy is leading the upcoming New Internationalist online re-design), have recently compared CSS frameworks like Blueprint CSS to Dreamweaver. For those Web producers that develop skillfully handcrafted sites, tools like Dreamweaver are akin to training wheels on a bike, or a “colouring between the lines.”

That is argument number one against CSS frameworks: they are too prescriptive in their approach, and limit creativity.

The second argument is that they are not purely “semantic,” that is that their markup contains both semantic class names, and names that are purely for presentation or layout purposes.

I think that both of these arguments are mostly (cough) malarkey, and only serve to divert the debate from where it should really be: manageability (And this is an area that really needs some creative, and innovative, thinking).