Dogeared Steel waill be playing at the Jes Reunion on Saturday

Dogeared Steel
Originally uploaded by Brian O'Donovan

The clock is now ticking with only 5 days left until the Jes Reunion on Saturday the 17th of October.

We are happy to say that the agenda has expanded. The festivities will kick-off with a 5-a-side soccer match between Xavier and Loyola being held in the school at 5pm. If you are interested in playing, please get in touch with the captain for your class (Xavier=Cor McDonnagh and Loyola=Pa Lowry).

Anyone who is still walking after the soccer match can make their way to Wards Hotel where we plan to meet up from 8:30pm until late. I am delighted to announce that we have lined up Dogeared Steel to provide musical accompaniment for the night. They will be playing their new smash hit The Jes on Sea Road.

I hope to see you all there and hope we are able to recognise each other.

Hackday presentation at UKLUG

This morning I hosted a session at the UK Lotus User Group (UKLUG) in Edinburgh about encouraging innovation through Hackdays. Instead of using a traditional slideshow I based my presentation upon the contents of the blog post I wrote earlier.

The attendance was smalller than I hoped, partly because many people had stayed late at the ceilidh the night before. However, I think that I got their interest by playing music and lively videos.

At the end of the session we had an interesting discussion about how the people attending could apply this idea in their own organisation. Most felt that they would need to customise the idea to make alloweances for the skills (or lack of skills) of their user populationm, but there was a cocensus that end user satisfaction with their IT applications would be greatly improved if people we shown how to hack around and customise the tools to match their working style.

I am really sad to have missed the fun of Hackday 007 back at work. I am looking forward to seeing the results next week.

Report on day one of UKLUG 2009 conference In Edinburgh

The opening general session was given by Bob Picciano who gave a good overview of the Lotus strategy. A good soundbite from his talk was "clouds without structure are just fog".

Bob's speech was followed by an excellent demo of Notes 8.5.1 by Ron Sebastian and I saw a feature that I never knew before - it is possible to drag an email from your inbox onto your calendar and it automatically converts the email into a meeting record. i know that there already is a tool to do this in the menu, but I think drag and drop is much more user friendly.

The sponsor showcase was good and I met lots of old friends.

The most interesting session in the afternoon was "XPages 101" by Tim Clark. He gave an introduction to XPages by developing a real application live on stage. the session was packed out with lots of people standing in the aisles. I guess everyone has heard the hype and wanted to see what the fuss was about. I think they were generally very impressed.

The next session on the agenda is an open bar sponsored by BE systems. I can't go too crazy because I will be presenting tomorrow morning, but I think it would be safer to post my report now instead of waiting until later :-)

Hackday talk for UK Lotus User Group

The Hackday concept is all about being innovative and different and so I thought I should not use anything as boring as a slide based presentation for my talk at the UK Lotus Users Group in Edinburgh. Of course the other advantage is that anyone not at the event gets to see what I covered.

1. I intend to start by playing some of the video hackumentary from Yahoo to acknowledge the Yahoo events ad the inspiration for the IBM Hackdays (but I will mention that Yahoo were not the first - just the best publicised).
   

   Open Hack Day 2008 - a hackumentary | Part 1 from ricky montalvo on Vimeo.

   
   


2. Next I will hare a Google map that shows the spread of the Hackday meme.
   
   View Hackday in a larger map
   
   Then I will show where the Hackday 007 local events are happening
   
   
   View Hackday7 Local Events in a larger map
   


3. Next I will tell them about out local Hackdays by showing them the map of Hackday pictures on Flickr


4. I will share some statistics of the growth of Hackday from HD1 through HD6
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   

   Hackday	Date	Projects	Participants
   HD1	1-Jun-2006	59	64
   HD2	1-Dec-2006	20	30
   HD3	18-May-2007	70	88
   HD4	12-Oct-2007	129	161
   HD5	25-Apr-2008	353	433
   HD6	24-Oct-2008	449	552

   
   


5. 
   I will speak about the concept of "winning" Hackday. Mostly the prize is the recognition of your peers. Occasionally we run special contest in conjunction with Hackday. There will be special conditions/criterion associate with the competitions (e.g. the best example of using a particular tool/technology). The competition winners can win a substantial prize e.g. US$1,500 or a trip to Lotusphere.
   


6. Finally I will how a few example hacks such as




1. IBM Travel Maps - a cool map/mash-up which allows IBMers to see IBM offices, IBM Approved Hotels, Airport etc. for a city that they plan to visit.
   
   


2. Google Gadgets in Notes - this was an early version of a feature which subsequently became Notes Widgets. At the time we had a composite application programming model, but no components were available to be assembled into composite applications.


3. Sametime command line - a simple command line interface to Sametime. Typical use case is a build script which sends a Sametime IM message to members of the development team when the the build is complete.



4. MicroBlogCentral a notes side shelf plugin which sends updates to the Lotus Connections Porfiles site - and also sends to Twitter, BlueTwit, BeeHive and several other services.
   


7. Finally I hope there can be some open discussion about whether or not it would be feasible to run Hackdays in other large companies and/or in conjunction with Lotus User Group events.

Does your employer own the rights to your reputation?

During a recent IBM Academy of Technology conference a speaker gave a presentation about how IBM could/should make sure that it effectively harnessed the good reputations of its many employees who have built up good reputations on the internet. During the discussion that followed one employee brought up the question of whether or not IBM was entitled to profit from its employees' reputations.

IBM employees (in line with industry practice)sign an employment contract which clearly gives the company the rights to own the copyright and/or patent rights to everything we create while employed by IBM. The contract does not explicitly cover the topic of whether or not the company owns the rights to our reputations. However, despite the lack of a formal contract it is inevitable that you employer will effectively benefit from any positive reputation you build up as well as be harmed by the negative reputation that you might gain from doing something stupid.

In the software industry we do not normally distinguish between the ownership of the intellectual property rights to exploit a creative work and the ownership rights of the reputation which comes from being involved with its production. The copyright statement with a piece of software will normally state which company owns the copyright, but will make no mention of the individual employees who worked on the product. This is in sharp contrast with the music and film world who normally give careful attention to recording and publishing a list of everyone who is involved in each piece of work. The credits at the end of a movie will normally list everyone who was involved in creating it - not just people with major roles such as the actors, director etc., but also people with more minor roles such as looking as looking after the catering arrangements for the people working on the set.

The reason for this practice is because the people involved are constantly moving from job to job and as result they need a way to provide proof of their portfolio of work. For example if I applied for a job doing the make-up on a new movie and claimed credit for working on the Harry Potter movie, the prospective employer would probably check the credits at the end of the movie and if my name was not mentioned assume that I was telling lies.

Perhaps the software industry should follow their example and find a way to give credit to all of the people involved in creating products. There used to be a tradition of inserting a hidden easter egg into software products to allow the people involved in creating it have the thrill of seeing their names visible in the product. However, this practice was never formally endorsed by the companies funding the product and it seems to becoming much less common recently. However the practice of having a job for life is no longer common and software engineers would benefit from having a way to prove their portfolio of work.

A proposal for how to help transfer of Irish University R&D into local industry

The Irish government has generally been praised for its increased investment in R&D in recent years, most notably since the foundation of Science Foundation Ireland. However, a number of commentators have criticised the fact that relatively little of the technology developed by this research is now being used by Irish industry.

In general the researchers have explained the lack of commercial spin-offs by the long time that it takes for research to advance to a stage where a company can actually build a business based upon the newly developed technology. While I do accept this explanation I am still worried that there is no special incentive to encourage adoption of Irish University research by Irish companies.

In addition there may be unrealistic expectations from some universities about how much license revenue can be gained from licensing the patents that they get from their research projects. In the pharmaceutical business some people and organisations have made large fortunes from licensing patents to blockbuster drugs, but in the ICT sector it is more normal to make money from your intellectual property by partnering with the company exploiting it rather than by selling a license.

Since the research in Irish Universities is mainly funded by the Irish government with the aim of encouraging the health of the local high tech industry, why don't we consider offering a royalty free license to any technology developed by a government funded project to any company who intends to establish or grow a business in Ireland based upon using the technology. This would have the effect of helping businesses already established in Ireland as well as helping attract new multi-national companies to establish an Irish base.

While this might mean that the universities need to forego a potential revenue scheme, I don't think that the loss in revenue will substantially effect their budgets. In addition we could have some scheme whereby someone like the IDA could certify how many jobs had been created by means of these royalty free licenses and this could be used as one of the metrics used to justify the funding awarded to the university(ies) in question.

Are network neutrality laws a good idea?

I used to be a big supporter of network neutrality legislation. However, after reading an interesting paper by Tim Lee of the Cato institute I a have changed my mind.

Tim's main point is that what supporters of network neutrality really want is what he calls the "end to end principle" i.e. that the network operator should not concern themselves with the content of traffic over their network and that they should leave such concerns to the users at either end of the network link (typically the service provider and the consumer). He argues that network operators who operate such an open content-neutral service have a natural economic and technical advantage which ensures that they will dominate even without government regulations backing them up. He further argues that whenever governments get involved in regulating rapidly changing markets like ISPs they are almost certain to make a mess of this. He gives several historical examples of where government regulation which was intended to support consumers ended up protecting poverful vested interests instead.

I am now veering towards the view that market forces can be an effective way to disuade misguided network providers from unfairly restricting the use fo their network. However, I still have two significant caveats:

1. Competitive forces only work where there is real competition going on. In many parts of the world consumers have no choice of broadband provider. In fact there are many examples where a telecom incumbent has an exclusive license to provide services but they don't cover their area fully. These companies then use their license to stop other companies from offering alternatives to the unlucky consumers who are left off-line.
   
   I think governments should aim to ensure that all citizens have at least three broadband providers to choose from. The recent growth of a number of innovative wireless broadband technologies should make this feasible even in rural areas.
   
   
2. The competitive forces argument also falls down when the discriminatory network routing is being done in response to government regulation since that regulation will apply equally to everyone in the market. I am specifically thinking about "The Great Firewall of China", but the recent court cases trying to force ISPs to block traffic to the Pirate Bay web site gives an indication that if we are not vigilant this kind of network censorship could become much more prevalent.
   
   In Tim's paper he mentions that there is a general consensus that blocking virus attacks is a generally accepted legitimate deviation from pure network neutrality principles. However, blocking copyright abuses is an area where there is much less consensus.
   

Jes reunion on 17th of October 2009

Jes Class Photo
Originally uploaded by Brian O'Donovan

I was surprised to realise that 30 years have passed since I left school. This class photo reminded me of how long ago that seems. I know that I have changed quite a bit over the years and I would love to meet up with my former classmates to see how much they have changed (if I even still recognise them).

A few of us got together and have arranged an informal reunion event. If you were at school in the Jes at the same time as the guys in this photograph, here are the details for your diary.

Location: Wards Hotel, Lower Salthill
Date: Saturday, 17th of October
Time: 8:30pm -late

We will be meeting up for drinks and finger food. There is no need for tickets and all are welcome. Even if you were not in the class you can come along if you want to meet any of the guys in the picture.

If you are not able to come in person, maybe you might like to leave a comment here and we will circulate your comment at the event.

You can click here to see a few more photos of our school days. Cameraphones had not been invented 30 years ago so we don't have as many pictures as we would like. If you have any photos or memorabilia it would be great if you could bring them along.

How will we know if we are making prgress towards building a Smart Economy

Everyone seems to be in agreement that we need to transition towards a Smart Economy in Ireland. Although there is some vagueness about what is meant by a Smart Economy , there does seem to be a consensus that when we achieve a Smart Economy we will observe the following facts:

1. Our economy will be vibrant (i.e. strong GDP growth and low unemployment).
   
2. Most of our workforce will be working in Jobs which require high skills and involve a high level of innovation.
3. Business leaders in other parts of the world will look to Ireland for new ideas and innovation.

Once we have these success factors agreed, the government should try to measure the impact of every initiative/investment taken to see if it helps us make progress towards achieving them.

The trouble with these success factors is that it difficult enough to measure the overall achievement and virtually impossible to judge the impact of any individual initiative. However, we should not allow the difficulty of accurate measurement to be used as an excuse to abandon all metrics.

What I would propose is that every investment proposal (e.g. to fund a new research group) should include a section where the proposers of the investment would include:

1. Their estimate for the economic impact of making this investment. I know this will be open to some interpretation, but perhaps the forthcoming economic forum in Farmleigh will give us ideas of a standardised way to do this estimation.
2. Some concrete metrics (e.g. Patents filed, scientific papers published, newly established companies etc.) that will give us an early indication that the hoped for economic impact is being eachieved.

It would be in the best interested of the people proposing a new investment to put in a realistic estimate for the economic impact achievable. If they underestimate the impact their proposal will not be likely to get funding, but if they overestimate the impact they risk making it very likely that their project will be cut off after the first review because they won't be able to meet the unrealistc targets they set for themselves.

The other advantage of this approach is that it emphasises the fact that the metrics are not an goal in themselves, but merely an indirect way of estimating whether or not the economic goals are being achieved. If you pick a single metric (e.g. number of patents filed) you will get people focussing on quantity over quality - this is one of the reasons why IBM felt the need to lanuch the Patent Value Initative.

Note: Is shoudl disclose that I work for IBM. While I am proud of the fact that my employer is the organisation has field the biggest number of patents per year for the last number of years, I must admit that I can't say I am proud of the quality and validity of all of the patents filed.

Is a Cruise an ideal hoilday?

I was luck enough to go on two cruise holidays this summer. They were both very enjoyable, although they were very different types of cruise.

At the start of august I hired a cruiser from Emerald Star lines in Carrick-on-Shannon. I was worried how this trip would go because I was not very confident in my ability to successfully navigate around the complex Shannon waterway (an my crew mates were even less experienced) and the weather forecast was for a typical wet Irish Summer.

Luckily we had no major safety incidents and the weather was quite OK once you dressed suitably. We got a lovely view of the Irish countryside from a different angle than I am used to. The kids even went swimming a few times - but the risk of hypothermia limited the amount of time they spent in the water.

At the end of August I went on a Thompson's Cruise around the Aegean. This was a completely different experience. The weather was hot and sunny all the time. The accommodation was luxurious in the extreme and the staff did a great job of keeping us entertained. We had an "all you can eat" option and it would have been possible to spend the entire time eating and drinking on board the ship and never left the ship (thankfully I resisted this temptation - otherwise I would have been barely able to waddle off the ship)

I took more pictures of the Greek cruise than I took of the Shannon cruise partly because I found the scenery more worth photographing when I was further from home but also because my navigational responsibilities for the Shannon cruise meant I could not feel free to snap away with the camera.

Click on the links above to see my photos. However, my other half insists that I set privacy restrictions on any photograph that features any family member. Since most of my pictures feature one of the family this means you won't be able to see many of the pictures unless you are signed in to Flickr and listed as a friend of mine.