Do you have a brilliant idea that needs a little polish before it is ready to help change Australia? Let us in on the idea; the innovation community can help out with fleshing your idea out or just help you work out the implications. Maybe you will come up with the idea behind the submission that makes everything click.
The AussieInnovation.com website is constructed from several different packages, each carefully selected as best of breed. Although this does involve some integration pain on our part, it will create a much more powerful piece of infrastructure for the community to use. We have recently integrated yet another package, the Central Authentication Server (CAS).
CAS allows us to store all of your login details in a single central database (actually, LDAP as discussed previously) and then only have to sign onto the website once. That’s the tricky part. Under normal circumstances each of the different web tools that we’re using requires you to log in using its own arcane system; our changes not only centralise this but also encrypt your username and password. (Hopefully you’re using a password for this website that’s different to the one you use for, say, your online banking, but it’s good practice to never transmit user/pass pairs in clear text—so we don’t.)
We are still rounding out a few sharp corners and making sure that all of the wiring is tucked away neatly, so if you notice something untoward, please report the bug on our contact page. However, everything works so there is no reason for you not to jump in and start contributing to our discussion on the National Innovation Review, suggest an idea that should be considered or add your previous or new submission to the wiki.
The digital infrastructure underlying AussieInnovation.com is designed both to be informed by and to define world best practice, and as such it uses Lightweight Directory Access Protocol (LDAP) for storing information about members of the site. Unfortunately, LDAP is an enterprise-level technology yet to reach the mainstream of commercial web hosting, with leading host management application CPanel expecting to introduce support for the protocol in the coming months.
Thus, AussieInnovation.com has moved webhosts from the US to Australia, and is now utilising the server space and bandwidth of WA-based sponsors, boutique ISP secure.com.au. You should see performance at least as good from the local providers, and even though we’re expecting to need to move to slightly larger premises one day, we’ll be sticking with secure’s advanced identity and authentication services into the foreseeable future.
In response to interest expressed at Stakeholder Consultation Sessions in Perth (06 March) and Melbourne (11 March), an Australian Innovation Community website incorporating forums, weblogging, news and information and social networking capabilities was seen to be a valuable community resource. Scheduled for soft launch in the week beginning 17 March 2008, the site saw its first content posted on 12 March.
As this thread on the Brad-inspired distributed SN google group (gah; using that term feels like such a betrayal) notes, getting information out of gated communities like effbee might prove legally challenging. Nevertheless, the net.zeitgeist’s definitely trending towards individual control of *stream; I see the potential in facilitating interface between individuals (and corporates, of course) to negotiate control of these major commodities of the twenteens.
I recently saw a press release (someone’s startup promoting extensions to robots.txt) disguised as a piece of technology news in The Age. How about announcing an OAuth-style automated licensing contract (ala CC) schema? (Version two could threaten microtransactions. :) I think smart VC’d grok that.
Hmm, maybe this is still Attribution.org…
Attribution.org is a domain looking for a project. Always intended to host an attribution-oriented SOA app fronting a silo full of work, author tuples, the domain has seen use as host for a testbed voluntary micropayments system, but has yet to fulfill its real potential.
I remember when the Creative Commons was touted on cni-copyright back in the mid-90s. I thought it sounded a bit too much like taking up the weapons of the enemy—but then, I was a little more ideologically shortsighted in those days. Naturally, its slick professionalism and credible academic backing have seen it develop into a mainstream organisation: one with real potential for a major cultural shift away from the fence-builders of the memepool. With the Age of the Remix ever-extending its influence, this is a Big Thing, and the Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license is probably the closest thing Western Culture is ever likely to come to the natural state. It’s a bandwagon well worth hitching to.
The world of the internet age is moving towards a reputation economy. This will raise all kinds of questions about virtual identity and about personal honesty; we’re already seeing extreme negative examples of the consequences of their intersection. Anonymity is terrific in many circumstances, but the absolute verification of identity is becoming ever more critical in an environment overshadowed by the tech-leveraged power of the equivalent of petty crims. In fact, Reputation generally is a Hard Problem without it. (That’s not to say it’s the answer to all Reputation’s problems, of course.) The problem’s not a simple one, and intuitively the answer should really include the word “distributed”, but attribution.org is a clear fit for an industry-standardising, ui-simplified, electronically verified and tracked, generalised “creative work” attribution system, leveraging compatibility with the automated licensing schema of the Creative Commons and extending to media such as website mashups, fanfic, machinima and user generated game content.
I just need to find the time.
Attribution.org is a domain looking for a project. Always intended to host an attribution-oriented SOA app fronting a silo full of work, author tuples, the domain has seen use as host for a testbed voluntary micropayments system, but has yet to fulfill its real potential.
I remember when the Creative Commons was touted on cni-copyright back in the mid-90s. I thought it sounded a bit too much like taking up the weapons of the enemy—but then, I was a little more ideologically shortsighted in those days. Naturally, its slick professionalism and credible academic backing have seen it develop into a mainstream organisation: one with real potential for a major cultural shift away from the fence-builders of the memepool. With the Age of the Remix ever-extending its influence, this is a Big Thing, and the Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license is probably the closest thing Western Culture is ever likely to come to the natural state. It’s a bandwagon well worth hitching to.
The world of the internet age is moving towards a reputation economy. This will raise all kinds of questions about virtual identity and about personal honesty; we’re already seeing extreme negative examples of the consequences of their intersection. Anonymity is terrific in many circumstances, but the absolute verification of identity is becoming ever more critical in an environment overshadowed by the tech-leveraged power of the equivalent of petty crims. In fact, Reputation generally is a Hard Problem without it. (That’s not to say it’s the answer to all Reputation’s problems, of course.) The problem’s not a simple one, and intuitively the answer should really include the word “distributed”, but attribution.org is a clear fit for an industry-standardising, ui-simplified, electronically verified and tracked, generalised “creative work” attribution system, leveraging compatibility with the automated licensing schema of the Creative Commons and extending to media such as website mashups, fanfic, machinima and user generated game content.
I just need to find the time.
Jeremy Byrne’s AussieInnovation weblog