• Last Monday evening I attended an event by Avenir Suisse on the topic "Engpass Föderalismus"("bottleneck federalism") with a number of high-profile speakers from politics and academia on the panel. They presented an interesting study (statistics, as political as usual) on what I'd call the "informal networks" (commuter networks, etc.) determining the real structure of the country, instead of the structure given by the political structure (the Swiss cantons), and the conflicts arising from this discrepancy.
  Glad to see the discussion shifting away from granularity (which isn't really an issue) towards connectedness (or the lack of it) and the costs and benefits involved.
  
• I'm now officially fellow number 398 of the Free Software Foundation Europe, as such I'm going to represent the Swiss FSFE Chapter at the Swiss e-government standardization organisation (eCH). If you have an F/OSS-related opinion on what's happening (or not) at eCH, please drop me a line, ok?
  
• mediagonal, my dearest company, now definitely is becoming the official Swiss Moodle partner. That's good news, especially with our moodle-based IMS/QTI2 infrastructure becoming of age while solid e-learning modules are being built on it for big time clients such as a major national telco and the countries most renowned newspaper.
  
• "Some very disturbing developments have emerged in the Semantic Web community." - Stefano's comments are among the clearest.
  
• I'm thinking about initiating a "Swiss Semantic Web User Group". There's enough people out there in the valleys, and after the exercise in community building phpug) has been I think this should be doable. And I do think there's a lot to learn from each other, I do believe in the utility of strong local expert network, in communities of practice. If you have any ideas about this, please let me know.
  
• I should work more on my Master's Thesis! Dammit.
• "Art 36 Basel is making broad use of RFID tags to convey information about the individual pieces to visitors and to collect and distribute personal information about visitors and potential customers." Oh.
• On Barry Hardy's initiative (thanks Barry!) I met with a group of Colayer employees on Saturday. Based in Switzerland, they develop a virtual collaboration platform (with about 40 programmers in India) that in itself seems to be pretty flexible. I think they see their product as an enterprise-wide layer (they always referr to it as "The Layer") where virtual organisations can exchange ideas and have their discussions and meetings online, accidental hallway meetings included.
  I think that it's mainly the real-time aspects of this that make the product pretty powerful.
  A technology tidbit: I was told the server-side platform originally had been implemented in Java, because of performance reasons(?) it now is being reimplemented in C (?), with the side-effect of being Microsoft-only at the moment.
  Stepping back a bit, I see some shortcomings in terms of openness and connectivity - "The Layer" seems to be rather monolithic and centralistic, expecting other pieces of enterprise software to integrate into it if need be.
  You know that I want systems to integrate, enabling both software and people to collaborate more effectively, but their ideas (as perceived by myself) don't seem to foster that kind of integration (APIs! RDF! Microformats! XML! A mesh of tools and services! Whatever. Perhaps nobody wants all that anyway).
  Oh, and by the way: They didn't really think semantic web technologies could be of any immediate use for them. Got invited to meet their CEO some of these day, though.
  However: It was a really good thing to talk to folks from one of those rare product-oriented, international web-companies based here in Switzerland. Thumbs up!
• If you really read all of the above: I'm sorry. My writing isn't really reader-oriented, it's rather something I do for myself. It's not actually an entertainment blog here, is it. But glad you read it!

«Zurich (CH) - Dublin (IE) - Zurich (CH)

This flight covers a distance of 2'476 km.
One myclimate ticket costs 27.00 Swiss Francs and compensates for the emission of 736 kilograms of CO2.

In order to save this amount of CO2, a solar collector from the myclimate project in Eritrea must be run for 9 months.»

The "Guide to Open Content Licenses" by Piet Zwart Institute Rotterdam was published these days and probably is the first publication to give a systematic, comprehensive overview of the topic from both historic and legal point of view.
The book is published under the Creative Commons Attribution- NonCommercial- ShareAlike- License, and here's where to find it:

PDF: http://pzwart.wdka.hro.nl/mdr/pubsfolder/opencontentpdf
XHTML(+-): http://pzwart.wdka.hro.nl/mdr/research/lliang/open_content_guide

Lovink, Geert: Uncanny Networks
Finally reading one his books after having heard him talk at VIPER.

Fröhlich-Bleuler, Gianni: Softwareverträge: System-, Software-Lizenz- und Software-Pflegevertrag
I finally should be able to feel more sure in those legal matters. Now Rachel bought this book, which seems to be pretty good.

Thommen, Jean-Paul: Managementorientierte Betriebswirtschaftslehre
Currently I'm reading about org-chart (will have to write a software for generating such in PHP) and about knowledge management (got another little consulting mandate in that area). Not my book, either. :)

Schneier, Bruce: Applied Cryptography
Finally something technical again.. I guess I'd better be ready to eventually apply those techniques when starting with my semantic-web-trust work.

1. Without being aware of, I attended my very last computer science lecture as a student.
   I actually was terribly sick, a stomach upset and a splitting headache were not actually helpful in delivering my OWL presentation, which turned out to be of inferior quality and entertainment value. I guess I should rather not publish material produced and presented under such unfavourable circumstances online.. :)
   
2. As a byproduct of the presentation, I hacked up popoon_components_transformers_highlightcode, which uses PEAR::Text_Highlighter to produce those nice colorful syntax examples included in the slides.
   
3. The paper for ICNEE I co-authored with Andrea Helbach has been officially accepted. This means another opportunity to practice public speaking.. I guess it'll be the first appearance in front of a non-geek audience :)
4. Ars Electronica 2004 will be just during my planned trip to Ireland. Which is a pity. I wan't to go see both, but Fribourg→Dublin→Galway→Linz→Fribourg seem just a bit too much (both in terms of km and €). Nevertheless, (the beginning of) this year's Ars Electronica Statement still is great fun to read:
   
   

   “I’ll throw the damned rearview mirror out of the damned window because I don’t want to know where I’ve come from, but where I’m going,” Frank Lloyd Wright, the American architect, is reputed to have said once in the ‘30s, and indeed he did actually break off the car’s rearview mirror and throw it out of the window. A brilliant anecdote. But...(read on)

   
   
   
5. I'm finishing "Hackers and Painter" by P. Graham... I don't particularly like it, in fact I disagree with quite a number of statements.. will be a fun review to write for O'Reilly :)