Blogs

When I was returning from the NetHope summit in Seattle, I had to stopover in Seoul airport for a few hours. After being watching all the Korean couples wearing matching track suits (so 80's!) and remembering my fantastic experience working there 5 months earlier, I went to have a look in the terminal bookshop and stumbled across this book "Building Wealth" by Lester C. Thurow.

The books a little dated now with its examples (it was published in 2000 showing how fast times are changing nowadays!) but is a great introduction on the economics of wealth creation and what countries must do to compete effectively in the global knowledge economy. I couldn't put it down during my 6 day stopover in Dubai a couple of weeks ago, I basically spent most of the day sitting in the sun smoking shisha and reading the book!

As mentioned in my last blog, I've been working in the NGO sector the past few months and also following Alfresco, the first open source Enterprise Content Management system. Through my contacts in Alfresco I've been talking about potential partnerships between Alfresco and the NGO sector. First of all, I have to dispel a myth, not ALL NGOs are fans of open source software! A lot of the CIOs of the major NGOs have originally worked in the commercial sector and are very pragmatic when it comes to choosing new technology and software for their organisations. One CIO for a HUGE NGO regularly debates with me about open source, me being a big believer in the model, and him being very sceptical!

But that doesn't mean there aren't a lot of NGOs out there that don't support open source. The fit between the two areas is obvious, they share similar values, and potentially help the same people, one through aid work, the other through free access to powerful software. Additionally, many NGOs have limited budgets, so even with grants many major software companies (particularly Microsoft) give to NGOs for software, they can very rarely beat free!

I'm here on my third day in Seattle, in the Microsoft campus in Redmond, Washington. This place is fantastic, and yesterday I swear I saw Steve Ballmer (CEO of Microsoft) walking down the corridor! We also did a tour of Microsoft's vision for how we will work in the next 3-7 years, round table video conferencing was particularly exciting and will be released later this year by Microsoft!

Yesterday I did my presentation for NetHope on the work I've been doing for the past 9 weeks in Bangkok. The response was fantastic, it seems all these global NGO's are looking to build collaboration portals for their organisations! A lot of them are using Sharepoint because it is specifically designed out of the box for an easy to administer collaborative workspace. In fact, my own vendor selection for NetHope's collaboration Intranet chose to use Microsoft Office Sharepoint 2007.

I've recently been running a vendor assessment for an NGO (Non Government Organisation, Charity) called NetHope. They are looking to build a collaboration Intranet for all their member NGO's (there's currently 18 of them!) to share information and documents. Obviously, I included Alfresco in the vendor assessment, and also Plone, which is heavily supported by Oxfam who have invested heavily in the platform.

I have to admit, I hadn't heard much about Plone before this project, and I was pretty interested to see what it could do. One of the interesting comments I saw on a few blogs and forums was a challenge to Alfresco's claim to be the first open-source ECM system, as Plone has been around since 1999 and claims to also be an ECM system, whereas Alfresco has only been around since 2005.

Finally, I have a reason to use this blog (as opposed to my personal one for friends only) for something useful, although I will be adding more geek-blogs on open source shortly, as I have been following that with great interest (especially Alfresco).

Following up on my blog a few months ago (I've pasted it below from my other blog), I have some VERY sad news. Unfortunately, the UK smoking ban in public places (which I am completely for in regards to normal clubs and bars) includes shisha.

What can I say? I'm not muslim, none of the Greeks, Russians, Spanish, Brazilians and English friends I know are muslim, but we all like to go for shisha during the week/weekends. Yet the British government claims there shouldn't be special exceptions for minorities such as muslims for the smoking ban. What about the exceptions they do for the other religions in the UK like allowing Sikhs to carry knives? Surely thats more of a health hazard than Shisha to the public?! I'm not going to turn this into a religious/minority argument like the government has, but I will say again what I stated in my last artical about this:

Shisha bars are unique - people only go to them to smoke Shisha! They have made a concious decision to expose themselves to smoke, so let us be!!!

The government wants to get rid of the binge drinking culture, but what options does someone like me have to go and meet up with friends in the evening? Starbucks? Or shall I go for drink at the bar down the road from now on like all the other English?! Shisha was something me and my friends could do regularly in London to meet up, hang out in a cool place, meet loads of new people (everyone sits close together in Shisha bars so you always end up meeting other people from other countries!) that didn't involve alcohol, or just sitting in a chain-coffee shop.

Anyway, there is an online petition for the Government, please take 2 minutes to sign up if you're a British resident (you don't have to be British just a resident living here!) to stop this idiocracy: http://petitions.pm.gov.uk/Shisha. The deadline is 29th June, and it only has 4000 signatures so far!

I've installed Drupal, updated some configurations and updated some content. Bascially, I've got a website up and running finally!

With Drupal its very easy to setup a site like this (it only took me half and hour of tinkering), the time from now on will be spent adding content and actually making this into a useful resource for people trying to find out more in the areas I have some expertise in, and provide a window for me to sell my skills across the world!

Anyway, I'm sure the site will go through several changes till I get it to be how I want it, but until then, I will start adding some useful content.
Welcome to my site!