this is a placeholder.

I'm still figuring out the details, but a conversation with my father (in which I told him this would be impossible) has inspired me to think about how to build a better feedback loop for Canada's parliamentary democracy, using free web based tools.

I'm interested enough at the moment that I might spend a long, long time figuring this out.  And then, shock of shocks, I might actually do something with it.

open standards vs. proprietary formats.

I don't buy clothes online.  I love clothes, and buying things online is cheaper and more efficient, generally.  But, sizes aren't standard, and I need my clothes to fit me properly.  So, generally, I buy things in person.  Sizes could easily be standard, but a mixture of appeals to vanity, and lack of rigorous agreed-upon meanings, is the current system.

It's the same deal with web browsers, as came up in a recent conversation.  They don't all read the same code in the same way.  A page might be programmed to say one thing, but when you get there, you see another.  On a wider scale, you can see why this would appeal to some companies - a closed process, or a proprietary one, combined with other market advantages (popularity, some unmatched feature) can equal dominance.  This is the same logic as one retailer making size 40 jeans labelled 34.

But when everyone does it, and there is a wide marketplace of comparable products each using the same system with different meanings, the industry in question is inherently fragmented.  This can result in greater brand loyalty, but only as a form of stockholm syndrome.

Proprietary systems make you, and your competitors wrong at least some of the time.  There's no incompatibility that doesn't go both ways.

So I have to go into the store to buy my pants.  Which means I keep buying my pants from the same places, because there is less inscentive to find new places, and have to learn the meanings behind each label there.

Open standards only seem like a bad idea if you can't understand the basic tenet of enlightened self interest - making your entire industry / ecosystem / world better inevitably makes things better for you.  It also lets you compete on something other than entrenched market position, which is always transient.

observations on open source

When I first made my never-far-from-the-conversation switch to Apple, I decided I was going to put my actions up against my words, and use OpenOffice for all of my text editing needs. And, for a little while, it was tolerable. When a fellow user and friend switched back to microsoft Word, he did so because OpenOffice felt like 'a windows app that just happens to run on a mac.' I later corrected him that it was much more like a linux app that just happens to run on a mac, but you get his point.

I persevered. But, today, I reached my breaking point. The hassle of settings, of formatting, of doing pretty much anything other than entering text, was getting to me. Hell, the hassle of saving a set of changes, and then opening .doc files to find that they had reverted, got to me. Moreover, my friend was right. The interface was hideous, counter-intuitive, and didn't work well with anything in a .doc biased world.

Today I learned something very odd. Microsoft products can look appealing. Apparently only when they are coded for a Mac, though. Confusing. Still, I had to abandon my open source ideals, and for one simple reason; it doesn't work well enough.

It works, inarguably. I COULD, if forced, live with using only that one program. But, for me, open source isn't just about escaping the tyrrany of massive corporations, or harnessing the power of crowdsourcing. For me, open source is mostly about creating alternatives to fight the limitations intentionally imposed on users for corporate gain.

Today I learned that unintentional limitations and failings are worse, on an individual experience level. Worse because being unable to do what you are supposed to do will always be more glaring than being unable to do something the designer doesn't want you to do.

Still, using Word makes me feel dirty. Maybe I should switch to Pages...