Chao-Kuei's Notes | 資訊.人.權.貴 隨便記

A national government can choose to design its ICT strategy to flow along with or against the forces and phenomena of the Internet. (See picture "internet phenomenon map" for details) To give some examples, a government setting up policies and formulating regulations may find itself facing dilemma such as:

1. government transparency vs national secret
2. government transparency vs citizen privacy
3. use value (and cultural value) vs sale value [of digital contents]
4. freedom of speech vs protection of minors

For those of us who have been using GNU/Linux, full-steam cloud computing began with ssh -X or VNC long time ago. For those of us who have contributed to Wikipedia or OpenClipArt or OpenStreetMap, the real benefit of cloud computing lies in the web 2.0 / read-write / prosumer / Pro-Am culture that emphasizes transparency, democracy, freedom of speech, collaboration, etc. Yet recent hypes smelling suspiciously of excessive commercial interest seem to mislead the general public away from the true values of cloud computing and into expensive software products that might lock in users. Lacking an exact and precise source of confusion to debunk the hype, I suggest that fellow advocates of the free culture movement jump on the cloud bandwagon and compete with the hype generator(s?) for the seat behind the steering wheel, popularizing the free culture concepts during the competition, as a peaceful way of fighting the cloud hypes.

Principals from more than 60 elementary, junior high, and senior high schools of Kaohsiung City, Taiwan, signed a "Software Freedom Manifesto" at the invitation of the city's Education Bureau on Sep 9 Thursday morning in a press conference. Also announced in the conference are the the upcoming events of International Conference on Open Source (ICOS), and the "mother tongue tux usb key" workshops designed for the growing population of Vietnamese mothers in Taiwan.

(Invited submission for the Taiwan Branch of The Association of World Citizens.)

Human rights are gradually eroding at several fronts as international interest groups lobby and pressure governments all over the globe to "protect copyright" using big-brother-like information and communication technologies (ICT).

(FLOSS friends: please see "Calling FS Community for Help in Debuking Cloud Hype")

Cloud computing is supposed to save you money and make things easier for your business/organization. If a self-proclaimed cloud computing provider tries to sell you some expensive and fancy new technology that requires a lot of training on your employees, then be alerted that this may just be a hoax. Try partially replacing MS Word and Frontpage with wiki before buying any cloud solutions. Wiki is a minuscule, and yet most used form of cloud computing. It takes more cultural changes than monetary investment to introduce cloud computing into your organization/business. You can forget about cloud computing if your employees cannot get accustomed to this new culture of transparency, participation, and democracy.