Technola : Public Interest Law & Technology Updates & Commentary : Matthew Burnett & Kate Bladow : Tech Advice for the Non-Profit Legal Sector

The October 2008 edition of First Monday includes an interesting article entitled "Reasons for the non-adoption of OpenOffice.org in a data-intensive public administration" by Philip Huysmans, Kris Ven and Jan Verelst:

It appears that although OpenOffice.org can be a viable alternative for the average organization, its functionality may not suffice for advanced users ... Based upon our results, it would appear that the increasing standardization of document formats, and the support of the ODF format -- and OpenOffice.org -- by third party vendors will be important in order for OpenOffice.org to become a viable solution in advanced environments.

First Monday has also launched a new podcast called Openness 2.0, a "five-part ongoing series brought to you by the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation and the University of Illinois at Chicago Libraries. In Part 1: The State of Openness, Sandra Braman, Mary Case, and Steve Jones breakdown the current state of openness in policy, culture and academics." -M

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If you heard about the recent ruling that said that open source licensors are entitled to copyright infringement relief and want to learn more, The Kojo Nnamdi Show on WAMU had a short segment that explained this ruling's importance. - K

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A nice article on Forbes.com about the growth of "open source" case law:

Working in the open-sourcers' favor is the fact that what lawyers do for a living is quite similar to what Google's software algorithms do with Web sites. Lawyers prepare cases by looking through old court decisions to find arguments that will help their cause. Then they rank those cases according to a well-established hierarchy. Decisions that have been cited frequently by other judges are considered more reliable than ones that nobody cites. Appeals courts rank higher than trial courts. Recent decisions trump old, stale ones. Google's servers use similar logic, ranking Web sites according to how many other sites link to them and how lofty the referring sites are in the ranking.

-M [Thanks, Claudia.]

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Some time ago, I had picked up by Visualizing Information for Advocacy: An Introduction to Information Design from the Tactical Technology Collective. It turns out that the information wasn't what I was looking for, but it has an amazing list of open source tools that you can use to help convey information and design graphics. They are

• OpenOffice - an office productivity suite that has a word processor, spreadsheet, presentation manager, and drawing program. (Windows, Linux, and Mac OS X under X11)
• NeoOffice - an office productivity suite that has a word processor, spreadsheet, presentation manager, and drawing program. (Mac OS X)
• Ajax13 - a web-based office productivity suite that has a word processor, spreadsheet, presentation management, sketch tool, and media player.
• InkScape - a vector graphics editor that is similar to Illustrator, Freehand, or CorelDraw. (Windows, Linux, and Mac)
• PDFCreator - a tool to create PDF files. I use this tool regularly and have been pretty satisfied. I would recommend using this along with PDFBlender, which allows you to combine PDF files easily. (Windows)
• Scribus - a desktop publisher that has similar functionality to Microsoft Publisher. (Windows, Linux, and Mac)
• The GIMP - my favorite image and graphics editor. It is incredibly powerful, but people often complain that it isn't as user-friendly as Photoshop. I was too cheap to buy Photoshop, so the GIMP seemed like the right option for me. (Windows, Linux, and Mac)
• GIMPShop - a version of GIMP for people who want something that looks more like Photoshop. (Windows and Mac)

After finding that list, I can't wait for their next publication, Quick 'n' Easy Guide to Mapping for Advocacy, which should be available soon. I hope that it has a similar list of tools. - K

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