The Third Bit

Jon Udell’s 1999 book Practical Internet Groupware was a revelation for me: it was the first coherent explanation I’d ever read of how the disparate collection of technologies and social conventions that we call “the web” fit together, and what the deeper patterns and concepts beneath them are. After a lot of further work and thought, Jon has condensed those ideas into seven principles—or as he puts it, “Seven Ways to Think Like the Web“. These concepts are the most meaningful definition yet of what the phrase “computational thinking” actually means, and of what people who aren’t programmers need to know in order to use the web effectively. But it raises a question: what would a high school course that focused on these concepts, rather than on Excel or Java, look like?  Is it even possible?  Is there an equivalent of “Civics 101″ for the web?

Government 2.0, Teaching

CivSource has posted an interview with David Wallace, the City of Toronto’s CIO, about open data. I’m really pleased to see things are still moving ahead — wish I could have stayed involved.

Government 2.0

Longtime readers will recall that I ran an open government/open data course at the University of Toronto last fall. I wasn’t able to stay as involved as I would have liked [1], but I’m heartened to see that the City of Toronto has released some more data sets — see toronto.ca/open‘s catalog page for details. Happy hacking!

[1] I couldn’t find a professor willing to run the course again after my departure from U of T, and having spread myself too thin for too long, didn’t think I could keep it going and do a proper job on Software Carpentry as well. Middle age is when you stop asking what is possible, and start asking what possibilities remain…

Government 2.0

I needed a long-form birth certificate to renew my daughter’s passport, so I went onto the Ontario government website, filled in the form, ticked the box saying “regular delivery (15 business days)”, gave them my credit card information, and clicked “submit”. Three days later I get a letter:

Dear Applicant,

Upon review of your application or request, additional information is required.

The payment that has been received is not sufficient to pay for the products and services that you requested. Please forward a further payment of $10.00 so that the ORG can continue processing your request.

Huh? I filled in their form—they calculated how much I owe. And they have my email address—why send a printed letter? Government 2.0 feels like it’s still a long way away…

Government 2.0

I keep telling my students not to over-commit themselves. It’s a shame I don’t take my own advice . Here’s what I’ve currently got on the go:

Software Carpentry teaches basic software development skills to scientists and engineers. I have 80% of the funding I need to spend a year upgrading its content and delivery. I hope to raise the last 20% of the money in the next few weeks. If I can pull it off, the major challenges will be:

1. Learning how to create effective online course material: there’s lots of handwaving out there about wikis in the classroom, but nothing substantive about instructional design for mature learners using present-day internet technologies.
2. Assessment. We don’t know how to measure the productivity of programmers, or the productivity of scientists; trying to gauge this course’s impact on the productivity of scientific programmers will therefore be something of a challenge. (One of the reasons I left industry for academia in 2006 was to figure out how to do this, but my attempts to find research funding all failed.)
3. Mechanics. Site5 only allows one shell account per domain, which makes it difficult to open up the project’s Subversion repository to other contributors. And I’ll have to choose a format for the lecture notes: LaTeX, plain HTML, S5, one of the many wiki formats… And figure out a better way to create and manage images and video. And pick a bibliography format. And…

A professional Master’s degree in Computer Science at the University of Toronto to complement the department’s existing research Master’s. The program consists of five regular graduate courses, a course each on business skills and professional communication, and an eight-month industrial internship in which students have to show that they can translate theory into practice. We are now accepting applications for September 2010 entry, so if you’d like to learn leading-edge ideas from some of the best researchers in the world, please check it out.

Basie, our replacement for Trac, built on Django and jQuery, is coming along nicely, but I don’t know what will happen to it once I leave U of T. A few non-students are now involved in its development, but we aren’t big enough to bid for our own Google Summer of Code students. If anyone would like to get involved, please give me a shout. (I’d particularly like to hear from ex-project students—it would be nice to have an excuse to stay in touch.)

UCOSP stands for “undergraduate capstone open source projects”. Since September 2008, undergraduates from several universities in Canada and the US have been taking part in joint capstone projects in order to learn first-hand what distributed development is like. Each team has students from two or three schools, and works for a term under the supervision of a faculty or industry lead on an open source project. We’re currently trying to find $35,000 to hire a half-time administrator to run the program from September 2010 so that we can scale up from the present 45 students/term to 80, 90, or more. Again, if you’re interested, please give me a shout.

CSC302 is my regular undergraduate software engineering course. This term, six teams of students are porting Django to Python 3, adding pivot tables to Gnumeric, parallelizing parts of ILUTE, upgrading PyLint, pluginifying Selenium, and extending SpatiaLite. It could be the last regular course I teach at the University of Toronto; it has been a bit bumpy, but I’m glad the students are getting to work on real things.

Grad student supervision: Alecia, Zuzel, and Mike all have topics nailed down, and Jason is writing up. I plan to spend one morning a week in the department working with them from now through next January; I’m looking forward to seeing what they produce.

The Cowichan Problems. This one goes back to the mid-1990s, when I first realized that human performance was at least as important to overall productivity in computational science as machine performance. The idea is to use a suite of fairly simple applications, all stitched together, to benchmark the usability of parallel programming systems. A couple of undergrads updated the code last year; I’m hoping to revisit it as part of my work on Software Carpentry.

Book #1, called What Really Works?, is a Beautiful Code-style book that presents evidence-based results in software engineering. Where do bugs actually come from? Does pair programming get the job done faster? Can code metrics predict post-release fault rates? Are some programming languages intrinsically more productive than others? Each of our authors will explore one such question in a chapter-length essay; contributions are now coming in, and we’re still on track to have the book on the shelves this summer. (I’ve been talking about this subject and this book for a few months now; if you’re interested, you can view the slides.)

Book #2 is yet another collection, this time exploring the architecture of open source applications. As I said in my lightning talk at PyCon, the aim isn’t really to explain the internals of Hadoop, Parrot, and Mercurial (though I think that’s worth doing). The real aim is to teach people how to think about software architecture by showing them how architects think. We’re hoping to have chapters in for review by November, and the book out this time next year.

Book #3 is an illustrated children’s book about the universe, life, science, and global warming. I’ve had some good feedback from the editor who handled my last children’s book, but most of the work is still in front of me.

Projects I’m not working on:

Government 2.0: I enjoyed working on open data/open government projects with my students last term, but I couldn’t find any faculty at U of T willing to keep it going. I could have found Gov 2.0 stuff for CSC302, but I thought open source work would be better for them.

Two novels and half a dozen short stories. I enjoy writing fiction, but it feels like an indulgence, and I keep pushing it aside to do “serious” stuff. I’m sure that when I’m seventy I’ll regret having done that, so I hope to spend one hour a day writing fiction once I start full-time on Software Carpentry.

Jazz: I haven’t touched my sax since this time last year—it may be vanity, but I’d rather not play at all than play badly. Maybe when my daughter’s a little older…

Exercise: yeah… exercise. Maybe I’ll get my bike back on the road this week…

Basie, Government 2.0, Making Software, Research, Teaching, Uncategorized

If I want to request a book at the University of Toronto Library, all I have to do is log in to their web site, look up the book, and click “reserve”.  Unless the book is in someone’s study carrel. In that case, I have to go to the library in person and fill in a recall slip. Can’t do it through the web or over the phone, even though the information about the book being in a carrel is in the same computer as everything else. According to the library I spoke to, “The computer will not produce a list of books to be retrieved from carrels, closed stacks, or basement. I believe people in [the library] are trying to automate the process but at present they have to use this process.” This isn’t stupidity or sloth: it’s just too low a priority to have been done yet.

The “Y2Gay” post is similar: millions of printed forms, and thousands of databases, assume that marriage involves one male and one female, not two of either. (I have this picture in my head of government IT staff sitting down to a Monday morning planning meeting back in 2006 to hear their boss say, “OK, I know this wasn’t in plan, but…”)

So, the next time you’re wondering why open government/open data is taking so long—why “they” don’t “just” make everything public—spare a thought for the poor, overworked database admin in the basement who has to turn good intentions into SQL.

Government 2.0

The opening isn’t promising—”more than 60 countries and international organizations have developed nearly 275 policy documents related with the use of Open Source in public sector”—but the presentation itself is worth a look.

Later: and then there’s The Guardian’s worldwide index of open government data sets.

Government 2.0

Cool. Kudos to the MyTTC team for pulling this together.

Government 2.0

The City of London is launching a data store with 200 datasets. Oh, to have time to play with this… *sigh*

Government 2.0

Steven Dale thinks we should build gondolas instead of digging tunnels. I know it’s unlikely to ever happen, but wouldn’t it be wonderful?

Government 2.0