"sustainable" entries

Everyone jumped on the app contest bandwagon. Now what?

The next wave of government app contests need to incorporate sustainability, community, and civic value.

Whether developers are asked to participate in app contests, federal challenges, or civic hackathons, it's time for the architects behind these efforts to focus on utility and sustainability.

Sustainable publishing is a mindset, not a format

Dennis Stovall on the intricacies of sustainable publishing.

Dennis Stovall, director of the Publishing Program at Portland State University, discusses the state of sustainable publishing and who's doing it right.

Four short links: 15 December 2010

Four short links: 15 December 2010

Google Database, Text UI, Sustainable Education, Font Basics

  1. Dremel (PDF) — paper on the Dremel distributed nested column-store database developed at Google. Interesting beyond the technology is the list of uses, which includes tracking install data for applications on Android Market; crash reporting from Google products; OCR results from Google Books; spam analysis; debugging map tiles. (via Greg Linden)
  2. Conversational UI: A Short Reading List — it can be difficult to build a text user interface to a bot because there’s not a great body of useful literature around textual UIs the way there is around GUIs. This great list of pointers goes a long way to solving that problem.
  3. Sustainable Education (YouTube) — Watch this clip from the New Zealand Open Source Awards. Mark Osborne, Deputy Principal from Albany Senior High School, talks about the software choices at their school not because it’s right for technology but because it’s right for the students. Very powerful.
  4. What Font Should I Use? — design life support for the terminally tasteless like myself. (via Hacker News)

The solutions to our big problems are in the network

"Sustainable Network" author Sarah Sorensen on global connectivity and positive change.

Massive issues around the environment, social change, and worldwide economies feel intractable, but "Sustainable Network" author Sarah Sorensen sees solutions to our biggest problems in something many of use every day: the global communications network.