OpenTABA

All of us live in places that are continuously modified by human intervention, which we call construction and infrastructure. We’ve evolved various rules and regulations around this process, because it effects us all and it tends to last — concrete doesn’t fade away and isn’t easily removed.

Let’s say you write code for a living. Every day you stare at a screen that looks like some variation of this:

Can you tell if there’s a bug here?

How about here?

Some problems are easier to notice than others. Software problems tend to be hard to notice, because the lines of code don’t sag, or rot or squeak when you walk on them. The letters and numbers look just the same.

This is why Open Source works so well. Given Enough Eyeballs All Bugs are Shallow: Turns out tens of thousands of developers of highly varying levels of expertise and commitment do better over time than hundreds of excellent developers working full time for Microsoft or similar companies. I think the reason is the obscure nature of software, which demands many observers to spot the problems.

If you think about it, that’s how transparency is supposed to work in general, this is the reasoning behind various freedom of information initiatives— Sunlight is the Best of Disinfectants is really another way of putting it.

Back to construction — it’s not working out so great. You’ve probably spent time in places that are just not comfortable to be in, or unsafe or plain ugly. There are a lot of reasons for this, one of which is that a lot of money can be made if you bend the rules a little bit, and the rules usually aren’t that hard to bend since most people don’t understand them and the building permit process is often complex and conducted away from the public eye using jargon understood by few.

OpenTABA is an project I’ve been co-leading within the Public Knowledge Workshop, an Israeli organization similar to Code for America or Open Knowledge International. Our goal is to bring more eyeballs into the building process. For now, we do it by at least making the permits themselves (TABA is a Hebrew acronym for “building permit”) more visible. On a map:

It’s in Hebrew, but you probably get there’s a map and a list of building permits

Or in a feed that can power a Facebook or Twitter page:

The idea is to put planning data inside your daily feed of cat photos, news and friend updates, and this way get more eyeballs on the process and catch the planning equivalents of software bugs before they turn into steel and concrete we’ll be stuck with for decades or more.

KalSMS Growing

It’s been a good first year for KalSMS, which I’m particularly happy about since I didn’t really have much time to work on it myself (nor, evidently, on this blog). It truly took on a life of its own.

In India, Sheldon D’Souza was using it to power a food ordering startup and contributed some polling code to the codebase (it’s still in a separate branch, I really didn’t have much time for non-work stuff).

In Liberia, local activists were using John Etherton’s Ushahidi KalSMS plugin to track conflict indicators and humanitarian needs.

I had the opportunity to give a talk on KalSMS at the inaugural Dar es Salaam GTUG meeting. Allen Machary, one of the engineers I met in Tanzania (an impressively sharp and passionate group, btw), later joined Bienmoyo and ended up using KalSMS for part of a mobile pregnancy care program he was working on. Here’s a photo I got from Lushen Wu, Allen’s colleague, of a training session in Tanzania.

KalSMS is not pictured, but is somewhere around here

I’ve been hearing from people interested in putting it to various other uses: cross-network SMS service in Poland, salsa club promotion in LA, activists communications in Northern Africa, marketing for a fashion boutique in Finland and so on. Who knows how many of these got built, and how many others I never heard of.

All that has been a pleasant surprise, since about a month after I released KalSMS Ushahidi project launched SMSsync, which has similar goals and obviously much more resources behind it. With my rapidly shrinking spare time and negligible Java skills, I assumed KalSMS was done for. But people still seemed to find a use for it, and improve it.

I was particularly happy to get an email recently from Jesse Young of Envaya, who have taken the codebase and added a LOT of functionality. Envaya’s version is now out as EnvayaSMS, the history page lists the major features they added.

If you’re looking for new features, EnvayaSMS is your best bet. I’m still going to keep KalSMS up, with minimal maintenance, in the same place, and it’s also out on the Amazon Appstore now for easier download. There may be a place for having a minimal feature and the super-simple UI it enables.

When I get some free time, I might integrate some of EnvayaSMS new features down to KalSMS, keeping the UI minimal. If Python/Ruby/etc on Android ever become viable I’d be happy to rewrite the whole thing in a language that doesn’t feel like it was designed by a committee of lawyers.

It’s been a fun ride so far. It’s a great feeling to see my code gets picked up and used all around the world, and have much better programmers than myself take it places I never thought it’ll get. Thanks everyone. Keep KalSMSing.

Open Sourcing Crowds Machine

I’ve been way too busy recently to give Crowds Machine much attention, and since it’s such a resource hog I’m frankly not that motivated to improve it – better performance will just mean more users which will lead to higher hosting costs.

So I figure the best thing to do is open source the code, so that people would be able to install their own instance (and hopefully give it some much needed TLC): http://github.com/niryariv/crowds

The code is layers upon layers of Rails, much of it written when Rails (and myself) were young & naive. I updated it from time to time, but it’s not my submission to Beautiful Code. Licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported – if that’s a problem, let me know and I’ll see what I can do.