Peer production, governance and property

Yesterday I attended a talk by Michel Bauwens (founder of the Peer to Peer Foundation which is creating a Commons of Peer to Peer practices). I found his ideas on Peer production under Peer governance inspiring. Of course he mentioned plenty of examples from Open Source, and also Wikipedia, Creative Commons, etc. One of the basic ideas is the abundance in the immaterial world allows such Commons (Peer production) to appear, so for abundance in the material world it would also be possible to create Peer production (early examples are free open designs, etc). Although some of it seems fairly obvious from the FOSS point of view, it was nice to hear it all in a wider economic setting. I think he is certainly someone to keep an eye on. He is also a really interesting person who has done a lot of different things.

inputting unicode characters by name

Just for fun I wrote a little perl script to generate a scim-tables input table for unicode characters based on the unicode names of the characters. I actually tried first with python, but python's unicodedata does not seem to include the aliases for codepoints without a unique name (like some control characters). The generating script could be improved and made more efficient but it seems to work anyway (generates about 15,000 entries, 500kB).


Using it one can for example write "→" by inputting "rightwards-arrow" in pre-edit with scim. It completes with a list of possible matches, but one needs to know the start of the name to find it. One day it would be fun to write an IME (Input Method Engine) that completes for any word in the name, so that typing arrow would also list "rightwards-arrow", etc.

first Fedora I18n IRC meeting coming

We are going to have a first meeting of the Fedora I18n project on IRC on Monday. I am happy that we are finally opening up fedora-i18n development more and hope this will help to enliven #fedora-i18n and fedora-i18n-list. A number of people already expressed interest which is encouraging.

There is not a good time of day for the meeting for everyone so we will have to experiment (I am planning to alternate the meetings between afternoon and morning in Asiania), at least until we get into a routine.