San Francisco, CA - Last Saturday, September 12th, I decided to spend my birthday at an all day design and programming session with CivicDB - A new project inspired by President Obama's January 21st Memo and endorsed by the City of San Francisco.

The meeting attracted developers, gurus and normal citizens wanting to aid in the creation of a free and open database of San Francisco's city government information.

San Francisco City and County Department of Technology's CTO Blair Adams (whose published slideshows make me proud to live in SF) and Jay Nath, the department's manager of research and development organized the event on Meetup.com with the help of Csaba Csoma, a developer from the communty and organizer of the CivicDB meetup group.

  Jamie Taylor, co-author of O'Reilly's Programming the Semantic Web and Minister of Information at Metaweb Technologies made a presentation about Freebase - The community driven database of the world's free and open data.

During the course of the day many different architectures were discussed but the support for the Semantic Web and formats like RDF was clear. This is a win for those who use Linked Open Data - the very real and almost mature semantic web of data that Tim Berners-Lee began fostering a few years after he invented The World Wide Web. 

The SF Data Wiki contains information on the CivicDB Project's scope, roadmap and architecture. Some side-benefits of the project show up in the diagrams. For example, the diagram below shows the data flow through a city department and then out into CivicDB. Implementation in city departments will introduce much needed data standards which will allow more simple interoperation of city departments in the longer term.

I think this project is a big win for open data and the citizens of San Francisco. Seeing our City Government and local development community openly discussing how we should publish our data and how to build solutions together as a team made my day.

To get involved, visit www.civicdb.org

Well the numbers are pretty plain. Companies like Acer, Motorola, HTC, Samsung, are all leveraging Linux, Android and Ubuntu to reduce overhead and deliver on user expectations. This is hitting Microsoft right where they care the most. A 14% decline in OEM sales.

In 2004 I took a position as the US implementation and configuration manager for a European mobile project on the PocketPC platform. The PocketPC platform was difficult and just plain goofy in places. I had been a bit spoiled by Palm in the 2000-2003 era. So I expected more than Visual Basic and MSSQL Server. In any case, during that project PocketPC magically became WindowsMobile.

There were mostly small changes, and the OS was largely the same, but felt better to use. The reason I mention this now, is that back then, there was a sense of momentum around WindowsMobile. Not only had Microsoft begun to vastly renovate it's flagging WindowsCE/PocketPC platform, but HP had just merged with Compaq and the iPaq was getting the facelift of a lifetime. There were new devices and in each consecutive generation, new features to explore. It was also the same time that SD Cards began to emerge as the standard medium for mobile digital devices. Data began moving easily between Cameras, PDAs and MP3 Players for the first time. There was opportunity and a sense of real development.

Skip ahead 5 years and that feeling is still here, but the new devices, the new apps, the new features and "wow moments" are coming from what 5 years ago was an unfathomable place: