It’s true, SHiFT is back!. We almost died on our first ’round’ in 2006 but we decided to do it again and today we just gave the first (public) step towards it: we’ve unleashed the dates - set your calendars:
A lot of work, discussion and planning will take place in the coming months, so EVERYONE is invited to help and participate in the discussion! We haven’t closed down the speakers list and there will be space for the community to vote on who gets to go up on stage later on, but if you know an exciting speaker or you’re just wishing your secret hero to be there, don’t be shy and let us know!
Pop us an email over at speakers@shift.pt.
Don’t forget to keep an eye on the official Blog, or subscribe SHiFT’sTwitter / jaiku feeds.
A notícia não é de hoje, mas há alguns dias atrás tomei conhecimento do nascimento formal da Associação Ensino Livre algo que a mim pessoalmente me traz alguma alegria por ver que ainda há quem acredite e se mexa por um ensino mais abrangente do que aquele que é tradicionalmente aplicado no nosso país. Como se pode ler na nota de imprensa:
A Associação tem como finalidade promover a utilização de software livre e a produção de conteúdos livres nos processos de aprendizagem, nomeadamente ao nível do sistema de ensino(…)
e ao que pude apurar na respectiva página, os seus mentores propõem-se a:
divulgar software livre e conteúdos livres junto dos agentes de ensino;
organizar acções pedagógicas junto de professores e alunos;
fornecer aconselhamento sobre software livre e conteúdos livres junto dos agentes de ensino;
desenvolvimento e suporte de software livre, especialmente de vocação educacional;
manutenção e promoção de pontos de reunião da comunidade de software livre;
organização de conferências nacionais e internacionais sobre a temática do software e conteúdos livres, nomeadamente de vertente educativa;
como a associação irá subsistir essencialmente dos seus sócios e ajudas que possa receber, sugiro (porque a cota é rídicula) que se tornem membros da mesma e ou ajudem com donativos:
Efectuar a transferência para a conta da Associação NIB: 003507390002696123053
Notificar a associação da transferência nesta página.
DataPortability gathers existing open standards into a blueprint for a social, open, remixable web where your online identity, media, contacts and content can follow you wherever you go.
DataPortability reune standards já existentes definindo a base para uma web aberta, social e remixable onde a tua identidade, os teus contactos e todos os contéudos por ti produzidos podem seguir-te para onde quer que vás.
Well, SHiFT isn’t happening this year… and yeah, believe me no one’s more sad about it than myself, well may two other crazy guys! But we couldn’t stand still so we’re helping SAPO in an astonishing event:
and trust me, we’re all aiming high, as high as we’re allowed to get all the Portuguese developers an amazing event, party and mash-ups contest!
The event is obviously inspired in the Yahoo Hackday which totally contagious us back in May in London when some of us managed to attend it. Since not all Portuguese can afford traveling as far, SAPO decided to recreate it!
We’re trying to include everyone that wishes to go, but since the seats are limited, I urge everyone who praises for his/her geekiness without shame to register at:
A lot of people argue that services like Twitter, Jaiku and more recently Pownce, are mere services aimed to boost our egos, services born to increase our already ego-flooded world, it might or not be truth, it’s a fact that a lot of their users simple use it to broadcast short status messages with few or no interest at all! It’s my belief that these particular services are the beginning of something unique simply because their particularly different from previous messaging services, and departing from this idea I’ll explain why I believe that we need a nationwide Twitter!
Twitter is much more than a messaging system, it’s a unique multi-platform broadcasting system. Like we’ve witnessed in the past with radio, which was used to helped distribute messages from different services across, simply and quickly, so is Twitter doing it somehow! Two different features in Twitter seem to me the groundbreaking, first it’s a internet based broadcasting network: my message is sent across a multitude of people and mediums originating from the internet, second it’s bridge for inter-connecteness with other systems: by using it’s Twitter public API we’re able to connected to it any system that outputs messages. In the end the process is simple: a message sent from the web, reaches people on their instant messengers, mobiles, or on their contacts page on the service website. The other-way around also applies.
The idea of a nationwide Twitter just pleases me because I tend to be more comfortable the more informed I am: I (unfortunately) have this deeper sense that in the event of something important I’d be the last to know!!
Cellphones don’t handle crises situations nicely! In case of a network breakdown, they’re dead in the sea, so we have to create something more reliable and universal. In the past, pretty much everyone had a radio, so trusting the radio was the obvious choice. Today, due to many factors no technology seems to be such common place, we have to consider that in the advent of something people will have different means depending on where they are at the moment, it could be a computers, a radios, or a simple cellphone, so we really need to have that in mind.
I would wish we could have a multi-plaform nationwide alert system, something that everyone interested, national citizen or not, could subscribe and register with different ids for different alert channels. When some relevant thing happens on the channels I’ve subscribed the system would broadcast an alert on all the mediums I’ve registered for being notified. This would assure that, when needed, the information would reach me somehow.
Everyday I see the more and more services using Twitter massive broadcasting platform for delivery updates on their interests. In Portugal we have Público, that through twittering is in fact delivering alerts for every breaking news they publish on their site.
So it’s probably just a matter of time before we actually see it being used for as multi-channel alert system, at least the “media” is doing it already!
The only reason I think Twitter wouldn’t make it, it’s related to the fact that I think this system should be managed by some Official Emergency Department to avoid and prevents it’s abuse or deviation and therefore ruin it’s success as emergency broadcast system.
Well, I must confess it was the most refreshing event in Portugal for the last couple of years, and simply for that, thank you Fred and all the WeBreakStuff team for organizing everything!
It was an impressive networking event, we talk about so many different things that would be impossible to write about them all here, so I just leave here a short list about the main projects and ideas we talked about during this barcamp:
It’s impressive what happens when people just sit down, take some time off, talk, share ideas, ask for advices, freely advice and criticize other projects/ideas! Regardless of what most of the portuguese tend to think, ideas just work like that, they blossom and tend to give way to a bunch more ideas, which I think that was the best achievement of this BarCamp.
I’ve met quite a bunch of new people, interesting people with interesting ideas! The main idea was summarized by Fred during his presentation: “we shouldn’t have fear of failing“. To fail is human, and failling is the best learning process we have. By failling we’re not just learning what lead us to failure we’re also learning a whole on how to procede on a next opportunity.
Having this in mind, it’s more than time that we here in Portugal drop the (easy) critic position and just take a part on this web 2.0 idea. Which as many people tend to think has nothing to do with the rounded corners or the gradients as we all laugh about! The “new” web is about the birth of new projects, new ideas, remix of “old” ideas and procedures, as Thomas put it during Reboot, we’re talking about a “New Renaissanse” here…
For all the BarCamp participants, one thing is for sure, not only we’re going to repeat it, you’re sure going to hear a whole lot more from all of us there!
I’ve blogged about it in the past, but since we’re so close to the date and following a request to spread the word from Fred (Webreakstuff), I’m posting about it again, as a reminder to all of you, who are planning on going to the first BarCamp in Portugal on the first weekend of september (2/3). I’m planning on going, what about you?
If you don’t know what a BarCamp is, and my last post didn’t help, you can find a whole lot more information on the Barcamp Wiki. There you’ll find also all the details regarding our portuguese edition: BarCamp Portugal. Besides this, we also invite you to join the conversation on its mailling list here.
SHiFT website was just unveiled: http://www.shift.pt, and in it people will find a whole lot of information about it, like dates (28/29th September), place and much more. Check it out:
Anyone developing web applications can just use it and have users logging in using their Google user accounts… which is a neat thing to do although I still prefer the idea behind OpenID.
I’ve blogged about it in the 
Following yesterday launch of