System76, Linux Hardware for Everyone. By Allison Randal Last week at the Ubuntu Developer Summit, I spoke with Carl Richell, co-founder of System76. For years I've been seeking the Nirvana of a company that would ship me professional, high-quality, Linux-only hardware. Various large companies offer half-hearted Linux options. Several sketchy-looking resellers offer brand-name hardware with [...]

Danger is clear – and we cannot afford to ignore it any longer. LAST month, we had the most comprehensive study to date of the economic costs and risks of global warming, and of measures that might reduce greenhouse gas emissions, in the hope of averting some of the direst consequences. [The Scotsman]

Use the right words to describe Next Actions. Merlin Mann over at 43folders.com has done it again: he's found an currently out-of-print guide which includes David Allen's lists of Project Verbs versus Next Action Verbs. Why care? Because if you describe Next Actions wrongly it's like tying your shoelaces together and then expecting to be [...]

The Need for Professional Election Officials. In the U.S., elections are run by an army of hundreds of thousands of volunteers. These are both Republicans and Democrats, and the idea is that the one group watches the other: security by competing interests. But at the top are state-elected or -appointed officials, and many election shenanigans [...]

When learning and knowledge collide.  Recently I've been reading (and listening) to Stephen Downes, George Siemens, Jay Cross and Richard MacManus exploring learning networks and connective knowledge. I'm seeing a convergence and emergence of themes: Learning is an ecology – remember knowledge ecology? Connections are key – we talk relationships and patterns in knowledge work [...]

KM practices. Which KM practices are the most important in your opinion? I've been giving this some thought and have this short list: Facilitate conversations – this is where connections are made, trust is built, new knowledge emerges. Fostering deep dialog, creating a meeting space to surface issues, heighten awareness, exchange ideas, increase understanding and [...]

Knowledge managers.  The knowledge manager may well be an endangered species as the KM meme fades and firms rush to stay abreast of complexity, social networking and chaos theory. So exactly what did a knowledge manager do and what were they responsible for? Strategic issues related to individual and group networking & learning, business intelligence, [...]

The Paperless Hacker. By Tim O'Reilly Jason Hunter's latest article on oreillynet.com, “Personal Document Management Made Easy,” is a great example of my thesis that “alpha geeks” tell us something about the shape of the future. Jason describes how he's done away with filing paper documents by scanning everything and keeping the scanned documents in [...]

Harnessing Collective Intelligence. By Tim O'Reilly I've long made the assertion that one of the central differences between the PC era and the Web 2.0 era is that once the internet becomes platform, rather than just an add-on to the PC, you can build applications that harness network effects, so that they become better the [...]

Zimbra Adds Offline Use of Their Productivity Apps. By Brady Forrest Zimbra announced at Web 2.0 yesterday that they were going to add an offline mode to their AJAX office suite. Any actions done offline will be stored in the local cache until you are back online. This will work for their email, calendaring, contacts, [...]