Warheads Stacked in the Kitchen

Jason Goecke
Jason Goecke

Jason Goecke has a long history in telephony. His unique perspective is built on extensive business experience around the world as well as technical depth. His passion for disruption manifests itself in his on-going support of open source telephony, with the latest phase being his commitment to the Adhearsion project.

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2010 (1)
2009 (43)
 

Adhearsion Developer Community Writing Apps for America

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@3lsilver (aka lewdsilver) has brought to my attention an application that he and a team built for the Apps for America contest. Apps for America is a contest sponsored by Sunlight Labs, where their moto is 'turning government data into usable information'. Sunlight Labs provides a set of APIs that exposes such information as census data, congressional data and much more. The APIs are intended to power mash-ups to drive government transparency and citizen participation. At least two of the applications submitted to the contest use the combination of Adhearsion and Asterisk. Speak for Change, submitted by @3lsilver and team, allows citizens to leave voicemails for their representatives by calling a toll-free number, then makes these messages public for all to listen to and comment on. The second application, Call Congress, provides a website with a click to call capability to find and then contact your Senators and Representatives. As I have said before, radical transparency is the way forward out of the current US predicament, not excessive regulation. This includes the government and financial markets. It is great to see open source telephony and Adhearsion playing their roles. These applications are great examples of open source making it possible to do things today that would have been prohibitively expensive and difficult before.
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Adhearsion Riding The Long Tail to Transparency

Transparency is the new regulation. A free market is best served by the open flow of information available to all as opposed to burdening the market with government regulations. Wired recently published an article bringing this into sharp focus with XBRL for the Financial Services Industry. Open source software and cloud computing are lowering the barrier of entries for companies and individuals. Who may now quickly create solutions that would have been prohibitively expensive previously. Dave Troy presented his experience launching the Twitter Vote Report at eComm last week, a solution for tracking voter experiences for the November 2008 Presidential elections.  Twitter Vote Report is a great example of activism translating into action. From inception to execution the project took weeks and performed brilliantly. The presentation may be seen here.
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Adhearsion played its part in the project providing the backend for the call-in reporting integrated to the Rails application. This effort highlights the ability to develop voice enabled Long Tail applications that leverage voice on the web in new ways. I hope to see more such projects where Adhearsion adds a new dimension to further the cause of transparency in government and the markets. The source code behind Twitter Vote Report is available on Github here.
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Obama the Open Source President?

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First this article was published on the BBC yesterday, reporting that President Obama has tapped Scott McNealy to advise on the Federal Government's technology strategy. Then on the same day Microsoft announces their unprecedented layoffs, the first major layoffs in their 34 year history. All of this on the heels of RedHat's quarterly earnings call reporting growth, in spite of the economic downturn. Is 2009, and the next 4 years (well, lets say it, 8), the time that open source will become the clearly preferred way to run not only your business but the whole Federal Government? A mandate by President Obama, and the person who will occupy his future technology cabinet position, to use only open source is not feasible. What is feasible is a directive that would encourage the selection of an open source technology when it is viable and more cost-effective (which is increasingly the case). As the stimulus package details become clear, and with Obama's penchant for technology, we may see times get a lot tougher for the likes of Microsoft and other proprietary vendors. A case in point. Amazon does a great job of breaking down the costs of their back-end infrastructure. Their Elastic Computing Cloud pricing structure contrasts the costs of operating Linux and Microsoft. One CPU hour of a Linux server runs you $0.10, while a Windows server runs you $0.125. There really is a 'Microsoft Tax'... While the economic downturn is wreaking havoc, there are going to be immense opportunities in the coming years. I for one believe open source will be an even larger factor in rebuilding the technology led economy.
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