Ton and James Burke created the Open Government Data Poster to help civil servants decide if and how it is ok to open up data sets they have available.
Also available in PDF (English) version.
Posted via email from pedrocustodio’s posterous
Posted: November 11th, 2009 | Author: pecus
Let’s improve European public services together.
On November 19th, the EU governments will meet in Malmo to sign a Ministerial Declaration that will define the key priorities for e-government strategy in Europe for the next years.
A group of Web 2.0 enthusiasts launched an open collaborative effort to build an Open Declaration on European Public Services, which calls on European governments to embrace the values of transparency, participation and empowerment and so improve public services. The European Commission and the Swedish Presidency of the EU have accepted that we present the declaration in the official program of the Ministerial Conference.
We now need to collect thousands of endorsements in order to convince governments to fully embrace these values.
If you share the values of the Open Declaration, please add your name in this form. Together we can make a difference!
If you agree, you may sign it and then join the Facebook Group to start spreading the word.
Posted: November 4th, 2009 | Author: pecusNope, it’s the fact that the Netherlands are just arounde the corner, this cookies are trully special:
Just another bunch of home-made cookies, right? Well, not quite! A better look at them, should prove my point:
(Via Comunicadores)
Posted: October 13th, 2009 | Author: pecusSHiFT 08 is about to roll out!
After some hard working months we’re happy with all the amazing Speakers that once again decided to come to Lisbon and help us decide on the role of technology in todays society.
SHiFT will take place during 3 days (15-17 Oct), this year theme is about transient technologies and how technology is shifting from it’s traditional boundaries, becoming progressively more transparent and ubiquitous, and being deeply integrated into almost all aspects of everyday lives.
We want SHiFT to be a happening not only in Portugal but thru Europe, and although we’re really close to the dates, we still have some last minute ‘helpers’ that might just persuade you to join us:
Hope to see you all at SHiFT 
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’s Twitter / jaiku feeds.
See you back in October!
Posted: February 29th, 2008 | Author: pecus
Being a fan of the so called Semantic Web and knowing the long way we still have to track to reach it, all the things that takes us a bit closer to it has me on board. So it has been with Microformats, I had played a bit with Structured Blogging before but rapidly moved to what was ended up being known by Microformats for their multipurpose and not just for blogging.
A brief introduction for non-geek persons about Microformats and why they’ll became ever so important: The web is full of information, trapped information, hidden relations, hidden contents, consider for instance a simple news article, a review in a product page, that information is trapped under the rumble of it’s page HTML. Not nice, isn’t it? Through the separation of layout/content we already improved, since we can read each one of those examples hiding the details of the document structure focusing on the information thats important!
Being intelligent beings as we tend to consider ourselves, we have the ability to spot which parts of the information are relevant, if I look at a contact page, I immediately search for something that looks like an address, phone or email contact. It’s something we’re used to. Well the problem raises that when it matters with information we really can’t depend on humans! 
To a program reading a regular webpage, all that rumble and layout information, etc. is just the same! That’s were Microformats became essential! They allow us to seemingly “format” that information, so that humans and machines alike are able to extract the REALLY important parts! Microformats are much more than that, but for today’s introduction that the key idea to retain.
After some of the big companies embraced them a few months ago, Microformats seemed to be on the right track for massive adoption, and yesterday the all mighty W3C (World Wide Web Consortium) seems to have given a step the consolidation of Microformats by providing a set of use cases (GRDDL) that provide real-world scenarios and examples of Microformat in use, as they quote it:
(…)
GRDDL is the bridge for turning data expressed in an XML format (such as XHTML) into Semantic Web data. With GRDDL, authors transform the data they wish to share into a format that can be used and transformed again for more rigorous applications.
(…)
Once data is part of the Semantic Web, it can be merged with other data (for example, from a relational database, similarly exposed to the Semantic Web) for queries, inferences, and conversion to other formats.(…)
I strongly suggest reading some of thew3c use cases:
As complementary to the Microformats Website, the nice to have in hand Microformats Cheat Sheet and the book written by John Allsopp: “Microformats: Empowring Your Markup for Web 2.0 “
For people reading this here in the Portuguese quarter I promise that in coming weeks you’ll get your opportunity to learn a bit more about Microformats! enough said!
The Web2Expo Berlin Tracks have been unleashed. Just by looking at the tracks, I can already guess that’s going to be a very special and unique conference in terms of tech conferences around Europe. Web2Expo will cover five different tracks:
My inner geek rejoices with the fact that Microformats have finally got a little more buzz lately! One particular Microformat I’ve been using is XFN (Xhtml Friends Network), aka the Relationships Microformats. This particular Microformat allows me to easily state the sort of relation I have with other people and for instance the blogs I link to.
Yesterday I was discussing with a colleague about whether she should or shouldn’t use them on her upcoming service and although to me the question had a dead simple question, convincing her and others wasn’t as simple as I expected!
Posted: August 31st, 2007 | Author: pecus
I'm Pedro Custódio. I'm a Webdeveloper and UserExperience Advocate, I'm organizer of SHiFT and I'm currently working for the Vodafone 360 project.