Okay, I haven’t posted in a while. I’ve been pretty busy with my day job and have lacked the time to complete my refactoring of the source code so far. But don’t worry, some day I’ll finally find the time and do it 
In the meantime I’ll write about a few things I’ve been thinking about lately, mainly about mobile devices and geolocation. Then I’ll tell you how I could use those in MapMyGlobe.
One of the great things about being a University student is that you get to see remarkable people. Today I got the chance to attend talks by both Brian Behlendorf and Natalie Portman. While both talks were insightful, the speakers kind of have different profiles and backgrounds so I thought it would be interesting to draw parallels and differences between the subjects.
Both speakers actually aim at making the world a better place, albeit in a different way. Behlendorf advocates for open source and collaborative development as a means to empower the masses, and Natalie Portman is an ambassador for a microfinance organization that “promotes micro-lending to help finance women-owned businesses in poor countries“.
I claim there are a couple of parallels between both activities. Microfinance is a form of collaboration if you come to think about it, where lenders and borrowers come together to agree on rules and future development. And open source software - well, at least the one that’s free - enables computer users with little to no resources (e.g., students) to have access to software, the same way microfinance enables poor people to have access to banking services. Moreover, as Brian Behlendorf stated it, collaborative development is hardly limited to software. His company CollabNet built a collaborative system for HP’s electronic circuits. Why not build one for microcredits? Finally, we all know collaborative development implies organizational tools and communication means between developers. Well, microcredit implies easier communications means too, and a great example of that is that a microfinance company recently decided to give a cellular phone to every one of its clients.
Thus, the goal of these non-traditional business practices is to create a virtuous circle, where collaboration sheds more social and economical efficiency, which in turns sheds more collaboration.
Besides these analogies which might sound a bit rhetorical, there’s something that I feel the open source community and the software industry at large could benefit from, and that I’m going to try and articulate. What’s truly innovative about microfinance organizations is that economic and social development is created from below, in the sense that some responsability is given to the very poorest on the planet. This is why the educational value of microcredit is huge. In comparison, current software collaborative development is much less accessible. Barriers to entry to a collaboration project are very high, and the meritocracy behind most organizations can turn into an elitist system, where protagonists really come from the top tiers of academia and corporate research. Since collaborative development is reserved to people that are already literate, there is no real educational value for developers who are either in training, or from parts of the world other than the US. That may explain why outside of the Silicon Valley - as a caricature - most of the web, for example, is 3 or 4 years behind.
That concludes my long post today about a topic that’s undeniably related to collaborative mapping apps such as MapMyGlobe. I’ll end up saying I am grateful to the speakers for inspiring me, both of them - although one of them is somewhat sexier, but I’ll let you decide who …