I spent Saturday at the Grassroots Technology Conference put on by the Organizers’ Collaborative. It was great fun, with an inspiring opening keynote by activist Nick Jehlen, useful workshops and a lunchtime talk by Professor Paul Niwa about his project charting connections in Chinatown, called BostonChinatown.org.
Useful is always good, of course. For me, the coolest part of the day was a workshop called “Keeping it Simple: Technology Tools that Won’t Make you want to Rip your Hair Out.” Harold Jordan started this session off with a discussion of applications that run off of USB drives. This is the ultimate nomad tool: you don’t even need a computer, just access a Windows machine and your desired applications plug right in.
There are two types of USB applications: those that require a U3 drive (Sandisk, and many Staples generic drives include this formatting, but not many others). U3 drives give you your own application menu for the drive. Programs include open source browser FireFox (although not the new version as of this writing), and Open Office, among many others. Check out software.u3.com for more. Anti-virus software for the drive is also available if you’re not sure what protection the computers you encounter will have.
There are also “portable apps” that will work with any USB drive or device. These are versions of open source software, including the new Firefox 3, available at portableapps.com. Besides portability, another advantage of both types of USB drive applications is security. If you surf the web from your flash drive’s browser, there’s no footprint (or much less of a footprint) once you take the drive out. The days of worrying about clearing your browser history are over.
The second half of the session was Martha Rogers’ demonstration of other online tools and apps available for free. Google Docs is one of the best known (which can be used with the Google Desktop and Google Gears applications so you can work offline), but she showed others such as Exploratree for making maps, charts and workflows, and Meebo, an online instant messaging portal that allows you to consolidate and use several different IM accounts on one site. Similar to the portable apps, the ability to store data online means that only an internet access is needed.
It’s getting easier to be a nomad every day!
The conference organizers hope to put some of the material presented up at their website, so check it out in a few days and see what you can find.
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on Monday, June 30th, 2008 at 10:07 am and is filed under Technology.
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