After a lot of editing, which entailed learning the open source audio editor, Audacity, we've finally published our first podcasts in the Open Source Conversations series. I wrote about Audacity previously in "Learing Audacity".

They stem from one conversation held at the Uptown Café among Clarise, Bernard Golden, and me, dealing with two topics:

• What is Open Source
• Why Open Source

We thought it was a good idea to just extend upon our conversations that we've had at the Uptown Café in the past, but the background noise was pretty bad. We sepnt a lot of time with Audacity working on that. There still is a lot of background noise, but I think you can follow the conversation without getting an headache. We also want to thank Mike for the hack he did to b2evolution to provide a better enclosure format for the RSS2 feed. Mike, it works great - now we need hacks for RSSv0.92, RSSv1 [RDF] and Atom.

I hope you enjoy conversations. More will follow; the adoption of Open Source software, and the commoditization of software products is becoming too important for either business or personal consumers to ignore.

We prefer hosting our own wiki(survey) software, vs. using a third-party or using email. There are two good open source survey software packages: phpESP and PHP Surveyor. We chose phpESP for our purposes. There are four potential advantages to hosting your own software, if you can:

1. The survey is up if your blog site is up with no additional lag time
2. Some users may not be willing to follow an "off site" link
3. You have the advantage of understanding and controlling the underlying statistical manipulations
4. The survey will have the same look as your site

Email surveys may be ignored, or treated as spam. We've found that if folk are at your site, they will be more willing to complete a survey on your site than respond to an email survey.

Both phpESP and PHP Surveyor are written in PHP and use a MySQL database. They both allow you to format the public [presentation] areas of the survey using CSS templates. Both also allow you to export your survey results to CSV so that you can analyze the results in a spreadsheet such as Excel, though phpESP offers internal statistical analysis and presentation of results without exporting, including cross analysis and cross tabulation. PHP Surveyor has more predefined quesiton types, though phpESP gets there with increased flexibility. phpESP has gotten good reviews on its ease of use and statistical rigour. As soon as we free up some time, we'll subject both to Bernard Golden's Open Source Maturity Model and see how they compare.

Jacqueline Mackie Paisley Passey is looking for software to conduct a survey concerning blogging for her ECON 475 Econometrics class. We hope this information helps you. Let us know if you need anything in this area.

We've recently recorded a conversation in a café and we're now learning the open source software Audacity in an attempt to clean it up. It may not be the easiest listening, but we think our upcoming podcast(s) will be very interesting.

Audacity is a very powerful program, but there just doesn't seem to be any way to remove noise that is quantitatively similar to the signal [voices ordering coffee as noise, voices discussing open source as signal].

But that's OK. We're learning. And the one thing that I have learned about myself is that I enjoy learning, more than doing. That's why I made the move to information mangement from aerospace - quicker learning curve required, over and over again.

We [Clarise and I] met with Bernard Golden, The CEO of Navica, again. One of the topics of conversation brought together our work in Business Intelligence and Open Source. Bernard's background includes Informix and our's includes Oracle [No rivalry though] All three of us have worked on large system integration projects requiring strict data modeling and centered around the RDBMS, ETL, EAI, OLTP and OLAP tools selected to best meet the business needs. Clarise and I have worked with Jetstream [ETL & EAI], Mondrian with JPivot [OLAP].

One of the most important aspects of a BI project is the implementing the business process and best practices for the users. Determining what that really means is key to the success of such projects. Do the current business processes implement best practices for that industry, giving the organization a competitive edge, but needing better implementation from IT? Are the best practices implemented in a COTS BI suite better than the organization's current business processes? This is at the heart of most "build versus buy" decisions.

And this is one advantage that open source packages may have over buying a proprietary solution that implements the vendor's version of BI best practices for a given industry or vertical. Open Source can be more cost effectively customized to implement those processes and practices that your organization views as giving a competitive advantage.

By the way, Bernard gave us a copy of his book, Succeeding with Open Source.

We (Clarise and Joseph) met with Bernard Golden, the CEO of Navica.

Bernard spoke at a recent Leadership Forum on Opportunities in Open Source, where we first met him. He read my blog article about the forum, and invited us to meet with him, to continue the discussion over coffee at the Uptown Cafe in San Carlos, CA. Bernard is the creator of the Open Source Maturity Model, which is used to determine the desirability and risk associated with using a specific open source product. Our discussion was an extension of the Leadership Forum, and lasted over two-and-an-half hours. We probably could have turned a tape of our discussion into five wiki(Podcasting,podcasts). What follows is a very brief summary of what we discussed.

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