Place Standard Tool Summariser: Full Test Run
As I've mentioned before, I'm working (with a group of other volunteers) on producing a Local Place Plan for Auchencairn, and, in the process of doing that, we're using the Place Standard Tool. Data from the Place Standard Tool is delivered as an unwieldy CSV file with 53 columns, most of which contain narrative data. This is pretty hard to analyse.
I'm prejudiced against 'Artificial Intelligence' summarisers, because I do to some extent understand how the technology works and know how shallow it is. But other members of the working group urged that we should use it, so I've written a tool to automate summarising the data. And, actually, I'm quite pleased with it.
Continue reading →On Village and Community
A village is a (small) settlement; a collection of dwellings in which people live, and with additional buildings in which at least some of them work, where they shop, where their children are educated. A community is a group of people bound together by common interests and friendship. Are these two things the same? In Auchencairn, it increasingly feels that they are not, that there are (at least) two communities, with a worrying degree of stress between them.
So how can we plan to make things better?
Continue reading →Installing Forgejo
Most of my open source work is on Github. It's been there for years — since long before Github was bought by Microsoft. Github has a lot of good features, not least that, following on from Freshmeat in the 1990s and Sourceforge in the 2000s, it has become the go-to place so look for interesting open source projects and libraries.
But I've never liked Microsoft as a company, and their use (without permission and in breach of the General Public License) of other people's software to train their AI bots has made them much more obviously obnoxious and their qualification for custodianship of the world's major open source repository at best questionable. Furthermore, developments in the political world suggest that dependence on US based corporates for anything is now actively unsafe.
Over the years I have experimented with a number of open source git web integrations, none of which has been very satisfactory. This week, largely because of the promise that it will soon have ActivityPub integration, I've been trying Forgejo; and I'm impressed.
Continue reading →Light Weight Web
This essay is likely to be revised, probably several times. It is tracked on archive.org, so that you'll be able to go back through versions. I'm not promising to do serious work on this proposal by myself, but if others are interested I think it may be worth pushing forward with.
Discussion of this proposal can be found here, and, if you wish to contribute, I'd recommend that in the first instance you post to that thread.
Updated: 25th February (three times); 26th February; 27th February.
Continue reading →Questions, and futures
Dumfries and Galloway Council, acting on direction from the Scottish Government, wants each community in the region to produce a document called a 'Local Place Plan' summarising its planning issues and priorities. Auchencairn has made no progress on this over at least two years. As incoming chair of the Community Council, I've set up a working group with representatives from other key civic society groups within the village, and started working on the plan. Because the deadline is now tight, we've had to work fast.
As part of this process, I've led the working group in preparing a questionnaire for villagers which explores questions which may be in contention within the village. This isn't 'my' questionnaire, it is a group effort; but it's fair to say I've led the effort.
Continue reading →