conference

Open Data – A postcard from France

Open Data – A postcard from France

Last week was held in Aix en Provence a public conference dealing with ‘Open Data and Citizen’ [ http://arsenicpaca.fr/]. The conference, organized by Arsenic PACA @arsenicpaca and lead by Philippe Méda @merkapt, was an opportunity to hear major french actors in the open data area. Here is what I could capture from that open day, mixing conference, panelist discussion and active brainstorms.

Open data – origin and today’s mood

While the 120 people gathered in the amphitheater of Aix En Provence Library, named La Méjane, were very educated about open data topic, Valérie Peugeot @valeriepeugeot, from Orange Labs and Vice President of French Digital Council (CNNum),  took some time to remind major aspects of the open data movement. She recalled open data origin based on citizen requiring from their government and politic representatives a better transparency. First laws in the US to allow citizen to access data were made in1966, but since, the topic has greatly evolved, with the arrival of the digital, which has pushed the citizen requirement from ‘let us watch the data’, to ‘let us make use and circulate the data’. On which a number of governments have answered positively, from left to right and from Americas to Europe, with first success stories in Africa. (more…)

[2/2] Main IT threats today – learning from Secutic Day in Marseille

Two weeks ago was held in Marseille the first edition of the Secutic Day PACA, a conference dediacted to IT managers focusing on protection of digital economy. A first post reported the legal aspects behind the risk of having weak security in IT systems, together with means for IT managers to understand and implement the primary security measures. This new post is detailing the views of the different invited experts on the recent threats that IT managers should face. Warning, this post includes all attractive buzz words, such as BYOD, cloud and social media …

Which environment are we trying to control ?

Thanks to the diversity of the speakers, different IT framework have been discussed, relying on different population and services :

  • Employees : big companies offering IT services to several hundreds of employees, a.k.a. corporate;
  • Citizen : government environment, where services are offered to citizen to pay tax or declare revenues, a.k.a e-government;
  • Machines : distributed industrial environment, where cars or vending machines are accessing central services, a.k.a M2M;
  • Mixing human : partnering environment, meaning environment such as Marseille Innovation [1], a place where start up are sharing a same physical space and IT systems, where new business models are designed, in a collaborative but protected environment. People are ready to share crazy ideas in front of the coffee machine, but do not want to disclose their business cases and make sure their innovations stay theirs. (more…)

[1/2] What IT Manager should know about security – learning from Secutic Day in Marseille

Last week was held in Marseille the first edition of Secutic Day PACA [1], a security conference, organized by Secutic. This one day event tagline was about securing the digital economy. While being a free and open to public event, it was mainly dedicated to IT managers interested to know more about security. The program gathered 24 great speakers who shared with the public the state of the art of security in various domain such as digital crime investigation, liability of IT managers, major today’s and tomorrow’s threats. Here is a sumup of the major ideas that some highly experienced people discussed.

About the legal risk for IT managers.

Some officials of the Gendarmerie Nationale together with Claude Leloustre, representing the Club de la Sécurité des Systèmes d’Information PACA (CLUSIR), reminded the legal aspects associated with the management of IT systems. Managing an IT network induces some liability. (more…)

ParisWeb 2012 : Tailor the web for the society you want

Yes ! A third contribution related to ParisWeb 2012 ! Because this event covered so much of the web that is deserves to spend pages on it. The web is not just a tool. It has an impact on the society. The way you use the web has an impact, the way you work for the web has an impact. I am gathering here some talks that touch some of the problems I find key for the “web society”.

Hacktivism. Origin : hack and activism. Fréderic Bardeau @fbardeau is working for Agence Limite, a web agency which serves non governmental organization to help them to build their digital strategy. Frédéric announced after few seconds of talk that he was not part of the cyber-enthousiast (like everything from the web is super cool), but rather a person with strong opinion, value, and positions [1]. He reminded us the definition and history of activist and hacking, to lead us to an approximate definition of what the hacktivist is, a.k.a someone who likes to crack things, perform, code and use digital communication, driven by art, politic or transgression. He admitted that this definition was flexible depending on regions, periods, aggressiveness, political commitment… But at least based on that we could start to discuss the new usage of hacktivist in the society today. (more…)

ParisWeb 2012 : Make an accessible web, make an accessible world

The web should be accessible to everyone, including people with disabilities thanks to assistive technologies. Once you have claimed that, you should be on the right side of the good-thinking people, but it may happen that this would not change anything to your life. Not being neither deaf, sighted person or blind, I am part of the people who accepted this notion of accessibility as a must have, but kept it purely theoretical … until ParisWeb 2012. This was my first time I actually realized that accessibility was needed and possible. Let me share with you few concrete actions that Paris Web deployed to make everyone on the same page during the event.

Sign language all day long. The conference was held in different rooms and each of it has a team of 2 or 3 people providing all day long live translation with sign language.This support was completed by velotypie (meaning, a screen displayed on stage, where each and any words pronounced by the speaker, including jokes, was typed) and french live translation via headsets when speakers where expressing themselves in English. As you can guess, this is simple to organize : what you need is people with appropriate skills such as sign language, english translation (@porteneuve made the job), good typers… The best challenge here was to make the choice (and associated investment) to make the event accessible. (more…)

ParisWeb 2012 : Make a beautiful web

As announced in a previous post, last week was the week of the francophone web, with Paris Web 2012 conference. 600 people including 70 speakers gathered in IBM conference center in Paris, orchestrated by a team characterized by a great kindness and smartness. The conference covered so much various topics that it was just like having a walk around the best monuments making the web today. We reviewed the state of the art of the web technology, society impact, usage trends, with a shared worry among speakers to have target speech, avoid bullshit, useless introspection and starring traps.

I am proposing here several posts to share some pieces I have been delighted to listen. Lets start with the design aspects : several speakers shared with the public their vision on how to be a good craftsman of the web, in terms of design.

(more…)

Experiencing #ParisWeb this week !

ParisWeb is one of the great web developer event held in Paris. Based on an amazing team of volunteer, this conference is gathering motivated attendees, 70 speakers (including me) in a collaborative framework. Everyone getting there seems to be ready to participate, share and learn.

The conference is happening this week, from the 18 to 20 of October, with 2 days of conference and one day of workshops. This year the program will cover various themes such as (frenglish list extracted from Paris Web official website) ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; .

Event is sold out – actually few hours after tickets were made available – but all attendees will definitely return their experience via social media, blogs, press. Live streaming is set up and in addition all material is usually now available on-line after the event, so in a way or in another you’ll get something from ParisWeb [1].

Anyway, if you wanna feel the ParisWeb energy this week, follow #ParisWeb hashtag on Twitter…

 

[1] Program and conference material under http://www.paris-web.fr/2012/conferences/

Grasping mood of the security industry during Chip to Cloud

Nice, the italian french town, with its car and boat parking lying in front of gigantic buildings, with amazing sea view. Nice with its old town and its awful modern contrast. Nice, with its World Smart Week [1], made of buzz words such as NFC, identity and cloud, held in Acropolis, offering a common exhibition area, demonstrating maturity of any-form-of-NFC solutions. An interesting initiative was conducted aside, called Université NFC des Territoires [2], allowing different french cities going NFC to share their experience and brainstorm in workshops.

I attended the Chip To Cloud Security Forum which tries every year to show a state of the art in terms of security (hardware, software), or progress on any tricky topics such as authentication (of machine, people, devices) and smart secure distributed services, including cloud. I captured this year, several interesting topics that fed the conversations during the coffee breaks.

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Take Mozilla, Microsoft, Tony Stark…

Take Mozilla, Microsoft, Tony Stark, add a motivated team of volunteers, and you have the recipe to gather more than 130 people during a W3Café in Microsoft Conference Center in Paris, along the Seine. The W3C Café appealing program was made of great plenary presentations and workshops –  for the generous price of 5 euros ticket. Paris traffic jam made me missed the general presentation and when I joined the conference room, David Rousset @davrous was on stage, demonstrating with expertise and great sense of show the Internet Explorer 10 features [0]. David wrote in 5 minutes a simple webapp delivering RSS flow, with a look & feel compatible with the Windows 8 Metro style  Windows 8-style UI Windows 8 Modern UI and spirit. On the basis of free developers tools, with a mixing of standard HTM5, CSS and javascript and specific WinRT APIs (some people said in the room, well Microsoft as usual…) he optimized a bit the application look. In addition, David suggested that the seamless and efficient integration of developers tools and designers tools would in the end support peace the conflictual world of developers and designers, becoming best friends of the world. Demonstration of a very simple application made by an expert like David, playing the role of the schizophrenic nice developer and the bad designer was convincing… Real developers and real projects will have a chance to experience on Windows 8 and IE10 in October 2012, David said. (more…)