Come join Eric Pugh and other local and regional Scrum practitioners for drinks and dinner where
we’ll hash out real world issues that face Scrum Teams. We’ll be talking about what made us start using Scrum, the cultural challenges we’ve had, and how we measure our results. We’ll share some
stories about wins and losses since we last met in May 2007!

Please RSVP to epugh@opensourceconnections.com so I can make sure we have an appropriate sized room at West Main.

When: July 24th from 5:30 to 8 PM
Where: West Main Restaurant http://tinyurl.com/5kdphs
Who: Anyone who is using Scrum, thinking about Scrum, or quit using Scrum!
Help: Eric @ 434-466-1467

Recently, the Newport News, Virginia Open eGov system was released. Using the Plone content management system, the system is designed for governments to install, out of the box, a website which also includes specialized departmental infrastructure. Newport News has also made the system available under the GPL; it can be found here.

I found this quotation from their Lessons Learned document interesting: “The adoption of new technology is an iterative process of innovation and learning…” While they did not use the actual term, it seems that the team which developed Open eGov utilized an agile approach to software development. Agile development does not mean a harem scarem approach to development; the team said that they spent a significant amount of time conducting research on best practices and content management systems before undergoing the customization necessary to launch Open eGov.

We are interested to see if this product gains traction. It is part of the PloneGov project, which, while claiming members in 20 countries, does not have an apparent member list, or much reach. I think that if the Newport News staff wants to extend their reach for the product, they’ll need to answer some questions:

• How can they increase citizen participation in these sites? I see surveys, but there is no way to comment
• How to spread the word about the availability of this product? The product is, from appearances, targeted at local governments.
• Is the Plone/Python/Zope package the best one to facilitate widespread adoption? The community of developers is much smaller than of other developers. Naturally, Scott Stults, our resident Plone and Python expert, believes it’s the right answer and could be seen dancing with joy when shown the Newport News announcement.
• Why not put the project into a system that allows user contribution to it? How a developer contributes to the Open eGov project is not particularly clear. Perhaps this is an intentional result of the lack of desire to be the gatekeepers of others’ contributed code.

Seeing Open eGov is certainly, to us, a positive development. Now, we’ll see what happens next. Building a great open source platform is just one part of the puzzle; developing a vibrant open source community is another kettle of fish.

Thanks to our friend James Walker at EzGov Europe for pointing this article out to me!

This week I was at the AAAE Conference in New Orleans, showcasing the AeroWeb product that we have just released at OpenSource Connections. Everyone who saw our demo seemed to be very impressed. I think that many of the airport executives I met realized they needed the better website that AeroWeb offers, with features like Flight Tracking, Online Booking and Airfare Deals (with referral bonuses for the airport), blogs, inline content editing right from your browser, custom directions, flash maps, and more. All wrapped in great designs customized to each airport.

But one reaction I got several times was “this looks great, but our county/city controls our airport and our website, and they want us to use the county IT staff and web page.” Basically they liked what we offered, but felt like they are locked into a single page static web page occasionally edited by County staff.

As an example, compare the Charlottesville Albemarle Airport website GoCho.com with this static web page of a regional airport in Hawaii, which is part of a larger state web site. The differences should be obvious. GoCho is a dynamic site providing real time information of immediate interest to passengers, and gives them incentives to fly through Charlottesville. The Hawaii site provides a single paragraph of generic information about the airport. As a passenger, it doesn’t really tell me anything of value about whether or not this is an airport I would want to consider using during a trip to Hawaii.

If you’re an airport executive, you inherently understand this. But how do you convince your County or governing authority to give you the freedom to create and manage your own site? Here’s a few ideas for discussion points you can bring up with them. When you’ve convinced your board to build a new site, please make sure to contact us at AeroWeb so we can submit a bid!

1. Show passengers you have great deals too! If you are a regional airport competing for passengers with nearby larger airports, then you know it can be a struggle to convince passengers that they can get good prices through you. Perhaps not all your airfares are cheaper, but with our Flight Deals tab, great deals targeted to your airport will be displayed from Kayak.com. Especially with rising gas prices, if you can show passengers that they are going to get a comparable airfare through your airport, they will skip the longer drive to larger airports.
2. Give passengers the information they need. When passengers enter your airport, the first thing they probably do is check the arrivals and departures board. With our online flight tracking, you can give them the same experience on your website. We can integrate our tracking widget with your internal FIDS or with one of our online data partners.
3. Easy content management. With our inline editing tool, you will be able to manage all the content on your website, without involving AeroWeb staff or your County IT staff, and without any technical knowledge! One reason your County’s IT department may be reluctant to let you have your own website is out of a fear that they will have to maintain all the content for you. With AeroWeb, you can manage the website yourself, so there is no burden on other IT staff!
4. Managed hosting. We will host your AeroWeb site for you, which removes another area of concern your IT staff may have. They don’t need to worry about the database or server uptime, or providing you with traffic reports and other analytics about your website. We do all of that for you - so there is no extra burden on your County IT staff!
5. Provide updates to media and passengers. Since editing content on your site and blog is so easy, it can become a communications channel for you directly to your passengers and even local media. By providing the latest news about your airport online in a timely fashion, you may reduce your customer service calls and keep passengers happy!
6. Your airport website is not the same as the county landfill site. No disrespect meant to your local garbage collectors, but the fact of the matter is that your airport has more specific website needs than the local landfill. So why are they both using the same boring static pages on the County web site? The landfill is not competing for customers like you are, and they don’t need to provide timely and updated information to passengers who expect you to have a great website.
7. Providing the latest functionality on your website. AeroWeb is tuned in with the features that airports need. In addition to the features described above, we offer other widgets for weather, customized driving directions, advertising tools, and more! We can do custom development to meet your airport’s unique needs, and we are working on adding additional features too!

I’ve uploaded some photos to Flickr of the debut of AeroWeb at the AAAE Conference in New Orleans.  You can see photos of our booth, as well as some of the fun we had at the Mardi Gras World event on Monday night.  It’s been a great conference, and I want to thank everyone who stopped by our booth to discuss AeroWeb!

You can view the photos here.

It’s Tuesday morning, which if the final day for exhibitors at the AAAE conference for airport executives in New Orleans. Eric, Riley, and myself, along with my wife Lauren, have been here since Saturday talking to regional airports around the country about OpenSource Connections new product AeroWeb.

The reception has been really great so far. While I think exhibitors always wish that there was more traffic by the booths, the quality of many of our leads has been very good. We are demo’ing the websites on our laptops, and have a screencast of AeroWeb running on a large monitor at the front of the booth. The screencast has certainly helped bring people into the booth, and our demos have been running very well so far and everyone who sees them seems to be impressed.

We’ve had conversations with a wide range of airports, with airport consultants who could conceivably recommend AeroWeb to their clients, with other vendors we could potentially partner with, and with industry journalists. We’ve also made a few contacts with companies who may be interested in the software development skills of OpenSource Connections, outside of our airport product.

The features we are showing airports for the most part seem to be right on. A couple of ideas that attendees have brought up have been interesting. One attendee noted that the main reason he felt people go to his airport website currently is not passengers, but vendors who are looking for information about RFP’s. So he wanted a content section with a lot of information about RFP’s. After looking at the websites of some other airports we’ve talked to, they also have at least a page with current RFP’s listed on it, and PDF downloads of the RFP’s right there. Of course, this is easy to do in AeroWeb, but we hadn’t put a page like that in our demos.

Another interesting observation made by a trainer from a small airport was “Can you schedule content to be published at a certain date?” The answer to this is also yes when you are editing content and blog posts through our back end Expression Engine administration tool. However that functionality and content versioning is not currently exposed through the inline editing tool we are primarily demo’ing to clients.

I’ve got some photos to post, so I’ll post those and more comments later today after the show ends. For now, I’ve got to run back to the booth for exhibiting hours!

PHP was one of the first languages that I learned when web design was my primary focus as a career. It seemed to be simple with plenty of examples on how to use it as well as plenty of code to grab to use on the fly in order to get the job done so that I could concentrate on what I loved the most, doing design. However along the way, I somehow got sucked into the programmer paradigm and ended up being a professional code monkey.

As such, my exposure to quite a few other languages, features, and coding paradigms have drastically increased as I’m a sucker for new technology and things of the geekified nature minus star trek, dungeons & dragons, and obsessions with super models. Now PHP seems to be more of a thorn in my side as a programmer than anything. Since I do have working knowledge of the language, especially its Object Oriented Features, magic methods, its various editors, extensions, and its limitations and quirks, I tend to get drawn into PHP projects. Working on a PHP project makes me long for a good rails or asp.net project because PHP just makes me feel dirty as a programmer.

PHP has gone the way of PERL: somewhat usable, a few good features and scripts, but stagnating with its ability to push the language itself to compete with other modern languages.

So what makes PHP so bad to work with? Read the rest of the story »

Today, OpenSource Connections announced the launch of AeroWeb, the airport content management system, available at http://www.aerowebonline.com. Based on the success of our initial AeroWeb platform client, the Charlottesville Albemarle Airport Authority, http://www.gocho.com, we are commercializing the platform by which airports can manage their public facing websites.

AeroWeb delivers powerful features like up-to-date flight tracking, inline web editing of content, airfare deals, and flight booking—all in an easy-to-maintain and flexible architecture. It includes features such as inline page editing, flight tracking, booking and reservation engines, and airport blogs and news aggregators. Most airport websites are staid and not interactive; AeroWeb changes that and puts the airport customer at the front of the line.

We will be demonstrating AeroWeb at the American Association of Airport Executives annual conference in New Orleans from June 8 - 11. Come check us out there, or go to the website, http://www.aerowebonline.com, for more details.

Thank you to everyone who helped with the May 15th meeting of the Charlottesville .NET User group. In no particular order this includes Al Tenhunfeld of Dominion Digital for providing Pizza and assisting with other meeting related tasks, Eric Pugh of Open Source Connections for bringing a fine selection of Pilsners and Ales and creating the introductory slideshow, Eric Meier of the McIntire School of Commerce for founding our group and spreading the word at UVA, Geoff Snowman of Microsoft for his presentation of Windows Workflow Foundation and Charlottesville Business and Innovation Council for use of their offices.

So what’s next?

Our next meeting is scheduled for Thursday July 17th. The current working topic is Microsoft’s Silverlight. But please suggest topics or speakers for future meetings.