When calamity strikes, authorities falter and show 1.0 behaviour

A big fire at a storing and packing plant for dangerous chemicals held our little country spellbound yesterday. Photo's and video's show billowing clouds of thick black smoke and fireball explosions.

All day the question everyone asked was of course: how toxic was the smoke and should we all upgrade our life insurance policies? I am glad to say the authorities measured the air quality constantly and there was no danger to the public. Those living in the path of the smoke cloud should however keep their windows and doors closed. Oh, and due to the rain that began falling it was advised to keep pets and cattle indoors as the particles brought down by the rain might stick to the paws of furry and feathery friends and cause illness. Also it was advised to clean shoes before entering a house should you have to go outside. But there was no danger to the public.

Meanwhile the crisis website that was set up for just such calamities and should be able to handle 10 million hits every 5 minutes was down. The municipality where the fire raged has a Twitter account but it was strangely quiet. Information about the toxic cloud was sketchy and bolstered by rumours and inconclusive results from fire department measurement teams.

The fire is now doused. There is no more toxic smoke billowing and so all is well that ends well. Ends well? Let's wait and see. I am very curious to see if no strange and unaccountable diseases start springing up in the vicinity of the fire in the coming years. I am also curious to see how our government is going to handle this affair.

Because if no health risks ensued from the burning of these stored chemicals why is the disposal of these same chemicals such a big problem? Burning them seems a great solution, right?

Twitter was buzzing yesterday and so were the comment streams on various news sites. People felt they were lied to by the authorities. Or at the very least treated like little children. Tell the truth, many wrote. Even if the truth is that you don't know. I wonder how much WikiLeaks and other Internet bell ringing affairs have educated the public but not the authorities. I wonder at how little the authorities realise that the public is much wiser these days and the old ways of 'behind closed doors government' may not work anymore.

The way the authorities handled the information stream yesterday during a local calamity proves that they are thoroughly 1.0 in a world that is speeding towards the upgrade from 2.0. Open government may not be what politicians want but just as our - the humble citizen's - privacy is dead, so is the ivory tower of government crumbling. They better learn to rule with open visor quickly.

Android or Apple: open or not open, that's the question

(Photo by Milan6)

Steve Jobs and Andy Rubin (Android creator) have a bit of a tiff. The crux of the tiff is the openness of Android and the closedness of Apple's Os's. The mud is flying both ways. Steve Jobs pointed out that Android is so fragmented that in effect it is as much a closed system as Apple's OS's are. Meaning that only technically proficient users can make use of the open aspects of Android. Many Twitter voices said much the same when Rubin responded with a tweet that contained a line of cryptic install code. Most users will read that tweet with the words "Say what?" on their lips.

Steve Job's argument seems a little far fetched though even if it is effectively true. Android is in effect a closed system to all but die hard code monkeys but that is a side effect of its distribution strategy: everyone can and more importantly may add to it, distribute it and use it if they have the skill. In Apple's case the OS being closed is part of its basic underlying philosophy. The OS is closed to protect users from fiddling with the innards and messing up the works. No one is allowed to touch it apart from the hallowed hands of the Apple coders. Result: a stable and homogenous system. However to attack one another over this seems a little pointless. Customers are better informed than ever thanks to the Internet so in most cases potential buyers know what they let themselves in for. And in any case: both platforms offer enough functionality out of the box to please most customers, no fiddling required.

The big question is: do we want our platforms to be open? The iPod, iPad and iPhone are locked into the tightly controlled world of Apple apps. However there are a couple of hundred thousand apps to choose from. There is an app for most functions you might want to use an apple device for. In practice there are only a limited amount of apps one really uses. The fact that the platform is closed is not relevant to the user. My washing machine isn't an open platform but it performs its duty perfectly.

Android is an open platform. Anyone can program for it, anyone can put it on his or her hardware and any program can be written and changed by anyone and finally the apps can be distributed through any website the distributer wishes to use. The result is a platform that is indeed open but Steve Jobs does have a point: it has become so fragmented that it is almost impossible to talk about a platform anymore. Android runs the risk of becoming one of those platforms where certain programs only run on certain iterations of Android. Like its Linux forebears the text terminal and cryptic code typing to get things working are never far away. Yet it has the huge advantage of welcoming everyone with a little programming skill to try and code for it. Through democratic filtering by users the easily usable and most functional apps will float to the top and become standard elements of the Android OS.

In both cases the bottom line is: does a device perform the function its user wants it to perform. And for both platforms there are a lot of users who will feel right at home, whether the front door is wide open or whether it needs a key. So bury your hatchets guys, the world is big enough for both of you.