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  Tuesday, October 29, 2002 

The accountability matrix

Phil Windley is reading David Brin's amazing book, The Transparent Society. When I first read it a couple of years ago, I posted Brin's "accountability matrix" to my newsgroup for discussion. Phil had exactly the same reaction:

1. Tools that help me see what others are up to.

2. Tools that prevent others from seeing what I am up to.
3. Tools that help others see what I am up to. 4. Tools that prevent me from seeing what others are up to.

His contention is that people see boxes (1) and (2) and good and boxes (3) and (4) as bad.  What what society needs is boxes (1) and (3) since that creates accountability.  Further, society should eschew boxes (2) and (4) since that pits citizens against each other in "an arms race of masks, secrets, and indignation.  [Windley's Enterprise Computing Weblog]

Back in February, Matthew Blair wrote:

There is tremendous power in his [Brin's] fundamental idea of 'freedom through accountability' instead of 'freedom through secrecy'...This is the most important idea I've come across so far this year. [Throb]

I think so too. It will be fascinating to see what such a prominent thinker and pragmatic doer as Phil Windley will make of it.

 

The Xopus in-browser XML editor

Regarding my article this week in InfoWorld, which says:

Structured editing of schema-controlled XML data is a hard challenge to meet. Tools that would make the task easy and natural are nowhere in sight. [InfoWorld.com]

Sjoerd Visscher notes:

Maybe Jon Udell still hasn't seen Xopus. I can't blame him. We (Q42) don't have a marketing department, and our Xopus site looks like we don't want you to use it. But Xopus does seem to be what Jon Udell is looking for.

I guess I wasn't paying attention. The Xopus demo is, indeed, an eye-opener. Runs in the browser, without plug-in support, toggling between WSYIWYG and XML modes, enforces schema, has multilingual support both in the UI and the document. Includes a competent table editor. The developers of this open-source project have even built a prototype of the MSIE ContentEditable feature for Mozilla, in advance of official support in Mozilla for that feature. Impressive!

 


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