There are only so many hours in a day and although this site has been an old friend for many years, it is time to put it to bed and let it lie. For some strange reason, people were reading these posts when I was a city councillor. Those days have gone and so has interest in this site. I am spending my time now on open source software and no longer have time to keep posting here.

The site will remain up for now, but I will no longer be posting.

I hope each one of you has a wonderful festive season with your family and friends.
I wish you luck and prosperity for the coming year. May 2008 be all you could hope for.
Best Wishes - I will be back here in the New Year.

Over at Mambo we are currently planning changes to the User Interface. Most GUI (graphical user interface) screens use icons to graphically represent the function or action a user can take. But choosing the right icon, that has the same meaning across languages and cultures can be a real challenge.

Programmers are not know for their interface design expertise and unless a volunteer, open source project has GUI experts donating their time, creating the perfect GUI can be a hit and miss exercise. I took responsibility for preparing a plan. As a result, I am spending a lot of time reading, studying up, and analysing GUI in action in various applications.

All over the Net, on every open source CMS forum, you will find people asking whether or not they should use that CMS. The answer is not an easy one, but can be given in a two-word sentence, “that depends”.

If you are new to content management systems you may find it difficult to understand just what a CMS actually is. The problem is, the term has become used in so many different ways that almost anything can be called a CMS these days. If you search on Google for “what is a CMS” you get thousands of results returned. A quick scan of those results shows that the term CMS is used to describe many different things. We have Asset Management Systems, document management, records management, and the enterprise grades of CMS, as well as the subset of all this which is really where most Open Source CMS’’s fall - Web Content Management.

Those of you who visit here regularly will have noticed there have been a few changes. The site name has changed - no longer, “Lynne Pope, City Councillor”, the site is now “discourse and data”. The words are self-explanatory. I did not seek a third term as a city councillor so on 13th October, my time as an elected public figure came to an end. I continue to serve my community, but no longer within the council chambers. For a long time I have kept my public life and outside interests separate and used this site to keep in contact with the people I represented. Now that I am just me, citizen again, I am going to use this blog to talk about the other things I work with.

Two days ago I received an email notifying me that I had been nominated as New Zealand’s Open Source Ambassador in the forthcoming New Zealand Open Source Awards, and that I had been judged a finalist. I was both honoured and humbled by this news and decided to share it with some colleagues.

“Oh, yeah, we knew that”, was the response. It seems that nominations have been a hot topic across the web and while I knew about the awards, I did not take the time to read any of the press releases or postings on various websites. It seems others had and “my” news had been reported in Computerworld on 13th September. You can read the article online here: Computerworld New Zealand

If you find it coincidental that this site was down from 21st September until today, well then perhaps you should consider on what date the local government elections voting papers were sent out!

Yes, folks, lynnepope.net went offline and instead, a vote for Heather Tanguay image was here. Did I do that? NO! I am absolutely disgusted that local government politics has stooped to the level of people attacking and defacing websites in order to promote their preferred Mayor. It should come as no news to you that I am not standing for Mayor of Palmerston North. I am not even standing for re-election to the Palmerston North City Council. I am standing for election to Horizons and if the person(s) responsible for defacing my website are reading this, may I remind you that Horizons is a separate entity and HAS NOTHING TO DO WITH THE CITY COUNCIL ELECTIONS! Kindly play your stupid games elsewhere and leave me out of your dirty politics.

“If you want something done, ask a busy person to do it. The more things you do, the more you can do.”
anon. (Often attributed to comedian Lucille Ball, but known as far back as William Hazlitt (1778-1830)

It seems a lot of people have taken that old saying to heart and the demands on my time have been rather heavy in the past month. Since returning from July’s Local Government Conference in Dunedin (with a good dose of norovirus to recover from) time has just raced away. I’m never much good with enforced rest, which may be why it took me a couple of weeks to recover from norovirus, but as soon as I was back to normal I found my days completely filled. The Standard has been reasonably good lately in reporting back on civic events and on council meetings so I won’t bore you by writing about those.

PNCC Press Release

The City Council’s innovative process to include glass as part of its roading foundations has been recognised nationally.

At the weekend the City Council received a Packaging Council of New Zealand award as the winner in the glass recycling category from the Acting Minister for the Environment, David Parker.

The Council, in conjunction with Higgins Aggregates, has, for the last 12 months, produced a roading foundation material which includes up to five percent of recycled glass.

The glass would otherwise be dumped in a landfill as it has no market value due to the presence of more than one colour and plastic which sticks to the bottles.

Does your organisation want to develop a project that has the potential to contribute to the City Council’s community outcomes and its Community Development Plan?

Or perhaps you have an idea for developing a new and unique community group? Then the Local Initiatives Fund may be able to assist.

Community outcomes are defined as “things that are important to people” and mean;

• People have lots of fun things to do
• Businesses grow here and people have plenty of job opportunities
• Palmerston North is attractive, clean and green
• The community is supportive and people and organisations work together
• People have lots of learning opportunities.