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Sometimes people come to us to “rescue” a website from technical debt, slow performance, and outdated software. We’re always happy to help, but today we are taking it further.
Our goal is not to fix problems that come up, it is to stop them from happening.
For individual clients, this is a way to take away the pains of dealing with servers and configurations. For agencies, this is a white-label solution for them to provide a wider range of services to their clients.
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The Value and Values of the Open Source Community
There is a lot to gain when a piece of software is open source. If the problem is important enough and people use it often, it will gain support. Most of my toolset comes from the open-source community and when I’m able, I participate in less technical tasks like reporting bugs and helping other users. And Gregory-AI is my open-source project.
An organisation can benefit a great deal by fostering a relationship with its community of developers willing to put any kind of effort into improving something. This should go without saying.
In a spectacular display of blindness, EMEL, the organisation that handles parking and bike rentals in Lisbon, had published a contract of almost 20,000 € to develop a way to block an open source version of their app.
The full story is in Portuguese, but the bullet points are simple:
- A supplier had developed the official app GIRA, which is no longer maintained.
- A group of users responded by creating an open-source version called Gira+
- EMEL, the company that owns the app, chose to block it instead of integrating the solution.
- The contract has since been redacted from the base.gov.pt website.
The newspaper Público has a less technical explanation of what happened.
EMEL’s actions reflect how they put procedures ahead of the User Experience. And since PR in Portugal is limited to press agentry, there was no one around to point out the ridiculousness of their actions.
But I wonder, are there Comms departments considering this community as a stakeholder?
Leaked Deck Reveals How OpenAI Is Pitching Publisher Partnerships
OpenAI has been offering partnership opportunities to news publishers through its Preferred Publishers Program (PPP). The program, which is available to select high-quality editorial partners, aims to help users discover and engage with publishers’ brands and content. Members receive priority placement and richer brand expression in chat conversations, and their content benefits from more prominent link treatments. The financial incentives for participating publishers are divided into guaranteed value, a licensing payment for allowing OpenAI to access their backlog of data, and variable value, contingent on display success, a metric based on the number of users engaging with linked or displayed content.
The news came out on Friday and should develop this Monday, according to Reuters.
Your app for this week
If you are like me and use #RSS to keep up with blogs and news sites, NetNewsWire is still alive and well (MacOS and iOS).
Your TikTok for this week
Ryan Kelly does an amazing job, he enacts conversations with companies and sheds light on the things they don’t want us to know. Things like their participation in world conflicts, or Spotify’s investments into a dystopian future.
