On Thursday, April 11, I gave a talk called “Open source all the cities” at the monthly meeting of the Triangle Linux User Group (TriLUG). The presentation is a look at the open government movement in Raleigh, a preview for my book The Foundation for an Open Source City, and a overview of the different apps and platforms the City of Raleigh has deployed in the Open Raleigh portal.

[yframe url=’http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Op82sOiEj6o’]

The SeeClickFix app was a huge hit. I like to describe it as a bug tracking tool for city issues. Another popular item was Raleigh’s new open data portal. Powered by Socrata, the open data portal has data sets for fire incident data, crime data, building permit data, and more.

Book update: I’ve finished the book! I self-published with Lulu and got the first copy last week. Everything was great except for the fact that the print was missing capital O’s, lowercase q’s, and some punctuation. Lulu has provided me some instructions to fix the issue:

The source file you used to make your project was created using Writer/ Libreoffice 3.4. and was not intended for creating professional print quality PDFs, therefore it is not a suitable option when publishing on Lulu. This is the likely reason for the font problems you are experiencing. To resolve this issue you will need to update your project with a new PDF not created with this software.

One option for fixing your file is to save it as Postscript (.ps) and then convert it to a PDF on your end. We find this has been the best solution for this issue. The steps below will give you a general idea of this process:

1. From your Word file, go to Print
2. Locate the PDF drop-down menu in the bottom left corner of the Print window > select Postscript
3. When you have saved the Postscript file, convert it back to PDF using a service like Zamzar.com, which converts files up to 100 MB for free.
4. This will create a new PDF while recoding the data and removing MacQuartz-specific code.
5. Upload this new PDF to your project and publish your revision.

For a list of recommended PDF creation programs follow this link:
http://connect.lulu.com/t5/Interior-Formatting/Recommended-PDF-Creation-Programs/ta-p/33683

This help node has some good information on making suitable PDFs:
http://connect.lulu.com/t5/Interior-Formatting/PDF-Creation-Settings-How-can-I-be-sure-my-PDF-will-print/ta-p/33681

So let’s hope that works!