One big idea we've had with OpenPsa has been supporting various standards and Microformats to make the user experience richer.

Today I finally had the chance to take the first step at this direction by adding web site probing support into the OpenPsa Contacts CRM component. Now when you enter a new person or company it does:

• Check if the contact has a homepage set
• Register an "at" entry for Midgard
• Next minute the homepage will be fetched
• If there is a <link /> to RSS feed that feed will be fetched
• If the feed includes ICBM metadata the position will be stored accordingly
• If the feed includes GeoRSS info then the a subscription will be registered
• ...and at every subscription run the person's position will be updated according to the time of latest RSS entry

End result is that if the contact has a geocoded website (like many do nowadays), the position will be available for the CRM system.

It is of course only the first step. When finally I upgrade my local development box to run PHP5 I can start reading Microformats in via hKit and do cool things like automatically populating employees and contact information.

We rolled the initial Project Broker user interface into OpenPsa 2 with Rambo yesterday. Since we were on schedule we went to work in the countryside where we wouldn't be disturbed. Fireplace, a bit of snow, and no Internet connection make it a perfect place for a coding sprint.

The idea of the Project Broker is to be a DBE service that automatically looks for potential subcontractors in the Fada P2P network. Matching criteria include competence tags, schedule and endorsements given by other members of the network. In addition to DBE, the same searches also work inside a single OpenPsa installation enabling automatic scheduling and resourcing of tasks:

Another change we rolled in was a reworked hour reporting system to the OpenPsa front page. There are now two ways to report hours: by manually entering them using a composite widget, or by letting OpenPsa keep the time for you selecting what you are working on:

I will be flying to Foz do Iguacu tomorrow for the LatinoWare 2006 conference. My talk on Digital Business Ecosystem is scheduled at 2pm on thursday the 16th.

As I've already given two earlier talks on DBE in Brazil, I will this time skip most of the politics and focus on how DBE can make everybody in the business of free software happier.

In the other news, here is the first look at the new version of the Maemo application catalog:

Notable changes include switching to a more easily browse-able format from the old giant wiki page, using the new single-click install format and automatically linking all wiki pages tagged with application's name to the application page.

Updated 2006-11-15: My talk has been rescheduled to 3pm.

Like last year and FISL, I'm again representing DBE in LatinoWare. My talk was yesterday, and this time I focused a bit more on the practical applications of DBE instead of the politics.

My slides are now available in PDF format (6MB). I also have most of the talk in cell phone video format that I will try to process and YouTube at some point.

After the talk I've been mostly hanging out in the conference cafeteria, discussing free software with other speakers and participants.

The conference is held in the technology center of Itaipu, world's largest hydroelectric plant. On thursday evening we went to see the light show on the massive dam wall, and after that to a Open Bar student party.

Friday morning, slightly hung over, we crossed the Friendship Bridge to Ciudad del Este, Paraguay. The city had the strongly commercialized feeling of a border town, closely resembling Vyborg for example. But that was quickly forgotten by getting to try a motorcycle taxi on the way back.

Updated 2006-11-20: Dave Neary has a good write-up on the conference.