These are my links for February 22nd to February 23rd:

• GOOD.is Transparency – Getting Around – A nice graphic showing how much energy is needed for various different modes of transport. Cycling comes out best.
• Free Wifi in London…Mapped – Londonist: London News, Food, Arts & Events – Does what it says on the tin, i.e. maps free wifi locations in London
• How we can fix the Plone skin situation – To summarize our overall conclusion… I’ve heard a number of people say “skin layers should die.” But this is a bit shortsighted, and probably reflects more the fact that people are tired of having two different ways to do this stuff, and that Zope 3 views and resources are a newer technology, rather than any clear superiority in functionality of the Zope 3 approaches over the alternative. So instead of ditching portal_skins, we should try to modernize it and make it compatible with the Zope 3 approaches.
• MIT Group Increases Global Warming Projections – Capital Weather Gang – New research from MIT scientists shows that in the absence of stringent reductions in greenhouse gas emissions, 21st century climate change may be far more significant than some previous climate assessments had indicated.
• Reuters AlertNet – How mobile phone banking is empowering the poor – Two years ago, a new phenomenon hit Kenya that allows money to be transferred between people using text messaging called M-PESA (pesa means money in Swahili). This system, known as "branchless banking", lets people set up remote bank accounts that are accessed through their mobile phone or other technology.
• The Groundswell Blog – Dedicated to critical cultural production at the intersection of art and activism. We cover artists from around the globe whose work explores and realizes social change. Our goal is to provide a narrative about these activist efforts while simultaneously participating in them. Maintained by The Groundswell Collective since 2007.
• Ben Emerson (book design) – This page has links to a complete versions of some great books!
• Ragmanslane Farm – produces shiitake and oyster mushroom logs, apple juice and teaches permaculture – Where I'm doing my Sustainable Land Use course "Ragmans Lane is a sixty acre farm in the Forest of Dean in Gloucestershire. The farm uses permaculture as a guiding design principle and is primarily about educating and employing people to work the land sustainably, giving them the opportunity to 'learn on the job', as well as producing shiitake and oyster mushroom logs and delicious apple juice."

These are my links for February 18th to February 22nd:

• Lippi Selk Bag – I had this idea ages ago, so glad someone has done it! "The Lippi Selk'Bag is a revolutionary new sleeping bag system which allows you the maximum mobility you need whilst keeping warm. This new concept retains the functionality of the traditional sleeping bag; it's FUN, COMFORTABLE and MOBILE!"
• pyDanny: Naming conventions thoughts for Pinax and Django – I really like Pinax. As the core framework behind our NASA HQ open source social networking application Spacebook, it has been a literal godsend. Out of the box it met most of our requirements, and the Pinax team has graciously added many of our needs to the feature set of Pinax going forward (div based forms, for example). My opinion is that Pinax is a great demonstration of what you can do using Python, Django, and an open source community. We'll be using it for Spacebook and other projects moving forward. However, if there is one thing I could improve in Pinax (and Django), would be its adherence to a model naming standard. Yes, it does follow the Django convention of naming models, but it doesn't have any internal conventions beyond the Django convention.
• Catastrophic Fall in 2009 Global Food Production – After reading about the droughts in two major agricultural countries, China and Argentina, I decided to research the extent other food producing nations were also experiencing droughts. This project ended up taking a lot longer than I thought. 2009 looks to be a humanitarian disaster around much of the world. To understand the depth of the food Catastrophe that faces the world this year, consider the graphic below depicting countries by USD value of their agricultural output, as of 2006.
• Making Western Agriculture More Sustainable, by Folke Günther – The energy crisis plus a shortage of phosphate fertiliser will change settlement patterns by forcing people to source their food from local farms. Modern Western European agriculture is heavily dependent on services that often are taken for granted. However, if we are to discuss how it can be made more sustainable we need to consider all the support systems necessary for the entire field-to-table chain. This is seldom done although several authors (Odum, H.T., 1971; Odum, E.P., 1973; Huang & Odum, 1989; Pimentel et al., 1989). have explored the topic. In particular, the support services agriculture gets from ecosystems are often left out.
• Small is Beautiful: Evidence of Inverse Size Yield Relationship in Rural Turkey – This paper examines the relationship between farm size and yield per acre in rural Turkey. The literature on the inverse-size yield relationship is reviewed, and a framework is provided that explains the inverse relationship based on rural factor markets imperfections in the markets for land, and labor. The hypotheses are tested on recent farm-level data from rural Turkey in 2002. A strong inverse-size relationship between farm size and yield (small farms are up to 20 times more productive per acre!) is prevalent in all seven regions of Turkey even though heterogeneity among households and regions is considered. The findings in this paper provide evidence in favor of labor-centered theories explaining inverse size yield relationship, and calls for a reconsideration of market friendly agrarian reforms in developing countries for sustainable development based on technical and allocative efficiency and equity.

These are my links for February 15th to February 17th:

• ‘Bank of Essex’ plans unveiled – Economic Development – Regen.net – By setting up a community bank, an idea inspired by similar models of community lending in the United States, emergency funds from the European Investment Bank could be channelled to reach hard-hit firms more directly, Essex County Council said.
• Essex Council to form £50m community bank – Essex County Council is proposing to set up a bank that can provide loans for small firms unable to tap funds from the UK’s private, or even part-nationalised, banking sector. The move is in response to pleas from local business people who say they are unable to secure credit from High Street banks.
• Bank of Essex to challenge high street brands – Councillors in Essex have released plans to create their own bank, in a bid to ease local companies' concerns that money is leaving the area, and pioneering a new era of investment in the region
• Essex council plans to set up own bank – Telegraph – Essex County Council has drafted the plan following complaints from local firms that high street banks are refusing to give credit amid the financial crisis. Lord Hanningfield, the council's leader, said it intended to create a £50million "community bank", pooling funds from the council and local health and police authorities.
• Public Service – Opening soon, the Bank of Essex – The 'Bank of Essex' is not the council's first radical idea. It recently announced handing out annual contracts worth millions of pounds to local businesses only, giving council tax rebates to thousands of pensioners (and maybe single mothers and families of Colchester-based soldiers in the future), and giving financial support to companies who take on apprentices.
• Bank of Essex could show high street banks how to help small firms – As small firms continue to have difficulties raising money from the high street banks, Essex county council has come up with an ingenious way of helping local businesses weather the economic storm – by creating its own bank.

  During a special session, the Essex Management Board, the body that represents the Essex public sector, proposed the creation of a new 'Bank of Essex', which would be a special delivery vehicle to act as an intermediary and distribute European Investment Bank (EIB) funds to local businesses.

• Watch out Big Four, here comes the Bank of Essex – Times Online – COUNCIL leaders in Essex are used to their county being the butt of jokes about white-stilletoed girls dancing round their hand-bags. Now, after deciding Britain’s banks have been making a joke of Essex businessmen, the council has come up with a pioneering plan to create its own bank.
• Council to launch ‘Bank of Essex’ – Home News, UK – The Independent – A "Bank of Essex" is to be set up to help small businesses struggling to win investment because of the credit crunch, under plans being examined by the county council. The proposal for a bank, which would be a central point for help in accessing European funds, is part of a wider plan to help the local economy, which includes a new credit union, Essex Savers, and an Essex Apprentice scheme, which would create 40 new jobs initially.
• Deli-dollar offers route to business funding – Business, News – The Independent – PASTRAMI ON rye might not sound like an alternative to hard cash but in one American town, sandwiches are replacing dollar bills. Frank Tortoriello runs a deli in Great Barrington, Massachusetts. In 1989 he wanted to move to larger premises but the bank would not lend him the $4,500 he needed, so he simply printed his own money.
• PB key message in empowerment white paper — Participatory Budgeting Unit – On Thursday 10th July, Communities & Local Government published 'Communities in Control: real people, real power' or the community empowerment white paper. The Participatory Budgeting Unit is really happy to note that Participatory Budgeting runs as a key thread throughout the whole paper and is linked to a number of other key commitments as well as there being PB specific key commitments.

These are my links for February 12th:

• Aggregation / Feed parsing Modules Comparison | groups.drupal.org – A summary of feed-related modules and code.
• collective.lineage — Plone CMS: Open Source Content Management – Lineage is a Plone product that allows subfolders of a Plone site to appear as autonomous Plone sites to the everyday user. This hub and spoke structure allows site administrators to easily manage multiple, seemingly independent, sub-entity websites in one Plone. Furthermore, the "parent" site can access and view the content in all the "child" sites while the child sites only view their own content. The parent site can also syndicate chosen content to the selected child sites. Lineage is less complex and easier to manage than a cluster of nested Plone sites but gives users all the same benefits. Lineage can be used within a large organization to manage multiple sub-sites , such as school district sites, university departments, corporate product sites, public library satellites, professional association events, and more.
• BarCamp / BarCampBankLondon2 – The aim of BarCampBank is to foster innovations and the creation of new business models in the world of banking and finance.
• crowdfunding / FrontPage – Crowdfunding, inspired by crowdsourcing, describes the collective cooperation, attention and trust by people who network and pool their money together, usually via the Internet, in order to support efforts initiated by other people or organizations. Crowdfunding occurs for any variety of purposes, from disaster relief to citizen journalism to artists seeking support from fans, to political campaigns.
• Home – mahara.org – Mahara is an open source e-portfolio system with a flexible display framework. Mahara, meaning 'think' or 'thought' in Te Reo Māori, is user centred environment with a permissions framework that enables different views of an e-portfolio to be easily managed. Mahara also features a weblog, resume builder and social networking system, connecting users and creating online learner communities.

These are my links for February 10th:

• Picklebytes » Blog Archive » Redesign of zope.publisher – # The IPublication interface and all its implementations should die, to be replaced with a WSGI pipeline. This should make the publication process dramatically easier to understand and customize.
  # Request and response objects should just hold information; they should have no interesting behavior such as traverse().
  # We should create and use two new keys in the WSGI environment, “zope.request” and “zope.response”. These will implement at least IRequest and IResponse, respectively. (”transaction” and “zope.interaction” are also possibilities.)
  # The WSGI-compatible pipeline should be capable of doing everything zope.app.publication currently does. We should use Repoze packages in that pipeline where possible.
• Ozore Age – Paris-based label Ozore Age and its offshoots Electro Lab Factory, Xunk and E-beat have become a reference for the French electronic music scene.
• Mp3 Store | Urban City Stores | Urban City Station | Mp3’s | Mp3 Downloads | Apparel | Pro Audio | Dj Gear | Music Gear – A newly created Ecommerce store offering Mp3 downloads using Ubercart Cart 1.6 and Drupal 5xxx. We also offer differnet styles of major brand apparel, Pro Audio, Dj Gear, and Music Equipment thru
  Amazon.com Associates.
• Polybonk.com | Next gen music store – Polybonk.com is an exclusively online next-generation music store specialising in experimental electronic music. Our revolutionary subscription service provides you with access to all of Polybonk's DRM-free music.
• Bloodshot Records – Bloodshot Records is a Chicago-based record company which publishes 'the music that lurks between genres. We've always been drawn to the good stuff nestled in the dark, nebulous cracks where punk, country, soul, pop, bluegrass, blues and rock mix and mingle and mutate.'