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Austin360 blogs > Digital Savant > Archives > 2009 > May > 22 > Entry
Whurley in the news
He calls himself an “Evil genius,” but I’m only convinced about the second part.
William Hurley (better known pretty much everywhere as “Whurley”) is the chief architect of BMC Software’s open-source strategy, but he’s better known in social media circles for his mind-blowing public presentations (the last one involved 3-D glasses) and his involvement in the local -camp (BarCamp Austin, for instance) movement.
I was on vacation last week, but while I was gone it seems that City of Austin Web site debate we had back in March was back in the news when Whurley announced the creation of OpenAustin.org, a go at crowdsourcing the massive city project.
I have no way of knowing if this project will be successful (and judging from some of the rough comments on that Statesman story, not everyone is convinced), but it brings me back to my original blog post. I have a lot more faith in people who take some action to keep the project in Austin in some way than those who were content to bellyache at the city on Twitter or Facebook with few solutions beyond, “Keep Austin’s Web site WEIRD!”
Yeah. Good luck with that.
(Edited to add: via Chip Rosenthal, the next Austin City Council Committee on Emerging Tech will discuss the City of Austin Web site next Wednesday.)
In other Whurley news, he and his two partners in the Palm Pre Dev Camp have each voiced their concerns with Palm Inc., which in their view is not supporting the worldwide community development project for the upcoming Pre phone.
The camp will proceed on June 13, a week after the Pre launches on June 6, but a blog post on the site takes Palm to task for not embracing the independent development of apps for the new platform and “tainting” the support it’s receiving. It will proceed without two of the three founders of the camp, Whurley and Giovanni Gallucci. In a blog post, the third founder, Dan Rumney explained that the flap involved non-disclosure agreements Palm asked the three to sign and a post on Twitter that was sent out shortly thereafter (ironically, the Tweet was about the NDAs).
Gallucci’s take on the situation.
And that’s your Whurley update for the week.
Permalink | Comments (2) | Post your comment Categories: Austin, Internet, Phones
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By Lex loves Clark
May 23, 2009 11:55 PM | Link to this
whurley is a true snake-oil salesman. The city website needs to be done by an organization (and I mean a for-profit company) who have done Enterprise websites before. Do you know why Fortune 500 companies get things done? It's because they pay for top quality goods and services. The don't go out begging for every wannabe engineer, inventor, accountant, or web developer to do something for them for free.
I went to "whurley"'s website and saw that one of his suggestions is for the ability to pay electric bills online. Um, yeah, you can already do that. You would think this guy might want to know about the current capabilities of the website he wants to replace with his "crowd". I'll love to see who will be responsible with this fails.
By whurley
May 22, 2009 8:23 PM | Link to this
I am starting to hear more and more positive response from within city government around actually establishing Austin as a thought leader in government 2.0 and crowdsourcing the website.
As far as the situation with Palm, which is sad, I eternally optimistic that they will be able to turn things around before the 13th.
best,
whurley
p.s. You are too kind in your opening statement ;)