Friday, July 17, 2009

Open Source Apps For Writers

Thanks to Glyn Moody for the pointer to these Five Open Source Apps For Writers and Authors. I've been mulling over some of the ideas for a new book on the insanity of large organisations whilst taking a few days leave from the day job. So it might be worth experimenting with some of these tools to see if they can help.

The basic thesis of the book btw is that as organisations, public and private, evolve, they converge on bureaucracies and administrative systems which are effectively simultaneously insane and oblivious to as well as extremely resistant to efforts to cure that insanity. The working title at the moment is 'Insanity and stupidity: the twin curses of managerialism' (I know - it doesn't exactly roll off the tongue but I'm not good at soundbites). At the moment the plan is to include stories from personal less-than-satisfactory experiences as a customer of large organisations like Talk Talk, through tales from NASA, the Tahoma Narrows Bridge, aircraft crashes, the 1927 Mississippi flood, and the intellectual property, education and criminal justice systems.

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