The Web Applications Working Group has published a First Public Working Draft of Service Workers. This specification describes a method that enables applications to take advantage of persistent background processing, including hooks to enable bootstrapping of web applications while offline. The core of this system is an event-driven Web Worker, which responds to events dispatched from documents and other sources. A system for managing installation, versions, and upgrades is provided. The Service Worker is a generic entry point for event-driven background processing in the Web Platform that is extensible by other specifications. Learn more about the Rich Web Client Activity.

Haik Avanian, his sister, Ani, and their mother, Gayane. (Photo courtesy of Haik Avanian)

He was just 11 years old in late 1995 when his mother uprooted him and his sister from their home and life in Armenia after the Soviet Union’s collapse to pursue an uncertain future in the United States.

“It was a huge leap and risk for her,” Haik Avanian says, “and luckily we’ve been able to make the risk worth it.”

This Mother’s Day, Treehouse is sharing a handful of tributes to recognize and honor the risks taken, sacrifices made, plans laid, support offered and inspiration provided by the mothers of web design and development professionals everywhere.

Each one has made a tremendous difference in her child’s life.

“I think a large part of why I’m a designer can be attributed to the fact that my mother is a programmer,” Avanian says. “I was fortunate enough to be exposed to computers and programming from a young age — which got me obsessed and fascinated even though I didn’t get hands-on experience until my early teens.”

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In a land foreign to them, that exposure was an intentional nurturing of creativity and a fostering of love for the visual arts. That culminated with Avanian and his sister taking college-level art classes while still in high school.

“One of my fondest memories is drawing and coloring with my mom when we were much younger,” he says. “My mom’s enthusiasm and enjoyment of it was very real, and there’s nothing like feeling that an adult is having fun with you in doing what you enjoy.”

The two children eventually found design careers, but even then their mother’s vision was pressing ahead.

“We were living in Ohio then and had reached a comfortable life that was quite American,” Avanian explains. “… My mother took yet another step that helped propel us forward: She moved to Boston to take on a new job, as the premise of staying in the Midwest didn’t seem promising. Her move to Boston inspired and encouraged me to move to the East Coast to pursue my career as a designer and to be closer to my family.”

Avanian left Ohio for a junior designer job with a friend who started an agency called Big Human in 2010. Today, that agency has grown to more than 20, and Avanian is the creative lead.

Early Internet Adoption Plays a Huge Role

Web design veteran Kim Larson of Rochester, Minn., also owes much to her mother’s vision.

“I was lucky that my mom (and dad) realized the value of computers and the Internet even though they never really knew how to work either of them (and still don’t today),” she says. “We were early adopters of having a PC and Internet at home, and I think that played a huge role in shaping my career choice.”

Larson first learned about the Internet from “The Late Show” with David Letterman when she was in seventh grade. “He kept exclaiming, ‘World WIDE Web’ repeatedly like it was some sort of joke,” she recalls. “I didn’t pay any attention to what it meant.”

She remembers the sounds of dial-up Internet in her family’s home: “Deee deee deee drrrrhhhhhhhhhhhhh. That noise will never escape my brain. We had to get a second phone line so people could actually call our house.”

Along with computer access, Larson’s mother also instilled in her key skills that translate directly to her role as co-owner of Root River Studio.

“When I was a kid, my mom used to play a lot of memory games with me, like putting a random assortment of items on the table. We’d both stare at it for a minute, and then she’d cover it with a towel and we’d both try to remember as many items as we could,” she tells. “It was a game that I loved to play. And she would always play puzzle games with me, making sure that they were ones that would be challenging. It’s probably why I still love things that give me a good challenge or problem to solve. And I can certainly say that is one of the many reasons I love web development — because there is always a challenge or problem for me to master.”

Larson says creating websites fulfills her artistic and science needs. “I love to help small businesses carve out their niche in the World Wide Web. At times you’ll hear me belt out ‘World WIDE Web’ David Letterman-style — but I don’t always treat it as lightly as he did. I absolutely love what I do.”

Mom’s Lesson: Embrace Technology

Like Avanian and Larson, it was another mother’s foresight that set her son on the path to programming.

“My mother has been a teacher for more than 30 years, so she knows very well the value of a good education and the cost of the lack of knowledge,” Oscar Barrascouth of Phoenix says. “She has always been the type of person to tell me to go out and look for new things to learn, to expand my knowledge and never stop doing so. I joined Treehouse because I love technology, and I love using it to do good things for people, and it gave me the opportunity to keep on learning.

“However, I would have never known what a computer was if it hadn’t been for my mother.”

That’s because she paid extra money for him to take a computer class in kindergarten, where he learned how to print, type numbers and do other “groundbreaking computer science work,” as he calls it, like playing Pong.

That was 1986, and the class was the first time he’d laid his hands on a computer.

“Little did I know that it would be my future,” he says. “It’s funny, because every time I look at an old 1980s DOS system that a friend of mine still has running at his home, I remember my mother and what she taught me: Embrace technology, keep learning and be the best man for the job — always.”

Web designer Abbey Fitzgerald with her mother, Jane. (Photo courtesy of Abbey Fitzgerald)

Lessons like those stick in the mind of web designer Abbey Fitzgerald, too. Her mother, also a teacher, underscored how learning is a lifelong process. “Once you graduate, the learning does not stop,” she says. “I think this is very true in web design. The field is always changing, and it is a constant process keeping up with it.”

And that process sometimes demands hard work.

Giving Back to Mom

“Her work ethic was very inspirational,” Fitzgerald, 33, of Minneapolis, says. “I remember her grading papers and creating lesson plans well after the workday was done. I think web designers are also very career-driven people. We go to work but also have side projects and take the time to keep learning. There are so many web designers that go to local meetups and go above and beyond the typical workday. Our career does not end at 5 o’clock.”

One of Avanian’s recent spontaneous side projects infused some excitement into his mom’s life. Surrounded by his sister, grandmother and mother for a holiday gathering, he combined his web design skills with her hobby of knitting to launch Rekn.it, which offers to unravel customers’ old sweaters and reknit them into something new.

“I think the comfort of having everyone in my family around at once made it very easy for me to work on this project and finish it in such a short amount of time,” he says. “We published the site, and I sent it out to a few contacts; within the next few days, we got loads of traffic and attention from NPR. This led us to have to cap the number of orders per month to 30,” a number he later learned was a little ambitious.

“Soon my mom’s apartment was full of packages from all over the world with old sweaters waiting to be transformed into something new,” Avanian says. “My mom later got help from my grandmother, and they kept busy for a good six months before we decided they needed a break from their hobby.”

And thanks to his mom, web design newcomer Barrascouth is looking forward to a career of giving back:

“I enjoy teaching others about technology, the good it has done for our society, and showing others how it has given a voice to people around the world who didn’t have a voice.”

The post Happy Mother’s Day! Thanks, Mom, for Helping Us Learn appeared first on Treehouse Blog.

The Special Collections department of the Albin O. Kuhn Library, in partnership with the History department and the Center for Digital History Education, is happy to announce that the Joseph L. Arnold papers are now open for research use. Dr. Arnold’s vast collection of research papers include two manuscripts on the history of Baltimore: one organized chronologically and another, thematically by ethnic and social groups. Making up the bulk of the collection, however, are files on more than 350 distinct topics in Baltimore history. Each file contains up to 150 newspaper articles (mostly from the Baltimore Sun), in addition to pamphlets, chapters from books, and Dr. Arnold’s hand-written notes, on a specific topic. These files, arranged into 14 categories, cover the economic, social and political history of Baltimore and focus mainly on the period between the Civil War and World War I. Topics range from annexation to abattoirs, from baseball to the Baltimore & Ohio Railroad, from marriage to manufacturing, and from streetcars to sewage. We are still processing additional records, including Dr. Arnold’s teaching materials, so be sure to check back as new items are added to the collection.

Dr. Arnold’s manuscripts, in Series I and II of the collection, represent the culmination of more than thirty years of research on Baltimore history. Although it was never completed for print publication, the Special Collections staff has been working with his widow Mary Jane Arnold, University of Baltimore historian Dr. Elizabeth Nix, and UMBC alumna Theresa Donnelly to prepare the manuscript for online publication. We envision free, open access for this invaluable resource. Once the material is online, it will be readily searchable and accessible to anyone with an interest in Baltimore history—both within and outside of the UMBC community. We anticipate that the manuscript will be online this fall.

As I have been handling these files over the course of the academic year—placing the contents of each file into new, acid-free folders to ensure that the papers last as long as possible—I have enjoyed picking up bits and pieces of what life was like for previous generations of Baltimoreans. To my surprise, I have been struck by how much has not changed over the past two centuries. I ran across so many headlines that seem like they could be from today: reporting on last night’s Orioles game, a new stall opening at Lexington Market, construction on Charles Street, the weather causing difficulties for commuters, upcoming graduation celebrations at Western High School, vacationers flocking to the Eastern Shore, heated debates among members of the City Council, family reunions at Druid Hill Park. The advertisements also provide a window into Baltimore of yesteryear.

Joseph Larkin Arnold (1937-2004) was a prominent urban historian and a key leader at UMBC for most of his career. Dr. Arnold joined the faculty of UMBC—then a very young institution—in 1968 after earning a PhD in social history at the Ohio State University. In his three and a half decades here Dr. Arnold fulfilled a variety of campus leadership roles, including a term as Acting Librarian in 1979-1980. He taught undergraduate and graduate courses on American cities, Baltimore history, historical research methods, and comparative urban history, among other topics. In his field he became known as “the dean of Baltimore historians” for his extensive research on Charm City’s transition from a colonial tobacco port to a modern metropolis. The author of six books and over 60 articles, chapters, and reviews, Dr. Arnold was in the final stages of writing a comprehensive history of Baltimore at the time of his death in January 2004.

Auni Gelles has been working with the Joseph L. Arnold papers and manuscript this year. Auni is graduate student in the History department and Graduate Assistant for the Center for Digital History Education and the Special Collections department in the AOK Library. She will continue her work with the Arnold papers next year. Thank you, Auni!

Interested researchers can learn more about the Joseph L. Arnold papers from the online finding aid or by contacting the Special Collections department at speccoll@umbc.edu or (410) 455-2353.

Thanks so much to everyone who came out to the 9th Annual Wine Tasting and Silent Auction hosted by our Chapter of Young Alumni. By attending the event, you helped us raise more than $6,500 for student scholarships. In fact, since 2009, together we’ve raised almost $25,000 to support UMBC students.

We’re also grateful to our generous sponsors, whose contributions came in at nearly $7,000 this year. Without their support, this event would not be possible.

We loved seeing you all there and hope you had as good a time as we did! We’ve shared just a few photos from the event below, but we hope you’ll check out our full gallery on Flickr.

See more photos from the Wine Tasting!

In this map, green markers show hydrants that groups in Boston have adopted to dig out during snowstorms. The red ones are available for adoption. The Adopt-A-Hydrant program is one of many public data projects made possible through technology. Image courtesy of adoptahydrant.org.

Civic Developers, Designers Helping Build Better Communities Through Open Data Revolution

Robert Campbell considered himself an engaged citizen.

The 47-year-old Cary, N.C., resident volunteered with his town’s technology task force and participated in the community’s annual open data day.

Then, he got serious.

On July 31, 2013, Campbell — a manager at Cisco Systems — became a Code for America brigade captain for his region. He also continues his work as a community volunteer.

“I see this as a way for me to stay engaged with my town and get tangible results,” he says. “I see a way to keep not only myself engaged, but reach out to others in the community.

“Some people want to build parks. I want to see more technology and apps in the town.”

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Campbell is among a host of civic-minded people and groups across the country contributing to what has been dubbed the Open Data Revolution, in which government information is mined and made available through technology to empower citizens, improve efficiency and advance economic landscapes. Such work could unlock $3 trillion to $5 trillion annually in the United States, according to an October 2013 report by the McKinsey Global Institute.

For Campbell and like-minded residents in his town, making government information accessible and easy to use has evolved into presenting development data in a meaningful way — through an app, he says.

“Imagine you are out in your community and you see something being built (ground dug up or that familiar construction box),” he says. “With our map/app, you launch it, using the geolocation service of your phone, we locate you on the map (constrained to our region for now) and on the map is shown the parcels of construction around you. You can tap on one of those polygons and you are given info and a link to the official plans for the site.”

To create the app, the residents used information from the Cary GIS and permits department. See the app’s beta version at http://codeforcary.org/dev.html.

Doing Work Together — There’s an App for That

Such grassroots activism and a new generation of tech-savvy citizens is what Jennifer Pahlka looked to in 2009 when she founded Code for America.

“There is a large community of people that are building the tools that we need to do things together effectively,” Pahlka said in her March 2012 TED Talk. “It’s not just Code for America fellows. There are hundreds of people all over the country that are standing up and writing civic apps every day in their own communities. They haven’t given up on government. They are frustrated as hell with it, but they’re not complaining about it. They are fixing it. And, these folks know something that we’ve lost sight of and that’s that when you strip away all your feelings about politics and the line at the DMV and all those other things that we’re really mad about, government is at its core, in the words of Tim O’Reilly, what we do that we can’t do alone.”

Code for America works with others to develop new tools that can transform mundane municipal undertakings into participatory government.

In January 2011, the city of Boston was hit with more than 38 inches of snow, about three times the average snowfall for the month. During the storm, Boston’s more than 13,000 fire hydrants were buried, leaving them of little use to the city’s firefighters.

Enter CFA fellow Erik Michaels-Ober, who worked with the city in a single weekend to develop the app Adopt-A-Hydrant.

The technology allows Boston residents to claim a fire hydrant, name it and shovel away snow for access after storms, helping improve local government efficiency — and freeing up firefighters and public works employees to tackle other pressing issues.

“This app represents how a new generation is tackling the problem of government,” Pahlka says in her TED Talk. “Not as a problem of an ossified institution but as a problem of collective action and that’s great news because it turns out we are very good at collective action with digital technology.”

Cities around the country are building on the basic source code for the app to address other critical needs. The city of Honolulu has used the technology to offer an Adopt-A-Siren app that residents use to claim one of more than 170 tsunami sirens to ensure they are functioning and that necessary batteries have not been stolen from the equipment.

The Adopt-A-Siren campaign on Oahu. Image courtesy of http://sirens.honolulu.gov/

Additionally, government officials in Seattle have used the technology to launch Adopt-A-Drain, where residents can claim one of the city’s 80,000 storm drains and maintain it to ensure it is functioning properly and not clogged.

“Technology is making it possible to fundamentally reframe the function of government, in a way that can actually scale by strengthening civil society,” Pahlka says in her TED Talk. “And, there’s a generation out there that has grown up on the Internet and they know it’s not that hard to do things together. We just have to architect the system the right way.”

Shining a Digital Light on Government Data

Creating a system that engages the machinery of government with technology is the focus of a first-time effort by the Colorado Secretary of State’s office.

Go Code Colorado is an apps challenge launched in March that makes government data more accessible and user-friendly so business owners can capitalize on it and help improve the state’s economy.

The challenge has pulled together teams of developers and entrepreneurs from across the state to solve business problems including:

• Business-site location
• Competitive landscape
• Access to capital
• Higher-education resources
• Business partners

Using real-world examples of issues faced by business owners and showcasing information available — but not easily accessible — has been an important part of the challenge, says Brian Gryth, program manager for the Business Intelligence Center with the Secretary of State’s office.

“We’re getting a lot of positive feedback and participation,” Gryth says. “Hearing the challenges the business community is facing made it tangible.”

A handful of chosen regional teams will present their work during a final competition on Friday, when judges will choose the most effective and relevant designs.

Teams of designers and developers have participated in Go Code Colorado since its launch in March. The apps challenge focuses on making government data more accessible and user-friendly so business owners can capitalize on it and help improve the state’s economy. (Courtesy of Virginia Stiles Photography)

Examples of the finalists’ work, include:

Team 5C01 — Developed an app for business partners

Like the Match.com of connecting nonprofits and for-profit businesses, this group’s app uses the list of registered Colorado nonprofits to verify a status and, through a matching algorithm, pairs businesses and nonprofits with similar cultures and goals.

Team StudentLink — Developed an app for higher-education resources

The app connects students and small businesses based on the students’ skill sets and the businesses’ requirements as well as location. It allows for immediate contact, eliminating a recruiter.

Team BizLink Colorado — Developed an app for business partners

The app helps businesses find other local service providers like accountants and landscapers. Business owners can search for and start using service providers.

Team Progress Local — Developed an app for business-site location

The app helps businesses gain exposure through the automated syndication of business listing data from the Secretary of State’s database, augmented by third-party APIs and enhanced by business owners.

The Go Code Colorado winning teams will receive cash awards and in-kind incentives. The final apps will be fully implemented by July 1.

Big Data Can Hold Big Government Responsible

While improving the economic landscape is the focus of Go Code Colorado, the Sunlight Foundation in Washington, D.C., has worked for years to create technology to improve government accountability.

The nonprofit, nonpartisan organization offers a variety of apps geared toward everything from exposing dark money in campaign ads to tracking legislation.

One app, Scout, even offers alerts for people tracking certain issues, says Tom Lee, director of Sunlight Labs, a department of the Sunlight Foundation.

“Scout is a sort of Google alerts for issues,” Lee says. “Here, we have people really interested in the Freedom of Information Act. Through the app, we set up an alert for any bills coming that touched part of the U.S. code where FOIA is defined. Recently, we got an alert that the FDA was putting forward a bill with a big FOIA exemption for drugs with clinical trials. We know other NGOs and groups interested in this and we reached out to them. They had no idea that the information was in the bill.

“That is a great example of what technology can enable by increasing the transparency in government and lowering the costs and oversight.”

Getting the 411

Groups across the country are capitalizing on a new generation of tech-savvy people interested in making government information and activities more accessible.

To do so, they are writing civic apps and developing other tools to create a government by the people, for the people in the 21st century.

Some groups include:

Sunlight Foundation — SunlightFoundation.com

The Sunlight Foundation is a nonpartisan, nonprofit group that advocates for open government and uses technology to improve government accountability.

Code for America — CodeForAmerica.org

Often dubbed the Peace Corps for geeks, Code for America is a nonprofit that helps residents and government use technology to solve community problems.

Data.gov — Data.gov

This is the home of federal, state and local data, tools and resources to conduct research, build apps, design data visualizations and more.

Project Open Data — http://project-open-data.github.io

The White House developed Project Open Data — a collection of code, tools and case studies — to help agencies unlock government data.

The Governance Lab @ NYU — TheGovLab.org

The GovLab builds, studies and implements technology for a collaborative, networked approach to government and processes.

Make a Difference

Do you want to help NASA track asteroids? Are you interested in making consumer safety reports and product recalls more accessible?

Check out challenge.gov. The site is a collection of challenge and prize competitions hosted by the federal government. The challenges include technical, scientific and creative competitions where the government is seeking solutions from the public.

Hack for the Government

Google will host a hackathon for government issues in Colorado May 17-18 in Denver.

The two-day event’s challenges won’t be made public until the event starts. Colorado and Wyoming are partnering with Google in the app challenge that offers a $5,000 top prize.

Colorado had a similar hackathon last year that led to creation of programs including Tutorgrape, which allows students to locate tutors in their communities.

For more information, visit www.govdevchallenge.com.

The post Public Data Brings ‘We the People’ Attitude to Technology appeared first on Treehouse Blog.