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Category Archives: Documentation

Roadmap and communications plan for “The Open Source Way”

Thursday, March 31, 2011

Having an open roadmap (and a communications plan is part of that) is a pretty integral part of running a community the open source way. Just as the idiom about the carpenter’s leaking roof, we have been going without a collaboratively written, working roadmap for “The Open Source Way“. To start that off, I am [...]

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Source repository for The Open Source Way

Friday, April 23, 2010

One of the goals of writing “The Open Source Way: Creating and nurturing communities of contributors” is to make a book that can be remixed for community work in any way someone needs, including customized branding and output to formats such as HTML, PDF, Epub, and so forth.  In making the book I did a [...]

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More on Publican

Thursday, April 1, 2010

When writing about the Practical Open Source Software Exploration textbook release, I had a bunch of extra thoughts about Publican that I wanted to separate out to its own post. My sense is that Publican is in good shape for groups to adopt and extend.1  For example, there was a recent discussion in a MeeGo [...]

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A better way to use Wikipedia in the classroom

Sunday, March 28, 2010

This is an idea I’ve said in presentations and in person over and over again, about time I give it a home. Where Wikipedia is a useful information source and starting place for deeper exploration beyond it’s reference-focused world, there is so much more that can be done with it to help teach the open [...]

Filed in Classroom, Fedora, TOS, Wiki | Comments (1)

Blowing open the doors to contributions

Tuesday, February 16, 2010

A few key pieces just fell in place and now we can easily open The Open Source Way for contributions. All the legal bits passed muster, and the new contribution policy explains the rules.  It’s simple enough – by contributing, you agree to put your contributions under the CC BY SA 3.0 Unported.  Read the [...]

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Config tweaks on TheOpenSourceWay.org

Friday, February 5, 2010

Thanks to folks for finding and pointing out the configuration problems on TheOpenSourceWay.org.  I’ve still got a BIND configuration to work out, I’ll be haunting #rhel this weekend looking for help. To get permissions to edit the wiki, I have put a human in the way (currently just me).  I’m working on getting up content [...]

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Community handbook – The Open Source Way

Tuesday, February 2, 2010

Introducing a community book written by a community. http://www.TheOpenSourceWay.org/wiki (read and participate) http://www.TheOpenSourceWay.org/book (HTML, HTML single page, PDF) This is a handbook for creating and nurturing communities of contributors.  It was originally thought of as a cookbook to provide recipes for enacting community the open source way.  It is released under the Creative Commons BY [...]

Filed in Community, Documentation, Fedora, FLOSS, Free Culture, Open Source | Comments (7)

How can we share some love about Red Hat with Wikipedia?

Monday, December 14, 2009

Wow, I just saw the saddest thing.  It’s a section of the Wikipedia article about Red Hat, listing programs and projects that Red Hat does in the free software and open source communities.  This is ‘programs and projects’ in the sense of, “Build a road is a project, build a freeway system is a program.”  [...]

Filed in Fedora, Red Hat, Wiki | Comments (5)

Updated technique for seeing git and directory status in bash prompt

Thursday, November 12, 2009

Just working with a git directory and noticed that whatever trick I was using to get the current git branch visible from my $PS1 variable in bash … stopped working.  In discussing if a man page for git(1) was incorrect on #fedora-devel, tmz pointed out to me why it worked that way (short version: refer [...]

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Calling out superrockstars considered harmful

Wednesday, November 11, 2009

Just a quick response to “Top Open Source technical writers on the Web”. First, I’m sure the intention was well-meant.  Thanks for trying to uplift open source technical writers. Second, I put in a comment response on the blog entry, which was more self-serving than helpful: Not sure what the metrics used are … but [...]

Filed in Community, Documentation, Fedora, FLOSS, Open Source | Comments (10)