Taught by a Terrible Disease

This interested me for several reasons.

• We are all going to have phases in life where we are disabled, either in comparison to the rest of the world or by our own definition.   It’s cool seeing how people creatively use technology to not only re-enable but to improve their interactions and experiences.
• As a remote team member for the last 10 years, I appreciate seeing how people are able to do their work from remote.  In this story, we read of how the professor’s teaching has improved by being remote from her class.
• Open source methodologies provides a way for massive improvements in accessibility through various hackability efforts, such as the Open Prosthetics Project.

Sometimes the only way to show educators is by immersing them in collaborative experiences where they learn personally the value of open participation, such as POSSE.  It makes them better able to help their students become open participants when the students see the learning and modelling from the instructor.

Early on a Saturday morning this July, Mel and I arrived at the Community Leadership Summit to help with setup. We found folks such as Amber Graner, Grant Bowman, and Jono Bacon working on the last morning touches for the day’s events.

When we walked up, the crew was rolling out two side-by-side, 30in by 8ft (72cm by 2.44m) sheets of white butcher paper.  Pen and ruler in hand and at Jono’s direction, they were making hash marks along the top edge.

“What’s this for?” I asked.

“We’re going to hang this on the wall for the BarCamp sessions,” someone explained to me.  “We’re marking a grid on this paper, then people write their session titles on these papers and hang them up using sticky-wall-putty stuff.”  The ‘papers’ were little 5in by 7in (13cm by 18cm) with a small Community Leadership Summit logo across the long edge.  There was still plenty of room to write, but it gave the pages a nice consistency and crispness:

I was able to quickly get the vision in my head of what Jono had in mind.  It would be a bit of polish that, for some of the audience and especially anyone new to the BarCamp format, gives a feeling of professionalism and attention-to-quality.  When people walk up and see the session grid all laid out, it is an attraction.  In the end, it looked about as I figured:

The irony is, a few weeks before I was on #cls on irc.freenode.net, where I told Jono a bit about how Fedora does BarCamp days.  For the session grid, I said, “We mark columns on a blank wall with blue masking tape, because blue is better.  Then we write our session title on 8.5 by 11 (A4) paper, taping it to the wall with another small piece of tape.  This makes it easy to move sessions around, combine them, etc.”  It’s also inexpensive, quick and easy, and gets the job done so we can move on to other things more quickly … such as having the sessions.  Here’s an example from a FUDCon:

There are a few more good pictures to look at, including people rearranging talks (that’s me in the middle, left forefinger on an item), a tight view of the finished schedule, arranging sessions in action, another view of the schedule showing all the masking tape glory, and someone pitching a talk in front of the in-progress schedule.

As it happened, I ended up finishing the grid, using one of the 5×7 papers as a guide.  I made a few suggestions along the way, but primarily, Jono had the vision, and I could see the value to be gained in following him through the process.  For example, while drawing row lines with a long ruler, I had a chance to reflect on this situation I was in the middle of.  In essence, I began writing this article at that very moment.  For another, I wanted folks there to know I could go along with the flow and help them enact their vision rather than spend effort advocating for my own.

For folks like me, the Fedora process has appeal.  First of all, it doesn’t require me to be there at 6:30 am to execute it.  It’s low resource usage, low technology, and a low barrier to entry.  Everyone could see how the sticking of signs was done, for example, and people could move things around, add and combine, without having to ask permission or how-to.  Sessions weren’t even combined on to a new sheet; the two or three were stacked together in one time slot.  The process invites contribution.

For another large group of people, the extra polish that Jono was doing provides the something special that makes them feel they are where they belong.  The central leadership, single vision accessible to all present, and sense of being ready-to-roll is important to those people.  It invites participation.

All of these ways of being and doing are natural, expected, and desired.  Diversity breeds innovation, quality, and a wider pool to fail … and learn from it.

This led in to a week at OSCON where I did a bit of thinking and talking about how people could be choosing their Linux distro.  Not through the idea of finding the “team” where they can be a “fan”.  More an idea of putting forward our best faces, in authentic stories written, told, and captured.  Maybe that’s the sort of service Linux.com DistroCental can provide – a way that shows people new to Linux what the day-to-day of being in one community and another is actually like.

California love, y’all.  Peace out.

In reading it, a number of inaccuracies and old school misconceptions leapt off the page at me (ouch!).  Unlike many modern online news and magazine outlets, there was no way to respond to the article, either in a comments section or to the author.  In the tradition of pundits everywhere, I’ll use my own bully pulpit to ask …

Have people not heard of Wikipedia?  Five minutes research there would have debunked most of the mistakes this author made.   The assumptions and tone made it sound as if he just asked a few people in the cubicles around him, “What’s the story with this Java stuff anyway?  What is open source?”  Unfortunately, the author, Eugene Bukoveczky, admirably free lances from Nova Scotia between bouts of wood chopping and bicycle riding (sounds like my kind of dude!), so he cannot blame his office mates.

Here’s a quick list of the inaccuracies, in the author’s own words, with the comments I would have put on his own article page if Investopedia (oh irony!) allowed them.

• ‘(S)o-called “open source” Linux software’ — When writers use the term “so-called” and then wrap the so-called term in quotes, it’s a way of double-insulating themselves from something that they don’t understand and fear will taint them by association.  Yeah, all that in the first sentence of the article.  FAIL by fear and lack of understandiing.
• “… Linux, a freebie operating system produced by legions of spare-time code junkies fueled by lashings of hot coffee, Red Bull, Jolt Cola or some other stimulant to tweak the creative juices” — We suppose at one time that was a semi-accurate description of Linux coding, but it’s been over fifteen years since actual Linux companies arose and began paying actual programmers actual money to do actually amazing work.  If you look at who actually contributes to the Linux kernel these days, you’ll see many familiar names that are i) public companies, and ii) doing quite well for some time.  Understanding that seems within the purview of an investment writer. Beyond that, most features of Linux that are crucial to success, from the file system to the graphical display, are coded by professionals doing real professional work … professionally.  Not sure about all the caffeine, but I can personally assure Eugene that I’ve met many developers, they are plenty creative to start with and caffeine is not what really drives them.  Finally, it’s a small point but an important one — Linux is not free-as-in-freebie, it is free-as-in-freedom.  The same kinds of freedoms that allow someone to call themselves an investment journalist without ever having to understand what they are writing about.  Again, all discoverable with reading a few Wikipedia articles.  FAIL by lack of clue and basic research skills.
  
• “Corporations get to profit from their efforts by giving away a cleaned-up package of this code, and making money from supplying service and maintenance contracts to their users.” — While the second half is roughly correct where it applies to just one or two open source business models, the first part is just silly.  Open source software companies are not typically freeloading on the backs of poor community members. Those corporations are contributing in the actual open source project, the code is already cleaned-up by the time it comes to QA efforts.  Any bug fixes from there go back to the upstream (rather, they should, if one follows an actual open source business model), so everyone gets the “cleaned-up … code”, not just the customers.  FAIL by misunderstanding what an open source business model actually is.
  
• “Linux has managed to capture about a 23% market share of the server market.” — Another assertion without reference or meaning.  Which server market?  Looking at the latest Netcraft count of just web servers, open source clearly dominates, with Linux a sizeable portion.  Animation studios, such as Pixar, Disney, and Dreamworks?  95% of their servers are Linux.  No “dominant” Microsoft servers there.  FAIL by assumption and misunderstanding generic data.
  
• “Sun has championed Java, the programming language preferred by most Linux users …” — While I’m sure “most Linux users” would disagree, and there is plenty of data to show what languages are preferred, that is not the true irony of this sentence.  The irony is, Java is the programming language preferred by enterprise and corporate developers who are not working on open source at all.  FAIL by misunderstanding enterprise market.
  
• “The move (Oracle acquiring Sun) has also being interpreted as the first step in a much needed consolidation process for the entire Linux market.”  Assertion without reference, and his inability to understand and analyze accurately makes this a very dubious statement.  “Much needed”? Says who?  FAIL by assumption.
  

Much failure all around.  I am now stupider for reading the article, and hope my own writing effort has raised my intelligence score back up a point or two.

Why?  Because they must provide textbooks for all children according to the state constitution, and they do so in the classroom, but don’t give them out to take home because of damage and loss being charged to the school when they retire the books every 6, 7 years.  But students in this district are also issued laptops, so they use the online version of the textbook instead.  However, the online version is a no-cost add on to the purchase of the physical, dead tree textbook … not the other way around.

That’s right, for every dead tree textbook they can get online access for one student.

‘Jay Diskey, executive director of the Association of American Publishers school division, … characterized his industry’s transition from paper to computer-based products as a “slow movement.”‘

Got it. The rest of the world is moving to free-as-in-freedom and open content, distributed cheaply via the Internet and digital media.  Laptops are under $300.  Everything a school district spends on dead tree books could buy a laptop and city wide wireless for every student.  And the publishing industry is moving slowly.

Association of American Publishers school division, welcome to the Jurrasic era. See you in the fossils!

Anyway, Ruth’s video is a great juxtaposition of the various hard formats (paper through Betamax to MicroSD flash) that have gone by the wayside over the years, and a reminder of what is at stake with document formats holding our copyrighted content hostage:

Happy Document Freedom Day!