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Running a student contributing program the open source way

16-Sep-10

This is a very exciting opportunity where free and open source software (FOSS) and other organizations meet for mutual benefit and the advancement of open source participation. Who might get to take advantage of this?  Perhaps some people who do not yet even know how they can, as a part of their day job in […]

Do you like knocking on doors?

15-Sep-10

As it happens, I don’t.  I’m a bit terrified by it. But many people relish the opportunity to help someone solve a problem they didn’t even know they had, or did know but didn’t know who to turn to.  Or they have it solved, but in an unsatisfactory way.  That’s where the people who will […]

Sad mad Dad feels bad and what else is new?

13-Sep-10

Feeling 3x worse than before I hammered on the kids. Build up and relief of anger rarely feels good. I KNOW the girls can see the build up, as I move, sometimes over the course of _days_ from reasonable, nice, conciliatory, consensus seeking to upset, sad, frustrated, and vocally angry.  Temper still as short as […]

Understanding computer scientists

13-Sep-10

This the question I’m trying to answer: How can a computer scientist do research without using and producing only free and open source software? This question is the corollary that follows from this hypothesis: Free and open source software (FOSS) is the only way to produce and use software that follows the scientific method. There […]

It’s time to help organize the next session of Fedora Students Contributing aka Summer Coding

25-Aug-10

We haven’t formally picked a new name for Fedora Summer Coding, but we need to, and ‘Students Contributing’ has the advantages so far.  We’re not sticking to summer in one hemisphere and we’re already doing projects that are beyond code.  Students Contributing is descriptive of what we’re doing. This post is about the upcoming session […]

Community building is down to Earth – a setiQuest Summit update

14-Aug-10

Spent the middle part of today in a working session, lead by IDEO facilitators, to tackle a few of the big questions in front of setiQuest and the Seti Institute. The two big questions were generally: How do we enable developers and designers to contribute back to setiQuest in a way that benefits all involved? […]

SETICON and setiQuest Summit this Saturday

11-Aug-10

This week I got a great surprise, my friend Jeff scored me an invite to the setiQuest Summit, held this weekend at SETICON in Santa Clara.  The excitement is that, after all these years, the SETI team is open sourcing their code, including the algorithms used to scan telescope data for signs of extraterrestrial life.  […]

Pondering a solution for a K12 strategy, or Treating our community leadership team like a FOSS project

09-Aug-10

There’s no denying the simple fact.  Our team can’t and won’t have explosive growth. Part of the way to scale ourselves we have always done, which is to engage with other community leaders and leverage each other.  Recently I had a new idea that we could fill out our circle on education and open source […]

Yay! More new people to play with

09-Aug-10

This morning I caught Simon Phipps’ dent about a 451 CAOS Theory report by Matthew Aslett, “The golden age of open source?“  In that report, Aslett describes our arriving at a fourth stage of commercial open source.  This fourth stage is highlighted by a return to community and collaboration.  Examples given are ones where different […]

Happy birthday Ray

08-Aug-10

Author Ray Bradbury turns 90 years old on 22 August 2010.  The Planetary Society is presenting him with a huge birthday card with good wishes from people such as you and I.  You can post your birthday greeting for him until 9 August. http://www.planetary.org/special/fromearth/bradbury The greetings are limited to 250 characters, and I took advantage […]