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Category Archives: Free Culture

Open source curriculum at Idea Fab Labs

11-Aug-15

Recently I’ve begun volunteering at Idea Fab Labs here in Santa Cruz, with two specific goals — expanding the space to include free/open source software ethos and hacking, and helping all these awesome makers with questions and reality around the open source way. Tip — I got quite fired-up to do this from Ruth Suehle’s […]

SCALE 13x – no talking, all walking, and a great ally skills workshop

10-Mar-15

For the first time in-I-can’t-remember I didn’t submit a talk to SCALE, so it was with a different personal energy that I attended SCALE 13x on 19 to 22 February this year. Not having a do-or-die public-speaking-scheduled-thing in front of me allowed for a more relaxed state of mind. Yet it was strange to not […]

The virtuous water cycle – updating an old analogy

29-May-13

When we talk about how code moves in the free/open source software ecosystem, we often use the upstream/downstream analogy. In this analogy, code flows from an upstream project downstream to the users and vendors. Users use. Vendors package and support. When anyone contributes their ideas (innovations) and code back to the project, it is said […]

Response to ‘Meaning of “the only thing that could have happened”’

16-Jul-12

After I setup John D. Smith’s account on The Open Source Way wiki, I followed up to look at his website and discovered he is one of the authors (with Etienne Wenger and Nancy White) of “Digital Habitats: stewarding technology for communities”. This is a book out of the communities of practice milieu, and in […]

Thinking about an audiocast for The Open Source Way

06-May-11

OK, so we’ve got this interesting, upstream, canonical, referenceable community to write cleverly and talk about the principles of the open source way. Also, hey, let’s gather some details on how to implement these principles! But *yawn*, pardon me, even a genius can’t make that prose very interesting. It needs some stories. A big part […]

Sadly skipping SCALE 9x, too

25-Feb-11

Similar to how things worked out for me and FUDCon this year, I have to cancel attending SCALE 9x this year. I had a talk to give, “Decentralized Collaboration with Open Source Tools: Technical and Cultural Implementation“, which thankfully Robyn Bergeron is giving on Sunday, and I’m sure it will be at least three times […]

Banner mistake for The Open Source Way website

19-Feb-11

One of the goals of writing a community how-to book was to write it by a community using the methods described in the book. This includes using 100% free and open source software to create and maintain the book, do the work of the community, and run the web presences. Of course, the source for […]

Community Leadership Summit (CLS) West success from a distance

15-Jan-11

Today is the Community Leadership Summit West (CLS West) in Daly City. I had to cancel attending today, which meant I was able to put the mantle of talking about The Open Source Way (book and methodology) to my main-man Mark Terranova.  I met Mark at the first CLS in 2009, we’ve become fast friends, […]

FAIFcast thoughts

06-Jan-11

Finally got myself to listen to a “Free as in Freedom” oggcast (aka “faifcast”), specifically the newest episode 0x06.  (I’m not a big audiocast listener normally, to really make it worthwhile I have to be actually listening, and I don’t have a lot of deadtime in my day where my brain is unoccupied such as […]

Open Source Bridge and the evolution of the Catalyst in Communities talk

24-May-10

Working on the next evolution of my talk “Being a Catalyst in Communities – The science behind the open source way” for Open Source Bridge next week in Portland.  It was originally given as a SCALE 8X keynote, and it’s mostly me representing Red Hat.  I’m busy reworking the slides based on feedback I got […]