In the Fedora Ambassador gig, at nearly every event there is an opportunity to get a view of the intersection of Fedora, open source, and the many backgrounds, experiences, and questions of other people at the event. Take last Fall’s OSBootCamp as an example. This series of no-cost events was put on by an organization […]
Category Archives: Open Source
Intersections — “Open source lifestyle: classroom to career and beyond” from FOSSLC (was OSBootCamp)
06-Apr-09The last day of CUE 2009 I was stuck by the pure awesomeness of one of the final presentations in the open source pavilion. It was titled Intro and Demo Open Source (Free) Software Programs for Educators! (found 1/3rd of the way down the conference sessions page). The three presenters, Shin, Katalin, and Branka, were […]
If you happen to be a user of Apache Hadoop, or want to use Cloudera‘s cloud software, it is available as an RPM from the company’s website. Oh, with a long set of installation instructions that include extracting RPMs from Sun’s Java 6 installer. I thought, wouldn’t it be nice if you could just do […]
After we discovered, along with our pals from the Linux Foundation, that the Fedora Project didn’t have any one to represent Fedora on a community contributions panel at the Collaboration Summit, the right folks at LF got together with us and sorted out what we needed to do. I volunteered to represent Fedora, and got […]
My favorite thing to hear from the mouth of Red Hat’s CEO Jim Whitehurst is (to paraphrase), “Red Hat is here to help customers becomes contributors to the projects that matter to them.” In that vein, I’ve made a few submissions of a talk/keynote, “Participate or Die“, including one to this year’s Red Hat Summit […]
Moodle as a killer K-12 app
06-Mar-09We talk about killer applications, the killer app, which are programs so good they change the nature of a situation. Email is long considered a general audience killer app, when you think about the impact it has had over the years. For educators, is Moodle the killer app? Sure looks like it. This is written […]
Stumbling around in the K-12 space
06-Mar-09This week I’m fulfilling a talk obligation that David Nalley and I set up last Fall, to talk about the advantages of bringing a culture of participation to the classroom. In particular, this is the Computer-Using Educators (CUE) conference, with teachers and technology coordinators from K-12 districts across the country. K-12 is short-hand for primary […]
Failure as the secret of success
28-Feb-09People get mad at the Fedora Project all the time because something important to them fails to work. “It used to work, it worked for a long time, and now it’s broken!” They look at an idea that we tried out, failed, and learned from, and don’t understand how we could let that get in […]
Hey Fedora contributors! Have you got a hot idea you are willing to mentor a student on for this coming Summer? Post it on the Summer coding project ideas for 2009 wiki page. That is our premier list for the Google Summer of Code 2009. For good advice, read this article of advice for mentoring […]
A heads up to anyone interested in being a Summer coding mentor or a student, the fine folks at Google’s Open Source Program Office have updated the frequently asked questions for the 2009 Summer of Code: http://code.google.com/opensource/gsoc/2009/faqs.html Read that before asking a bunch of questions on some mailing list!