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Show ’em how participation is done with a talk at the Red Hat Summit or JBoss World; deadline extended to 16 March

09-Mar-09

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 and JBoss World in September in Chicago.

The call for papers deadline has been extended a week to 16 March.  If you’d like to get in front of potential contributors and help them to get to the next level in open source, then submit a talk in one of the ‘Summit or ‘World tracks.

Filed in Business, Enterprise, Events, Fedora, FLOSS, JBoss, Linux, Open Source, Red Hat, Talks | | Comments (1) »

Moodle as a killer K-12 app

06-Mar-09

We 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 while sitting in a talk at CUE 2009 about Moodle, with Michelle Moore, of Remote Learner.  I missed her intro, but she is clearly a trainer and experienced with presenting Moodle to educators.  A trainer of trainers.  She has an example Moodle site up on the screen, and is having the audience find what is wrong with it — spinning animated logo, video box is too big, content area is a bit too big, etc.  To fix it, she is using the various edit tools, which ends up demonstrating how easy Moodle is to use.

She is also enticing the audience with another of my favorite tech talk ideas — keeping notes from the session directly in a wiki page about the course.  Michelle asked the audience for volunteers to edit the wiki and keep notes; “… don’t worry, Moodle will tell you if someone got there first and is already editing it.”

There are about 25 seats with computers plus 25 more, all full, and another 25 of us on the floor.  This is the same lab running as an LTSP cluster, thanks to Revolution Linux.  I wonder how many folks recognize they are running a Linux desktop?

Note to Fedora Ambassadors — Steve Hargadon used to run Fedora on these thin clients, and would happily do so again.  If we show up and help work the next K12OpenSource.com event, I bet we won’t have any problem getting these using Fedora again.  That puts the running desktop in front of several hundred or more educators at every edutech conference.  Next up?  NECC June 28 to July 1 in Washington, DC.

The K-12 community seems to be wide open for participation from a project such as Fedora.  The message I’m bringing to CUE is about the culture of participation.  I want to see a classroom running Sugar on a Stick as a testing operation — isn’t there a 4th grade classroom out there with access to a computer lab that wants to test SoaS?  So many possibilities …

I’m also hunting for K-12 teachers or tech coordinators who can program Python and work as part of the North America XO developers program.  I’ve a few good leads so far, will carry those through to the next step.

Filed in Classroom, Education, Events, Fedora, FLOSS, Free Culture, Open Source | | Comments Off

Stumbling around in the K-12 space

06-Mar-09

This 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 schooling in the United States, standing for Kindergarten (~5 years old) to the end of High School (12th grade ~18 years old.)

In this country, there is a stark contrast between K-12 and the secondary schools, that is, college and universities.  K-12 educators are plagued by extremely thin resources, a load of rules and regulations enforcing standards that are a requirement to getting money, and a constantly changing landscape of a real world their students live in.  They remind me of a group of people constantly in start-up mode, doing amazing things with almost no money.

You would think that free and open source software is a perfect fit here, and everyone agrees who understands.  “We cannot get to 1:1 computing without Linux,” Steve Hargadon is saying to anyone who will listen. Unfortunately, getting the attention of the actual budget makers, the school districts and school boards, is much harder.  These are people driven by a higher set of regulations where techology is just a tool, but it must be the right tool from their perspective.  With school boards made up of local business leaders, the focus on what is the right real world solution for students ends up mirroring their business expectation.  Kids are taught to use PowerPoint because the perception is this is a useful life skill.

Due to laws such as the ironically named “No Child Left Behind” act there is a focus on testing and test preparation.  Teaching for this testing takes the path of least resistence, and the proprietary software companies have such traction here they are the apparently frictionless pathway.

But here at CUE are the actual people in the trenches, teaching students, providing techology solutions, so if there is anywhere a grassroots groundswell can start, it is as a revolution amongst educators.

Thursday afternoon I blew in to town a few scant hours before my talk, got settled at the hotel, and made my way to the conference.  My talk, “Using the open source two-way street in the classroom”, was held in the open source pavilion.  This was my first surprise.  Steve and other cohorts had worked over the years from being a small table in a corner to having a huge presence across the back of the conference.  The K12OpenSource.com email garden is running an LTSP cluster of Ubuntu, thanks to Revolution Linux.  The open source pavilion is another set of thin clients, in the same network but separated for control by iTALC, a classroom desktop session monitoring tool.

I got there just in time to listen to Megan from ISKME, which runs OER Commons, an open education resources clearinghouse — good stuff for finding, rating, and reusing open courseware from around the world.  Right away I was seeing there is a lot more support for open source and open content in the K-12 world.  Fortunately for me, Megan revealed that contributing back to the open stream is not as common of an idea, so my talk wasn’t going to be entirely old news.

In the talk, I started with a trick I learned from Max Spevack, to ask about the knowledge of the people in the room, then set the understanding about what open source and free culture are.  From there I explained how the skills used apply to many parts of life, and that contributing and collaboration are much more than code.  Then I gave some examples and ideas for how to turn a classroom from consumers to participants.  My main focus was on a low-barrier to entry open content tool, Wikipedia.  By working their way up from editing to authoring to owning pages in Wikipedia, a classroom can gain a collaborative underpinning while learning, reporting on what they are learning, and doing something that is going to live on rather than be in a shoebox in the attic.

So far, the best things have been having a good discussion with Steve about how Fedora can be involved with K-12 Open Source in other shows, such as NECC in Washington, DC on June 28  – July 1.  This is where the Fedora Ambassadors can choose our own agenda — if we want to focus on K-12 in the United States, we can.  I’m going to talk more with Steve this week, and invite him to come to a North America Ambassadors meeting soon to discuss how we can help him.

Another great conversation was with Benoit St. Andre, of Revolution Linux.  He showed me some of the slicker aspects of their LTSP clustering, and explained why they built in response to real school district needs.  For example, they have a district in Canada that has 5000 desktops running thin client Linux.  Standard LTSP tooling didn’t work at that scale.  Their clustering allows them to have 40 servers provide LTSP services to those 5000 desktops, a scalability otherwise unheard of in LTSP circles.  Fortunately, they are intimitely involve in the K12 Linux project, so all of that code is working its way upstream.

On Friday, I’m going to attend some talks, sit for a while in the open source pavilion, and talk to the many, many software vendors looking for those who are open source or who build on an open source platform.

(This post disappeared from my WordPress instance.  Very odd.  So I reposted it.  Thank you Fedora Planet for having a copy in your feed.)

Filed in Classroom, Education, Events, Fedora, FLOSS, Free Culture, Open Source, Presentations, Talks | | Comments Off

Failure as the secret of success

28-Feb-09

People 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 to a release.

This comes up in my house, with my daughters and wife, who hate to fail.  HATE IT. I know where this comes from.  Even when you try your supportive best, it’s easy to focus on the success and the praise.  How often do we praise failure?

I’ve been telling them, telling Fedorans, telling anyone who will listen that the secret to our success is in fact our failure.  You cannot learn without failure.  Even when you dock a massive fail boat, you at least learn after all is done what not to do next time.

Last night I caught a shortened version of a Honda documentary, available here on youtube.com (or search here.)  The moment in the video that grabbed me initially is Indycar driver Danica Patrick talking about racing:

You’re driving your car and you feel frightened a little bit.  We bump up against that feeling as much as we can to try and push that limit further, and get comfortable there, and then push it again, so, you know, you’re constantly on the brink of crashing because that’s the fastest.

In an engineering-oriented organization such as Honda, “Failure is a by-product of pushing the envelope,” as one engine designer puts it.  It’s a culture that goes back to the organizational founding, as explained by Takeo Fukui, President and CEO of Global Honda, when talking about Soichiro Honda’s ideas of trial and error.  “We can only make fantastic advances in technology through many failures.”

What we do to make free/libre and open source software better is a rapid a process of fail, learn, succeed, push the envelope, fail, learn, succeed, push the envelope, ad infinitum.  Fedora happens to be particularly good at this, more willing than some, more like Danica Patrick, to be frightened, get comfortable, then push the limits again.

(Post updated with spelling correction and being added to the Red Hat category.)

(Post updated with new links to video, as previous links had expired.)

Filed in Business, Design, Fedora, FLOSS, Leadership, Open Source, Red Hat | | Comments (14) »

Mentors with ideas – Google Summer of Code is a’calling

27-Feb-09

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 organizations, and remember — be specific … no, be general.

We need lots of mentors to review proposals.  If you are interested in mentoring in general or in specific, with or without your own ideas, please add yourself to our mentors list for 2009.  Some students will have their own ideas, or need your help to expand on an idea.  This is a key form of participation.

If you are generally interested in the idea of mentoring these or similar efforts, our Summer coding special interest group is overseeing those efforts.

Filed in Fedora, FLOSS, Open Source, Red Hat, Summer Coding | | Comments Off

Polarity of child raising

26-Feb-09

It seems to me there are two fundamental world views that drive parenting.  Depending on which you subscribe to, it says how you are going to make many choices from there.

  1. Your goal is to prepare your child for a rich and abundant life in the real world.
  2. Your goal is to let your individual child blossom in her way, in her time, knowing a firm grounding in her family and roots prepares her to find her best path at each step of life.

If you follow the first guideline, then you make preschool decisions that affect college choices, are working hard to make money that supports a rich and abundant life, and want your children to attend the best schools with the best programs.  You may not have spent as much of a quantity of time with your children, you focus on quality, and figure that their rich and abundant life that they’ll lead forever is the best thing you can do for them.

Or something like that.

If you follow the second guideline, you treat your children like a slow cooked meal.  Each ingredient of their lives is cultivated from the ground, locally and appropriately.  You follow the schooling they want, letting them set their own pace and break away slowly from the family constellation at a pace that suits each child.  You may work less or for less money or make some other compromise that puts the most amount of time in the hands of your family, aware that the future years are going to be unknown but most likely, they’ll be little stars moving in their orbits by then.

The first guideline is most like the guideline that our society follows.  That is, “The norm and the expectation.”  Some people follow it by clear choice, others because they haven’t thought of any other way.  Following the second guideline is more rare in the US culture, although perhaps a little less so than even a decade ago.

I was contemplating this as I looked at the International Baccalaureate site. I’m clearly in the second guideline camp, but I felt mixed emotions looking at the little baccalaureates from around the world.  How happy they look!  I be they feel really a part of something! What bright, shiny futures they’ll have!

This emotion has to do a bit of battle with the part of me that knows these children are forming a new constellation with new people precisely because they were forced from their first constellation, their family circle, at an early age.  Forced from the breast, from the family bed to the crib, from the crib to their own bedroom, from their bedroom to the nanny, nanny takes them to preschool, preschool starts a bond with same age people that is shattered in college, and after that … well, the real world starts.  A real world that is in fact nothing like those first 18 years, except where they repeat family choices with their own future families.

It’s honestly hard not to feel I’m failing in part with my children by not teaching them everything now that they’ll eventually need.  Even as I watch their peers in other lifestyles learn so much more at such an earlier age than I ever did.  If it weren’t for the pioneering experience of other homeschoolers to bolster me when the cold chill goes down my spine in the night, I don’t know how I’d make it through to the morning.

Filed in Art of Living, Education, Family, Freedom, Homeschool | | Comments Off

A bit FADdish — Docs wiki pages reorganization

23-Feb-09

This weekend while I was at SCaLE 7x for Fedora, stumbling but progressing on the Fedora 10 User Guide at the Fedora Activity Day (FAD), virtual-FAD work was occurring in #fedora-docs.  The team was busy getting at least the same amount of effort done on cleaning, organizing, and fixing the Docs wiki presence.

We intend to show ourselves as another example of how a project can organize itself on the wiki, but we have a ton of crufty content to work through.  The work was done by Susan Lauber, who has been working with the Packaging Committee and Docs for some weeks on cleaning up both groups’ wiki presence, and John J. McDonough, a very active Docs contributor with a real clue how much better things can be in Docs.  Definitely Golden Shovel of Wiki Gardening Award time!

Filed in Fedora, Wiki | Tagged , | Comments (1) »

It’s more than a passing FAD — the bad

23-Feb-09

Continuing the thought output from the first North American Fedora Activity Day (FAD) at SCaLE 7x, this post details the mistakes that we made and so should be learning from.

  • Yes, the turn out was good and I said it is stronger than I realized, but … where are my West Coast homies?   I tend to be cynical here, so please pardon if I am offensive to any West Coast Fedorans … but either there aren’t as many of us, or you are a very quiet, homebody bunch.  (Of course, I know we’re just starting the New North American Ambassadors and I need to give Cali a chance.  I know this.  I do.  It is hard to be patient.)
  • I think I set too high of an expectation around the User Guide, and then I didn’t deliver that.  I forget that in the mix of setting aggressive goals they also have to be obtainable.  Meaning, make them aggressive within the realm of possible.
  • Didn’t test my tools before the day, so I lost at least an hour and bottlenecked on people trying to get it working.  I may have had it all solved if I’d tested some days before.
  • We didn’t have roles defined, so we ended up all trying to fill them.  Rather than making individual progress at varying degrees, we ended up making very little progress in the activities while we all responded to the ringing doorbells, wiring needs, hiding food, etc. We clearly need one person responding to whoever walks in the door, routing them in the right direction.  Each activity needs a clear leader who is not distracted with all the other happenings and needs.  The overall activity day needs someone who can troubleshoot and do whatever it takes to keep things smooth, from passing out food to arranging network fixes.  This facilitator can also track the tasks from a meta-level.
  • Schedule wasn’t written on the wall in plain site, nor were the specific tasks.  We also didn’t have complete task tables on the wiki ready to go (when the network was available …)
  • Long, large gauge wire extension cords and power strips weigh a bunch so don’t fit a light-weight Ambassador Event Box, but boy do we need them.  Maybe we can just have each Ambassador have a mini-kit that includes them, then several of us bring it locally.  That did happen, but not until after we’d had the hotel drop in an expensive loaner.
  • It was a bad idea to try to work VoIP at a conference … without proper hardware … and no hard network drop … using the conference wireless.  In fact, that was just a FAIL.  (We did talk on the channel, but used Jon Stanley’s cell phone for most of it.  When we did get a mic hooked up, I realized it wouldn’t play the audio back because that would normally be the undesired state (to hear yourself talking in our own ear.))  The VoIP attempts were quite distracting, although it was nice to have some chats with folks once we got things working.  It may have been more useful for people at remote … if all they wanted was to hear me talk, since we couldn’t get the room included.

That is the list that Clint and I wrote up.  Let us know if you think of any other bad parts, we’ll be making some sort of a wiki page of procedures form this.  If I think of any more, I’ll do a redux post.

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It’s more than a passing FAD — the good

21-Feb-09

Writing the next day, it’s a bit hard to put myself back in the mindset of Friday morning and remember why, by 10 am, I was chewing nails, an idiom which here means, pretty angry and gnashing teeth over it.  But I think it’s pretty important for me to air the parts of the event that did work and the parts that did not. Take it with a grain of salt and pinch of butter.

To follow the meme properly, this post starts off with a raw list of what was good personally, for the FAD, for Fedora, and for the wider communities.

The Good

  • Fonts were packaged.  Yay!  New packagers, yay!
  • User Guide was branched for F10 and we got a half-dozen chapters updated.
  • The turnout was impressive for a first time event in an area with a relatively small Fedora presence.  We had 20 chairs around a U-shaped table setup, and during the day those chairs were most often 75% full, and sometimes barely a chair was left, people still standing.  So, we had from five to twenty-five people in the room throughout the day, with the norm being a dozen.
  • A few people walked in the door without FAS accounts or any track record of contributing, and moved from interested participant to document writer and/or font packager by the end of the day.
  • Having kids along keeps my heart sane.
  • Met a couple of people face-to-face for the first time.
  • The Fedora community in California is clearly stronger than I realized.
  • Very social, many good conversations.
  • We were close to an open source healthcare symposium, so David Nalley and I went to meet some ISVs there, Clear Health and Web Reach.  We took a chance to pester Zenoss folks about getting packages in to Fedora.
  • I got to talk with Rob Tiller for a while, who is talking this evening on patents and open source after the Bilski decision.  I love lawyers with serious clue.
  • Found some bugs in the ‘python-mwlib’ package that we use to render DocBook XML from MediaWiki, and got some movement on the fix.
  • We did it!  It was conceived, planned, announced, and executed.  New people showed up, many more than signed up, and it was a success with enough failures to learn from.

When I think of more, I’ll do a redux post.  Until then, time to list out some of the bad …

Filed in Events, Fedora, Linux | Tagged , , | Comments (1) »

User:Kwade merges in to User:Quaid

17-Feb-09

I’ve long had two accounts in the Fedora Account System (FAS).  My online free and open community nick has been ‘quaid’ since I started at VA Linux Systems in 2001, and my ID ‘kwade’ has been my corporate login since 1997.  I appreciate having separate identities, and in all other locations have kept my logins and etc. separate.

However, when the Fedora Project was started, the CVS was internal to Red Hat, and in that environment my username is ‘kwade’.    Somewhere along the way I registered and began using ‘quaid’ so I could have e.g. quaid.fedorapeople.org.  This is important as most people know me as quaid, so send me email to quaid (at) fedoraproject (dot) org, and so forth.  I have maintained both accounts, and in some cases had permissions for a project in one ID and not another, so had to switch around within different Trac instances, etc.  In addition, Fedora Infrastructure guidelines now require people to have a single user account unless there are special circumstances.

As a kind favor, Toshio merged my permissions to various FAS groups in to my ‘quaid’ account, and along with some other jiggling, I am now ‘quaid’ everywhere that matters for Fedora.  If you’ve ever been confused by this in the past, be confused no longer.  From wiki user page to Fedora talk, I am now just ‘quaid’.  Time to order new Fedora business cards!

Filed in Fedora, Online life | | Comments (1) »