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One developer's road: Programming and mental illness by @gsequencer | https://t.co/XHt68o6sqZ pic.twitter.com/V3MgItefBh

— Open Source Way (@opensourceway) December 13, 2018

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How to set up WordPress on a Raspberry Pi by @ben_nuttall @Raspberry_Pi | https://t.co/GmgZBpDrdQ pic.twitter.com/EHC0UAgoiY

— Open Source Way (@opensourceway) November 23, 2018

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Abundance's own rentier parasites?

The Blog

Antistatist technologies enthusiast and accomplished writer Kevin Carson exposed the real behavior of corporations that claim to triumph latent network-based management and production made possible with new technologies.

In a defiant post called "Uber: NOT the Networked Successor Economy You’re Looking For", Carson pointed out that in reality, corporations such as Apple, Uber and Lyft do not create anything. Rather, they stifle other people's creativity and undermine humanity's yearning for an alternative economy driven by networks and peer-to-peer production. Instead of creating anything, such corporations make network technologies available that could have made corporate hierarchies and the state obsolete, yet then they extract rent from them by getting the state to protect them by enforcing the suffocating idea of intellectual property. According to Carson, intellectual property is being used as a last-ditch defense by management hierarchies who feel that new network technologies will oust them. These organizations spend less time inventing new technologies that could empower networks and individuals and make them independent of hierarchy, than they spend trying to maintain dependency so that people will not be able to use such technologies without going first to such corporations. This situation was not necessary, Carson argues, and it will become increasingly apparent that it is not necessary as a result of new network technologies that shall "render the corporate form entirely superfluous". Carson pointed to "the rise of the open-source hardware, micromanufacturing and peer production movements" as the best observation supporting this conclusion. While today, one cannot obtain the needed technologies to network without first going to a corporation, this is the result of deliberate steps keep to corporations in power. The entire current global mode of production has been corrupted by corporate hierarchies desperate to entrench themselves, in order to extract rent from works that they do not rightfully own - the most apparent of which today is the Internet itself.

Destroy and remake education?: The BlogA recent open response to an email posted by Center for a Stateless Soc... http://t.co/FH2ci32pS1

— The clubof.info Blog (@ClubOfInfo) August 28, 2015

The Blog

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Listen up! It's not all #code and #content

@JenWike.

Running communities around projects is all about getting the job done, and getting it done well. If you don't nurture a community, it won't grow and produce. Then, if you get that right but fail to maintain and organize things so that the people involved, your community, can continue to succeed and feel happy doing it, your project's growth and success won't last long.

These are the intricate details of a project, and the people that constitute it, that Robyn Bergeron orchestrates everyday. She incorporates a deep understanding of the technology behind her company with the feedback she gets from the developers who are building the project out.

Robyn is an Operations Advocate for Elasticsearch, an end-to-end search and analytics platform. In this interview, she answers my questions about her role as part community manager, part developer advocate at this acclerating open source company. But, what is it exactly? Bascially, Elasticsearch is an open source, distributed tool for powering search applications, based on Apache Lucene. It has many uses; a popular one is a configuration often referred to as an ELK stack (ELK = elasticsearch + logstash + kibana) used as a backend for analytics tools. Find out more in this interview.

Let's go way back. How did you get started in open source? What or who made the biggest difference to your start?

I started participating in open source communities back in 2008, volunteering as an editor for the proceedings of the Ottawa Linux Symposium. The toolchain and environment we used for editing was entirely on the Fedora desktop, and by chance in 2009 (my second year of editing) I happened upon the Fedora wiki page that showed the many ways to contribute to Fedora. I was intrigued by the idea of participating in the marketing group, as I had previous career experience in that area. I joined the mailing list, and within probably 6 months of my first post, I found myself not only writing a lot of release-related content, but also volunteering to organize a FUDCon in Tempe, Arizona. I think there were a number of factors that influenced my participation and enthusiasm; honestly, if I hadn't seen the "join" page describing how to participate, which highlighted ways for non-coders to contribute to the project, I never would have thought that I could have contributed in any way. This is one of the reasons why I think it's incredibly important for projects to show how people can be involved—many people, including myself at the time, don't realize all of the different ways that various skillsets can make a project even better. Of course, having a number of people making me feel incredibly welcome and valued made a huge difference. I really felt like I was part of the team. I remember the day when "stickster" (aka Paul Frields, who was then the Fedora Project Leader) first talked to me on IRC; it seems funny in retrospect, but I was so blown away that I was worthy of his attention that I was just giddy with excitement. And I learned so much from so many people, in such a short period of time. Max Spevack took time to listen to me and blessed me with his wisdom, Mel Chua taught me the value of transparency and documenting anything and everything. I could go on and on... but the real point is that there were people who really believed in me, and that made all the difference in the world.

What does a Developer Advocate do, in general? What's it like to do this job for Elasticsearch?

It's funny—there are lots of "Developer Advocates" out there, and much like the "community manager" job title, the roles and responsibilities seem to vary from project to project (or company to company). And in many cases, there is a fair amount of overlap between those two job titles in terms of the roles and responsibilities they perform. I would say that, for myself, it comes down to a small handful of things:

Ensuring that community members have access to the things they need to contribute in the ways that they wish. That can be anything from information, to helping out with a meetup location, to facilitating improvements in pull request processes, etc.

Listening. Lots of listening. Making sure that what I'm hearing from the outside world is being funneled back into the project's developers ears.

Communicating. Generally getting the word out, whether via presentations, newsletters, social media, or just participating in the hallway track at a conference. Making sure contributors and observers know about what's going on in terms of project development, participation opportunities, etc.

All that said, I recently, with my lovely boss's blessings, have shifted my title from "Developer Advocate" to "Operations Advocate"—mostly because ops is where my interests have always been, having been a sysadmin way back in the day (years that start with "19"), and because those are the folks that I tend to interact with most at conferences. In all honesty, I think there's not much difference between the two, other than perhaps better reflecting who I tend to connect with. I really just think of myself as advocating for contributors in general.

Any stories or lessons of note from your time as the Fedora Project Leader?

Oh, I have an a-bun-dance of stories. And the wurst puns you've ever heard. (Ah,Beefy Miracle. He shall live forever!) But they're best told in person. As far as lessons go, that's tough. If I was to give advice to anyone participating in open source, it would be to remember that sometimes things fall on the floor, don't get finished, or just flat out fail—and that's okay, so long as you figure out why and prevent it from happening in the future. Even if that prevention is simply determining that perhaps something wasn't as important as you thought and eliminating it altogether! But nothing is worth burning people out; the community isn't made up of code and content, it is made up of people.

You'll be talking at SCALE13X this year about DevOps in practice, theory, and otherwise. Can you share a few things with us now?

Sure. Be warned: It may sound buzzwordy! (And barely scratching the surface!) Communicate. Communicate. Communicate. And have empathy. Automate All The Things. Release early, release often! Be transparent! But wait! Those last two sound like things from the land of open source, you say? You're right. In fact, a lot of the goals one might have are very similar to what open source communities have, as they are both communities of practice (even inside an organization!).

What's the #1 best practice or habit of a successful open source community?

I have to pick a number one?! Impossible. But I'll mention one that I think is less often mentioned: Listening. As individuals in a community, and the community as a whole. Being humble enough to not be above advice or criticism; being empathetic enough to put yourself in someone else's shoes; being kind enough to listen to one another as individuals who sometimes just need a friend to talk to. The things you learn by listening can be the things that make a difference to one person, or to the community as a whole. This article is part of the Speaker Interview Series for SCALE13X. The Southern California Linux Expo brings together Linux and open source users, developers, companies, and enthusiasts.

Jen Wike Huger | More articles by Jen Wike Huger

Originally published at Opensource.com on 12 February 2015 CC BY-SA 4.0

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Open Source Virtual Reality + More

. @i_robin. #gaming. #opensource. #warhammerfantasy. #vintagegaming.

Open gaming roundup

Week of January 3 - 9, 2015

Razer introduces Open Source Virtual Reality (OSVR)

A lot of buzz this week about Razer, who teamed up with companies like Unity, Leap Motion, Gearbox Software, and more to launch Open Source Vitual Reality(OSVR). Mic Wright on The Next Web writes: "The aim of OSVR is to create a standardized interface for building virtual reality apps and games." Where OSVR is an alternative for the Oculus Rift, any software developed for Unity 3D or Unreal 4 Engine will run on it, and it will work with the latest version of Oculus. Linux Gaming News also covered this news in detail.

Good news from Steam

Gaming On Linux writes about a new Steam client beta that will include a useful feature to see how your game is performing in FPS (frames per second), without any extra plugins. More Steam news on Linux Games News mentions a record set by Steam as it reached 8.4 million concurrent users on January 1, 2015! There were 8,357,541 players online. The most popular games are: DOTA 2, Counter Strike: GO, Team Fortress 2, Football Manager 15, and The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim.

Play old DOS games in your browser

2,314 classic old DOS games are free for play in your browser, according to CNET this week. Game titles like Prince of Persia, The Oregon Trail (1990), Bust-A-Move (1997), Wolfenstein 3D (1992), and many more can be found on the Internet Archive, who preserves digital content. It's all made possible via the EM-DOS box emulator (on GitHub) which is open source. What old game will you play?

Warhammer Quest released

Warhammer Quest has been made available on Steam and is currently on sale on Steam, with a 10% discount until Wednesday January 14. See more news on this from Root Gamer and Linux Game News.

Lead your group of brave adventurers through the perilous dungeons of the Warhammer world in the search for wealth and glory! Based on the classic Games Workshop board game, Warhammer Quest is a mix of adventure, strategy and role-playing. (Source:http://warhammerquestgame.com/)

By Robin Muilwijk - More articles by Robin Muilwijk

Originally published at Opensource.com on 10 January 2015

Republished under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International License.

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Rebuilding Afghan tech: open source

. @baldnichtmehrda. #opensource. #innovation. #technology. #Afghanistan.

The Center for International and Intercultural Communication (ZiiK) at the Technical University of Berlin (TU Berlin) has been helping with the reconstruction of academic organizations in Afghanistan since 2002. Under the supervision of the Berlin IT lecturer, Dr. Nazir Peroz, Director of the ZiiK, computer centers have been established at five college locations in Afghanistan.

Through the project, many students and college employees have been trained in the use of the computers. A new curriculum tailored to the requirements and prerequisites of Afghan students has been developed and Afghan IT students and future lecturers have been trained for Masters degrees in Germany.

Since its inception in 2000, ZiiK at TU Berlin has been a platform for international and intercultural exchange on information technology. In addition to intensification of the international dialog, one of ZiiK’s main goals is to offer students from developing countries promising perspectives for the future. After the Bonn Conference, the need for reconstruction of Afghanistan's education system was apparent, and the search began in late 2001 for partners to help.

Dr. Peroz accompanied the German Academic Exchange Service's (DAAD) first fact-finding mission to Kabul in early 2002. The team was sent to evaluate the requirements for the reconstruction of the higher education system. The situation it encountered in the Afghan capital confirmed that after decades of war and tyranny from the Taliban, there was not much left of the academic education system. According to Dr. Peroz, “When we arrived there, Kabul University was made up of just a few run-down buildings. There were a few lone tables and chairs lying around along with a few tattered books. In the whole of the capital’s college there was just a handful of old computers, some of which didn’t even work anymore.”

Since civil war had erupted in 1978, many well-educated Afghans had already fled the country. Then, after the Taliban seized control in 1996, many schools and colleges were closed down completely.

From the start it was clear that it would not be enough to just provide new infrastructure, it would also be necessary to familiarize the people with modern electronics so that they were in a position to make use of them. In addition, to ensure that the Afghan facilities were not permanently reliant on foreign aid, it was also important to train specialists who could take care of the operation of the established structures autonomously. “From the beginning, our aim was always to create something that will continue to help Afghanistan in the long term as well—something which opens up perspectives for the future for the nation, and offers the people hope”, explained Peroz. “The IT sector is ideal for achieving these goals because it is indispensable for modern economy on the one hand and requires lower investments in hardware than other branches of trade on the other. The most important asset in IT is expertise and that is what we want to communicate.”

The basis for an education in IT is a functioning IT infrastructure which can be used to train college employees, specialists, and students. One of the first project milestones for the ZiiK was the establishment of a computer center at Kabul University. The IT Center Kabul (ITCK) was launched in March 2003 and has guaranteed the college’s IT capacity ever since. It connects the networked institutes and PC pools with the Internet and provides services such as storage space and mail and web servers. Today, the colleges in Herat, Mazar-i-Sharif, Jalalabad, and Kandahar now also boast their own IT centers.

When establishing the computer centers, the German-Afghan project employed open source software from the start. Over the years, the ZiiK team and its Afghan partners have tried out several different operating systems, primarily a variety of Linux distributions. The newest computer center, the IT Center Kandahar (ITCQ), was the first to adopt the open source Univention Corporate Server (UCS) from Bremen-based Univention GmbH.

"It was important for us to find an operating system which put the Afghan staff in a position to perform all the necessary work with as little training as possible and if possible without our support”, said Daniel Tippmann, Project Planner and Coordinator at the ZiiK. “Simple administration of UCS via a central, graphic management surface, lots of integrated tools, simple installation and mounting of additional programs via an integrated App Center are important to the Afghan administrators not as well-versed in the operating system as we are here in Germany."

The administrators trained in the summer and winter, and now schools in Berlin can use the web-based UCS management system to administrate their servers, computer workstations, users (rights) as well as different server applications and web services across various platforms. New software can be installed on connected computers from the management console and the App Center via a graphic interface, for example for educational support software.

"Now we can put our Afghan colleagues on site and are able to resolve everyday problems such as resetting a forgotten password, creating new users, or installing new software much quicker than before,” said Tippmann. “This allows us to reduce our role to emergency support, intervening only if the local staff is no longer able to proceed. And the more experience they gather, the less often that is the case!"

After six successful months using the new open source corporate server, the decision was made to switch the other IT centers over to the operating system from Germany too. The Bremen-based company provides the requisite licenses free of charge as well as the training documentation. In addition, the ZiiK and Univention run joint workshops to train the Afghan administrators.

In the more than 12 years since the plea for help with reconstruction went out, over 4,500 college employees and specialists have been trained in the use of computers. Forty-eight Afghans were awarded scholarships and have completed a Master's degree in IT in Berlin and then communicated their knowledge to lecturers in newly established IT courses in their homeland. Around 1,000 IT students have already completed their IT studies at the colleges in Kabul, Herat, Mazar-i-Sharif, Jalalabad, and Kandahar, or are currently enrolled. Many of these graduates have gone on to found their own IT companies. "Every time a company is founded, it is a step towards a stable and better future,” said Peroz. “The country has an incredible amount of catching up to do, and educating the young people is the best way to make up for the missed development of the past 40 years in just a few years."

By Maren Abatielos – More articles by Maren Abatielos

Originally published at opensource.com on 29 October 2014

Republished under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International License.

Image via Wikimedia Commons.

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Why open data matters in education

. @aseem_sharma. #open. #opensource. #opendata. #webwewant. #education.

Rajan attends a school in a small village located around 140 kilometers from my hometown of Amritsar, India. Otherwise an active boy who is adept in handling numbers in the ledger book at his father’s convenience store and who loves playing flute, he falls into the depths of apathy and indifference the moment he enters his classroom. Rajan is not at fault for the abrupt change in his behavior at the school. He attends a school that has one teacher for all its students from classes starting from the first standard through the fifth standard, that has no proper infrastructure, a dilapidated library, and an obsolete teaching methodology.

In an environment where the students do not get personal attention indispensable for nurturing their strengths, where the teachers lack the professional training to bring sophisticated teaching methods in the classroom, and where the concept of a customized curriculum is unheard of, Rajan's distrust in his school is not surprising. Like him, millions of students in India in particular, and the developing world in general, get lost in the complex maze of the schooling system. Interestingly, these millions are counted in the educated and literate sections of governmental statistics. These scenarios are indicative of the fact that the solution to the problems of education transcends far beyond just opening up schools in the rural areas of the country.

Nelson Mandela once said that "Education is the most powerful weapon which you can use to change the world." It thus becomes a responsibility of both the public and the private players to create a system which maximizes the potential of children in their formative years. The way students learn can be constructively influenced and improved. In the long run, quality of a person's life grows proportionally to the quality of education of the person.

Similar to the way open source changed the way technology is built and used, open data has begun to change the way the world looks at data. Open data provides an opportunity to resolve some of the world's most complicated problems, whether in private sector or public sector. Businesses and governments have already started to realize the benefits that opening up the data and using/reusing it can bring. Joel Gurin, senior advisor at the Governance Lab at New York University, writes in his book "Open Data Now" that “open data is the world’s greatest free resource—unprecedented access to thousands of databases—and it is one of the most revolutionary developments since the information Age began."

Education in general and schooling system in particular is one area where the journey has just begin and there is still a long way to go. In comparison to other areas, it is one such critical area which is still largely untouched by innovative solutions, especially when it comes to people living at the 'bottom of the pyramid'. In such a scenario, what role can open data play in improving the situation? Why is it relevant to the education system? What new approaches does it offers to the problem in context? A few perspectives in this regards are as follows.

Contextual intelligence

Approximately 5500 kilometers away from that village near Amritsar is Finland, where the standards of schooling system and education take a 180 degree turn. Whether it is a sprawling suburb of Espoo near Helsinki or the thinly populated Lapland, the country's 62,000 teachers and 3,500 schools ensure that their students get the best of education and grow as responsible citizens. Finland has consistently performed high on Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA), a standardized test given to 15 year olds in more than 40 global venues.

Whether it is deciphering text or manipulating numbers, Finnish students are among the top performers in the world. Teachers rarely stand at the front of the classroom for the entire 50 minutes, and it is typical to see students walking around from one workshop to another which exemplifies high degree of autonomy in thinking and decision making that the students have. There is an evident disparity in educational systems and the growth of students across the world. Open data increases the understanding of this disparity across different countries tremendously. Solution providers can better understand what works where and what does not works in what parts of the world. They can also understand and analyze the situations most amicable for creating a learning environment.

A dashboard on the World Bank's open data website vividly showcases, along with other statistics, the stark difference in the autonomy in planning and management of school budget between Burkino Faso and Finland. These kind of visualizations created from open data increases the contextual intelligence and consequently equips the solution providers to focus on areas which need the maximum attention.

Improved understanding of the problem

Anything that can be measured can be resolved. Applications built on top of open data can be used to monitor among other things, the learning patterns of students, their performance patterns, teacher absenteeism, and on a larger scale regions that perform better and regions that perform poorly. This creates a better grip on the problem we are encountering as well as the scale of the problem. An educational map indicating the best and the worst areas and the scale of the problem in each of those areas can assist both the private players and the public entities to customize solutions accordingly.

Efficient public-private partnership

With the push to open data in the government sector in the US, under the leadership of Aneesh Chopra, who served as the first chief technology officer of the country, umpteen opportunities have been created for start up entrepreneurs and public sector employees. The shift of the policy towards opening up the data to the public has enhanced the collaboration opportunities between government and the citizens. Many initiatives like the School of Open, School of Data, and Open Knowledge are collaborating with public sector across the developing world to assist them make better use of their data. A bootcamp organized by the School of Data in conjunction with the government and the civil society organizations resulted in the participants creating a map showcasing whether schools in Moldova encourage rather integration or segregation. Innovation in the educational sector can result from the effective collaboration of open data, public policy and start up business dedicated to change the landscape of schooling system.

Lessons from other fields

Jay Bradner, a researcher at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute in Boston, was stuck by the explosion of data about the human genome on one hand and the reliance on primitive anti-cancer drug like arsenic on the other. Bradner was a big believer in sharing research in open data. He began work on a compound that could interfere with malignant cells in a rare kind of cancer called midline carcinoma. He shared his data with other labs and got important insights from Oxford, and soon showed that the compound, which they called JQ1, could stop the growth of that cancer in mice. He later shared his research at the earliest prototype stage which in turn attracted interest from various pharmaceutical companies, academic labs, and start-ups. This example from the healthcare field exemplifies that when research comes out of an isolated lab, it benefits society at a faster rate. Many businesses in various industries ranging from telecommunication to transportation have benefited from open data. The same success built on the common methodology of leveraging open data can also be replicated in education.    I strongly believe that improving the state of education and making children better learners is a human endeavor. It requires understanding the behavior of children, what motivates them and what demotivates them. Technology solutions based on open data can strengthen and fuel that human endeavor on which much of our future depends.

By Aseem Sharma – More articles by Aseem Sharma

Originally published at opensource.com on 23 October 2014

Republished under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International License.

Image via Twitter user: @opencorporates.

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ClubOfINFO app available

. @ClubOfINFO. @AndroidDev. #android. #androiddev. #freeapp. 

A free developer version of the ClubOfINFO mobile app is available for 60 days. The app can be used on Android and Windows devices. The basic feature of the app is similar to other news apps, providing the latest headlines, summaries and thumbnails right from ClubOfINFO. This is ideal for staying up to date on the latest posts from ClubOfINFO's main blog. Download the ClubOfINFO App instantly

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