New Examples of Collaboration, Freedom, and Transparency at Work
- Dr. Roy Schestowitz
- 2014-01-29 20:54:41 UTC
- Modified: 2014-01-29 21:42:45 UTC
Summary: News items from December and January, demonstrating the power of peer production and cooperation
Sharing/Transparency/Openness
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Another 100% Open Source camera is coming up: we really think that Open Source photography is the next big thing in open source!
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After my initial stint with Wikipedia editing, I increasingly realized that the English version of Wikipedia lacked articles on Indian writers, famous personalities, cultural artefacts, and more. The problem is multi-layered and includes poor coverage of everything relating to non-western societies as well as to women within those societies. Once, I created article on Wikipedia about an Indian, female writer named Bama. She is from the lowest caste community called Dalits in India; and while the author is a celebrated writer of stories on the subject of double oppression (which is oppession of women by people of higher castes and oppression by men within their own communities), Wikipedia almost naturally had no record of her work. Sadly, within minutes of my creation of her article it was nominated for deletion. I then quickly added more references while simultaneously starting a discussion about why it should not be deleted. At that point, another Indian editor jumped in and helped with the explaination; the next day the deletion tag was removed.
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Just a few years ago, the words “open source” and “hardware” were never mentioned in the same sentence. Instead, the focus was on open source software running on top of closed, proprietary hardware solutions.
Hardware suppliers were inwardly focused on creating proprietary, “converged” infrastructure to protect their existing businesses, instead of working with the community to develop new solutions.
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Built alongside friend and colleague Robert Attorri, his creation is called Light Table, and he believes it can not only improve programming for seasoned engineers like himself, but put the power of coding into the hands of so many others. “We consider programming a modern-day superpower. You can create something out of nothing, cure cancer, build billion-dollar companies,” he says. “We’re looking at how we can give that super power to everyone else.”
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1) “Open”: Early on, most commonly thought of as short form for “open source” (code all can use, tinker with and contribute to), “open” has opened up a Pandora’s Box of multiple and sometimes contradictory implied meanings: “open standard” (technical standards anyone can apply); “open access” (for participation in online activities); “open content” (digital content that can be reused, remixed and shared); and “open data” (publicly released data, generally governmental or research).
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Goteo is a crowdfunding platform for the commons. Founded in Spain in 2011 with an explicit mission to promote and support p2p values of openess, collaboration and sharing, Goteo’s innovation in crowdfunding has seen them go from strength to strength. Their 2013 year end report is an inspiring testament to the power of the crowd. We highly recommend reading the article and encourage you to consider Goteo for your next p2p and commons inspired projects.
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The winners in the domestic challenge covered a broad range of issues Sunlight cares about, including public procurement, public sector innovation and the use of data to improve public administration. If last year’s challenge was any indication, this year’s European-focused competition will likely demonstrate that cities around the world are turning towards new technology and open data to improve the lives of city residents.
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Last year, a third of honeybee colonies in the United States quite literally vanished. Commercial honey operations, previously abuzz with many thousands of bees, fell suddenly silent, leaving scientists and beekeepers alike scratching their heads. The reasons remain mostly a mystery for what is called Colony Collapse Disorder—a disturbing development of the drying up of beehives throughout the industrialised world.
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Most of the Honey Badger platform is written in Python, an open source programming language popular with mathematicians and web programmers. And the team stores and processes its data with a combination of Hadoop — an open source clone of Google’s big data crunching system — and the tried and true open source database MySQL. The team pays Amazon and Microsoft Azure a few thousand dollars a month for cloud hosting — a bargain compared to what they would have had to pay upfront for supercomputers ten years ago.
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Open-source magic is not about slapping magical secrets up on YouTube; there are more than enough eager teenagers and fun-ruiners willing to do that. Instead, it takes a lesson from the open-source technology activists who believe that better innovation comes through collaboration.
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The Open Source Ecology project is designed to develop plans and methods to build these fifty machines, and do it as one collaborative effort. In his TED Talk he confessed that after completing a PhD in Fusion Energy he felt useless. There was no practical knowledge to be used in the world to implement change.
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Sundance winning documentarian Ondi Timoner isn't in the habit of doing things in half-measures. Her latest endeavor, the web series "A Total Disruption," features some of the biggest names in Silicon Valley. The project is in a sense a quest to profile the entrepreneurial spirit of the age.
As such, the project hasn't been limited to the tech sector. Timoner has turned her lens on creative luminaries like Shepard Fairey and Amanda Palmer. Those two are headlining a benefit soirée for the next phase of "A Total Disruption," that will also feature Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian and YouTuber Jhameel, this Sunday in Los Angeles.
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Sam Beck is the guy behind Blueshift, an open source sustainable eletronics business that is all about building cool stuff. Helium speakers are the company's first product to market and will be the world's the first supercapacitor-powered portable speakers. Not to mention the design files are open source.
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But what if architecture could make life better for the many. What if good-quality, life-bettering architecture were open-source and available to download off the internet? For free?
Open Data
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EdX, the non-profit online learning organization with a huge roster of global institutions under the xConsortium participating, has been a leader in the free online education arena for several years. In June of last year, the organization released the code for its learning platform under an open source license. And, MIT has been leveraging the platform to deliver free online courses, as we covered here. Now, MIT has announced that it will start offering for-profit courses on edX, beginning with a course on Big Data. Because of the salaries that people with Big Data skills are commanding in the job market, the course could be a good opportunity for job seekers.
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Few things are more frustrating, or more likely to result in irreproducibility and error, than trying to reconstruct a computational analysis based on a prosaic description of an algorithm in a research article. Yet this is a very typical part of the working day in my field (bioinformatics) and I imagine, in many others.
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Being unprepared for the conversation, our 45 minutes together wandered through introductions and eventually focused on a conversation about how public data could be used to advocate for employment opportunities for communities of color around municipal development sites. My perspective was that we could use public data to document the ways that these employment opportunities often are not given to members of the community adjacent to or containing the development site. While we didn’t get very far on this topic, many participating (myself included) seemed interested in exploring it further.
Elsevier Against Open Access
We last
covered this a month and a half ago. Here's later coverage:
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I thought Elsevier was already doing all it could to alienate the authors who freely donate their work to shore up the corporation’s obscene profits. The thousands of takedown notices sent to Academia.edu represent at best a grotesque PR mis-step, an idiot manoeuvre that I thought Elsevier would immediately regret and certainly avoid repeating.
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We just recently wrote about the terrible anti-science/anti-knowledge/anti-learning decision by publishing giant Elsevier to demand that Academia.edu take down copies of journal articles that were submitted directly by the authors, as Elsevier wished to lock all that knowledge (much of it taxpayer funded) in its ridiculously expensive journals. Mike Taylor now alerts us that Elsevier is actually going even further in its war on access to knowledge. Some might argue that Elsevier was okay in going after a "central repository" like Academia.edu, but at least it wasn't going directly after academics who were posting pdfs of their own research on their own websites. While some more enlightened publishers explicitly allow this, many (including Elsevier) technically do not allow it, but have always looked the other way when authors post their own papers.
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As we all know, University libraries have to pay expensive subscription fees to scholarly publishers such as Elsevier, Springer, Wiley and Informa, so that their researchers can read articles written by their colleagues and donated to those publishers. Controversially (and maybe illegally), when negotiating contracts with libraries, publishers often insist on confidentiality clauses — so that librarians are not allowed to disclose how much they are paying. The result is an opaque market with no downward pressure on prices, hence the current outrageously high prices, which are rising much more quickly than inflation even as publishers’ costs shrink due to the transition to electronic publishing.
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One of the world's largest academic publishers has launched a wide-ranging takedown spree, demanding that several different universities take down their own scholars' research.
Open Hardware
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One of my favorite quotes is "We are what we celebrate." Dean Kamen, founder of FIRST Robotics, says this and it comes up on an almost daily basis one way or another in my work in open source hardware and education. One of the challenges of getting more young people into engineering and computer programming is that we're collectively competing with the high profile status that becoming a famous, professional athlete or musician, or reality show star, promises. I don't expect the mass media to change, because change happens from small groups of motivated people. And, this is where the maker, hacker, and open source software and hardware communities are making great progress.
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With growing concern about government agencies such as the NSA, open-source software has stepped into the spotlight as a way to ensure complete transparency. While this has so far only applied to software, there could soon be a way for you to take complete control of your hardware as well, all thanks to Project Novena.
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Usually, I avoid making predictions. However, increasingly, I believe that the sleeper trend of 2014 will be free-licensed hardware -- and that its availability could transform free and open source software (FOSS) as well as hardware manufacturing.
As 2013 closes, the trend is already well-advanced. Ubuntu Edge's crowdfunding might have failed, but Ubuntu Touch is supposed to have a still-unnamed vendor, while the first Firefox OS phone was released in July, and Jolla released its first phone based on Sailfish OS.
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3D printing is set to disrupt multiple industries thanks to its unique position at the intersection of three important trends in technology: the Internet of Things, our growing desire to personalize our things, and the coming revolution in the way things get delivered to us.
Recent Techrights' Posts
- Over at Tux Machines...
- GNU/Linux news for the past day
- [Meme] Being Believed, Not Censored or Defamed
- Daniel Pocock, Zini, and John Sullivan (FSF)
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- The Albanian open source community is very healthy indeed
- Windows nosedives from 99.1% to a lot less
- When I discovered people trafficking in open source software
- Reprinted with permission from Daniel Pocock
- Web Sites Hijacked by WIPO on Behalf of Microsoft-Sponsored SPI (and People Looking to Hide Embarrassing Facts)
- debian.chat; debiancommunity.org; debian.day; debian.family; debian.finance; debian.giving; debiangnulinux.org; debian.guide; debian.news; debian.plus; debianproject.community; debianproject.org; debian.team; debian.video
- Julian Assange on Privacy of People, Even Little Children
- Facebook/Google (or GAFAM, an acronym I coined with Assange) knows you better than your mom knows you
- [Meme] Miscomprehension of GDPR
- Social control in general is a ticking timebomb
- In Haiti, the Market Share of Windows Collapsed (From 97% to 27% on Desktops/Laptops)
- A couple of months ago Windows was measured at 3.04%
- In Most Countries It's Still Possible Not to Have a 'Smartphone' and to Pay for Nearly Everything With Cash
- Withdrawing money will be possible as long as enough people use many ATMs (cash machines)
- Expect Lots of Material From Daniel Pocock as Election Day Nears
- The experiences of Daniel Pocock were an excellent example of reprisal or retribution against either whistleblowers or people who give a voice to whistleblowers
- I've Been Promoting Free Software for Over 25 Years
- I wrote my first computer program when I was about 14, maybe a little younger (I have visual memory of it)
- Reminder: Richard Stallman's Talk is This Week in Paris (and in French)
- Defending rms isn't the same as defending everything he has ever said
- IRC Proceedings: Saturday, May 11, 2024
- IRC logs for Saturday, May 11, 2024
- Online Bullying (Trying to Make People Unhappy)
- Narcissists and bullies behind mice and keyboards, no honesty or fact-checking required
- Talk About Software Freedom
- "Linux" and "BSD" may mean a lot to more and more people, but they're still just brands or acronyms
- Windows in South Korea: From 98.5% in 2010 to About 30% (Android Rises to Almost 50%)
- Samsung ships like a million Linux devices per day
- Improving Site Navigation for Easier Discovery and Catch-ups
- This site is run by code we wrote ourselves
- LibrePlanet 2024 Recordings
- Let's hope independent recordings by viewers can help recovery of "lost talks" (recordings)
- GNU/Linux Reaches 11% Market Share in the United States Of America - an All-Time High
- The United States Of America is where the operating system started (Boston) and where Linus Torvalds works (Portland)
- Links 11/05/2024: XBox Crisis, Spotify Exodus Continues
- Links for the day
- Gemini Links 11/05/2024: Why to Delete GitHub
- Links for the day
- In Europe, Bing Fell Every Month This Year, Lost a Considerable Share Since "Bing Chat" and All the Chatbot Hype
- Microsoft's Bing has had many layoffs lately
- Links 11/05/2024: Analysis of the Microsoft Crisis and Backdoor-Looking Bugs
- Links for the day
- Attacking the Messenger?
- Stack Overflow and LLM licencing
- Microsoft Fired Loads of Staff in Kenya, Which is Another Large Country Where GNU/Linux Has Grown a Lot
- Microsoft pays Kenyans only 2 dollars an hour for an IT/office job
- Knowing the True History of Debian, Owing to Irish Debian Developer Daniel Pocock (Currently Running to Become Member of the European Parliament)
- Irish-Australian and scapegoat of a highly dysfunctional 'Debian family'
- Attacking by Credentials
- Modest people do not demand fancy titles
- Microsoft Windows Used to Have 99% of the OS Market in Jordan, Now It's Just 13% (Less Than iOS)
- Based on the data of statCounter, GNU/Linux in Jordan climbed from 0.62% in May 2014 to nearly 5% right now
- More Nations Are Reaching and Exceeding 5% Market Share for GNU/Linux, Microsoft Wants to be Bailed Out Again
- Microsoft is once again reaching out to Biden for a bailout - a subject we'll cover in a video some time this weekend
- Over at Tux Machines...
- GNU/Linux news for the past day
- IRC Proceedings: Friday, May 10, 2024
- IRC logs for Friday, May 10, 2024
- [Meme] What Do You Call a Woman Who Does BDS on Free Software? Elana Hamasman.
- Here are some confused thoughts
- [Meme] Mission Aborted
- Mission Aborted: cancel RMS
- Taking Things Up a Notch
- we strive/aim towards 15-25 new pages per day, i.e. around 500 per month or 6,000 per year
- Gemini Links 10/05/2024: Love Is Infinite and Books vs Internet
- Links for the day
- Links 10/05/2024: Fears Over TSMC, Microsoft Loses Major Patent Case
- Links for the day
- Links 10/05/2024: Burner Phones in 6-Eyes Government, “Hatred and Demonization” on the Rise
- Links for the day
- Microsoft Layoffs and Closures Now Reported in Africa
- Microsoft Uninstalls Nigeria as it closes African Development Centre (ADC) in Lagos
- [Video] Richard Stallman, "I Saw You Playing Your Recorder in Paris" (Due to Proprietary Software Only)
- Corporate autocrats do not want counterparts or alternatives to even exist
- Five Years After the Extensive Campaign of Defamation Against Richard Stallman He's Still Giving Public Talks
- "Richard Stallman will give a talk, in French, Free Software and Freedom in a Digital Society at Centrale Supelec in Saclay, on May 15."
- Microsoft Is Rebranding Its 'Chatbot' Search for the Third Time Because It Fails to Gain Adoption
- it always means that something has failed - not that they'll openly admit it
- Richard Stallman Gives a Talk in Paris Next Week (in French) and It's About Freedom
- another talk, which he has only just announced
- Pace Up, Distractions Down
- We've made our curation process faster and more efficient
- In Algeria, GNU/Linux Estimated to Have Grown Tenfold in a Decade
- a sharp rise in GNU/Linux usage
- [Meme] Red Hat Diversity
- Red Hat: don't mention Haghighi
- Our Sister Site Turns 20 in Exactly One Month
- twentieth anniversary of the site
- Corporate Media Focuses on Who's Suing Red Hat, Not What It's Sued For
- The unfortunate thing is, anybody who has an opinion on this lawsuit will inevitably be framed as "pro-Trump" or "anti-Trump"
- Links 10/05/2024: Many More Microsoft Layoffs on the Way
- Links for the day
- Over at Tux Machines...
- GNU/Linux news for the past day
- IRC Proceedings: Thursday, May 09, 2024
- IRC logs for Thursday, May 09, 2024
- Microsoft OSI Uses Its Money to Hire PR Agencies That Spy and Spread Mindless Openwashing of GPL-Violating Microsoft Ploy
- `We're under attack. But the attackers smile at us and hire PR firms to spy, mislead etc.
- Gemini Links 10/05/2024: geminispace.info to Shut Down in 3 Weeks
- Links for the day
- In Nigeria, Africa's (by Far) Largest Population, Microsoft Bing is the 0%
- To Microsoft, Africa is just "someplace" to get intensive, hard-working human 'resources' (tech labour) at 2 dollars 'apiece' as in per person per hour