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
- Hate Mail From Anonymous Cowards
- if this persists, we'll need to escalate
- Informal Open Letter to the Lawyer of the Microsofters (on Who's Funding the SLAPPs Against Techrights)
- Whenever I ask about the funding they try to change the subject and act all aggressive
- Microsoft Lunduke is Just Provoking People for Provocation's Sake
- Be forewarned and remember where this guy came from: Microsoft
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- Links 09/08/2025: Apollo 13 Astronaut Jim Lovell Dies, Slop Future Bleak
- Links for the day
- After Shutting Down Studios, Divisions, Applications (e.g. Skype) Microsoft is Also Shutting Down 'Apps'
- Cuts all around as layoffs persist this month, Microsoft tries to get many people to resign, and debt skyrockets
- Most of Geminispace Can Probably Fit on a CD-ROM or a DVD (the Textual Part)
- If one excludes very large capsules and ones that contain non-textual contenty
- Eventually UEFI 'Secure Boot' Will be Dropped (Users Will Demand Its Removal and Boycott Its Pushers)
- we expect OEMs will just listen to users
- The Register MS: We Know Slop is a Bubble and Mindless Hype, But We Get Paid to Participate
- Call out the culprits
- There Are Probably Over a Million Pages in Geminispace
- there are two many limitations which merit a mention when it comes to assessing magnitude
- Besieged by Plagiarists Who Play With LLMs and Image Fusions
- We really need to exercise or use our collective voice to oppose Serial Sloppers
- Over at Tux Machines...
- GNU/Linux news for the past day
- IRC Proceedings: Friday, August 08, 2025
- IRC logs for Friday, August 08, 2025
- Gemini Links 09/08/2025: Water Painting and Political Violence
- Links for the day
- Slopwatch: LLM Sloppers in Google News, LinuxSecurity, and More
- they also perpetuate some falsehoods as the LLMs lack any comprehension
- Links 08/08/2025: China King of Plastics and US Dictator Plans to Meet Russian Dictator
- Links for the day
- Gemini Links 08/08/2025: Cracking a Family Member's Password and Overdose of Slop
- Links for the day
- Red Hat's Latest Talent Hunt, Day Ahead of Mass Layoffs, is Yet Another Microsoft Executive
- Red Hat will apparently commence mass layoffs early this coming Monday
- Links 08/08/2025: "Quit Facebook" and High Cost of Microsoft/Windows Shown Again ("BlackSuit")
- Links for the day
- Good Morning, Readers of The Register MS
- Things The Register MS could (but does not) cover this morning
- Why Gemini Protocol Has a Bright Future
- Maybe Gemini Protocol's promise becomes more appealing as the Web turns to slop and bloat
- It's a Lot Easier to Participate in the Unethical System Than to Oppose Injustices in It
- Going after powerful and high-budget interests is never easy
- Microsofters Filed Two SLAPPs Against Us, Now They Cannot Keep Up With Judges' Orders
- For over 4 months already their facilitator in London has been under investigation by British authorities because of what's being done to my wife and I
- Censorship Regarding Red Hat Layoffs
- Talk about this? They'd rather not.
- Struggling to Cut Costs, Microsoft Continues Shutting Down and Cancelling Stuff This Month
- There are August layoffs at Microsoft
- Over at Tux Machines...
- GNU/Linux news for the past day
- IRC Proceedings: Thursday, August 07, 2025
- IRC logs for Thursday, August 07, 2025
- Fake 'Linux' Articles, Written by Bots to Take Traffic Away From Real Articles
- LLM slop helps replace information with junk or misinformation
- When Google's Googlebombing of "Gemini" Was Not Enough; They Now Also Googlebomb "Gemini Space"?
- We know GAFAM not only worries about Gemini Protocol but also attempts to 'infiltrate' Geminispace
- The Register MS Promotes Microsoft Slop, Assumes All Readers Use Microsoft Windows
- Microsoft really dominates the site
- Gemini Links 08/08/2025: KDE/Qt Development and What's Missing From "Retro"
- Links for the day
- Links 07/08/2025: US Punishes India Instead of Russia, Attacks Law Firms to Prevent Scrutiny
- Links for the day
- Read Us in Geminispace as Well
- it's definitely a lot simpler than using a Web browser
- Once a Site About BSD and GNU/Linux, and After Months of Silence, LinuxBSDos.com Comes Back Only as a Slopfarm
- very frustrating
- Links 07/08/2025: Hardware Wars, Mass Recall of Colgate Total Clean Mint, More Microsoft Holes Found
- Links for the day
- Gemini Links 07/08/2025: "Right To Manage" and LoRa Analysis
- Links for the day
- For the First Time in a Month OSI's "OpenSource.org" Blogs and It's Basically a Microsoft Blog Post (Microsoft Controls OSI)
- For the first time in a month OSI writes something and it is Microsoft propaganda composed by a Microsoft-salaried operative
- Microsoft, Already Borrowing 3 Billion Dollars a Month, is Trying to Cause Many People to Resign
- MSN (i.e. Microsoft) and others openly admit it
- GAFAM 'Says' is Front Page "News"
- The point of journalism is to check and assess facts, not parrot what people and companies merely claim
- Links 07/08/2025: Apple Makes False Promises, More Trouble for Microsoft
- Links for the day
- OSS Didn't Always Mean Open Source Software
- "oligarchs all the way down"
- The Register MS Does More Microsoft Sez or GitHub Sez (Says) Pieces
- 60 minutes ago
- They Want Activists to Just Barely Walk and Eat, Not Do Activism Anymore
- It's sort of like the ending of '1984'
- Quit Perpetuating the Narrative of Gemini Protocol 'Dying' (It's False)
- The "whisper campaign" against Gemini Protocol
- Criticising Social Control Media in Social Control Media
- Many people are quitting Social Control Media (fewer of them announce this in public)
- Non-Free JavaScript Programs in Banks Aren't Even the Biggest Problem
- Technology was supposed to make life easier; in practice, however, for most of us the opposite effect can be observed
- Slopfarms Are Typically Fake News
- Slopfarms typically relay falsehoods
- Gemini Links 06/08/2025: Replacing a Pocket Watch and Buying in Bulk
- Links for the day
- IBM is Obliterating Fedora
- "Fedora releases were shipping with an increasing number of bugs on launch day even while I was using it for a several year stretch."
- Over at Tux Machines...
- GNU/Linux news for the past day
- IRC Proceedings: Wednesday, August 06, 2025
- IRC logs for Wednesday, August 06, 2025