Open Source Tracking of Fossil Fuels Companies
Information is power, and the fossil fuel companies don’t want anyone but them to have power. They have lied to governments, manipulated political parties, and publicly deny their actions are…
open source
Happy 20th Birthday to VLC
One of the best open source projects is undoubtedly VLC, that little app with the pylon icon that plays any video file you throw at it. VLC embodies the spirit…
Covid-19: Lessons from and for Government Digital Service Groups
This article was written by David Eaves, lecturer at the Harvard Kennedy School, Tom Loosemore, Partner at Public Digital, with Tommaso Cariati and Blanka Soulava, students at the Harvard Kennedy…
3D Printing Respirators to Fight the COVID-19 Pandemic
The Italian health care system finds itself short on parts due to the influx of COVID-19 patients. Due to the nature of the virus people with it are more likely…
Streetmix: Remix Your Street
Streetmix Let’s be honest, people are bad at conveying their ideas on what streets can look like. Thankfully there’s an open source project designed to help people remix their local…
Changing the Capitalist System – We are closer than you think
I’ve recently changed computer operating systems, moving from Windows 10 to a version of Linux called Mint. I was motivated primarily by concerns about privacy and had grown weary of…
Bravo to Elon Musk, patent-buster
Inventor/entrepreneur/engineer/investor Elon Musk recently announced he was giving away all the patents on Tesla Motor’s electric car technology, allowing anyone, competitors included, to use them. Musk, CEO and product architect…
Mozillians: Announcing Community Metrics DashboardCon – January 21, 2014
Please read background below for more info. Here’s the skinny. What A one day mini-conference, held (tentatively) in Vancouver on January 14th San Francisco on January 21st and 22nd, 2014…
Open Hand: Low Cost Robotic Hand
A funding campaign on IndieGoGo is focused on making an open-sourced robotic prosthetic hand. This is wonderful because the end product will be shared with everyone and the hand can…
Open Tech Forever Hardware Cooperative in Colorado
Colorado has a new permaculture and open sourced initiative taking shape and it look promising. The team is adding open source technology from hardware and software to a sustainable agriculture…
Aaron Swartz’s Last Gift: Site Launches Whistleblower Safe House
In era of “most aggressive government assaults on press freedom,” new open source dropbox provides “secure route” for leaks By: Lauren McCauley | Published by Common Dreams on May 17,…
CivicOpen: New Name, Old Idea
The other day Zac Townsend published a piece, “Introducing the idea of an open-source suite for municipal governments,” laying out the case for why cities should collaboratively create open source…
Open Source Ecology Explained
Way back in 2008 I blogged on Open Source Ecology (OSE) which is an open source project to create tools and knowledge to build a fully sustainable village. The project…
Making Bug Fixing more Efficient (and pleasant) – This Made Me Smile
The other week I was invited down to the Bay Area Drupal Camp (#BadCamp) to give a talk on community management to a side meeting of the 100 or so…
Is the Internet bringing us together or is it tearing us apart?
The other day the Vancouver Sun – via Simon Fraser University’s Public Square program – asked me to pen a piece answering the questions: Is the Internet bringing us together…
Community Managers: Expectations, Experience and Culture Matter
Here’s an awesome link to grind home my point from my OSCON keynote on Community Management, particularly the part where I spoke about the importance of managing wait times –…
Transparency Case Study: There are Good and Bad Ways Your Organization can be made “Open”
If you have not had the chance, I strongly encourage you to check out a fantastic piece of journalism in this week’s Economist on the state of the Catholic Church…
Using Metrics to Measure Interest in an Open Source Project
David Boswell has a couple of interesting posts (here and here) about how he is using metrics to measure how effective Mozilla is at attracting and engaging people express an…
Is Civic Hacking Becoming ‘Our Pieces, Loosely Joined?’
I’ve got a piece up over on the WeGov blog at TechPresident – Is Civic Hacking Becoming ‘Our Pieces, Loosely Joined?‘ Juicy bit: There is however, a larger issue that…
Government Procurement Failure: BC Ministry of Education Case Study
Apologies for the lack of posts. I’ve been in business mode – both helping a number of organizations I’m proud of and working on my own business. For those interested…