FLOSS Flyover

I mentioned yesterday that I'd post about all the latest in the world of FLOSS that's been on my mind lately. Here's the laundry list:

The Google-O'Reilly Open Source Awards: After a bit of cajoling and nag mail (read: expert geek herding), we've nearly arrived at the list of winners for 2008. Awesome list of nominees this year and no, we won't tell you who won until OSCON.

Open CourseWare and Open Source in education are topics near and dear to my heart, so imagine my pleasure when this list of Linux Open CourseWare floated through my inbox (via the LinuxChix Grrltalk mailing list). LH sez check it out, both the site and the list.

I mostly talk about Open Source programs for students on the Google Open Source Blog, but I'd like to give a shout out to the folks at the OpenUsability for organizing another Season of Usability. Fantastic stuff, and many a former Summer of Code student involved I might add. I'm so excited that this meme continues to spread - while we're on the subject, check out the Haiku Code Drive - and it means a great deal to me that I have the opportunity to contribute to an effort whose effects are yet to be understood, but are far reaching indeed. Life is good.

Speaking of said meme, via the NOSI list about a month ago I saw a call go out for proposals and support for the Freedom Summer of Code, a program to get students designing software for advocacy campaigns and other "radical tech." There have been times when folks wonder why Summer of Code doesn't have an overt social justice component to it and the simple answer is that the program is about code. The more complex answer is that there's no effective way for our team to take a position on which social justice and world saving mission is better than another, so we focus on helping Free and Open Source projects get useful code written. Then other folks can use that code for whatever good they deem most worthy. I've got an email into the organizing team to find out how their call for student proposals went, as they stopped taking submissions on 24 May.

Speaking of Open Source as a catalyst for social change and a corner stone of the Open Culture movement - yet another topic near and dear to my heart - check out the awesome work being done by the folks at the Textbook Revolution project. The site recently relaunched and there are some great resources for finding Open CourseWare. The accompanying Stingy Scholar Blog also rocks.

I may live to regret this offer, but if anyone is looking into doing a Summer of Code like mentoring program, let me know. I may have some useful guidance to offer you. Free and Open Source software/culture projects only please.

Adventures in Canadiaing

I returned from BSDCan 2008 just over a week ago, fully intending to spend some quality time with my poor, neglected blog. What I thought was a case of ineffectively coping with jetlag - and come on, it was a mere three hours time difference, so how bad could it have been - was a nasty case of stomach flu, from which I now seem to have extricated myself. Hooray!

My slides are now posted, as are those of many of my fellow presenters. If technical meat on all things BSD strikes your fancy, hie thee to the conference website to get your fill. I was quite pleased with how my talk turned out; when I asked how many Summer of Code mentors and students we had in the room, nearly half the hands in the audience of ~75 raised. We had two students turned mentors in the audience, as well, which was the nicest treat of the conference. You can check out a summary of my presentation on KernelTrap.

I'd like to once again thank the gentleman who agreed to be interviewed as part of my research: Jan Schaumann, Justin Sherill, Murray Stokely and Robert Watson. Special thanks to Jan for meeting with me the day before his family was to move from the Bay Area to the East Coast, and to Justin for pointing me to his Alphabet Project, which provided me with an awesome image for my presentation, used with permission of the artist, Cal Slayton. That's right folks, paranoia is not just for the Security geek anymore.

BSDCan is the kind of conference that I love attending: small scale (~200 attendees), solidly community focused, college campus venue, no excess, all tech. I'm sure the great vibe owes much to the conference's stalwart organizer, Dan Langille, who continues to organize both BSDCan and PGCon in Ottawa annually, despite having relocated to the United States. Dan's a consummately gracious host and his gift for making his attendees feel welcome and engaged is phenomenal; on the social side of things, BSDCan boasted two low-key but fun and conversation filled pub nights, an evening hacking lounge in the dorm accommodations and a full slate of tourist activities the day after the conference concluded, with all invited to join in the exploration of Ottawa. Really bringing the community vibe home, though, was the conference's concluding session, where Dan's mad auctioneering skills and the signatures of the attending FreeBSD core developers raised over 800 dollars for the local men's mission.

In addition to getting to spend more time hanging out with Dan, I had a great conversation with Dru Lavigne about measuring the maturity of Open Source projects, with Dru making the point that an excellent metric for establishing a project's maturity is its perceived value of non-code contributions.I'd add to that sentiment by noting that a truly mature project focuses strongly on user needs, equally or sometimes moreso than developer desires. The interplay here is still a difficult one since the vast majority of contributions, code and otherwise, remain voluntary. (More along these lines in the May issue of The Open Source Business Resource; many thanks to Dru for the honor of inviting me to serve on the publication's Advisory Board.)

More highlights from the conference and our few days in Ottawa, including an awesome leftward facing moose, can be found on Emma Jane's blog. I'm greatly looking forward to her talk this year at OSCON, Form an Orderly Queue, Ladies. In fact, speaking of the maturation of Open Source, I'm quite excited about a great number of sessions - and the great number of sessions - in the People Track this year.

Yes, the Canadia and the Canadians are amazing. Just ask the server who was kind enough to send me home from breakfast with a sealed bottle of HP Sauce because I was so delighted by its existence.

There's a few cool happenings in the world of Open Source that I've been keeping my eye on for the past few weeks that I'll write up later, but for now I'll be catching up on work.