Right now, I’m mulling the idea of an education consortium for Teaching Open Source. There are several of us who are really working on the day to day teaching of open source and I think that if we build a model of education that could be useful to both academics and practitioners, we could begin to find sustainable funding from outside partners.
We have our first development server up and running. This is good news. Thanks to Kate Stewart today for helping out with a piece by piece overview of the SPDX spec (1.1). Believe it or, there’s some humor in the spec.
I had an opportunity to visit with Jeff Bates (Slashdot fame) who now works at Google in Ann Arbor. Jeff spent a few days with the faculty at the University of Nebraska at Omaha, talking about things like women in IT, the Google recruiting process, and open source participation at Google. Thanks to Jeff and all the UNO faculty who gave their time and effort! I think it was a really great meeting.
I was part of a very nice panel today at LinuxCon with members of the SPDX working group. It was nice to hear the feedback from the audience and get a better sense of the directions and goals of the group. Good thoughts to move forward with on our public instance of FOSSology and our build out to include SPDX.
The project just got a nice boost as we were invited to participate in a panel at LinuxCon in San Diego next week. We are going to talk about our work here at the University of Nebraska at Omaha with respect to FOSSology and SPDX. In short, we are running a public instance of FOSSology (https://fossology.ist.unomaha.edu/) and our next goals are to integrate the FOSSology output with the SPDX standard. Very fun.
It’s been a while but I’m finally moved over to the University of Nebraska at Omaha. What an experience that was! Throughout this time, I’ve had a great opportunity to talk with many great people regarding organizational participation in open communities. Per the project, we are going to beging working with the NYSE on their OpenMAMA initiative. Very fun! More to come on this. Additionally, we are working with the SPDX group to develop an new mapping from Fossology for the creation of SPDX documents. Looking forward to that as well!
Well, this was my second time around at the Collab Summit (https://events.linuxfoundation.org/events/collaboration-summit) and it was an excellent event once again. It’s not often that I get to rub shoulders with some of the big-wigs of the Linux community. It was nice this time around knowing a few people and seeing the cutting edge issues on Linux. I can say that the community at Collab is very eager to talk about organizational participation in open communities and how we should be helping students get traction in this area. Thanks to all!
What a fantastic time at the NSF this week. I had the chance to discuss open source with a variety of project directors and academics. *Very smart* people with wide-ranging views of open source. The primary thing that I took away from the discussion (really three things). First, no one has open source nailed down. It is a very slippery topic with many points of entry. That does mean it can’t be understood but knowing how to educate people on what open source is is a tall task. Second, open source is understood across two clear domains at the NSF: Data and code. Eye-opening to me. Third, smart people are fun.
I just gave a talk in the Philosophy 308 (Computer Ethics) class on organizational participation in open communities. Thanks to the class for the excellent discussion and questions. That was a nice way for me to spend a few hours.
Thanks to Jeff Bates at Google for hosting and talking about the project with me. Among the many things we talked about, one of things that surfaced was how the NSF can try and increase project sustainability through open communities. Here are a few of the very pointed things Jeff pointed out, when asked if he were a reviewer, what he’d be looking for on this issue: What would you want to see?
1) Proposers to answer: Why having projects hosted in the open space makes sense?
2) Proposers should discuss how they would communicate their project in an open community space. These could include (but not limited):
3) Can the proposers speak to the language and the technology stack
4) Output based – lower barriers to entry to the finished artifact
 | Eric Thomas on Texas Instruments at UNO |
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