Life

The humble browser. Its main purpose, for many years, was to serve up simple HTML documents and provide information on just about any subject you could think of. In the last decade, with broadband taking over from dial-up, and net connections getting ever quicker, websites have increasingly provided applications usually restricted to the desktop.

With the evolution of languages such as HTML, CSS and JavaScript helping push the limits of what could be done, we find in turn it provides new opportunities in openness and sharing. This has evolved to the point where there's really not much that can't be done or opened up online now.

When I first started to learn how to code and program, as a student and during the pre-internet era, it was common practice to share your source code as you were creating it. My classmates and I assumed that was the best way for us to learn—from each other.

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It's not news that popular media have undergone significant changes due to participatory digital platforms. We tweet. We connect. We comment. Above all, we share. And the ability to share media has become a need and expectation in networked culture. There are already all sorts of buzzwords swirling around this topic—viral media, memes, prosumers, attention economy, Web 2.0, etc.

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At Open Source Junction 4 we invited attendees to present their hardware projects. Some were open source hardware, while some used consumer hardware components in conjunction with open source software to provide an innovative solution to a problem. » Read more