research

We are excited to announce the official launch of Crowdcrafting.org, an open source software platform—powered by our Pybossa technology—for developing and sharing projects that rely on the help of thousands of online volunteers. » Read more

Pete Herzog began an article he wrote for opensource.com last year about Hacker Highschool by saying:

It might sound strange, but every industry and profession could benefit from an employee as creative, resourceful, and motivated as a hacker. 

You see, Pete is not only motivated by what open source and open thinking can do to change our world, he is moved by it. He tell us that his passions change every few years, but always revolve around open source. 

Right now, he's working on an open source project called: Smarter Safer Better, a study and research (what he calls, neuro-hacking) on trust. Read more about his work on the subject: What They Don't Teach You in "Thinking Like the Enemy" Classes and Mind Control.

The Obama administration recently responded to a petition asking the government to "require free access over the Internet to scientific journal articles arising from taxpayer-funded research."

I first heard about the petition on Google+, and am very proud to be signature #52. Back then 25,000 signatures seemed like a tall order for what is a somewhat niche area. In the end, the petition gained over 65,000 signatures and an official response from the White House. The Open Science Federation posted a screen capture of the 25,000th signature landmark on June 3, 2012. John Wilibanks started the petition with signature #1.

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FOSDEM, held annually in Brussels, Belgium, is a free event for open source communities to meet, share ideas, and collaborate. It offers a mix of focused devrooms and themed main track talks, with no requirement for registration. It has a reputation of being highly developer-focused, this year brought together over 5,000 geeks from around the world.

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Information is power. But like all power, there are those who want to keep it for themselves.—Aaron Swartz

I have been a PhD student for less than two years. On the other hand, for six years, I have been a member of the free culture movement, which emphasizes the importance of access to and openness of technology and information. » Read more

Scientific software tools have long lived in the conflict zone between open source ideals and proprietary exploitation. The values of science (openness, transparency, and free exchange) are at odds with the desires of individuals and organizations to transition scientific tools to a commercial product. This has been a problem in neuropsychology and neuroscience for decades, and extends outside the bounds of software.

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Last week, Winston Hide committed what he called "a toxic career move." Hide, an associate professor of bioinformatics and computational biology at the Harvard School of Public Health, publicly resigned from the editorial board of Genomics, an influential journal in his field. » Read more

The SIGCSE community (ACM Special Interest Group in Computer Science Education) is fairly large and quite diverse. Computing educators from all across the world and all levels (K-16+) gather to discuss tools, techniques, and research that might inform our work as techers of computing. 

At the intersection of tools and research lies the Comment Mentor (COMTOR) project, which is led by Peter DePasquale, an Associate Professor of Computer Science at The College of New Jersey. The COMTOR project combines Peter's passions at the intersection of computer science education research and the development of robust, distributed applications in the cloud. » Read more

Open source research often paints the community as a homogeneous landscape. I have collected stories from open source contributors to begin constructing a new narrative of diverse experience. These contributors are 20 women and men, living in seven countries. » Read more