transparency - Page number 14

I presented “Creating online community the open source way” at the Triangle Drupal Users Group (TriDUG) on the evening of Thursday, July 22 and thought it would be a good idea to share with a broader audience. For this post, I'll use the opensource.com online community as my case study.

Opensource.com is a community for exploring how open source principles like collaboration, transparency, and meritocracy are influencing innovation beyond technology--shaping education, law, business, government, and everyday life. Opensource.com is a platform to share, discuss, and discover how people are applying the open source way, even if they don't call it that.

Many people are familiar with how the » Read more

attachments: 

TriDUG presentation from July 22, 2010 by Jason Hibbets (PDF)

Tell us what the missed opportunities are, that could be improved, based on your vote.

We got a chance to send a few questions to Jim Zemlin, executive director of the Linux Foundation. We wanted to explore open source principles like transparency, community, and collaboration in his world.  And we got a chance to ask him about the Open Source World Summit in China--and why both Microsoft and the Linux Foundation want people to pay for Windows.

» Read more

Here on the Life channel, we've realized there are a lot of stories about everyday life that are using open source principles—collaboration, participation, sharing, transparency—what we call the open source way. But we can't find them all. And we certainly can't tell them all. That's where you come in. » Read more

If we look at the differences between closed and open source software development processes, we can identify aspects that can be generalized and applied to other industries and domains.

Open source development—that combination of transparency, iterative development with early-and-often releases, and open participation—leads to higher quality products. When we're talking about software, people tend to think of quality in terms of bugs. But this is only part of the story of open development. » Read more

So maybe I'm just getting old, but when just about every article about the Silly Bandz craze credits social media with the spread of the fad, I can't be the only one who thinks we're overvaluing the role of Twitter and Facebook.

Word of mouth marketing has always been the best type, and social networking and the Internet are really just amplified versions of it. But when I compare the progress of the Silly Bandz fad to a similar one of my youth (Millennials, I'm talking about slap bracelets), the colorful silicone bands don't actually seem to be spreading any faster or in a different manner. In fact, substitute the word “Silly Bandz” for “Slap Wraps” in this 1990 NY Times article, and you'd hardly know it's been twenty years since the bracelets made news headlines.

(I'll give my fellow Gen Xers a moment to pick themselves up off the floor.) » Read more

I had the opportunity to sit down with Larry Lessig last week.  Co-founder of Creative Commons, law professor, author, and copyright guru, Lessig is a visionary of law and technology policy.

In the FLOSS community, Lessig is best known for his book Free Culture and work on copyright policy. In his view, attitudes towards copyright started to change when we saw kids and grandmothers sued for file sharing. Lessig has never argued for abolishment of copyright, but he has always argued that there needs to be balance―a more permissive society that allows artists to reserve the rights they need, while allowing others to remix and improve without fear of prosecution.

But two years ago, Lessig moved away from the copyright field to invest more time researching institutional corruption and citizen-funded elections. » Read more

Market confidence is a valuable commodity in tough economic times. And governments will try just about anything to inspire some.  Recapitalization--bailouts--for struggling sectors is one approach.  Another (less deficit-inducing) solution seeks to inspire confidence through a sizable dose of transparency. Bank stress tests are beginning to figure prominently in the later effort.  Stress tests measure how well financial institutions perform under financial "what if" scenarios.  » Read more

Earlier this year, Red Hat launched opensource.com as a way to shine a light on the places where the open source way is multiplying ideas and effort beyond technology. The open source way is more than a development model; it defines the characteristics of a culture. Openness. Transparency. Collaboration. Diversity. Rapid prototyping.

Through opensource.com, we want to find out where the open source way is headed next. Hear what you're doing. Tell you how to get involved. Help you apply it to your life and the world around you. » Read more

Let's face it. There are tons of projects out there in the world being run the open source way today. While the great ones can accomplish unbelievable things, the bad ones, even the average ones, often fail to achieve their goals.

In many cases, the failed projects still used many of the tenets of the open source way, transparency, collaboration, meritocracy, etc. So why did they fail? » Read more