Going through the speaker list at thenexthope, and seeing how many notes I have written in tasque made me realize I consume way more than I can follow up on. Prioritization aside, just getting this down for posterity is important, and what better way than to public random notes on the internet? (Seriously, I need a better scheme than this, preferrable one that following the antihacking idea I posted earlier. This post will probably be split into a few ones later, but its better to push early and often, before this stuff slips away.

FossCon

Great convention, organized by JonathanD

• Lots of talks involved open education, not just in using FOSS technologies for IT infrastructure, but to take advantage of real world excercises, contributing to code/documentation/art/testing in projects that people will actually use.

  • hkcmp
  • freebay / nomoola
  • collectivefoundation
  • aaaarg.org
  • publiccollectors
  • collectivefoundation
  • thepublicschool.org
  • learningsite.info

• From the talk on community management given by kloeri

  • define what you want from the community early on
  • changing direction is ok as long as everyone is moving in the same direction
  • leave trivial bugs as low hanging fruit
  • be open about exploitation of users to turn them into contributors
  • take “bad” patches to illustrate ease of contribution
  • attribute contributions even if the contributor did not do any of the real work
  • upstream gets contributors <> contributors get credit and learning
  • users can socially engineer the developers to do work for them! (just pose the question as an interesting problem)
  • for another good example, see BFS from Con Kovilas

• POSSE

  • productively lost is a good thing, stumbling around means you have a greater learning potential

  • RiT has a good FOSS movement going on, check out the foss@rit projects page!

    • Professor Stephen rocks, and so does the OLPC

• Openhatch - job site++ for FOSSheads

  • Would be cool to add mission badges, integration with statusnet

• Civx.net - git history of laws!

  • Both built on pygears < turbogears2 < moksha

Music

Music to check out - stuff that sounds good at first glance but I should consider putting into my regular rotation / radio show.

• fabriclive 50
• faded paper figures
• clermont
• frog eyes
• slothbeat kids
• icarus himself
• hyperbubble
• the humms might have a song that flaming lips took the chord progression for ‘I dont know where the sunbeams end and the starlight begins…’

Projects

Its important to document work - really, really important. Here is a crappy start.

• Get pics from Prof. Jose
• Fix arduinome
• Build Problem Light (have a good chassis…)