Vol. 1
Open Sourced( ); Breaking boundaries between ownership and collaboration in the information age.
{
Open Source Everywhere
}
Open Source Projects that Changed the World Build it. Share it. Profit.
Winter 2011
OpenSourced EDITOR IN CHIEF: Chris Anderson EXECUTIVE EDITOR: Thomas Goetz MANAGING EDITOR: Jacob Young FEATURES EDITOR: Mark Robinson ARTICLES EDITOR: Robert Capps STORY EDITORS: Jon J. Eilenberg, Sarah Fallon SENIOR EDITORS: Chris Baker, Nancy Miller, Adam Rogers, Jason Tanz, Bill Wasik SPECIAL PROJECTS EDITOR: Mark McClusky SENIOR WRITER: Steven Levy COPY CHIEF: Jennifer Prior COPY EDITORS: Brian Dustrud, Holly Haynes SENIOR EDITOR, RESEARCH: Joanna Pearlstein ASSISTANT RESEARCH EDITORS: Rachel Swaby, Angela Watercutter EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR OF PUBLIC RELATIONS: Samantha Rosenthal PR MANAGER: Rachel Millner EDITORIAL OPERATIONS MANAGER: Jay Dayrit ASSISTANT MANAGING EDITOR: Erica Jewell CREATIVE DIRECTOR: Scott Dadich DESIGN DIRECTOR: Wyatt Mitchell SENIOR ART DIRECTOR: Margaret Swart ART DIRECTORS: Alice Cho, Tim Leong ART DIRECTOR, SPECIAL PROJECTS: Margaret Swart CONTRIBUTING DESIGNER: Victor Krummenacher SENIOR PHOTO EDITOR: Zana Woods PHOTO EDITOR: Carolyn Rauch DEPUTY PHOTO EDITOR: Anna Goldwater Alexander PHOTO ASSISTANTS: Sarah Filippi VIDEO EDITOR: Alexa Inkeles PRODUCTION DIRECTOR: Ron Licata PRODUCTION MANAGER: Ryan Meith SENIOR MAVERICK: Kevin Kelly FOUNDING EDITOR: Louis Rossetto EDITORIAL DIRECTOR: Thomas J. Wallace
Community
DIY
Culture
DYK?
02 OpenSource Everywhere
12 Build it. Share it.
18 Open Source Creativity
22 Social Media Revolution
06 Change the World
17 Arduino Developers
20 Freeing Knowledge
24 Open Source Facebook
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get ready for the era when collaboration replaces the corporation.
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Vol. 1
Open Sourced Winter 2011
Open Source Everywhere( ){ Cholera is one of those 19th-century
But the team needed more medical exper-
ills that, like consumption or gout,
tise. So Prestero turned to ThinkCycle,
at first seems almost quaint, a malady
a Web-based industrial-design project
BY THOMAS GOETZ
from an age when people suffered from
that brings together engineers, design-
11.11.03
maladies. But in the developing world,
ers, academics, and professionals from a
the disease is still widespread and
variety of disciplines. Soon, some phy-
can be gruesomely lethal. When cholera
sicians and engineers were pitching in,
strikes an unprepared com munity, people
vetting designs and recommending new
get violently sick immediately. On day
paths. Within a few months, Prestero's
two, severe dehydration sets in. By day
team had turned the suggestions into an
seven, half of a village might be dead.
ingenious solution. Taking inspiration
Since cholera kills by driving fluids from the body, the treatment is to pu mp liquid back in, as fast as possible. The one proven technology, an intravenous saline drip, has a few drawbacks. An easy-to-use, computer-regulated IV can cost $2,000 - far too expensive to deploy against a large outbreak. Other systems
from a tool called a rotameter used in chemical engineering, the group crafted a new IV system that's intuitive to use, even for untrained workers. Remarkably, it costs about $1.25 to manufacture, making it ideal for mass deployment. Prestero is now in talks with a medical devices company; the new IV could be in the field a year from now.
cost as little as 35 cents, but they're too complicated for unskilled caregiv-
ThinkCycle's collaborative approach is
ers. The result: People die unnecessarily.
modeled on a method that for more than
"It's a health problem, but it's also a design problem," says Timothy Prestero, a onetime Peace Corps volunteer who cofounded a group called Design That Matters. Leading a team of MIT engineering students, Prestero, who has master's degrees in mechanical and oceanographic engineering, focused on the drip chamber and pinch valve controlling the saline flow rate.
a decade has been closely associated with software development: open source. It's called that because the collaboration is open to all and the source code is freely shared. Open source harnesses the distributive powers of the Internet, parcels the work out to thousands, and uses their piecework to build a better whole, putting informal networks of volunteer coders in direct competition with big corporations. It works like an
Community
DIY
Culture
DYK?
02 OpenSource Everywhere
12 Build it. Share it.
18 Open Source Creativity
22 Social Media Revolution
06 Change the World
17 Arduino Developers
20 Freeing Knowledge
24 Open Source Facebook
Community();
5
Open Source Everywhere
Software is just the beginning‌ open source is doing for mass innovation what the assembly line did for mass production. Get ready for the era when collaboration replaces the corporation.
ant colony, where the collective intel-
But software is just the beginning.
ligence of the network supersedes any
Open source has spread to other disci-
single contributor.
plines, from the hard sciences to the
Open source, of course, is the magic behind Linux, the operating system that is transforming the software industry. Linux commands a growing share of the server market worldwide and even has Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer warning of its "competitive challenge for us and for our entire industry." And open source software transcends Linux. Altogether, more than 65,000 collaborative software projects click along at Sourceforge.net, a clearinghouse for the open source community. The success of Linux alone has stunned the business world.
liberal arts. Biologists have embraced open source methods in genomics and informatics, building massive databases to genetically sequence E. coli, yeast, and other workhorses of lab research. NASA has adopted open source principles as part of its Mars mission, calling on volunteer "clickworkers" to identify millions of craters and help draw a map of the Red Planet. There is open source publishing: With Bruce Perens, who helped define open source software in the '90s, Prentice Hall is publishing a series of computer books open to any use, modification, or redistribution, with readers' improvements considered for succeeding editions. There are li-
In the Beginning:
brary efforts like Project Gutenberg,
Message-ID:
6,000 books, with hundreds of volun-
1991Aug25.205708.9541@klaava.helsinki.fi
teers typing in, page by page, classics
From: torvalds@klaava.helsinki.fi (Linus Benedict Torvalds)
from Shakespeare to Stendhal; at the
To: Newsgroups: comp.os.inix
same time, a related project, Distrib-
Subject: What would you like to see most in minix?
uted Proofreading, deploys legions of
Summary: small poll for my new operating system
copy editors to make sure the Gutenberg
which has already digitized more than
texts are correct. There are open source Hello everybody out there using minix-I'm doing a (free) op-
projects in law and religion. There's
erating system (just a hobby, won't be big and professional
even an open source cookbook.
like gnu) for 386 (486) AT clones. This has been brewing since april, and is starting to get ready. I'd like any feedback
In 2003, the method is proving to be as
on things people like/dislike in minix, as my OS resembles it
broadly effective - and, yes, as revolu-
somewhat
tionary - a means of production as the assembly line was a century ago.
Any suggestions are welcome, but I won't promise I'll implement them :-)
In the beginning thousands of coders, hackers, and developers answered Linus
Linus
Torvalds' call - and helped him build a
6
Vol. 1
Open Sourced Winter 2011
We are at a convergent m when a philosophy, a stra and a technology have ali unleash great innovation. robust system that continues to pick up
OF COURSE, FOR ALL ITS NOVELTY, OPEN
steam. Yet what's amazing about Linux
SOURCE ISN’T NEW.
isn't its success in the market. The revolution is in the method, not the result. Open source involves a broad body of collaborators, typically volunteers, whose every contribution builds on those before. Just as important, the product of this collaboration is freely available to all comers. Of course, there are plenty of things that are collaborative and free but aren't really open source (Amazon.com's book reviews, for instance). And many projects aren't widely collaborative, or are somewhat proprietary, yet still in the spirit of open source (such as the music available from Opsound, an online record label). Not to mention that, as with any term newly in vogue, open source is often invoked on tenuous grounds. So think of it as a spectrum or, better still, a rising diagonal line on a graph, where openness lies on one axis and collaboration on the other. The higher an effort registers both concepts, the more fully it can be considered open source.
Dust off your Isaac Newton and you'll recognize the same ideals of sharing scientific methods and results in the late 1600s (dig deeper and you can follow the vein all the way back to Ptolemy, circa AD 150). Or roll up your sleeves and see the same ethic in Amish barn raising, a tradition that dates to the early 18th century. Or read its roots, as many have, in the creation of the Oxford English Dictionary, the 19th-century project where a network of far-flung etymologists built the world's greatest dictionary by mail. Or trace its outline in the Human Genome Project, the distributed genemapping effort that began just a year before Torvalds planted the seeds of his OS. If the ideas behind it are so familiar and simple, why has open source only now become such a powerful force? Two reasons: the rise of the Internet and the excesses of intellectual property. The Internet is open source’s great enabler, the com munications tool that makes massive decentralized projects possible. Intellectual property, on the other hand, is open source’s nemesis: a legal regime that has become so stifling and restrictive that thousands of free-thinking programmers, scientists, designers, engineers, and scholars are desperate to find new ways to create.
Open Source Everywhere
Community();
7
moment, ategy, igned to .
we are at a convergent moment, when a
The Internet excels at facilitating the
philosophy, a strategy, and a technology
exchange of large chunks of information,
have aligned to unleash great innovation.
fast. From distributed computation projects
Open source is powerful because it’s an
such as SETI@home to file-swapping systems
alternative to the status quo, another
like Grokster and Kazaa, many efforts have
way to produce things or solve problems.
exploited the Internet’s knack for network-
And in many cases, it’s a better way.
ing. Open source does those one better: It’s
Better because current methods are not
not only peer-to-peer sharing - it’s P2P
fast enough, not ambitious enough, or
production. With open source, you’ve got the
don’t take advantage of our collective
first real industrial model that stems from
creative potential.
the technology itself, rather than simply
Open source has flourished in software
incorporating it. because programming, for all the romance
“There’s a reason we love barn raising
of guerrilla geeks and hacker ethics, is
scenes in movies. They make us feel great.
a fairly precise discipline;
We think, ‘Wow! That would be amazing!’”
you’re only as good as your code. It’s relatively easy to run an open source software project as a meritocracy, a level playing field that encourages participation. But those virtues aren’t exclusive to software. Coders, it could be argued, got to open source first only because they were closest to the tool that made it a feasible means of production: the Internet.
says Yochai Benkler, a law professor at Yale studying the economic impact of open source. “But it doesn’t have to be just a romanticized notion of how to live. Now technology allows it. Technology can unleash tremendous human creativity and tremendous productivity. This is basically barn raising through a decentralized communication network.”
}
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Open Sourced Winter 2011
Open Source Projects that here are seven projects that have, quite
the wayside, leaving webmasters all
literally, changed the world.
patches and fixes. The Apache project was
over the world developing their own started to bring all of these patches together in one server, which made it A “Patchy” Sever. In less than a year, the Apache web server became the number one server on the Internet, and stays at the top today. Ease of access of the Linux kernel, the GNU userland tools, and the Apache web server created a perfect environment for businesses large and small to start hosting their own
BY JON BUYS
GNU: The grand-daddy of them all, and
08.09.10
everyone’s favorite recursive acronym, the GNU project was founded in 1984 on philosophical grounds that software should respect users freedom. GNU is the founder of several other projects, but possibly the most important in sheer scope is the GNU General Public
web sites in the fledgling Internet. MYSQUL: The worlds most popular open source database, MySQL powers all or part of the b most popular web sites. Corporate backing ackend of many of the worlds and ingenuity have made help MySQL make inroads against some of the
License, the GPL. The GNU project also
biggest competitors in databases. MySQL
tried for years to come up with a
has deep integration with Linux and the
complete desktop system based around
Changed the World( ){
the Hurd kernel, but found another kernel that quickly leapfrogged GNU’s efforts, and was quickly adopted. LINUX: Linux is now used to refer to a class of operating system that generally uses GNU userspace tools and the Linux kernel. Developed by Linus Torvalds as a college project to clone the Minux kernel, Linux has taken off in ways that were unimaginable a few years ago. Linux runs on the largest mainframes, and the smallest cell phones. APACHE: In the early ’90s, the most popular web server was a public dom ain http server developed by the National Center for Supercomputing Applications. That project fell to
Community
DIY
Culture
DYK?
02 OpenSource Everywhere
12 Build it. Share it.
18 Open Source Creativity
22 Social Media Revolution
06 Change the World
17 Arduino Developers
20 Freeing Knowledge
24 Open Source Facebook
Community();
Open Source Projects that Changed the World
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Open Sourced Winter 2011
DO YOU KNOW ABOUT THE NEXT GREAT OPEN SOURCE PROJECT?
open source community,but also has a
base of OS X, the merger of NeXTStep and
successful corporate identity as well.
the original Mac OS. OS X, in turn,
Acquired first by Sun, and more recently
spawned the iPhone OS, now called iOS,
by Oracle, the corporate side of MySQL
which powers the iPhone, iPod Touch, and
provides the support necessary for open
iPad. Apple’s mobile “i” devices changed
source software to thrive in the enter-
the entire cell phone industry, and
prise data center.
knocked the smart phone market on its ear.
LANGUAGES: Normally seen together as PHP/
The importance of open source projects
Perl/ Python, the “P” of the LAMP stack
like those above cannot be underesti-
(Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP) encompasses
mated. The impact on the market, the
the interpreted languages that form the
workplace, and even our culture is so
glue of a massive number of sites. Word-
deep that it’s difficult to measure or
press, Drupal, Expression Engine, Movable
understand. What is known though is
Type and more are all built on the back
that we are still at the beginnings of
of PHP.
the open source movement, and that
MOZILLA: Risen from the ashes of Netscape, Mozilla’s Firefox browser has stormed the world by showing how far a browser’s
there are still great things waiting to be done. Do you know of the next great open source project? Sound off in the comments!
capabilities could be pushed. The first browser with tabs, the first browser with extensions, the first cross-platform browser, Firefox has pushed the industry forward. Features of the original Firefox can now be found in Safari, Chrome, and even Internet Explorer. FREEBSD: FreeBSD is similar in functionality to Linux, but has a completely different family tree, and a much looser license. FreeBSD was adopted by NeXT to provide the base of their NeXTStep operating system, which provided the
{
With almost religious fervor, open source evangelists have been fighting the good fight for freedom of code
}
}
Community();
Open Source Projects that Changed the World
11
open source software isn’t just about getting something for free...
it’s a statemen the world shou
nt about how uld be( );
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Build It. Share It. Profit. ( ) {
BY CLIVE THOMPSON 10.20.08
Community
DIY
Culture
DYK?
02 OpenSource Everywhere
12 Build it. Share it.
18 Open Source Creativity
22 Social Media Revolution
06 Change the World
17 Arduino Developers
20 Freeing Knowledge
24 Open Source Facebook
Do it Yourself();
Build it. Share it. Profit.
“ CHECK THIS OUT,” Massimo Banzi says. The
Indeed, 50,000 Arduino units have been
burly, bearded engineer wanders over to
sold worldwide since mass production
inspect a chipmaking robot “pick and
began two years ago. Those are small
place” machine the size of a pizza oven.
numbers by Intel standards but large
It hums with activity, grabbing teensy
for a startup outfit in a highly special-
electronic parts and stabbing them into
ized market. What’s really remarkable,
position on a circuit board like a
though, is Arduino’s business model: The
hyperactive chicken pecking for seeds.
team has created a company based on
We’re standing in a one-room fabrication
giving everything away. On its Web site,
factory used by Arduino, the Italian
it posts all its trade secrets for anyone
firm that makes this circuit board, a
to take—all the schematics, design files,
hot commodity among DIY gadget-builders.
and software for the Arduino board.
The electronics factory is one of the
Download them and you can manufacture
most picturesque in existence, nestled
an Arduino yourself; there are no
in the medieval foothills of Milan,
patents. You can send the plans off to a
with birdsong floating in through the open doors and plenty of coffee breaks for the white-coated staff. But today Banzi is all business. He’s showing off his operation to a group
15
Can Open Source Hardware Work?
of potential customers from Arizona. Banzi scoops up one of
Chinese factory, mass-produce the
the boards and points to the tiny map
circuit boards, and sell them yourself
of Italy emblazoned on it. “See? Italian
pocketing the profit without paying
manufacturing quality!” he says, laugh-
Banzi a penny in royalties. He won’t sue
ing. “That’s why everyone likes us!”
you. Actually, he’s sort of hoping you’ll do it. That’s because the Arduino board is a piece of open source hardware, free for anyone to use, modify, or sell. Banzi and his team have spent precious billable hours making the thing, and they sell it themselves for a small profit while allowing anyone else to do the same. They’re not alone in this experiment. In a loosely coordinated movement, dozens of hardware inventors around the world have begun to freely publish their specs. There are open source synthesizers, MP3 players, guitar amplifiers, and even high-end voice-over-IP phone routers. You can buy an open source mobile phone to talk on, and a chip company called VIA has just released an open source laptop: Anyone can take its design, fabricate it, and start selling the notebooks.
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CAN OPEN SOURCE HARDWARE DO THE SAME THING?
Team A Banzi admits that the concept does sound
was launched when Torvalds decided he
insane. After all, Arduino assumes a lot
didn’t like the operating systems
of risk; the group spends thousands of
available to him. The top three—Micro-
dollars to make a batch of boards.
soft’s DOS, Apple’s operating system, and Unix—were all expensive and they were
Then again, Linux sounded pretty in-
closed; Torvalds wanted a system he
sane, too, back in 1991, when Linus
could tinker with. As it happened, a lot
Torvalds announced it. Nobody believed
of other geeks wanted the same thing.
a bunch of part-time volunteers could
So when Torvalds began working on Linux
create something as complex as an
and sharing his code, other hackers
operating system, or that it would be
were willing to pitch in and help
more stable than Windows. Nobody be-
improve it for free—creating a virtual
lieved Fortune 500 companies would
workforce that was infinitely bigger and
“ If you publish all your files, in one sense, you’re inviting the competition to come and kill you,” trust software that couldn’t be “owned.” Yet 17 years later, the open source software movement has been crucial to the Cambrian explosion of the Web economy. Linux enabled Google to build
smarter than Torvalds himself. That is the central benefit of open source projects: They’re like a barn raising in which everyone gets to use the barn. Somebody has a problem and creates a tool to solve it. And once the tool is created, hey—why not share it? The hard work has already been done. Might as well let others benefit.
dirt-cheap servers; Java and Perl and
Arduino began the same way. Banzi was a
Ruby have become the lingua franca for
teacher at a high tech design school in
building Web 2.0 applications; and the
Ivrea, Italy, and his students often
free Web-server software Apache powers
complained they couldn’t find an inexpen-
nearly half of all Web sites in the
sive, powerful microcontroller to drive
world. Open source software gave birth
their arty robotic projects. In winter
to the Internet age, making everyone,
2005, Banzi was discussing the problem
even those who donated their labor,
with David Cuartielles, a Spanish micro-
better off.
chip engineer who was a visiting researcher at the school. The two decided
Every open source project begins with
to design their own board and enlisted
an itch that needs scratching. Linux
one of Banzi’s students—David Mellis—to
Do it Yourself();
Build it. Share it. Profit.
Gianluca Martino
David Cuartielles
17
Massimo Banzi
Arduino
write the programming language for it. In
“We did 200 copies, and my school bought
two days, Mellis banged out the code;
50,” Banzi says. “We had no idea how we’d
three days more and the board was com-
sell the other 150. We didn’t think we
plete. They called it the Arduino, after
would.” But word spread to hobbyists
a nearby pub, and it was an instant hit
worldwide, and a few months later there
with the students. Almost anyone, even if
were orders for hundreds more Arduinos.
they didn’t know anything about computer
Turns out there was a market for this thing.
programming, could use an Arduino to do something cool, like respond to sensors,
So the Arduino inventors decided to
make lights blink, or control motors.
start a business, but with a twist: The
Then Banzi, Cuartielles, and Mellis put
designs would stay open source. Because
the schematics online and spent 3,000
copyright law—which governs open source
euros to make the first batch of boards.
software—doesn’t apply to hardware, they
PHOTO: JAMES DAY
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Open Sourced Winter 2011
Arduino gadgets:
PHOTO: JAMES DAY
decided to use a Creative Commons license
Members of the team had slightly dif-
called Attribution-Share Alike. It
ferent motives for opening the design of
governs the “reference designs” for the
their device. Cuartielles—who sports a
Arduino board, the files you’d send to a
mass of wiry, curly hair and a Che
fabrication plant to have the boards made.
Guevara beard—describes himself as a
Under the Creative Commons license, anyone is allowed to produce copies of the board, to redesign it, or even to sell boards that copy the design. You don’t need to pay a license fee to the Arduino team or even ask permission. However, if you republish the reference design, you have to credit the original Arduino group. And if you tweak or change the board, your new design must use the same or a similar Creative Commons license to ensure that new versions of the Arduino board will be equally free and open.
left-leaning academic who’s less interested in making money than in inspiring creativity and having his invention used widely. If other people make copies of it, all the better; it will gain more renown. (“When I spoke in Taiwan recently, I told them, ‘Please copy this!’” Cuartielles says with a grin.) Banzi, by contrast, is more of a canny businessman; he has mostly retired from teaching and runs a high tech design firm. But he suspected that if Arduino were open, it would inspire more interest and more free publicity than a piece of proprietary, closed hardware. What’s more, excited
The only piece of intellectual property
geeks would hack it and—like Linux fans—
the team reserved was the name Arduino,
contact the Arduino team to offer
which it trademarked. If anyone wants
improvements. They would capitalize on
to sell boards using that name, they
this free work, and every generation of
have to pay a small fee to Arduino. This,
the board would get better.
Cuartielles and Banzi say, is to make sure their brand name isn’t hurt by low-quality copies.
}
Do it Yourself();
Arduino Developers
19
Want to join the World of arduino Developers?( ) { Wired editor in chief Chris Anderson already has, designing two Arduino-based autopilots for unmanned model aircraft: ArduPilot and BlimpDuino (you can find them at diydrones.com). Here's his formula for getting your creation out and into the world.
1
2
Upload your files to a board
Order bulk electronic parts from
and circuit board files from
fabricator like BatchPCB. Your
digikey .com and solder the
arduino .cc. Use the free version
boards will be manufactured in
components onto the board to
of CadSoft Eagle (from cadsoft.de)
Chinese robotic-electronics
make a prototype. Test the board
to modify them for your particu-
factories and sent to your house.
and your code. You’re ready to
lar creation.
Typical cost is $10 each.
distribute your gizmo to the
Download the Arduino schematic
4
5
3 6
If you want to produce and sell
Publish your revised schematics
Alternately, an open source hard-
the product yourself, use a
and circuit board files so that
ware specialist like SparkFun or
manufacturing service like
others can modify them. The
Adafruit can make and sell the
Screaming Circuits to assemble
cycle begins again.
product for you. They’ll add a
the boards on robotic pick-and-
profit margin and pay you a
place soldering machines.
license fee.
Community
DIY
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DYK?
02 OpenSource Everywhere
12 Build it. Share it.
18 Open Source Creativity
22 Social Media Revolution
06 Change the World
17 Arduino Developers
20 Freeing Knowledge
24 Open Source Facebook
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Open Source Creativity( ) { Altman. “There were a handful of them. There were different than the way they are now. Back then, it was very small BY JENNY OH
groups of people who were incredibly
01.26.11
talented, almost always with software. And they were not very open to other people. They got together and did what they loved, which is software and just kept it amongst themselves... Occasionally someone would come along who was doing something just so cool they would let them in. But… a lot of people thought it
“ i hadn’t heard of hackerspaces prior to producing this story about noisebridge, a hackerspace located in san francisco’s mission district.”
was a bit elitist… They did a lot of great work and a lot of what we take for granted today with the internet is a result of these people.”
Mitch is a technological Renaissance man; he’s a hacker, author, instructor and the inventor of TV-B-Gone, a device that allows one to turn off any television with a click of a special remote.
By the ‘90's, a bunch of German hackers called collectively the Chaos Computer Club, they caught wind of what was going on there. Of course, there were ties from Europe to North America. And they started doing hackerspaces in a
He and co-founder Jacob Appelbaum headed
uniquely German way. And these people
to the Chaos Communication Camp near
have a lot of anarchist background, so
Berlin, Germany in 2007. CCC is a creative
they were doing it with less… rules,
gathering that occurs every four years
less control, less… leaders —no leaders.
and was founded by the Chaos Computer
And so they started having hackerspaces
Club. This German hackerspace that has
that were more open, and then sharing
been instrumental in developing the new
the model so that hackerspaces, little
wave of hackerspaces.
ones, would open up
Hackerspaces started in the U.S. in like
all over Germany in not only big towns,
the late 1980’s, early 1990’s,” says
but smaller towns as well. And that
Community
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02 OpenSource Everywhere
12 Build it. Share it.
18 Open Source Creativity
22 Social Media Revolution
06 Change the World
17 Arduino Developers
20 Freeing Knowledge
24 Open Source Facebook
Culture();
went on for awhile, and there were maybe 50 hackerspaces or so in the world
Open Source Creativity
21
Hackerspaces
by 2007…Of course, people had been hearing about Chaos Camp and hackerspaces and hacker conferences, which were getting more and more popular. At the same time, the do-it-yourself movement is taking off with the help of Make Magazine, and Maker Faires, which are becoming huge at this point.” Upon their return, Mitch and Jake were inspired to start their own hackerspace, along with several colleagues who founded HacDC, The Hacktory (the founder has moved on to create Hive76) and NYC Resistor. Me and Jake told everyone we knew that we were gonna start a hackerspace. If you wanted to be a part of it, let’s do it. And we put the word out in email lists; there are a lot of geek email lists that have existed in San Francisco for a long time, and we created our own email list. Really quickly, within a couple of weeks, we had over 15 people. And within like 3 or 4 weeks, we were meeting every Tuesday in cafés around town.
}
“ they caught wind of what was going on here.”
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Freeing Knowledge( ) { BY KELSEY GEISER
The project works on how to make precious
The project involves mainly software
01.26.11
new information easily available to anyone
developers, researchers and librarians,
who wants it. Education professor and
who together created open journals and
project director John Willinsky has been
conference systems and are currently
working on the project since 1998. He
working on an open monograph press. The
began with the premise that research should
journals system provides a publishing
be made more widely available. Since then,
platform that allows scholars not only
the project has taken a more technological
to make their hard-earned information
direction.
widely available, but also to easily manage the journals, edit and peer-review
“ we are trying to help developing countries use their own language to contribute from
submissions and carry out the overall publishing process.
their own perspective but still with scholarly
The scholars who use the software to publish
standards,”
commercial publishers. This means the
their journals do not have to go through project does not publish the journals
It revolves around free, downloadable
itself. Rather, it facilitates the
software that provides scholars with the
publication process so scholars can do
means to launch new or existing journals
so easily and efficiently.
and the option to make those journals free and publicly available. With this “open-
More than 7,500 titles in 35 languages are
source” option, the project aims to have
using the software, half in developing
many scholars join it in its mission to
countries. The journals address a wide range
improve the quality of public research
of topics, from arts and poetry to medicine,
not only in the U.S., but also all over
and can be published by anyone from a high
the world.
school student to a university professor.
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One of the journals is printed in Kiswahili, making it the program’s first journal in an African language. Juan Pablo Alperin, a researcher and systems developer in the project, has spent time researching and running workshops across Latin America to discover how best to help editors in the region publish research journals. “I see the open-access movement and the work that we do as aimed at helping journals in these regions that are not currently valued by the system achieve visibility, recognition and prestige,” Alperin said. He and others working toward this goal around the world have found it difficult to encourage people to change how they publish their work. Alperin has been working to reverse this aversion to open forums for research by “using technology to shift the landscape of what is possible.” Jamie O’Keeffe, a fellow researcher in the open-access movement, is making similar strides in the medical field. She is working on a journal researching the impact of open journal resources by looking at health care providers. O’Keefe’s research is “an exploratory study to investigate the ‘current’ state of access,” she said in an e-mail to The Daily. She found through interviews
The project’s open conference systems allow users to easily manage large meetings. It helps them to create webpages, to schedule, to review submissions, to create registries and to organize the sm all but important details of conference plan ning. The program is also working on an open monograph press, which will allow for free access to monographs, edited volumes and scholarly editions, many of which are especially difficult for developing countries to access. The project plans on expanding its mission, especially in the field of student journals and in further supporting the active participation of developing countries in the global network.
with health care providers that critical
The project has taken technological
decisions physicians needed to make
leaps towards making journals easily
depended on their access to particular
available. However, its long-term goal
research articles.
is to make all scholarly information openly accessible. “About 20 percent of research is now freely available, and we are not going to stop until it is 99.9 percent,” Willinsky said.
{
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“ we can make knowledge available online more easily, more widely and more cheaply,”
}
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There’s no such thing( ) {
There seems to be a contingent out there that analyzes each of the globe's various political conflicts and attempts to figure out, through plenty of speculation and the occasional Wikipedia look-ups of far-flung sovereignties, which uprising will mark the first true "social media revolution."
BY CAROLINE MCCARTHY 01.26.11 4:00 AM PST
A dictator toppled by Twitter or ousted
This sort of rhetoric has been going on
through the efforts of a Facebook group?
for nearly two years when an anti-government
It's an enticing idea, particularly for
uprising in Iran swelled up through
those who are in the business of social
Twitter and, as a result of traditional
media and have a personal stake of sorts
media crackdowns, became the primary
in tallying each instance of social
medium in which much of the world knew
media's global value making headlines.
about what was going on in the Islamic
Twitter punditry this week has been
nation. The activists' efforts ultimately
peppered with speculation about whether
had far less impact on the government
upheaval in Tunisia or the subsequent
than many of the breathless Twitter
anti-government protests in Egypt might
observers expected, and for too many of
amount to the "first" true revolution
them it's now known as the movement in
spawned by social media. But this just
which everyone tinted their Twitter
isn't the right way to measure things:
profile photos with green as a sign of
the occurrence of a "social media revolution,"
solidarity (which now seems awfully
at this point, should be neither
passive). This, alas, wasn't "the social
noteworthy nor remarkable. If a dictator
media revolution." And so the pundits
is overthrown or a government ousted,
moved on.
it would be notable if Facebook or Twitter weren't used.
So let's look at the basic numbers. Facebook
That's because social media is a part
the world, an inarguable lock on the
of the world we live in and has become
mainstream in much of the world and
such a crucial form of communication
significant penetration even in the
that it will factor into any political
countries where it doesn't have as much
movement nearly anywhere in the world.
reach. Twitter is about one-third its
In other words, the use of Twitter,
size, though its most active users tend
Facebook, or YouTube should not be what's
to be more in the vein of newshounds
worth talking about. At this point, it
and culture fans than FarmVille players
takes away from the substance of the
and vacation photo swappers--which may be
revolution (or lack thereof) itself.
the reason why the smaller Twitter is
has more than 600 million users around
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as important, if not more so, than Facebook
the candidate's popularity among young
in political activism. Both social media
voters who heavily favored him at the
services are actively looking to expand
polls. Two years after Obama's inauguration,
their reach in developing countries,
these things should no longer surprise
particularly Facebook, which has launched
us —nor should we be surprised that,
mobile sites and applications geared to
yes, social media is a vital instrument
lower-end cell phones and slower connections.
in political change all over the world.
25
}
The truth is that smaller elements of "social media revolution" have been all around us already for over half a decade— even in our own, comparatively humdrum political system in which "revolution" means a switch in the partisan balance of a governing body accompanied by plenty of red-and-blue news-ticker graphics on cable networks. George Allen, a Republican senator from Virginia, was in a tight race for re-election in 2006 until a video from a campaign rally surfaced on YouTube in which he called one of his opponent's campaign staff volunteers by a bizarre epithet that turned out to be a racial slur of sorts. The video went viral, Allen lost, and his "macaca moment" has been widely highlighted as the source of his downfall--in spite of the presence of countless strategists, publicists, and glossy campaign ads, social media's power prevailed. Yes, social media can lead to the improbable rise of leaders who otherwise might never have had a shot. Without Meetup and the readership of liberal blogs, former Vermont governor Howard Dean might never have had a shot at the Democratic presidential nomination (which, of course, he lost). In 2008, Barack Obama's campaign team's digital savviness was a crucial component in
as ‘social media revolution'
26
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Open Source Facebook Contender Releases Code to Public( ) { BY RYAN SINGEL
DIASPORA, an open source challenger to
own domain name or use a hosted service
11.16.10
Facebook, hit its first milestone
or even run their own e-mail server — but
6:27 PM
Wednesday, releasing code for fellow
all can still interact, regardless of how
hackers to test drive and improve.
or where their e-mail service is. Dias-
The code is not ready for general use, and you can’t go to Diaspora.com to use it. Instead, those with program ming skills can install it on their servers, test the code, and work on it — adding
pora isn’t the only effort at creating so-called federated social networking — there’s a number of other active open source projects, including the Appleseed and OneSocialWeb.
features via a shared code-hosting
Diaspora was founded earlier this year by
service called Github, where the changes
four New York University students as a
can be pulled into the main code base.
way to create a social network that put
Diaspora warned that there are know n
users in control of their data. The four
security issues with the code, making it
tapped into this spring’s anti-Facebook
clear this was a release for developers,
zeitgeist to collect $200,000 in online
not early adopters. The code is based on
donations, even one from Facebook founder
Ruby on Rails and MongoDB.
Mark Zuckerberg.
As its name suggests, Diaspora isn’t aiming
The founders moved to Silicon Valley this
to turn Diaspora.com into a replacement
summer and have remained largely silent,
for Facebook.com, but instead is seeking
except for very occasional blog updates.
to create software that allows people to have more control over their social network, without having a single entity
On Wednesday, Diaspora made good on its August promise to release its source code
holding all the data and making the rules.
in mid-September. On the Hacker News
The idea is to disperse social networking,
were generally pleased with the code,
so that it works more like e-mail, where
which focused more on user interface issues
users can sign-up for an account with
than packing in as many features as possible.
message board, fellow start-up engineers
any number of providers or buy their
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Diaspora says it intends to keep developing the product and that an “alpha” release aimed at users, not just developers, is scheduled for October. Screenshot: The Diaspora Project’s activity stream as implemented in its developer release. Follow us for disruptive tech news: Ryan Singel and Epicenter on Twitter.
{
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The idea is to disperse social networking, so that it works more like e-mail
}