open source software (OSS)
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30 Brilliant African Tech Startups
The secret is out. Wired likens the opportunities in Africa to those of the pre-dotcom boom in 1995. Says the magazine: “If you want to become extremely wealthy over the next five years, and you have a basic grasp of technology, here’s a no-brainer: move to Africa.” Read More »
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3D Design Contest for Medical Tools in Africa
The moment the open source RepRap 3D printer was created, its potential for helping the developing the world was evident. The distributed digital production of open source appropriate technology can make a real difference. Research in this area has been heating up with numerous applications from the Enabling the Future's prosthetic hands, to the Waterscope microscope, to more mundane things like organic farm tools. The ReFab Dar project hopes to accelerate this trend. It is a pilot program that explores how plastic waste can power entrepreneurship using 3D printers in Tanzania. They have built on the early work done by the Michigan Tech Open Sustainability Technology Laboratory's efforts with open source recyclebots to turn plastic waste into 3D printing filament and then into high-value products...
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3D Printers Become Viable Tools In Healthcare
3D printing has received a lot of attention for its applications in the health sector, from helping Bespoke prosthetics change patients' lives to enabling huge strides in stem cell research. And with desktop 3D printers becoming increasingly affordable and reliable—and open source software such as Cura being versatile, easy to use, and free to update—barriers to further 3D printing innovation are quickly disappearing. What was once only available to well-funded practitioners has now become genuinely accessible to every patient, nurse, doctor, surgeon, hospital, and teaching facility...
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3D Printing Could Herald The Age Of Open Source Stuff
3D printing is set to disrupt multiple industries thanks to its unique position at the intersection of three important trends in technology: the Internet of Things, our growing desire to personalize our things, and the coming revolution in the way things get delivered to us. Read More »
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4 Open Source Drone Projects
Over the past few years, interest in both civilian and commercial use of drones has continued to grow rapidly, and drone hardware sits at the top of many people's holiday wish lists. Even just within the civilian side of things, the list of unmanned aerial devices that fit the moniker of drone seems to be constantly expanding. These days, the term seems to encompass everything from what is essentially a cheap, multi-bladed toy helicopter, all the way up to custom-built soaring machines with incredibly adept artificial intelligence capabilities...
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40% Italian Public Administrations Uses Open Source
Just over 40 per cent of Italy's public administrations are using open source software solutions, the country's National Statistical Institute, Istat, reports. According to its 'Public institutions' 2011 Census' report, published on 31 March, this is especially the case among state, regional and provincial administrations. Read More »
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5 Apps Working to Improve Women’s Safety Across the World
Girls in Dharavi Diary Slum are learning how to code apps, changing the lives of people living in Mumbai’s biggest slum. The project aims to empower and educate girls from the Dharavi slum, giving them vital skills to thrive in a digital world. In a country where education for girls is considered secondary to maintaining the family home, this programme is revolutionary in changing the way India is looking at education for girls...
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5 Assistive Technology Open Source Programs
Assistive technology software is any program or operating system feature designed to let a user with cognitive, sensory, or physical impairments use a computer system. Innovations in assistive technology software can make a huge difference in the daily lives of these people... Read More »
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5 Eclipse Tools for Processing and Visualizing Data
Gone are the days of scientists processing data by hand. Scientific tools are rapidly scaling to meet the increasing demands of their users, both in terms of complexity and sheer volumes of data. In various domains, highly sophisticated scientific workbenches have been developed to enable scientists and researchers to quickly make sense of their data in a reproducible way. Several scientific workbenches have been built on top of the Eclipse Rich Client Platform (RCP) framework and offer up open source environments for processing and visualizing data. The companies and institutions behind these workbenches got together to collaborate on these tools, and so the Eclipse Science Working Group was born...
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5 Free Open Source Alternatives To Microsoft Office
While Microsoft Office is the industry standard in terms of , integrated applications for word processing, spreadsheets, presentations, database management, email and desktop publishing. However, it's important for small business owners to know that these types of office applications are also available in free and open source office productivity applications. Read More »
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5 Government Health Challenges To Watch
The Obama Administration brought a new public policy strategy to the federal government in 2009: challenges, with prize money for private organizations that design solutions (typically software or apps) for policy problems. Read More »
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5 Humanitarian Crises Where Open Source Projects Aimed to Bring Stability Government Software
Natural disasters, epidemics, terrorism, and uprisings—the world awaits with bated breath for the situation to turn to normalcy for those directly and indirectly affected by these crises. Here are five crises where open source technologists have helped, in some way, to bring stability in these hostile regions. An annoyed user couldn’t fix his printer as the printer’s source code wasn’t available to users. This was the reason that led to the start of the open source movement...
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5 Myths Busted: Using Open Source in Higher Education
Have you ever heard someone say, "It's impossible to do X with Linux"? Me too. This is the story of how I busted the myths about open source in my own head and used Linux to finish my PhD in fine arts. Many people think non-technical students can't use Linux, and they make a lot of assumptions about people who use it in their advanced degree programs. They scoff and reply with something along the lines of, "Well, of course; those people do 'computer stuff,' but in my [lofty, important, unique area] it's just not possible." Well, it is possible, and I'm proof...
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5 Q’s for Nnenna Nwakanma, Africa Regional Coordinator for the World Wide Web Foundation
Right now, the community of civil society, media, and academia using open data is still growing in Africa. Governments are still not sharing enough open data. And while more and more freedom of information laws are being passed, citizen inquiries are not always responded to in practice. We don’t have clear open data champions.But I’m hopeful this will change because in spite of the challenges a number of excellent projects have shown us what’s possible. For example, the Africa Data ConsensusAfrica Open Data Conference, and the growing network of open street mapping across the continent.
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5 Reasons Professors Should Encourage Students to Get Involved in Open Source Projects
I've been supporting student participation in humanitarian free and open source software (HFOSS) projects for over a decade. I've seen students get motivated and excited by working in a professional community while they learn and mature professionally. Out of the many reasons for supporting student participation in open source, here are five of the most compelling reasons...
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