OSCON 2016
See the following -
5 Keys to Hacking Your Community. What Works?
One of the many great keynotes given at the Community Leadership Summit (CLS) this year was by Rod Martin of Mautic, creator of marketing automation software. Rod spoke to us about the five key secrets to growth hacking your community. If you're like me, you might be wondering what growth hacking is? Growth hacking is a fancy way to say throwing everything against the wall to see what sticks / works. Rod's talk stuck with me because he presented his argument by using a series of words and definitions to make it completely clear what it is we're trying to do when building our communities...
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Computer Science Professor on the Changing Face of Tech
Dr. Kyla McMullen spoke at OSCON's morning keynote session today. She was the first African-American woman to graduate with a PhD in Computer Science and Engineering at the University of Michigan. And it says a lot about tech's lack of inclusiveness that this landmark achievement happened in 2012. These days she is Assistant Professor in Computer Science at the University of Florida. In her keynote, Dr. McMullen explained that as a child she was a tinkerer and reader—like most of us in the room...
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Cory Doctorow on the Real-World Dangers of Digital Rights Management
Cory Doctorow gave a fast-paced keynote at OSCON 2016 this year that served as a warning message against DRM (digital rights management): Open, closed, and demon haunted: An Internet of Things that act like inkjet printers. Cory's example of what DRM and copyright can look like in the physical world: Let's say you're building a conference center and your engineer says that he's going to make sure the ceiling won't fall down on your attendees, but he's not going to share the math he's using to do those calculates because it's proprietary. Would you want to enter that conference center? I wouldn't...
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Open Source at Your Company? 6 Questions Your Manager Will Ask
Christian Grail gave a talk at OSCON 2016 titled: "How to convince your manager to go open source." I thought the perspective was going to be from the user side but it was from the employee side, about convincing your manager to open source the projects at your company. "Isn't the quality going to suffer?" There is a perception that when we're only depending on our internal team, we can control the quality. The fact is that with open source, you have nice lean code and the quality is usually better because it's being worked on all of the time, regardless of where and by whom. The advantage with most open source software is that you get a community, so you have more than just your team of X developers...
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Prepare to Be Hacked: Information Security for Small Organizations
Information security is challenging, and can be breathtakingly expensive in money and staff energy. Smaller organizations may not have the money or staffing expertise to do the job right, even when the need is the greatest. At OSCON 2016, Kelsey Gilmore-Innis of Sexual Health Innovations (SHI) gave a really interesting talk on how her small nonprofit has done some creative thinking about security, and how that influences the deployment and operation of their application. Callisto is an online reporting system designed to provide a more empowering, transparent, and confidential reporting system for college sexual assault survivors...
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Storming the Government Castle
Open source software seems like a perfect fit for government IT projects. Developers can take advantage of existing code bases and, it's hoped, mold that code to their needs quickly and at less cost than developing code from scratch. Over the last few years, governments in the U.S. and abroad have been more closely embracing open source. However, agencies at all levels of U.S. government are still wary of open source and can be reluctant to adopt it. It's still not easy for government projects to use open source or for developers employed in the public sector to contribute their work to open source project...
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The New Open Source: Money, Corporations, and Identity
Danese Cooper, head of open source for PayPal, spoke to during the Day 2 OSCON morning keynotes about the sustainability of open source, mixing in some of the history of open source as well as her own sage advice. She started on a high note. We have won! But this comes with some interesting challenges. We now have a whole new wave of people coming in to participate, but they are not "battle tested," as she calls it. The group of people that have gone before, who have seen open source start, falter, struggle, and finally win, have passion for open source. Many newcomers do as well but they are also more intent on the money in open source...
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