what are we doing today, brain?

In March 2007 I went to Oxford University and worked on a paper about openness, a topic that had become vitally important as we were seeing more and more companies jump on the FOSS bandwagon with psuedo FOSS projects that were often not at all open. This had concerned Jeff and I somewhat and so we came up with a model that took into account 5 core themes - Open Source, Open Standards, Open Knowledge, Open Governance and Open Market.

A conversation with Dave Neary yesterday reminded me that I hadn’t published and needed to publish this paper. Many thanks to all those who contributed (attribution in the document) and to the Randy Metcalfe who worked very hard on this with me to bring it together, and of course Jeff for his enormous input and for coming up with the basis of this with me

I have specifically blogged this, to gain feedback, create dialogue and hopefully inspire a raft of new ideas around this topic. People can also download a pdf here or an odt file here. I challenge people to apply the model to their own projects (FOSS and proprietary) to see how well it maps. Have fun! Pull it apart! Update the document!

Foundations of Openness by
Pia Waugh & Randy Metcalfe is licensed under a
Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.5 Australia License.

(more…)

Last week I spent 3 packed days at the Global Women and Technology meeting in Drammen, Norway. We had about 22 women from 16 countries talking about projects, strategies and ways to collaborate globally on helping women in technology. The scope for this is quite broad, it includes getting women into ICT careers and the like, but also for assisting women to use technology in innovative ways to assist themselves, their work/businesses and their communities. In many countries for various reasons women don’t have the same access to education nor technology, and as such are at a significant disadvantage. By increasing the general digital literacy we increase the opportunities for education and work.

An interesting example of a real digital divide for an entire country was Uganda where the pay US$90 per month for a 64k link! So we are discussing hosting services in-country and developing a big LAN with web stuff replicated externally for backup and international access, and SMS gateways to blogs amongst other ideas. It was a really intensive interesting 3 days and I gave a presentation about technologies that could help and had an excellent reception. More to come on this soon!

This week, OSCON! I’m really excited as this is my first time at OSCON. I’ll be speaking about both women in FOSS and the research research project Jeff and I completed about the FOSS industry and community in Australia. Both talks are on Wednesday, so come along!

Then finally, before I head home to Australia (and Jeff!) I’ll be spending a week in Niue helping with the world’s first OLPC 100% saturation of one laptop, per child Details about the Pacific trials are all on the OLPC wiki here. It is a really exciting project and I’m proud to be helping make it happen. I’ll be kicking off and announcing some OLPC Australia projects over the coming months, some public and some not, so join the OLPC Australia mailing list in order to be kept up to date.

The people already on that mailing list will say “but nothing is happening on that list”, I’m happy to say I’m about to start doing a monthly newsletter with project updates. There is also some great community development action planned to start in the coming month, so again, join the list!

My IBM T42 notebook — which I have loved and which has served me well — is unfortunately on its last legs. So in preparation for a trip overseas which will require a reliable laptop, I bought a black EeePC 901 netbook.

Wow! It is awesome. The battery lasted 5 hours today at a conference I took it to. The keyboard is great (although getting used to the shift key being right next to the up key is a little annoying). It cost $580 at Orange IT in the city (Sydney). Unfortunately in Australia they don’t have the Linux version (which also has a 20GB hard disk instead of 12GB on the Windows version) so I installed Ubuntu Hardy when I got home.

Jeff and I ran into a few little glitches. Here are some tips.

Firstly to get it installed. There is no CD-ROM so you can either create a bootable USB key or netboot the Ubuntu live CD image. We went with the latter as we have a fast network and server. We had to add the EeePC ethernet driver to the PXE image. We basically did this by first unpacking the default initrd.gz cpio image, adding in the atl1e.ko driver file and then cpio-ing the initrd.gz making the driver available for the PXE boot. This excellent blog post by Joseph Monk gives the instructions for getting and making the kernel driver (as well as how to install from USB key).

The webcam, sound and screen res all worked without any tweaking. Install cheese for extra fun! But the wireless did not work!

Even after trying the driver from the Ralink website, it would associate with networks but seemingly not connect, and at any rate Network Manager wouldn’t work with the wireless card using that driver. So we ended up having to use ndiswrapper (install ndisgtk — it has all the right dependencies and is easy to use) with the RT2860 Windows driver from the Ralink site.

After downloading the Windows driver, you need to unpack the file to get access to the inf file. cabextract and unzip on Linux didn’t work, which often work with self-extracting cab/zip installers, so Jeff had to install it on a Windows virtual machine to get these files. Once this is done and ndisgtk is installed you have to start ndisgtk and install the Windows driver by pointing to the inf file.

Lastly and importantly we installed the Ubuntu Netbook Remix user interface which looks totally awesome on the EeePC and makes the best use of the available screen space. Also the 901 uses an Intel Atom processor, it is fast and uses relatively little power. It feels fast and I’m really loving it

Reference: a big thank you to Joseph Monk for this post which got us on the right track.

• Gender perceptions in using computers in the classroom
  A really interesting study that reflects some of what I’ve seen. It is based on a couple of classes of 9-13 year olds. I’ve found soon after that age is when you see a gender gap. I believe this is due to negative (and incorrect) stereotypes and social pr
  (tags: women technology software geek tech teachers education)

Several weeks ago I went down to my hometown, Yass for Bonfire Night, which is on the Queen’s Birthday long weekend and often includes fireworks Anyway, I camped out there with some family and friends (in sub 0 degrees temperatures) and took some pretty cool photos. Enjoy!

Check out all the photos here where there are also some explanations

• McDonalds sued over Happy Meal toy (by Devo)
  “This New Wave Nigel doll that they’ve created is just a complete Devo rip-off and the red hat is exactly the red hat that I designed… Plus, we don’t like McDonald’s, and we don’t like American Idol, so we’re doubly offended.” HAha!
  (tags: mcdonalds devo humour)