Indigenous Literacy Day and TechEd women’s panel

Today I went to a talk by a great man, Noel Tovey, a 64yr old Australian Aboriginal man who has been through some of the most awful experiences you will ever hear. He shared his story, and how he overcame extreme adversity to become successful globally. He wrote a book a few years back called “Little Black Bastard“, and he read a little from the book which I will absolutely be going out to buy now. Anyway, it was awfully sad but inspiring at the same time. I spoke at the event about the OLPC project and how it might be both beneficial to disadvantaged communities, but also a way to get Australian Aboriginal cultural content out to children through the project.

Straight after that event I went and spoke on a panel about women in technology at… TechEd πŸ™‚ It was pretty amusing to be there in a way. The other panelists were all Microsoft or Microsoft engrossed, and we all spoke about our careers, answered questions from the audience and just enjoyed being in a room full of women in the industry. It was good to get different perspectives particularly given how my experience is quite different from a typical IT career largely due to the awesome nature of the FOSS community, which went down pretty well. There were some good questions from the floor, and I spoke with one women from Malaysia afterwards for a while about the poor self-image of a lot of women in technology. It was a fascinating conversation and I learnt a lot πŸ™‚

Good day, now to work late to catch up :/

Cape Town Open Education Declaration

This is a really interesting read, and a great initiative for openness (software, standards, collaboration) in education!

We are on the cusp of a global revolution in teaching and learning. Educators worldwide are developing a vast pool of educational resources on the Internet, open and free for all to use. These educators are creating a world where each and every person on earth can access and contribute to the sum of all human knowledge. They are also planting the seeds of a new pedagogy where educators and learners create, shape and evolve knowledge together, deepening their skills and understanding as they go.

The Cape Town Open Education Declaration

Also I’m working on the ASK-OSS (Australian Service for Knowledge on Open Source Software) project again, helping with some newsletters, case studies and information services. Should be fun and the newsletter is quite useful.

OLPC in Niue

In late July I was very privileged to help roll out the world’s first 100% saturation of OLPC XOs to the country of Niue, in the Pacific near New Zealand. There are around 400 students, and every single one got a laptop! I was in charge of the server/wireless infrastructure, and the imaging of the laptops as well as technical training for the people there on the ground. I worked closely with Ian Thomson who coordinated it (from SPC) and Grisel Carriera, a education specialist from Australia. Grisel and I were volunteers for the project, and Ian/Grisel between them basically coordinated the teacher training.

I thought I’d write up a few notes about the project, although most of the details are on the OLPC Niue wiki page. Basically I spent a week setting up the (currently) fairly beta XS software on the server, setting up a WDS wireless network (to get network connectivity for the XOs throughout the entire two schools without an extensive wired LAN) and a few additions to the XS software such as Moodle (which will soon be integrated) and some great locally relevant education resources pulled together by David Leeming who is working with Ian in the Pacific OLPC deployments. I used the XO 703 image with about 30 applications including Speak, Cartoon Builder, Flipsticks, Colors, Scratch, Ruler, Stopwatch, Wikibrowse (v9 as v10 is all Spanish!) and Sudoku, as well as all the default applications in the activity pack. They worked really well!

Check out some photos below! One of the schools was a primary school, and one a high school, and I believe the primary school will gain the most benefit, but it will be an interesting experiment how the high school goes with them. Ultimately in Australia we will only be looking at primary schools, because they aren’t really made for high schools.

Useful references:

If anyone wants to volunteer for these kinds of projects specifically in the next month or two, please drop me an email at pia dot waugh at olpc dot org dot au with when you are available, your interests and skills, as Ian and David need more volunteers for Pacific based projects πŸ™‚ For people able to volunteer in the medium to long term, there will soon be a rego system available.

The worlds oldest XO user (we think) :) Shes 70yo
The world's oldest XO user (we think) πŸ™‚ She's 70yo
Grisel and Ian, holding up mountains!
Grisel and Ian, holding up mountains!
Students using the XO
Students using the XO

Who wants to sleep with Bill Gates?

I have a lot of blogging to catch up on! In the last month I’ve been to Norway, the US and Niue on really cool projects and conferences, Software Freedom Day is only just over 4 weeks away, and I’ve had some awesome ideas I want to blog. All will happen in the next few days, but last night I went to another Girl Geek Dinner in Sydney, which was awesome. About 80 women who love technology, great cheese and chocolate, talks and networking. It was a really fun night, and a huge thank you to Damana who organises the events!

Some highlights:

  • Fountain of Chocolate – now I’m not really a chocolate sort of girl, but when you throw strawberries in the mix, I’m totally there! Plus lovely cheeses, champagne and other nibblies made it really nice! Thanks Thoughtware!
  • A talk on Agile programming, presented in Agile format, that left me a little confused. So Mary in about 45 seconds explained what they meant. Thanks Mary, you rock!
  • Mary winning the sparkly girly Microsoft shirt in a competition where you sat down if you weren’t geeky enough. Her putting it on and the girl sitting next to me saying “I really wish I was more geeky, I LOVE Microsoft!”. I made the introduction figuring Mary probably would grow tired of it fairly quickly (seeing she is a Linuxchix gal) and the other girl told us that if she could sleep with any man (but her husband to be) it would be Bill Gates. Mary and I were a little stunned at that one πŸ™‚ The girl was very enthusiastic about big trends and also fangirls Google, so we had a very interesting and fun discussion after the fact, but I’m still a little stunned. I mean my picks would be Trent Reznor or Jet Li, but I guess it takes all sorts. Also, to be fair she was pretty nervous, and a really interesting person nonetheless πŸ™‚
  • Quote of the night, in reference to Ruby on Rails:
    Question: I’ve heard that Ruby on Rails doesn’t really scale when you starting getting thousands or tens of thousands of users?
    Answer: There are loads of large successful Ruby on Rails implementations. For example, Twitter!
    FAIL! πŸ™‚

I’m looking forward to the next one, which will be at Tech Ed. That will be quite weird but hey I’ve been invited onto a panel about women in technology there, so it should be interesting πŸ˜‰

The Foundations of Openness

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 πŸ™‚

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 for printing purposes. I challenge people to apply the model to their own projects (FOSS and proprietary) to see how well it maps.

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 πŸ™‚

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 Foundations-of-openness-V2-release.Β I have an odt file somewhere which I will try to find again. 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! πŸ™‚

UPDATE Jan 2015: The OSS-Watch crew took this paper and turned it into an app people can use to rate the openness of their software! Nice work guys! See the Openness Rating App by OSS-Watch, released December 2014.

Creative Commons License

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

Continue reading “The Foundations of Openness”

GWT, OSCON and OLPC Australia

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 πŸ™‚ 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 Ò€œbut nothing is happening on that listÒ€, 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!

Ubuntu Hardy on the EeePC 901

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.

eeepc screenshot with ubuntu

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. πŸ™‚ 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 πŸ™‚

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

Bonfire night

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 πŸ™‚ 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 πŸ™‚

Fire and moon

Sunset

Rodonda by sparkler

Dad with sparklers

A real bonfire!

Moving fire