Community

Decentralized Collaboration with Open Source Tools: Technical and Cultural Implementation

A collection of simple open source communication tools can coordinate thousands of decentralized contributions.

This talk is a live version of a recurring Fedora Classroom session taught both online and in-person at classrooms as part of the first-day curriculum for POSSE (Professors' Open Source Summer Experience, a week-long cultural immersion workshop for university faculty looking to get their students involved in open source communities). The Unix design philosophy of modularity - simple parts that each do one thing well, connected by clean interfaces - applies to communication workflows as well as code ones. We'll give a live demonstration of how a collection of simple open source communication tools are used by the Fedora Project to coordinate thousands of technical and nontechnical contributions on a technically complex, rapidly moving, large-scale Linux distribution - all in a decentralized manner. Although each tool by itself is simple to learn and use, the magic comes in the interactions between these tools and the communication culture it makes possible in the communities that fluently use it. We'll go through both technology usage and cultural norms, with publicly available slides and resources for full tutorials and setup instructions for each tool available to all attendees by the start of the presentaion. We'll also explain how this ecosystem of tools can be deployed in your internal infrastructure and applied to communications within a school or industry team. Tools covered: * IRC: synchronous communication * supybot / IRC bots: synchronous context-bridging * etherpad: synchronous text editing * mediawiki: asynchronous text editing, documentation * ticket trackers: asynchronous task-tracking * blog planets: asynchronous context-providance * Classrooms: structures for synchronous community teaching

Speaker: Robyn Bergeron
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Open Source Television

Audience: 

How one New York startup is using FOSS to change the way the world watches television

The living room remains the final frontier of open source software. With wide adoption from home office to enterprise, from datacenter to dining rooms, consumers all over the world rely on OSS daily to run their lives. However, the third screen that has dominated eyeballs for the past sixty years has been the exclusive dominion of proprietary, monolithic black boxes. With the average American consuming eight full hours of television per day, one New York startup aims to change this paradigm of closed software in the single room in the house were most waking time is spent. Boxee is the first "social" media center, whose free, open source, downloadable software is changing the way consumers experience media. Lead Apps Developer and Community Evangelist Rob Spectre will discuss Boxee's open source heritage, hacker culture, and open API as well as answer your questions and unload T-shirts a-plenty

Speaker: Rob Spectre
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OpenShot: Lights. Camera. Action!

An in-depth look at OpenShot Video Editor.

OpenShot Video Editor is a free, open-source, non-linear video editor for Linux. OpenShot empowers you to create and edit videos in an easy and intuitive interface. In this presentation, we will discuss everything from basic video editing to the advanced topics of video effects and compositing. Learn all about this great project, such as where it came from, and where it's going. Learn about features that are not available on any other Linux video editors, such as 3D animation and YouTube upload support. Also, we have brought along many short video clips, to help demonstrate some of these powerful OpenShot features.

Speaker: Jonathan Thomas
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Membase

Membase: the Open Source simple, fast, elastic NoSQL database for interactive web applications.

The kinds of apps we build have evolved. Mobile apps. Facebook apps. Responses are needed in milliseconds. Techniques for storing and getting that data are starting to evolve too. The category even has a name: NoSQL. Which one should you choose though? Your site really runs on memcached, occasionally accessing a SQL database. You need SQL for some types of data access, or you fear the effort involved in breaking free from some of that legacy mapping code. Other types of data access could be serviced by something like memcached, but you would need the same speed, it would need to be compatible with current production applications and your application data has to survive the seemingly hostile environment from your cloud computing provider. You want to know that it will never make your application wait for data; you need to know that it’s been deployed for something other than batch-based workloads. Membase is a simple, fast, elastic key-value database. Building upon the memcached engine interface, it is memcapable, meaning it is completely compatible with existing memcached clients and applications. The functionality from the Membase project allows for persistence, replication of data, lots of statistics on data use and even streaming data for iterating over every item in the store. The founding sponsors of membase, Membase, Inc., Zynga and NHN launched a new project at membase.org under an Apache 2.0 license. Learn how to get it, about the deployments behind some of the largest sites and how you can get involved in the project.

Speaker: Matt Ingenthron
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