The Opensource.com team gathered in one of the large conference rooms at Red Hat tower in Raleigh on March 21 to make an open hardware day of it.
We ordered some delicious burritos and discussed how the next few hours would unfold. We decided we'd load up Arduino software on my laptop, switch on the ginormous monitor in the front of the room, and see if we could make some blinky lights happen—maybe even make an LED display come to life with something like: “Opensource.com for the win.” After we ate as much queso dip as possible, we opened up our newly purchased Starter Kit for Redboard and got to work.
The crowdsourced data collection platform Ushahidi, now assisting activists worldwide, was first created to facilitate public accountability and social activism during crises in its home nation, Kenya. Not surprisingly, Ushahidi is also the name of the non-profit behind the open-source project. Open-Steps.org interviewed the organization’s director of data projects, Chris Albon, about the platform. The article prefaces the dialogue with a brief explanation:
“In a nutshell, it allows citizens to make reports in a collaborative way, creating crowdsourced interactive maps. With a very intelligent approach, Ushahidi gives citizens the possibility to use the web, their smartphones and even SMS to gather data, which makes this technology accessible almost everywhere and for everyone. Originally created in Kenya to serve as an instrument for social activism and public accountability in crisis situations, the software has proven to be a great companion worldwide in bringing advocacy campaigns to a successful end. The team behind Ushahidi has not only created a world-changing technology but also they share it with others since it is released as Open Source.”
Albon tells us that the core Ushahidi platform is now being used in 159 countries and has been translated into 35 languages, and explains it is being used by groups from small, election-monitoring non-profits to global organizations tracking disaster relief efforts. Journalists also make use of the platform. Albon notes that his group helped build iHub in Nairobi, an “innovation hub” and community workspace designed to facilitate collaboration and community growth. See the article for more on this and Ushahidi’s other projects, Crowdmap, Swiftriver, Ping, and BRCK. The interview wraps up with something to look forward to: the next generation of the Ushahidi core platform, v3, is on its way.
“The present day global set of sovereign states is not capable of keeping peace, and it is not capable of saving the biosphere’s non-replaceable natural resources. What has been needed for the last 5,000 years, has become technologically feasible in the last 100, but not yet politically, is a global body politic composed of cells on the scale of the Neolithic-Age village community — a scale on which participants could be personally acquainted with each other, while each of them would also be a citizen of the world state.”
What does it mean when, over a single year, the number of people who come to LibrePlanet more than doubles?
It means that the free software movement is strong and growing. It means we have a fighting chance to protect our freedom and privacy in the digital world, and that we are inspiring new people to join us.
This weekend, at LibrePlanet 2014: Free Software, Free Society:
Wikimedia executive director Sue Gardner kicked off the conference with a call for the free software movement to become bigger and bolder than ever.
Almost four hundred people attended, including fifty-four presenters, 40% of whom were women.
NSA-revealer and privacy hacker Jacob Appelbaum gave a remote keynote via videochat, using Tor to anonymize his location. Watch the recording and stay tuned for more videos from the conference soon.
I recently connected with senseFly’s Adam Klaptocz who founded the non-profit group DroneAdventures to promote humanitarian uses of UAVs. I first came across Adam’s efforts last year when reading about his good work in Haiti, which demonstrated the unique role that UAV technology & imagery can play in post-disaster contexts. DroneAdventures has also been active in Japan and Peru. In the coming months, the team will also be working on “aerial archeology” projects in Turkey and Egypt. When Adam emailed me last week, he and his team had just returned from yet another flying mission, this time in the Philippines. I’ll be meeting up with Adam in a couple weeks to learn more about their recent adventures. In the meantime, here’s a quick recap of what they were up to in the Philippines this month.
Below Graphic: Partnered with Vision Critical, Crowd Companies (the association I started for big brands in the collaborative economy) surveyed over 90,000 people to find out why they share goods, services, space, transportation, and money.
A dissection of the largest study in the Collaborative Economy
Over the coming months, we’ll be dissecting some of the key findings from the largest study ever done on the Collaborative Economy, sharing both factual data and insights beyond market observations. When people first think of the sharing economy, a subset of the greater Collaborative Economy, they think of technology-laden hipsters in communes. What we found was quite the opposite – that this sharing behavior is common place behavior across many scenarios. We discovered that people often share for reasons that made pragmatic sense for themselves – not community altruism. If you want to view the entire report (over 28k already have), you may download it by clicking here.
On Monday, Cisco unveiled an investment worth more than $1 billion to launch the world's largest global Intercloud over the next two years. This open network of clouds will be hosted across a global network of Cisco and partner data centers featuring application process interfaces (APIs) for rapid application development, built out as part of an expanded suite of value-added application- and network-centric cloud services.
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Riegel said the global Intercloud differentiates itself from Amazon Web Services in five ways. First, its focus will be on apps, not the infrastructure. Secondly, he explained, Cisco is the only company that can provide quality of service from the network all the way up to the application. Cisco has also designed the Intercloud for local data sovereignty in the post Eric Snowden era, where customers increasingly request that their data stay in their own home countries or the particular countries where they do business.
The fourth big difference is the Intercloud is firmly based on an open model, or open source innovation based on OpenStack. The last difference is the Cisco network will incorporate real-time analytics.
WO#D
