Group items tagged

good article on value of open source software by Ernie Smith, Associaitons Now, June 16, 2015

list of open source organizations showcasing their open source projects

article by Martin Dewhurst and Paul Willmott, September 2014 on new leadership skills required in age of new information technologies Machines force executives and senior leaders to: 1. open up their companies through crowdsourcing and social platforms within and across organizational boundaries 2. create data sets worthy of the most intelligent machines 3. "let go" in ways that run counter to a century of OD 4. executives...able to make the biggest difference through the human touch. ...questions they frame, their vigor in attaching exceptional circumstances highlighted by increasingly intelligent algorithms ... tolerating ambiguity and focusing on the "softer" side of management to engage the organization and build its capacity for self-renewal. 5. turbocharged data-analytics strategy, a new top-team mind-set, fresh talent approaches, and a concerted effort to break down information silos...transcend number crunching..."weak signals" from social media and other sources also contain powerful insights and should be part of the data-creation process. 6. ...early movers will probably gain insights of unstructured data, such as email discussions between representatives or discussion threads in social media. 7. ...dashboards don't create themselves. Senior executives must find and set the software parameters needed to determine, for instance, which data gets prioritized and which gets flagged for escalation. 8. ...odds of sinking under the weight of even quite valuable insights grow as well. Answer: democratizing it: encouraging and expecting the organization to manage itself without bringing decisions upward. ...business units and functions will be able to make more and better decisions on their own. 9. 8 will happen even as the CEO begins to morph into a "chief experimentation officer," who draws from acute observance of early signals to bolster a company's ability to experiment at scale. 10. need to "let go" will be more significant and the discomfort of s

For many small businesses, open source software represents an unexplored gold mine. When you run a small business, budgets are always tight. While you need many of the same kinds of software that larger businesses need, you don't have hundreds or thousands of dollars to spend on that software like bigger companies do.

Should we check this out? It is an open source web conferencing system built on over fourteen open source components to create an integrated solution that runs on mac, unix, or PC computers.

Offers reasons for contributing to open source projects

Good history of Mozilla's open badge project, a joint venture between the Mozilla and MacArthur foundations. The open badge system is now called Badgr and is launched by a new entity for this purpose, Concentric Sky in partnership with edX. It is still open source and badge criteria still displays with the badge when awarded and displayed on a web site, profile, etc.

Education Week published online 6.10.15 on why districts put OERs to work in their schools. Commercial publishers fighting back saying that curriculum is more than content; C.P.s offer "wraparound support" for their resources to educators.

"Openlab Workshops' mission is to use open source and free software tools and knowledge to both enable and inspire people's creativity. We are part of the open source and free software community because of their idealistic emphasis on transparency, knowledge-sharing, and collaboration. Since 2009 we've developed and taught over 24 workshops in such topics as programming for artists and designers using Processing, interactive lighting, livecoding, Arduino, and sound generation and analysis."

My cousin Evan Raskob's Openlab Workshop site. They are f2f workshops, but the concept is to bring diverse people together to create and share knowledge about digital art and technology.

Marcin Jakubowski speaks to open source development of farm hardware that can be replicated by others at low cost. "Newly relevant DIY maker culture"

resources gathered on open-source projects

Overview of the Open Organization Field Guide by Bryan Behrenshausen, December 2015, and benefits of community produced resources from stories of projects.

Amazing TED talk by an Italian artist who created a global community to help him cure his brain cancer. He created a web site, La Cura (the cure) and posted his brain scans online, inviting anyone to help him heal as a whole person. His site went viral and he received over 500,000 contacts. Through his site, he formed his team of neurosurgeons, oncologists, and several thousand people who were there for his cure as a person, not just for his cancer. He offers his open source model as one for anyone to do, for as he says, it is not just healing for himself, but healing for all of us that matters.

A truly inspiring nonprofit organization in Africa, that has not only developed an open source software for mapping crowdsourced data as it comes in - real time data collection - but has developed an internet platform and start-up incentive program for Africa. Clay Shirky used them as an example of the Culture of Generosity in his TED talk and book, Cognitive Surplus.

I've already donated to them! Very inspiring org.

Blog by Ben Werdmuller, one of the creators of Known, a new platform designed to encourage connectivist learning. He explains the platform in this blog and why he created it instead of a LMS such as Blackboard that has terrible usability. This is much lower cost and is open source.

Blog by Ben Werdmuller, one of the creators of Known, a new platform designed to encourage connectivist learning. He explains the platform in this blog and why he created it instead of a LMS such as Blackboard that has terrible usability. This is much lower cost and is open source.

short video (about 6 minutes) showing underwater robot built under open source (publish and share all code online for others to adapt) in a garage. remote operated vehicle. 1,000 times cheaper than vehicle used to explore Titanic. Underwater vehicles used in oil exploration, construction, etc. set up website with discussion forums to bring in tips from others; slow at first, then hobbyists and professional ocean engineers started showing up; people wanted kits, they used Kickstarter to raise $20,000, raised over $100k in 2 hours, then had to start small manufacturing. now they have ocean explorers all over the globe.

ebook published in 2005 by Ron Goldman and Richard P. Gabriel on open source as a business strategy

blog post by Sean Cavanagh, 6/19/15, EdWeek, with very interesting Prezi with sources for momentum in school districts to adopt Open Educational Resources (OERs) and how long it takes to make the shift. It doesn't save much money--they project $500,000 in savings over a ten year period if the district doesn't regularize and buy textbooks--in districts with $200 million annual budgets; need to do more research on why they choose OER. Do know that two huge OER interests are driving development of these resources but aside from that?

"Innovation often comes from where you least expect it and harnessing collective intelligence, the core principle of Web 2.0 as well as Enterprise 2.0, is the very art of eliciting value from emergent systems such as the Web and our intranets. That this value is forming the bulk of the networked economy (open source software, social networks, social media sharing, etc.) is one of the signature lessons of the era of open business models and 2.0."

Dion Hinchcliffe's blogs are very interesting and he has great graphics. He also explores stats to show ROI in the networked age, or explains why they are not forthcoming. His home page is: http://blogs.zdnet.com/Hinchcliffe

This is a chapter from a book written by the Ed Techie guy Martin Weller. What is interesting is how he detailed the new methods he used to write his most recent book. Many of the sources and practices that he engaged in for writing the second book did not even exist six years before when he finished writing his first book. These new aids include ready e-journal access, Delicious/social bookmarking, blogs, Youtube, Wikipedia, Slideshare, Scribd, Cloudwords and other sites, his own blog, social network especially twitter, Google alerts, etc. I am not sure how this relates to MOOCs and open landscape learning except he has so much more to manage, and gain from, in having a well developed dashboard of tools for seeking, sensing, and sharing.