"aim to reduce roadkill. In this project we investigate, which animals are killed on roads and which factors are influencing roadkills. Your data allows us to identify roadkill hotspots. Our vision is to mitigate those hotspots in cooperation with local authorities."
"easily replicable design with stock components and minimal use of custom parts (unless they can be digitally fabricated with a RepRap class 3-D printer or CNC mill -e.g. limit to what is found in most fab labs and avoid high energy processes and a skilled machinist). The designers should seek to minimize cost and complexity while keeping throughput high (continuous if possible)."
"eBird is among the world's largest biodiversity-related science projects, with more than 100 million bird sightings contributed annually by eBirders around the world and an average participation growth rate of approximately 20% year over year."
"Cities at Night is a citizen science project that aims to create a map, similar to Google maps, of the earth at night using night time colour photographs taken by astronauts onboard the ISS."
buzzing sounds of larger insects, but not of very small insects, since the variation in air pressure that their wings create falls below the sensitivity threshold of these types of sensors. One option for tiny insects, such as Drosophila, is to use an optical tachometer, which uses light to detect the flapping of wings.
GitHub has no managers among its 140 employees, for example. “Everyone has management interests,” he said. “People can work on things that are interesting to them. Companies should exist to optimize happiness, not money. Profits follow.” He does, however, retain his own title and decides things like salaries.
Another member of GitHub has posted a talk that stresses how companies flourish when people want to work on certain things, not because they are told to.
Asana bases work on a series of to-do lists that people assign one another. Inside Asana there are no formal titles, though like GitHub there are bosses at the top who make final decisions.
Mr. Preston-Werner thinks the way open source requires a high degree of trust and collaboration among relative equals (plus a few high-level managers who define the scope of a job and make final decisions) can be extended more broadly, even into government.
GitHub’s popularity has also made it an important way for companies to recruit engineers, because some of the best people in the business are showing their work or dissecting the work of others inside some of the public pull requests.
For all the happiness and sharing, real money is involved here. In July GitHub received $100 million from the venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz. This early in most software companies’ lives, $20 million would be a fortune.
“For now this is about code, but we can make the burden of decision-making into an opportunity,” he said. “It would be useful if you could capture the process of decision-making, and see who suggested the decisions that created a law or a bill.”
Can this really be extended across a large, complex organization, however?
As complex as an open-source project may be, it is also based on a single, well-defined outcome, and an engineering task that is generally free of concepts like fairness and justice, about which people can debate endlessly.
Google once prided itself on few managers and fast action, but has found that getting big can also involve lots more meetings.
Still, these fast-rising successes may be on to something more than simply universalizing the means of their own good fortune. An early guru of the Information Age, Peter Drucker, wrote often in the latter part of his career of the need for managers to define tasks, and for workers to seek fulfillment before profits.