Last weekend I organised the first OggCamp to be held in Oxford. OggCamp is an annual free culture unconference, where 300 people with a variety of interests related to open source, open hardware, creative commons and more meet up to share projects, ideas and experience. As an unconference, the vast majority of the scheudle is … Read more
We’ve decided to change the way we publish our newsletter, so instead of having a separate site over at http://newsletter.oss-watch.ac.uk, from now on we’ll be posting a monthly round-up of our activities on this blog. If you’re only interested in these round-ups, you can subscribe to the feed for the Newsletter category. We’ll still be … Read more
Last Monday I attended the first (hopefully of many!) AGM of The UK Community of Research Software Engineers. The group has been formed to champion the cause of software engineers producing software of research, be they developers who are embedded in research groups, or academics who have found themselves developing and maintaining software. Throughout the … Read more
As we’ve mentioned before, OSS Watch is involved in the VALS Semester of Code project, enabling university students to participate in open source projects as part of their degree course. There’s a week left for FOSS projects to sign up and submit their mentored projects for the pilot, before the students can sign up and … Read more
UPDATE: Please note that sign-ups for the original round of Semester of Code have now closed. Please refer to the Semester of Code website for the latest information. As we’ve mentioned before, OSS Watch is working as part of the VALS Project to run a Semester of Code, engaging students with FOSS projects as part … Read more
Last month, OSS Watch delivered a series of sessions on communication and participation with open source communities at the TYPO3 Developer Days event in Eindoven. One of the sessions in our series looked at the theory of communities, the varieties of the communities we form and the motivations involved in each. The core message of … Read more
The latest issue of Linux Voice included a cover feature on common security flaws in web applications and how they can be exploited. Alongside this, they are running a competition to win a Linux Voice t-shirt. To win the competition, you need to be the person who finds the most security vulnerabilities in one of … Read more
At OSS Watch, our name means we get a lot of spam offering to sell us watches, so I decided to find out if there really is an “OSS Watch”. It turns out there is, or at least, an “OS Watch” since it’s more about the watch being open than the software it runs. The … Read more
The VALS Semester of Code is an upcoming project that will work with universities and FOSS communities to give students real-world experience working in software projects. Unlike Google Summer of Code, Semester of Code students will be participating for academic credit as part of their degree courses, and we hope that after completion of their … Read more
We received an excellent contribution to our Open Source Options for Education list this week, in the shape of a real-world usage example of Opencast Matterhorn at the University of Manchester. The previous examples of Matterhorn usage we’ve had on the list have been documentation of pilot projects, so it’s great to have such an … Read more