I broke my arm while ice-skating with the kids back in February half-term. For the first few days and weeks after the accident, life was turned upside-down. I couldn’t dress myself or butter a slice of toast – how was I going to look after two children, run a household and hold down a job? … Read more
Following the publication of Michelle Pauli’s blog report on our recent event, we are pleased to bring you a series of mini-interviews with speakers and attendees from both industry and academia. The interviews give a flavour of the range of interests represented at the event, and an insight into why people came and whether their … Read more
This guest post was written by Michelle Pauli, who also wrote the live blog at Open Source Junction. ‘More people pooling more resources in new ways is the history of civilisation’ Howard Rheingold Open source software features, in some form, in just about every mobile device. This has created huge opportunities for innovation, communication and … Read more
Open Source Junction: Cross-platform mobile apps (Trinity College, Oxford, 29-30 March 2011) is almost upon us. There’s still time to register (registration closes on 24 March), but if you can’t make it, keep up with all the action by following us on the #osjmob11 twitter tag. We will also be live-blogging proceedings throughout both days … Read more
This guest post was written by Mark Webb, research scientist at the Met Office. I work at the Met Office Hadley Centre and part of my job is to evaluate the representation of clouds in the computer models which we use for climate predictions. One way in which we do this is to compare the … Read more
This guest post was written by Dr Gail Bradbrook, who works for Citizens Online, a charity that promotes digital inclusion. Fix the Web is, in the jargon of the day, a crowd-sourcing project with the aim of changing the face of web accessibility. It is led by Citizens Online, the national charity I work for. … Read more
In my last blog post, I mentioned an article by Stephen Sackur, in which he suggests that most of us, in our youth, have the capacity to be innovators and free thinkers, but that we learn at an early age that it’s easier to conform than to rebel. Since then, I’ve been thinking about why … Read more
In his article ‘The secrets of changing the world‘, Stephen Sackur explores the characteristics that he believes unite genuine innovators. To identify the common qualities that ‘seem to separate us sheep from the innovative goats’, he draws on interviews he has conducted over the years with some of the world’s great innovators, in spheres as … Read more
You don’t have to be a software developer to contribute to an open source project – there are all sorts of ways you can get involved, whether you are experienced or a newcomer, technically minded or otherwise inclined. In our forthcoming briefing note (update: now published and called Roles in open source projects), we identify … Read more
Damien Katz, whose Apache CouchDB recently hit 1.0, provides some excellent tips on creating a successful open source project in his blog Getting your open source project to 1.0. Drawn from five years’ experience, the tips include general advice interwoven with examples from the project. He begins with the fundamental question, Why?, explaining that a … Read more