Loomio
Tue 17 Feb 2015 4:41AM

Introduce yourself to the OS//OS community!

AI Alanna Irving Public Seen by 578

People often say that the best thing about conferences is networking, meeting people, and opportunities for connecting. So let's get a head start!

Please introduce yourself in whatever way you like! You can include links and photos too, if you want. Who are you, and why are you participating in OS//OS?

SR

Sam Rye Wed 18 Feb 2015 6:17AM

Hey folks, I might as well kick things off!

I'm part of the Enspiral collective, currently co-leading a Govt-backed collaboration called Lifehack which is looking at participative youth-led approaches to shifting the needle on youth wellbeing and mental health.

I've been involved in the social enterprise space for the last 5 years in some form or another. I have followed the rise of "open culture" more than "open source", but have spent a fair bit of time with developers who work with and contribute to open source code communities.

I'm actually pretty excited about the idea of Open Cultural Technologies - facilitation toolkits which mostly live in the offline world, to bring groups of people together to get them working collaboratively - and I don't mean 'Google Docs Collaboration' - I'm talking cross-disciplinary, cross-sectoral teams of people actively creating things which none of them could do alone. I believe one of our first versions of this might be launched at OS//OS, so I'm excited about that too.

Chur,

Sam

DM

Dan Milward Wed 18 Feb 2015 10:14PM

I'm Dan.

My first experience with OS was building an Apache web server about 15 years ago to host my a personal website. Sometime soon after me and some mates ended up setting up a web hosting company and I sold out.

My next OS love affair was with WordPress. We created some of the first WordPress Plugins (back when they were called WP hacks) and I'm still responsible for setting up local WordCamp conferences.

Our Plugin WP eCommerce (wpecommerce.org) is still going strong even though it is not the dominating Plugin anymore. That makes me sad and I often think "oh if I could only do it again I'd do it this way".

I don't support them because it is kicking my ass but because it was not born out of the good open source spirit that I like to champion and a lot of people got burnt along the way. OS Spirit might sound airy fairy but it is at the heart of most of my decisions and I don't associate or promote OS products that don't come from that place / understanding.

Through this experience and running various projects I have a fairly good understanding of the GPL & MIT licences. Selling GPL products threw me smack bang in the middle of all kinds of controversies and debates around licensing. I survived and I'm more knowledgeable because of it. Beware of people with a little bit on knowledge around the GPL - these people are especially dangerous when you give them tools like the internet.

One of the things I love about the WP community is the community. One of the things that saddens me the most about the WP community is the community.

Unrealistic expectations from OS community users can be a thing if they don't get what they want and you're not clear about what it is you're giving them. If you're not clear your users might think that you're also giving away 40 hours of free customer support and any damn feature that they happen to want. So being clear about your free offering and your up-sells from the start is bloody important. What is dangerous about not doing this is that you open yourself up for attack and it crushes the OS spirit. I've seen many projects come and go under this duress.

These days my main focus is Gamefroot.com and Kiwi.js. Gamefroot is an online level editor for building Kiwi.js powered Javascript games.

Gamefroot uses Google Blockly for constructing Javascript. It is bloody powerful and loved by non-coders and coders alike.

Our next steps are to launch a "publish to Github" feature within Gamefroot. This will mean that people can make games, learn to code and push their games (licensed under MIT) to their own repo.

To be honest I'm not even sure just yet what the most awesome Github integration looks like. I'm hoping to nut this out at OSOS :)

Chur!!!

MS

Megan Salole Thu 19 Feb 2015 1:47AM

My love for open source comes from a non-tech background - I'm just someone who recognises the need to hack/re-tool almost every institution/cultural norm that we currently have to enable a more equitable and sustainable life (read: save the planet, and ourselves! ) and FOSS offers a clear path and practice for how to do this.

So there is a very tangible example of collaborative and distributed development. If we can add a values framework to the society stuff, and leverage the existing and emerging tools to help with collaboration then it feels like we can make progress really quickly. It feels important to have this conference as a 'meta' conversation that enables us to be really strategic and share learnings across many different domains of society.

I also love the idea that developers, who live at the code-face might end up being the ones to literally rebuild our society (with a little bit of input from the rest of us!) :-) because developers are by nature 'hunting for solutions', and tireless in this quest.

What a great way to be in the world!

DM

Dan Milward Thu 19 Feb 2015 2:33AM

LOL @megansalole there better be a LOT of input from the rest of us otherwise it might look like a mess. Aka I'd much rather MY digital future designed to look smooth and feel like a nice iOS interface as opposed to a clunky awkward feeling Samsung thingy ;)

Without guidance from creative visionaries like Steve Jobs (love him or hate him) it'd be a world with less continuity.

I hope the future brings Open Source developers and creatives together to collaboratively form whatever the most beautiful world possible could look like.

JVD

Jaco van der Merwe Thu 19 Feb 2015 4:04AM

Wow - what a great group so far!

/me name is Jaco.
I'm a Free Culture ardent - so much so that I moved to NZ to immerse myself in a society that I believe (at the time) has a lot in common with the underlying principals.

For my sins, I started my professional life many years ago doing dev in MS-houses, but made then concious decision to start working "The Open Source way", although I don't do as much dev nowadays as I would like (I'm in the process of relearning Python & trying to get my git-fu on).

Some things that I've been involved in of late;
* I'm an New Zealand Open Source Society (NZOSS) council member, and try to take an active role in the broader local FLOSS landscape.
* Presently self-employed, with the aim of providing FLOSS-centric solutions to local SMB's, but the reception has been... disappointing - mostly because users need & do their work in vertical stacks not available on FLOSS stacks (think AutoCAD)

* A bunch of us started The Meshed Co-operative, with the aim of empowering other small operators in this space to pool resources & address common needs, but that's is staled atm - mostly because people have day-jobs and we lacked the energy & momentum (& largely biz savvy on my own part) to get it to where it needs to be.
* A founding member of TangleBall, a Auckland MakerSpace, and have decided to direct my efforts into growing the local Makers scene, under Makers.org.nz (MoNZ), drawing on lessons learnt from Meshed. I'm immersing myself into this by reaching out & talking to people & groups involved in this community, even would-be commercial sponsors, and getting my hands dirty by helping Vik & Co @ DiamondAge (one of the inventors of the RepRap) in building a local FabLab.
* Serial volunteer - I'm keen to help others in Free Culture who serve the Commons, and so have freely given my time to efforts such as Linux.conf.au, KiwiCon, MultiCore World, etc, and want to do more (also getting into edu space, with projects like Code Club, Coder Dojo, OMG, etc)

I consider myself a bit of a general tech-geek, but will not pretend I'm any sort of expert (/me gets schooled on a regular basis), and feel I can make a more meaningful contribution by assisting others & so create a more rounded environment than "just code-monkeys" (me being part of the latter).

Please note: I use the term "FLOSS" - Free, Libre, Open Source Software - as I believe we do ourselves more harm than good with the word "Free", where the English language (not my native tongue, as is the case for most of the world) creates the expectation of "gratis" ($, not inherently bad in & of itself) rather than the unambiguous "Libre" (freedom), and so I feel the contributors in this environment are not valued enough because they gift their work to the Commons, unless they go work for $BIG_CORP.
I'll reiterate this point in the other thread.

PJ

Peter Jacobson Thu 19 Feb 2015 8:30AM

Hi!
I'm just new to these ideas and this scene. I did a BEng in mechanical engineering, realised what a bubble I'd been living in, and after roaming round the world am now a student at Enspiral Dev Academy, which I think will be heaps of fun (so far so good!) and give me some more useful skills to contribute to this OS/OS project. I've been away from NZ for two years and need to catch up on the social and political landscape here. I'm passionate about making the world a better place, and am looking for the next project to engage with. I'm new, with miscellaneous experience across sectors and patchy high-level knowledge, but I'm keen and can learn.
I'll be coming to listen.

RF

Rochelle Furneaux Fri 20 Feb 2015 12:05AM

I'm Rochelle Furneaux and i have been a lawyer for 20 years. 3 or so years ago I started Enspiral Legal Ltd, and I hope to use that vehicle to realise my dream of bringing some of the Open Source goals and values to the legal profession - or should I say, drag the legal profession to the realisation of the changes around collaboration now possible with changes in technology.

I'm particularly interested in legal informatics, what can and can't be automated in the legal field, and automated mechanisms for sharing information, learning and precedents within the legal profession.

I'm also a Councillor at InternetNZ, and do some work for open source developers. Please send any lawyers interested in these things my way - its a little lonely over here!

GC

Greg Cassel Fri 20 Feb 2015 5:53PM

Hi guys, I'm an American multimedia artist, videographer, and discussion facilitator. I've done social media, public messaging and internal comms for activism groups. I'm focused on truth in media, organizational ethics, and nonviolent activism in favor of freedom and opportunity for all. I try to facilitate genuine and empathetic connection. (I deeply believe that truth and love lead to the same place.)

I've had open society ideals for a long time, but open source developed slowly for me, after a poor childhood and an arts background rooted in traditional ideas of intellectual property. I quickly adopted freemium concepts, and then crowdsourcing and crowdfunding. After much reflection, I finally betrothed myself to the Commons around the time I first heard about OS//OS. What lovely timing!

The OS//OS vision resonates completely with my views on sustainable culture, economy and government. I've been brainstorming about healthy, sustainable media and networking practices for building a sharing economy. I look for an "all of the above" approach to change, and as a self-styled populist, I'm especially interested in outreach to diverse audiences.

OS//OS already makes me very happy, and I hope to give back to it!

MI

mix irving Sat 21 Feb 2015 11:55PM

Hi I'm mix, I like:

  • exercising imagination / reflecting on society via sci-fi
  • working digital magic
  • conversations in small groups/ while walking/ in trees
  • using analogy/ story to compress knowledge
  • concise comms
  • telling friends when they have spinach in their teeth

here's what play + learning look like to me:

PC

Phil Crothers Tue 24 Feb 2015 1:56AM

Hi,
I'm Phil and I've been working the IT recruitment space for the past 7 years.
Over the past 4 years I have working with industry colleagues and people in the IT space to make recruitment better. The way we engage, the value we add and how we can change the standard "bums on seats" model that plagues the industry.

I love OS, especially the design thinking around community building and collaboration.

I am a fledgling techy having only just started tinkering with WordPress and a few coding languages.

As well as getting a better understanding into what makes the OS community tick, I am extremely interested in how communities of knowledge and skill are built in different areas.

I have a passion for coaching and industry growth so the work Enspiral has done with LifeHack is a big drawcard for me.

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