Awesome!! I just discovered that there is a site devoted to those who teach open source.

TeachingOpenSource.org was set up in March 2009 to serve as a neutral collaboration point for everyone involved in Teaching Open Source, where we can:

• Work out Open Source educational models, support and funding schemes, community relationships, and other issues.
• Advocate for the changes that are necessary to further the goal of teaching Open Source.

The initial collaboration points were this wiki, the Planet, and the TeachingOpenSource Mailing List; these have been extended with the #teachingopensource IRC channel and a monthly conference call.

I’m off to read and learn more - share with those around you who are teaching open source - this might be a very handy tool.

I’ve been catching up on blog reading and learning about all kinds of great open source learning tools. In addition to yesterday’s post about teaching open source to students, I found this great list of tutorials for open source applications from OStatic. It includes tutorials for OpenOffice, GIMP, Linux and more. Make sure you share these tutorials when teaching your colleagues about open source.

InfoPeople have an upcoming (July 21) webinar are on open source software in libraries:

Open Source Library System Software: Libraries Are Doing It for Themselves

The first webinar in this series presented an introduction to and overview of Open Source Library Systems (OSLS). This webinar focuses on how you can become involved in improving OSLS software – even if you’re not a programmer or a “techie”!

One of the great advantages of an Open Source Library System (OSLS) such as Koha or Evergreen is the ability to empower staff and optimize the user’s experience by getting involved in improving the software. This is in contrast to the traditional integrated library system (ILS) model where all the software development was done by “the vendor,” creating a condition of “learned helplessness” on the part of library staff. By making the transition to OSLS, you can shift the culture of your organization from “learned helplessness” to one in which everyone can contribute to enhancing their work environment.

Learn more on the official page.

When I was in undergrad, my college didn’t have many options for computer classes. It has since adopted lots of open source (including Moodle - which I just love). I don’t know what portion of their curriculum includes open source, but I hope they come close to what’s being done at Seneca:

When I first became involved with Mozilla through working on a Mozilla Foundation accessibility grant, I quickly discovered the impressive open source educational work at Seneca College in Toronto, lead by David Humphry and Chris Tyler. Students on the computer science course get the enviable opportunity to work on projects that immerse them directly in some of the most successful open source development communities, contributing to programs such as Firefox, Thunderbird, Open Office and Fedora (Linux).  These projects are not just academic exercises, rather they are strategic for the open source projects, and students contributions are accepted into the projects. As a result students get incomparable experience working on large code bases and in the process acquire the open source software and community development skills that are highly sought by companies all over the world.

This from a post on open source education at the OSS Watch team blog. Do you know of any educational institution that’s teaching this much (or more) open source? If so I’d love to hear about it.

I’m with Matt Asay when he asks and answers:

Has open source come to include so much that it’s somewhat meaningless? If so, should we return to the free-software roots that defined its infancy?

Personally, I think the bigger the tent, the better it is for open source. Even a tent that includes a wide array of open-source leeches, an issue taken up by Bill Snyder in InfoWorld.

I like the big tent (and even, increasingly, the “leeches”) because the broadening is largely driven by the same motivation: finding ways to feed one’s family by writing more open-source software.

That, after all, is really the reason for the term “open source” in the first place: make it more relevant so more people could create sustainable businesses around it.

Purists might think that open source should be applied to an elite few (and I do hate that Microsoft can now be used in the same sentence as open source) but the fact of the matter is, the more people promoting, using and selling open source the better it is for open source.

We live in a time when people expect openness and the ability to participate in development, so why not build the biggest tent ever for open source?

For those of you who read this blog through an aggregator, you may not have noticed that I have my recent open source bookmarks on the right hand column of the page. Since I have found so many awesome resources (mostly today) I thought I might want to share them in a post. These are in order of bookmark - I have no preference based on the ordering below.

• All for Good
  Inspired by the call of President Obama to engage more Americans in service, a group of individuals from the technology, marketing and public sectors came together to build an open source application that allows you to find and share volunteer activities.
• VirtualBox
  VirtualBox is a powerful x86 virtualization product for enterprise as well as home use. Not only is VirtualBox an extremely feature rich, high performance product for enterprise customers, it is also the only professional solution that is freely available as Open Source Software under the terms of the GNU General Public License (GPL).
• Fluid Project Wiki
  An open, collaborative project to improve the user experience of community source software.
• Fluid Engage
  Fluid Engage is a new project that will create an open source community that will provide curators and educators within museums and galleries the necessary supports, tools and resources
• MacLibre | Open Source Software Distribution for Mac OS X
  MacLibre is an Open Source Software Distribution for Mac OS X. It’s simple, intuitive with applications you need. It brings a new way of software installation on your Mac.
• Three Open Source E-book Readers Worth a Look
• Over 40 Free, Must-Have Open Source Resources
• The EveryBlock source code
  EveryBlock.com is an experimental news Web site that provides information at a “microlocal” level — by neighborhood or city block. It was funded by a grant from Knight Foundation, which requires the site’s backend code to be open-sourced. Here is the code.
• Teaching Open Source
  This is a neutral collaboration point for professors, institutions, communities, and companies to come together and make the teaching of Open Source a global success.
• Melody: Community Powered Publishing
  Melody is an open source content management system for bloggers and publishers where its community of users and contributors is its most important feature.
• 40 Mac Freewares and Open Source Software for Web Designers | Desizn Tech
• Sugar on a Stick - Sugar Labs
  A “Linux-based learning environment” that boots from a USB drive and is designed for children’s ease of use.
• Free / Open Source Research Community (Home)
  In the spirit of free and open source software (F/OSS), we are attempting to establish a community in which information will be freely exchanged, so that we may further the understanding of open source and its implications outside the realm of software development.
• SemperTool
  SemperTool introduces the first open source product: Subscription Management Database - SMDB. SMDB is an Electronic Resource Management system - ERM.
• ILS Survey: Open Source vs. Proprietary
  This survey was conducted from October 30, 2007 to January 3, 2008. It was answered by libraries using the open source ILSs Koha (n=113) and Evergreen (n=119), and proprietary ILSs (n=129). The current version of Koha was 2.2.9 and Evergreen was 1.2.
• Mac4Lin
  The goal of this project is to bring the Mac OS X user interface to POSIX Operating Systems (GNU/LInux, FreeBSD, openSolaris etc.).
• Freeciv
  Freeciv is a Free and Open Source empire-building strategy game inspired by the history of human civilization.
• Lupo PenSuite
  The Suite includes over 200 highly selected portable programs and games (7-Zip, Audacity, CCleaner, eMule, FileZilla, Firefox, Foxit Reader, GIMP, IrfanView, Miranda, Notepad++, Opera, Thunderbird, µTorrent, VLC and many more). Over 5 million users have downloaded it.
• LiberKey
  LiberKey installed on your USB key (or mini external hard drive, a music player such as iPod…) can be connected on any PC. Immediately you have under hand all your familiar tools, without any installation on the host PC.
• Open Source – Open Libraries
  Open Source – Open Libraries is a consortia of libraries, library systems, and other organizations committed to pursuing Open Source Software (OSS) alternatives for libraries.
• OmCollab
  omCollab is a powerful, Enterprise 2.0 collaboration product completely built on open source software. It provides a web portal environment to create, share and search Microsoft Office content, files, shared bookmarks, blog posts and wiki articles across the enterprise. omCollab integrates some of the most powerful open source software applications into a single collaborative environment. It enables organisations to drive innovation, collaboration and community building.
• Inkscape
  An Open Source vector graphics editor, with capabilities similar to Illustrator, CorelDraw, or Xara X, using the W3C standard Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) file format.
• Library a la Carte
  Librarians have enough to do and maintaining static HTML pages is tedious and time-consuming. The Library à la Carte tool enables librarians to easily and quickly create dynamic web pages that integrate Web 2.0 features, such as chat and RSS feeds, with traditional library content, such as catalogs and article databases.
• LibData Project Site
  LibData is a library oriented web based application which provides authoring environments for subject pathfinders (Research QuickStart), course related pages (CourseLib) and general purpose web pages (PageScribe).
• Senayan
  Senayan is an open source Library Management System. It is build on Open source technology like PHP and MySQL. Senayan provides many features such as Bibliography database, Circulation, Membership and many more that will help “automating” library tasks.
• LimeSurvey.org
  The Leading Open Source Survey Tool
• Weminaria
  Open source screen recording software, free video capture, video recorder, capture tool, desktop recorder, software tutorial, create software demo
• EmeraldView
  EmeraldView is a lightweight front-end for the digital library software Greenstone.
• Wubi - Ubuntu Installer for Windows
  Wubi is an officially supported Ubuntu installer for Windows users that can bring you to the Linux world with a single click. Wubi allows you to install and uninstall Ubuntu as any other Windows application, in a simple and safe way. Are you curious about Linux and Ubuntu? Trying them out has never been easier!
• AmpliFeeder
  Open source lifestream platform

WOW! Joomla has reached 10 million downloads!

The Joomla Project is excited to celebrate a remarkable benchmark in the world of open source—our 10 millionth download.

As one of the most powerful publishing platforms available, Joomla has grown exponentially since it’s first release in 2005, which was downloaded just over 72,000 times from JoomlaCode. That meteoric rise in less than four years is a solid statement by the Joomla Community about how the project changes lives all over the world.

With Joomla 1.6 on the horizon, that same community is energized and excited for what the future holds. Development is underway on the next generation content management system, which will enable you, our faithful users, to achieve new heights and hopefully accomplish another 10 million downloads. 

This is a amazing!! Congrats to Joomla!

The biggest worry about going open source is the lack of documentation. While I say there is no worry about this with Koha, it is a problem with some small open source projects. This is why LiveTechDocs is offering a free lifetime subscription to open source projects!!

LiveTechDocs is an online collaboration service for XML documentation review. It’s simple, secure, and satisfying!

I haven’t tried it out because I have the documentation for Koha on Plone - but I’d love to hear about other experiences with this tool.

I am working on some very very broad research on open source use in libraries for a book I’m working on. The focus of the book will be on software you can use that is open source. If you have a chance to answer this brief survey to help me out that would be greatly appreciated:

http://opensource.web2learning.net/limesurvey/index.php?sid=63946&lang=en

In sticking with the open source theme, I used LimeSurvey (an open source survey management tool) - check it out!!

Feel free to link here or repost this announcement all over libraryland.

I worked in an Academic Library for a while (and was a student working in HR while an Undergrad) and I know how hard it was to get the HR systems to work with the library systems - wouldn’t it be easier if everything was open source?? Well this article makes it look like academia finally has a viable open source option for their financial systems.

While the open source movement has taken off in course management systems, with Moodle and Sakai as alternatives to the dominant Blackboard, the administrative side of the house has been almost entirely corporate. While some colleges use home-grown systems, the norm has been to use any of a number of vendors for systems that allow colleges to manage and report on budgets, billing and many other functions crucial to running a college. These administrative software systems cost millions of dollars to install and manage, and any malfunctions can be hugely frustrating to institutions.

Last week, in a move that could lead to a shake-up of the industry, Colorado State University and San Joaquin Delta College both went live with the first large-scale installations of full financial systems produced by the Kuali Foundation, a consortium of colleges that have pooled resources to create open source systems that could compete with corporate offerings. The University of Arizona is well on its way to following, as is Michigan State University. Cornell University is planning for a likely conversion. Indiana University has been involved from the beginning and has tested many modules, which are expected to expand. The University of British Columbia is also expected to be using Kuali soon.

Read the entire article and make sure to share it with all of your friends and colleagues in Academia