This from one of my mailing lists:

OLE Project participants will host a webcast to share information about the project and invite comments and questions. The webcast will be held Wednesday, October 1, 2008, 3pm-5pm EST. This webcast is free or charge and open to anyone. Please register in advance at:

http://survey.oit.duke.edu/ViewsFlash/servlet/viewsflash?cmd=showform&pollid=CIT!OLEWebcast

A more detailed agenda and information about logging into the webcast will be posted within the next week.

Learn more about the OLE Project here.

I just finished reading a very interesting article on the principles of participation and open source:

One of the greatest and most destructive beliefs in the open source community is that “Because I’m not a programmer, I can’t participate in an open source project.” Let me be the first to tell you that if you believe that, you’re wrong. Dead wrong. Why? Well let me explain.

One of the age old principles of open source is the free and open sharing of software source code. That source code is the product of somebody’s time, effort and labor. So trading or sharing source code is essentially sharing your work with everyone else, and in turn receiving a portion of their work in return. And since programmers and developers are what made traditional open source possible, it’s easy to understand how people can equate participation in an open source project or community as requiring them to be able to program.

Read the entire article here.

This weekend I wrote a guest post over at the Open Source blog hosted by Howard County Library. Check it out.

Many of you may know me as the Open Source Evangelist for LibLime or the author of What I Learned Today…, but today I’m a guest author here and I’m going to write about a topic that I’m very passionate about - open source and libraries.

Whenever I teach open source to librarians I always start by outlining why libraries are the prefect breeding grounds for open source. What many librarians probably don’t realize is that the open source community actually shares a lot of the same ethics, ideals and characteristics as the library world.

Read more here.

At the last class I gave on Open Source, someone asked me if there was a way to put social bookmarking tools behind their firewall. I didn’t know of any open source social bookmarking tools at the time, but now there is one (that I know of):

The social bookmarking service Ma.gnolia is announcing a new version at the Gnomedex conference in Seattle today, and the big news is that the whole thing is being rewritten from the ground up. M2, as it’s being called, will include all of the features of the current Ma.gnolia, but it’s going to be entirely Open Source. A first look at M2 should be available by September.

Found via DownloadSquad.

In your preparations for Software Freedom Day (9/20/08), don’t forget your official 2008 t-shirt.

Sales only open for another few days so get in soon! All proceeds go to supporting teams around the world with goodies for their events.

John Blyberg has done it again! On September 1 Darien Library went live with their new website and OPAC.

SOPAC 2.0 (“Social OPAC”) focuses on community for both users and library software developers. The roughly 20,000 residents of Darien will be the first to benefit from and contribute content to the new library catalog, but the software is built to tap into a much larger community of users, incorporating shared aggregate user data sets, similar to products like LibraryThing for Libraries and BiblioCommons. As Blyberg has said, a larger community is necessary for a critical mass of content for robust search and discovery.

Very very cool and well worth looking at. Read more of Josh Hadro’s article about SOPAC 2.0.

There has been a lot written in the last day about Google Chrome. While I’m not terribly excited, it would be wrong of me to not mention it here on an open source blog. Google Chrome is an open source browser from the people at Google. Why aren’t I jumping up and down with others? Well, right now you can only see Google Chrome on Windows!! When I have an open source browser (Firefox) that works on my Mac, and works really well, why would I be excited about a new browser that I can’t even test?

Want to learn more about Chrome? Visit the official site.

This came over the Web4Lib list over the holiday weekend:

Kete 1.1 is now available with a giant helping of new features and improvements. This is also the first release where you can grab Kete from our code repository’s new home at Github.com. See http://kete.net.nz/site/topics/show/25-downloads for details or browse the code online at http://github.com/kete/kete/.

For those who haven’t seen Kete in action, Kete is open source software that enables communities, whether the community is a town or a company, to collaboratively build their own digital libraries, archives and repositories. Kete combines features from Knowledge and Content Management Systems as well as collaboration tools such as wikis, blogs, tags, and online forums to make it easy to add and relate content on a Kete site. You could create a service like Google’s Knol for your community using Kete.

I’ve seen Kete in action and it’s pretty darn neat, so check out this new release!!

Technorati Tags: kete