Yesterday I read this awesome post by Kirrily Robert about being a woman in open source. This post is a summary of her talk from OSCON about standing out in open source as a woman.

So what does it feel like to be a woman in open source? Jono Bacon, at the Community Leadership Summit on the weekend, said — addressing the guys in the room — that if you want to know what it’s like to be a woman in open source, go and get your nails done at a salon. He did this a week or so back, and when he walked into the salon he realised he was the only man there, and felt kind of out of place.

Another example someone suggested is walking into a sports bar on game night wearing the wrong team’s jersey. It can be the most friendly sports bar in the universe, but you’re still going to feel pretty awkward.

So as a woman in open source, it can be a bit like that. You walk into a space, and you feel like you stand out. And there’s enormous pressure to perform well, in case any mistake you make reflects on everyone of your gender.

I haven’t felt this way in the Koha community - which says something great about the people involved in Koha - but I do sometimes feel like I know less than the others on the project because I can’t program in Perl and submit substantial patches. One way Kirrily recommends making women and community members in general feel welcome is to thanks them for even the smallest of contributions - once again - something I have seen done in the Koha community plenty of times!!

Value all contributions.

Large or small, code or docs or bug reports or organisational tasks. All are valuable to your project. Say “thank you”. You don’t have to be the project leader to do this; anyone can do it, and it makes a big difference.

The entire post is well worth reading even if you think your project is creating all participants equally.

I am a Google Office user because work has Google Apps for us all, but maybe I should start using Google for work and Zoho for home. In a post by Matt Asay he talks to Raju Vegesna, evangelist at Zoho. He notes that the back end of Zoho is completely open source.

Could Zoho.com exist if it were built with proprietary software?
Vegesna: Technically, we could do the same thing with proprietary software but the cost would be prohibitive. Imagine Google trying to run 600,000 servers on Windows. Could it do so technically? Probably. But it’s doubtful that it could give so many different services away for free if built on pricey, proprietary software.

Without open source I can’t imagine SaaS [software as a service] taking off. The economics simply wouldn’t work.

Open source gives us flexibility so that we can add our own layers of business logic. For example, we use OpenOffice for document conversion. There are some conversions that OpenOffice doesn’t support, however. Because it’s open source, we can split the code to allow our proprietary software pick up the slack where OpenOffice can’t handle transformations.

Most of our applications are built from the ground up by Zoho. Ninety-five percent of our employees are engineers. We use open source strategically but we need to be able to understand our code intimately, so writing it ourselves is important.

We use the best of open-source software, contribute back strategically, and write our own software where it makes sense.

Awesomeness! Read the entire post here.

A few months ago I was asked to come to Norway to give a keynote on openness and libraries. Now I’ve learned that at least one library in Norway is on the right road

Thomas Brevik, librarian at the Royal Norwegian Naval Academy (in Bergen) selected Koha for his library. He selected Libriotech to help him out with this project : Libriotech is a company recently created by Marcus Enger, who starts on his own for now. I had been in Norway in February to meet up with Magnus, who was thinking about starting a business with Koha there at the time, and to also meet several librarians interested in Koha. We talked about our experience with Koha in France, and about the ways in which BibLibre might help Koha flourish in Norway.

This from BibLibre. Very cool.

As for me - I will be in Norway in November to sing Thomas’ praises and talk about openness in libraries.

I have often written about governments and open source alternatives, today I found an organization that is trying to encourage open source software use in the US government:

Open Source for America (OSA) is an effort to raise awareness in the U.S. Federal Government about the benefits of open source software. We hope to encourage the government’s utilization of open source software participation in open source software projects, and incorporation of open source community dynamics to enable transparency.

…

Open Source for America includes a diverse cross-section of technology industry leaders, associations, non-governmental organizations, communities and academic/research institutions.

There is a new open access journal devoted to the law of Free & Open Source Software. We all know the basics of the GPL and other such licenses, but sometimes we get confused with the minutia - now we can keep up with the International Free and Open Source Software Law Review and learn about the legal aspects of the software we all love!

The International Free and Open Source Software Law Review (IFOSS L. Rev.) is a collaborative legal publication aiming to increase knowledge and understanding among lawyers about Free and Open Source Software issues. Topics covered include copyright, licence implementation, licence interpretation, software patents, open standards, case law and statutory changes.

This from Actuate’s recent open source survey:

• China reveals high adoption rates with a large majority of those surveyed (80.3%) using open source software. In all regions surveyed the main perceived benefit of open source software is no licence costs. However access to source code was uniquely given a 72.6% rating by Chinese respondents.
• In North America two-fifths of respondents are already using open source (41.0%) with close to one-tenth of respondents either in the process of adopting or planning to adopt.  The proportion of respondents who feel that the benefits of open source software outweigh the inhibitors (56.8%) is nearly seven times higher than the proportion that disagree (8.4%). These results are even more positive than in the previous survey. 
• Europe continues to capitalise on its early recognition of open source software’s potential, in particular France where over two thirds (67.0%) of the respondents already use open source software and Germany where the proportion using open source software has increased this year to 60.6%.  This contrasts with the UK at 42.1% adoption and the USA at 41.0%
• Germany’s attitudes to open source adoption continue to be more positive than neighbouring UK.  For example the proportion of UK respondents who feel that the benefits of open source software outweigh the inhibitors has decreased this year to 47.0% (from 54.0% in 2008) whereas Germany scores 62.0% in favour of open source, a notable increase since last year’s survey.
• The UK shows little change since last year with just over two fifths (42.1%) already using open source software.  Significantly the UK continues to demonstrate a degree of reticence towards open source adoption with almost a quarter (22.4%) still monitoring developments but not yet evaluating. 

In short - open source is everywhere

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.