jmcmichael

The GitHub Generation: Why We’re All in Open Source Now →

GitHub was intended to be an open software collaboration platform, but it’s become a platform for much, much more than code. It’s now being used by artists, builders, home owners, everyone in between, entire companies … and cities.

GitHub is doing to open source what the internet did to the publishing industry.

As people who were once just users become producers, they’re re-shaping the culture of open source. GitHub, I believe, is doing to open source what the internet did to the publishing industry: It’s creating a culture gap between the previous, big-project generation of open source and a newer, more amateurized generation of open source today.

-Mikeal Rogers for Wired Opinion

How a Stigmergy of Actions Replaces Representation of Persons →

A new system of governance or collaboration that does not follow a competitive hierarchical model will need to employ stigmergy in most of its action based systems. It is neither reasonable nor desirable for individual thought and action to be subjugated to group consensus in matters which do not affect the group, and it is frankly impossible to accomplish complex tasks if every decision must be presented for approval; that is the biggest weakness of the hierarchical model. The incredible success of so many internet projects are the result of stigmergy, not cooperation, and it is stigmergy that will help us build quickly, efficiently and produce results far better than any of us can foresee at the outset.

- Georgie BC (via Michel Bauwens’ P2P Foundation)

Legitimacy in Cooperative Human Systems Design: Mediating Power, Structure, and Motivational Misalignment

by Yohai Benkler (Harvard), at the MIT Collective Intelligence 2012 conference

Maker/Hacker spaces popping up everywhere: MakeShop opens in Dublin →

Makers and Hackers around the world are building public and private spaces that serve as meeting places for creation, experimentation and creative disruption. Innovative and useful tools such as 3D printers, drones, resilient farming tools, robots, and software are increasingly being churned out by these bottom-up, grass roots, collaborative teams of diverse individuals.

Dublin has a new maker space called MakeShop, and it sounds wonderful:

“While the target audience is 15- to 25-year-olds, people of all ages can attend the drop-in workshops. Adults and children sit side-by-side and there is a quiet sense of community interrupted by sudden bursts of laughter and excitement. Fionn Kidney of the Science Gallery says it’s about “Taking DIY and turning it into ‘Doing it Together’. It’s about developing a spark of discovery. We want to help young people find their interests.” Fundamentally, he says, MakeShop is about getting hands-on and creative, encouraging questioning and conversation.

“Niall Hunt a 14-year-old from Sandymount in Dublin was making a badge – incorporating soldering techniques with learning about circuits by connecting LED lights to a battery. “I’ve always wanted to try soldering but never had the chance before,” says Niall, who likes the idea of a space where people can try out new things. With an interest in DIY, Niall’s dad John says that MakeShop provides access to materials he wouldn’t have at home as well as being an “ideas space”.

“I think it’s important to use our hands to take things apart, to figure out how things work and to fix things rather than constantly throwing stuff out.”

“Technology has now got to a stage where you can be creative very easily,” says Fionn Kidney. “Components are more readily available and low cost, so it makes things more accessible.” Aside from basic workshops, MakeShop also plan to run premium workshops including 3D printing, papercraft for model making and Arduino (a microcontroller platform that can be used to control everything from computers to household appliances).”

I love the contrast between the new-aesthetic logo and the classic European storefront.

Read more at the Irish Times…

MIT Technology Review: People Power 2.0 - How civilians helped win the Libyan information war →

After weeks of skirmishes in the Nafusa Mountains southwest of Tripoli, Sifaw Twawa and his brigade of freedom fighters are at a standstill. It’s a mid-April night in 2011, and Twawa’s men are frightened. Lightly armed and hidden only by trees, they are a stone’s throw from one of four Grad 122-millimeter multiple-rocket launchers laying down a barrage on Yefren, their besieged hometown. These weapons can fire up to 40 unguided rockets in 20 seconds. Each round carries a high-­explosive fragmentation warhead weighing 40 pounds. They urgently need to know how to deal with this, or they will have to pull back. Twawa’s cell phone rings.

Two friends are on the line, via a Skype conference call. Nureddin Ashammakhi is in Finland, where he heads a research team developing biomaterials technology, and Khalid Hatashe, a medical doctor, is in the United Kingdom. The Qaddafi regime trained Hatashe on Grads during his compulsory military service. He explains that Twawa’s katiba—brigade—is well short of the Grad’s minimum range: at this distance, any rockets fired would shoot past them. Hatashe adds that the launcher can be triggered from several hundred feet away using an electric cable, so the enemy may not be in or near the launch vehicle. Twawa’s men successfully attack the Grad—all because two civilians briefed their leader, over Skype, in a battlefield a continent away.

Wired: Ward Cunningham, creator of the wiki, releases federated version of the collaboration software →

Ward Cunningham, the creator of the wiki, is proud of his invention. “We changed the world together,” he says of those who contributed to his software development site C2, which spawned the online collaboration software that underpins Wikipedia and countless other services across the net.

But there is one thing about the wiki that he regrets. “I always felt bad that I owned all those pages,” he says. The central idea of a wiki — whether it’s driving Wikipedia or C2 — is that anyone can add or edit a page, but those pages all live on servers that someone else owns and controls. Cunningham now believes that no one should have that sort of central control, so he has built something called the federated wiki.

- Klint Finley, Wiki Inventor Sticks a Fork in His Baby