Add an eventOpen Source Bridge 2011 schedule
Tuesday 21st June 2011
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Registration Opens
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Morning Keynote - Hacking for Freedom
by Pete Fein
A first-hand talk about the politics, technology and ethics of hacktivism. I'll give an overview of some of the active groups, including "Anonymous":http://anonops.ru/ and "Telecomix":http://telecomix.org and discuss some of the projects I've worked on in the past few months. See this "blog post":http://blog.wearpants.org/hacking-for-freedom and "video of lightning talk":http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bilJ7lZtutQ from Pycon
- organizing "protests in support of WikiLeaks":http://whyweprotest.net/ and freedom information. Over one hundred cities in two weeks.
- supporting communications in the Middle East: working 20 hours / day for a week for "Egypt":http://werebuild.eu/wiki/Egypt/Main_Page without dying
- When the Net is up: proxies, mirrors, VPNs, encryption, retweeting
- When the Net is down: dialup modem pools, fax blasts, ham radio
- Works in Progress: two-way radio HOWTOs, Intranet LiveCDs
Other areas of discussion include: possibilities for future action, staying safe online, IRC etiquette, do-ocracy and anarchic organizing. Questions answered.
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Coffee Break
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"Don't Give that Book Away!": Why Every Project Needs an Open Source Book
by Tim O'Brien
Your open source project is "revolutionary", but no one knows how to install your software and new users are complaining about documentation. What you need is a book, and you need it fast! If your project catches their attention, you'll quickly be approached by one or more publishers.
*What do you do?*
The first half of this talk delves into this particular decision point. Should you publish with a publisher, or should you just write an open source book? We'll explore the advantages and disadvantages of open source books and provide attendees with one model for making such a decision.
- What effect does open source documentation have on the adoption curve of a new technology?
- What is the "lifecycle" of a traditional (published) book?
- Who owns a published book? and How is it distributed?
The second half of this talk explores the technical infrastructure, tools, and cultural mechanisms that best support an ongoing documentation effort.
- Open Source documentation "governance": how it works
- Who manages the open source documentation project?
- What is in a sample open source publishing pipeline?
- How can open source documentation be used to support an open source business model?
Attendees will explore the infrastructure behind two publishing pipelines and explore the various options that are available to a project that has decided to take responsibility for production.
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Cloud Scaling: High Performance Even in Virtualized Environments.
Virtual hosting platforms promise easy, efficient access to computing resources on a whim. There are huge wins to these offerings, both economically and in terms of efficiency. However, many service types aren’t well suited to cloud environments. These services require special consideration in order to keep our sites, our businesses, or our organizations humming along nicely.
In this talk, you’ll learn how to identify and remedy bottlenecks in your production stack which are particular to the cloud. We’ll discuss how to get high performance out of variable, multi-tenant, and degraded (virtualized) hardware, including some of the important considerations in choosing a provider. Using experience from Urban Airship’s travails in the cloud, we’ll focus on getting the most out of your network, cpu, memory, and perhaps most importantly, your disk configuration.
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Control Emacs with Your Beard: the All-Singing All-Dancing Intro to Hacking the Kinect
by Greg Borenstein and Devin Chalmers
Thanks to mad consumer science like the Microsoft Kinect, the future of human-computer interfaces is approaching faster than a jetpack-powered high-speed rail line filled with Phil Dick novels.
Watch, dumbfounded and thunderstruck, as award-winning Kinect hacker Greg Borenstein (and his grotesquely deformed, half-literate assistant Devin) use open source libraries like libfreenect, Cinder, and OpenFrameworks to build gestural interfaces that let them:
- Play web browsers like violins!
- Manage windows like so many marionettes!
- And, of course, hack on Emacs hands-free with the assistance of _nothing but a beard_.
Working without a net and at great personal and professional peril, they will show why even the crustiest open-source geeks will be excited to play with this new toy.
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Lightning Talks
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Open Source: Saving the World
Open source software is being used around the world to keep people safe and help ensure self-determination when the existing democratic processes break down. It's providing innovative, scalable, and locally appropriate solutions to the issues of literacy and information dissemination. And it's solving the practical problems of getting help to the right places, and letting people know where to avoid as a disaster unfolds, and where to go for most impact when cleaning up.
Of course, while open source projects are saving the world, working to make every scrap of available information useful, it's social media and ordinary people that are producing the reports, providing the data. But how do you extract signal from the amazing noise generator that is the internet? You guessed it - open source software comes to the rescue again, along with a good dose of volunteer time!
This talk will draw on Noirin's experience with working on crisis management in the wake of the Christchurch earthquakes, as well as her keen interest in humanitarian work, to look at some of the projects currently saving the world, and how ordinary people can repurpose the technology they use every day to make all of this possible.
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Read the Docs: A Completely Open Source Django Web Site
Hosting open source documentation was a mess. The best-of-class solution for the Python world as uploading a tarball of html to packages.python.org or doing similar to upload to github pages. If you wanted to self-host it, that generally meant having a cron job that ran a shell script to pull your source code nightly. We set out to solve this problem using the current best of class tools that Django has to offer.
"Read the Docs":http://readthedocs.org/ is the official documentation host for many open source Python projects. It is built around the "Sphinx":http://sphinx.readthedocs.org/en/latest/index.html documentation toolkit. In the simplest form, we are a hosting provider for Sphinx documentation. However, we have added a lot of features to make this useful. These include:
- Support for svn, hg, git, and bzr.
- Post-commit hooks to automatically build documentation on commit
- A custom Read the Docs styled Sphinx theme.
- Full-text search across all projects.
- Support for VCS tags and branches. (branches git only for now)
- PDF generation for all documentation.
- Editing of documentation that results in a pull request on github. (Bitbucket doesn't have a pull request API)
Read the Docs has a lot of the standard parts of any website, and also some other intersting parts that are relatively unique. These include:
- Subdomains
- CNAME Support
- Search using Solr and Haystack
- Delayed task execution with Celery
- Front end caching with Varnish
- Deployment with Chef
- Multi-server architecture
- Monitoring with Nagios and Munin
This talk will consist of three parts. The first part is the origin story of the site, how and why it was created over a weekend by 3 people. Then I'll talk about the technology involved as the site has grown. It started out as a very simple site, but as features have been added, it has gotten more complex. Finally I will discus some of the interesting outcomes that come from having a completely open source site, including security and community contributions.
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Sales-fu
Sometimes, you're your own sales droid, and you'll need to put together proposals that say what you do and will get you money.
This session is a light-hearted jaunt through the sales cycle for freelancers and small companies in open source, and it's going to be fun. It's not going to have any suits, and it'll be interactive too.
Included will be:
* The Thrill Of The Hunt!
* Categorizing Your Hunting
* Pickup Lines
* The Handoff
* The Pleasant Shakeoff
* The Shakedown
* Getting Your Game Face On
* Actual Written Materials
* Getting cash on the table -
Diary of an Open Source Sysadmin Entrepreur
by Luke Kanies
Building a great company requires passion and ability focused in an area that can make money. This talk is focused on helping you understand which to start with and which to iterate on until you see success, and the lessons are in the form of the story of how Luke Kanies found himself with no choice but to start a company and how he iterated on what that company built and why until he had a business.
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Gearman: From the Worker's Perspective
by Brian Aker
Many people view topics like Map/Reduce and queue systems as advanced concepts that require in-depth knowledge and time consuming software setup. Gearman is changing all that by making this barrier to entry as low as possible with an open source, distributed job queuing system.
In this talk we’ll start with problems such as:
• Map/Reduce style problems
• Pipeline processing
• Scatter/gather queries
• Asynchronous queuing of tasks
We’ll get to the root of these problems and show how Gearman can be used to solve them efficiently. Armed with distributed architectures and examples, we will explore how to integrate these concepts into custom applications. This knowledge can greatly benefit those building scale-out, fault tolerant, and/or cloud based solutions. -
Get 'Em While They're Young: Cultivating the Next Generation of Open Source Contributors
by Jane Wells
Does your open source project participate as a mentoring organization for GSoC? WordPress does. Do you have other mentorship programs for college students? What about high school students? Middle school, even? This talk will go over some new initiatives WordPress is planning (through the WordPress Foundation) to help kids who want to use and/or design/develop for WordPress. From kid-specific workshops at WordCamps to partnerships with existing educational institutions, we're trying to make it easier for younger students to learn more about getting involved with WordPress if they are interested.
Good idea or doomed to fail? By the time OSBridge comes around, we'll have a couple of months of these projects under our belt, and can assess the progress we've had so far. It would be an interesting discussion among projects about whether investing in the next generation of contributors at a younger age will yield a return or if it's a big waste of time. Is going younger an appropriate way of taking mentorship and education a step further?
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How 5 People with 4 Day Jobs in 3 Time Zones Enjoyed 2 Years Writing 1 Book
by Ian Dees
In May 2008, five busy programmers in town for a conference sat down for dinner and decided to do a book together. We dreamed big dreams for the project scope, made big plans for technical collaboration, and yes, made big mistakes as we worked. Two years later, reality looks really different than we'd imagined--better, in fact.
In this talk, you'll hear about:
* Getting through the Trough of Sorrow
* What to do when you have all the responsibility and no authority
* Laughing at your estimates (and getting stakeholders to laugh with you)
* What worked for us (and what might or might not work for you)
* Lessons for freelancers, telecommuters, and distributed teams -
Intro to CouchDB
Apache CouchDB is the oldest of the new breed of non-relational databases. It's a JSON based web server, so it should fit right into your stack. Get inspired by real world use cases. See what makes Couch tick. Learn some Map Reduce. Relax.
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IRL: How Do Geeks Undermine Their Presentations and Conversations with Body Language
Watching my peers and staff speak and work with clients for many years, I have realized that many geeks are uncomfortable interacting IRL. But, you don't have to be. There are some simple physical tricks to keeping an audience (of 1 or 1k) engaged and not undermining your skills and yourself.
I'm going to talk about positioning of the body, head and hands in relation to the people you're interacting with, in relation to the room, and in relation to yourself. I'll outline some best practices, some behaviors to watch for in you, and even some things that you can watch for in other people.
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Lunch
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DNSSEC @ Mozilla
by Shyam Mani
The session will discuss the following topics :
*Basics*
Introduction to DNSSEC
Why DNSSEC is needed
New RR records – DNSKEY, DS, NSEC and RRSIG
Keys
Relationship between the new RR records and keys aka Chain of Trust[demo]*Implementation*
Things to consider before you implement
Setup at Mozilla, before and after
Commands
Config changes
Steps to switch
Verification [demo]
Possible issues to be aware of*Errors*
Mistakes I made, and you shouldn't*The Future*
Where we stand with DNSSEC today
Possible issues that delay DNSSEC implementation
Data from Mozilla (before and after DNSSEC)
Possible changes to Firefox/Other Software -
Give a Great Tech Talk
by Josh Berkus and Ian Dees
While a terrific presentation may take talent, making a good one is a matter of science and practice. As generations of Toastmasters have proved, anyone can do it. Veteran conference presenter Josh Berkus will go over his tech talk tips in detail in order to help you improve your presentation skills. Programmer and slide-slinger Ian Dees will take on the specific topics of showing code to an audience and composing your slides.
- How to prepare for a talk
- Nobody cares about your slides
- … but make good ones anyway
- 7 terrible habits of ineffective presenters
- Audience interaction 101
- When your demo crashes
- Curate your code examples
- The audience outside the lecture hall
Speakers who are giving talks later in the conference are especially encouraged to attend.
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Mozilla School of Webcraft @P2PU
by John Britton
P2PU School of Webcraft: Web developer training that’s free, open and globally accessible.
Mozilla and Peer 2 Peer University are creating the P2PU School of Webcraft, a new way to teach and learn web developer skills. Our classes are globally accessible, 100% free, and powered by learners, mentors and contributors like you.
Our goal is to provide a free pathway to skills and certification to help people build careers on open web technology. Existing developer training is expensive, out of touch, and out of reach. We leverage peer learning powered by mentors and learners like you and self-organized study groups. We use existing open and free learning materials
In this forty-five minute session we'll briefly cover the inception of the Peer 2 Peer University along with details and success stories from the first three cycles of courses. We'll then dive into more detail about our collaboration with Mozilla Drumbeat including Mozilla's mission to engage the next million Mozillians. We'll present the P2PU School of Webcraft, and a case study of courses offered so far, including the first course, 'Mashing Up the Open Web.' Additionally, we'll introduce our plans to separate learning from assessment and our community driven credentialing system.
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Qs on Queues
by Eric Day
Why do you even need a queue, and which one should you use? There are a number of queuing options out there today, and while options are great, it is sometimes hard to examine all the features of each to determine the best fit. As you start to look deeper into the options certain patterns and features emerge. Some projects are more suitable for certain environments, and it would be nice to learn which one best matches your environment.
This session gives an overview of a number of open source queuing systems categorized by feature sets and explains what each feature means and when it comes in useful.
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The Locker Project, TeleHash, and You
The open source "Locker Project":https://github.com/quartzjer/Locker and "TeleHash":http://telehash.org/ protocol are new efforts to build a platform that focuses on a person first and live at the edge of the network. They combine tools to collect your personal data from everywhere with apps and utilities to let you make more sense of all of it. Then using the new peer mesh networking of TeleHash with your Locker enables all kinds of awesome to exist in directly connecting your devices and data together for you and secure private sharing with others you trust.
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Turning Mediocre Products Into Awesome Products
How many Google product ideas were built, but never really made it to market? A little of that is OK, but why does it happen so much? We don't believe it's because of bad ideas. We believe it's because a holistic approach to design for people is missing inside and outside your organization.
We're going to avoid an abstract talk in favor of a practical look at the design process and the design techniques everyone should know how to use. We'll show you how we screwed it up on one of our products and how we got it right on the next one. A few techniques we'll cover are:
*Sketching to sell and open up the idea
*Creating a product blueprint with proof points
*Finding team overlap between Marketing, Design, Engineer functionsThis people-centered, holistic approach to design makes Apple and other innovative companies what they are today. It has helped our 150+ clients create more than a billion dollars in market cap. We'll end the talk with a hands-on example.
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A Dozen Databases in 45 Minutes
by Eric Redmond
Choosing a data storage engine is an important decision, but it doesn’t have to be painful if you know the landscape. The decision should be made by research, not buzzwords. Authoring the book “Seven Databases in Seven Weeks” has opened up a whole world of open source database alternatives that I never before seriously considered - and we’ve sifted through them so you don’t have to. At the very least we can settle the Mongo v. Couch debate (hint: they’re both awesome).
This talk will include:
- A 30,000 foot view of the current database ecosystem.
- How to choose the correct database for a project (the CAP theorem).
- Thoughts by database project leaders.
Among the DBMSs we’ll look into are: MySQL, PostgreSQL, Redis, Memcached, Riak, Cassandra, HBase, MongoDB, CouchDB, Neo4J, OrientDB, DB4o.
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Getting Started with Semantic Web Applications
by Brian Panulla and Leif Warner
Curious about the semantic web / graph stores, but don’t know where to start?
We’ll walk through setting up a community network directory webapp using standard Linked Data ontologies, using a combination of Scalatra (a Sinatra workalike in Scala), and Jena (a Java Semantic Web library).The standard model for the semantic web / linked data is RDF, a directed, labeled graph where everything is identified by a URL (mostly). This can be viewed as a regular Object-Oriented model, where objects (nodes), that have properties (labeled edges), whose values can be data types or other objects. This makes an Object-Relational Mapping layer unnecessary, and any part of the data model can be presented in the REST paradigm at the URL it uses for its identifier. With a plethora of graph stores available, this format is a flexible and effective choice for networked data with arbitrary link depth, and the graph query language allows for very powerful patterns to be queried.
Also covered:
* Practical tips & tricks for incorporating open web schemas into your existing app, both consuming and publishing standard semantic web data.
* Data inferencing: adding rules to infer additional information as logical entailments of your existing model data.
* SPARQL, the standard graph query language (a description of a graph snippet with wildcards).
* Turning your network graphs into exciting diagrams! -
Open Source: Open to whom?
What makes the culture of open source so hostile to women and how can we as individuals act to change it? This talk will begin with some theoretical exploration of how open source came to be this way, but most of the talk will focus on practical instructions listeners can implement right away.
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OSWALD: Lessons from and for the Open Hardware Movement
by Tim Harder
With funding from the National Science Foundation and other generous sponsors, OSU’s Electrical Engineering and Computer Science Department set about creating an ultra-mobile hand-held device for distribution to undergraduates. Envisioned as a cutting-edge computing platform that would encourage students to tinker with all the latest developments in the mobile space without fear of breaking their own gadgets, the "OSWALD":oswald project had some fairly grand and noble ambitions: design all hardware and software in house with the help of student developers, thus making the device that much more hackable and learning friendly.
Sadly, things didn’t quite goes as planned for OSWALD and the project encountered a number of critical points of failure. In this talk, Tim explores the design and deployment decisions made while constructing the OSWALD platform, with an eye to providing lessons learned to the open hardware and open source educational community. He’ll also discuss OSWALD’s future and the steps taken to provide similar, useful student experiences in a more efficient fashion.
[oswald]http://beaversource.oregonstate.edu/projects/cspfl
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Pulling the Plug
by Ryan Snyder
The end-of-life portion of a product’s life-cycle is certainly the least glorious, but it doesn’t have to be something approached with sorrow or dread. This talk will be focused on the issues Mozilla is facing with its conglomeration of 130+ websites. We will look at the organization’s process of creating an oversight committee for all of these websites, as well as the subgroup responsible for identifying and taking down websites that no longer supported the organization’s current mission. We will discuss the privacy, security and political issues that the organization has faced during the removal of a website, as well as the act of documenting a website’s role and purpose in the Mozilla Website Archive. Finally, we’ll look at the process of defining end-of-life plans for all new campaign websites prior to launch.
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Afternoon Tea
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"Why did you do that?" You're more automated than you think.
by Paul Fenwick
Your brain is really good at surviving in neolithic Africa, but not because of our powers of higher levels of thought; they're much too slow. Humans are so successful as a species because we're champions at automating things, including our own thoughts and behaviours.
What's fascinating is that we're profoundly unaware of just how much our own lives run on automatic, and just how much our own behaviour is influenced by external factors. Join internationally acclaimed speaker Paul Fenwick as we examine the fascinating world of the human mind.
Open Source Bridge 2011
United States United States, Portland
21st–24th June 2011
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