Open-source News

Small-Scale Fab: Make Parts with Free/Open Source Software  thenewstack.io

How To Use the Grep Command in Linux to Search Inside Files  Tom's Hardware

Making for an exciting Saturday morning, Miguel Ojeda has posted the latest patch series plumbing Rust language support into the Linux kernel. The "Rust for the Linux kernel" patches are now up to their sixth version for adding the necessary infrastructure for this second, optional language to the kernel plus continuing to add more sample code / basic functionality for showing off use of this memory-safety-focused language for kernel purposes...

It's been a while since there was last a Wine-Staging update with notable new patches added for this experimental version of Wine. But with today's Wine-Staging 7.8 release based off yesterday's Wine 7.8 there is a new patch worth mentioning as well as updates to some of the existing patches...

KDE Plasma 5.25 has embarked on its soft feature freeze meaning the focus is quickly turning from feature development to bug fixing and testing for this next KDE desktop update...

How to Install Python 2 on Ubuntu 22.04 LTS Jammy Linux  Linux Shout

For better power-savings with new/forthcoming AMD powered laptops, this week AMD engineers sent out a patch series for PSR2 / PSR-SU MPO functionality for reducing display power consumption...

Rust Code Updated For The Linux Kernel - Networking & Async Support Started  Phoronix

Build community engagement by serving up Lean Coffee Angie Byron Sat, 05/07/2022 - 03:00 Register or Login to like Register or Login to like

I recently started a new job at MongoDB as a Principal Community Manager, spearheading the MongoDB Community Champions program. In that role, I faced two challenges.

First, I was joining a brand new, fully remote team. Not only was I new myself, but the team as a whole was just beginning to form, with new members coming on board a couple of times per month. This team was also spread across several time zones, with about half of them older, established members who've been with the company for a long time and know each other pretty well, and the other half entirely new faces.

Second, the Community Champions program started during the pandemic. As a result, program participants from around the world had very little opportunity to meet each other and meld as a group. I wanted to find out more about what they wanted to discuss and learn, so I could use that to plan out the first few months of programming. I also wanted to give them a chance to talk with each other about their interests.

I ran these scenarios past a friend of mine, the fabulous Donna Benjamin, and she suggested an extremely useful tool from the Open Practice Library: Lean Coffee.

More great content Free online course: RHEL technical overview Learn advanced Linux commands Download cheat sheets Find an open source alternative Explore open source resources What is Lean Coffee?

Lean Coffee is a structured but agenda-less meeting. Participants gather, build their own agenda, and begin talking.

You start with a Kanban board with To Discuss, Discussing, and Discussed columns. Optionally, you can add an Actions section to write down anything that needs following up after the meeting. Participants get a fixed amount of time to brainstorm topics to talk about. Each topic is then written on a sticky note.

All sticky notes are placed in the To Discuss column and clustered by grouping similar topics together, also known as affinity mapping. This is followed by a round of dot voting, which is exactly what it sounds like: voting by placing a dot on a sticky note to indicate your choice. At the end of the process, you might have a board that looks something like this:

Image by:

(Angie Byron, CC BY-SA 4.0)

The most popular topic moves to the Discussing column, then you set a timer for 5-7 minutes and start the group talking. When the timer goes off, everyone votes again on whether to keep going for another few minutes or switch to the next topic. Stickies are moved and topics are discussed accordingly until the allotted meeting time runs out.

Lean Coffee all but guarantees you'll be harnessing the passion and interest of the group, since these are all going to be things they want to talk about. It's also great because the format is extremely lightweight; you can do it with just a whiteboard, a few pens, and some sticky notes in person or with virtual tools that emulate them, such as Scrumbler.

So how might Lean Coffee work in practice?

Real-time remote team building

This is an example of utilizing the Lean Coffee pattern as intended: to foster a conversation among people who may or may not know each other, but for whom you want to try and surface commonalities and spark discussion.

First, choose a time that works best for your team as a whole. This is critical, because if your focus is on building up team cohesion, you do not want some of your team to feel left out. Lean Coffee can stretch or shrink to fill whatever time you have available, but an hour is a good amount of time.

Since you will be using virtual tools, you may want to begin with a short icebreaker exercise to get folks used to the tool and the voting process. For example, you could put up a couple of open-ended questions on sticky notes and allow people to vote on which one they want to answer as a group. Next, run the Lean Coffee exercise as documented: Set a timer, let each person drag over sticky notes and write down their topics, cluster the responses together, then discuss!

During our first run of these, we talked about everything from where we would most like to travel to what our favorite kinds of food were and what hobbies we had. There were insights and laughter, and the team came away feeling it was a really positive experience.

Asynchronous topic gathering and discussion

With the Champions, it is impossible to get everyone on a call at the same time due to the international nature of the group, everyone's personal schedules, and so on. But it's possible to run a modified, more drawn-out version of Lean Coffee for this situation.

First, walk folks through how the tool generally works and what they should do. You can do this live on a video meeting or via a prerecorded video. For topic gathering, set the time limit for something like a week to 10 days to accommodate peoples' various schedules, vacations, sick kids, and anything else that might come up. Expect that because the deadline is extended and there's no real-time component, you will need to send one or two gentle reminders to folks to participate. You should also expect that, despite your efforts, there will be some drop-off in participation.

After topics are in, you can cluster them as you do in the synchronous version. Since you can't talk through this in real time as a group, you will probably want to add headers above each cluster to explain your thinking. Some of our clusters were Best Practices, Learn about Product X, and so on. For clusters that already clearly have consensus, you can wait for the voting process or just go ahead and move those to the To Be Discussed column proactively.

Repeat the "timer" (and the gentle reminders) with the voting process, leaving a week or so for folks to get their votes in. If there are a large number of topics generated, you may want to allow each member more than one vote—up to three, for example. By taking the highest-clustering and highest-voted topics, you effectively have a backlog of meeting topics. Set a meeting schedule over as many weeks or months are needed and work your way down the topic list for each meeting.

This approach is definitely not as dynamic and exciting as the real-time version of Lean Coffee, but the basic mechanics serve the same purpose of ensuring that the members are talking about things that are relevant and interesting to them. This is also a useful approach if you, like me, need to track down one or more people (such as product managers or engineers) in order to have a useful discussion about a given topic.

Lean Coffee for remote and in-person collaboration

Lean Coffee is a versatile, fun, and engaging way of allowing relative strangers to meet each other, interact, find common ground, and learn from each other. Its simplicity allows it to be modified for a variety of remote and in-person gatherings and used for a variety of purposes.

There are dozens of other patterns like this in the Open Practice Library, so you should definitely check it out!

This idea from the Open Practice Library can re-energize your in-person and remote meetings.

Image by:

Pixabay. CC0.

Community management What to read next 7 ways anyone can contribute to Open Practice Library This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International License. Register or Login to post a comment.

Those with extra time on their hands this weekend can try out the AlmaLinux 8.6 Beta as the newest version of this completely free enterprise Linux distribution built off the RHEL sources...

Wine 7.8 is out today as the newest bi-weekly release of this software for enjoying Windows games and applications on Linux, macOS, and other platforms...

Microsoft Discovers Nimbuspwn Privilege Escalation Vulnerability on Linux Systems Granting Hackers Root Pe ...  CPO Magazine

Channel Bytes May 6, 2022 – State of Wireless WAN Report released; SONiC project joins Linux Foundation; NINJIO partners with TD SYNNEX; and more  Channel Daily News

10 ways to check ports in Linux to help troubleshoot systems  TechRepublic

Why your open-source project definitely should not be the next Kubernetes  TechRepublic

The latest Apple M1 excitement on Linux for the mainline kernel is the NVMe driver is slated for introduction in the upcoming Linux 5.19 merge window...

Senior Linux Engineer  IT-Online

The "AST" DRM/KMS driver for ASpeed chips in Linux 5.19 is adding support for DisplayPort outputs... Leading to the era of hopefully seeing more servers with DisplayPort outputs to eventually replace VGA that is still very common on server platforms for display purposes...

This post originally appeared on Linux.com. The author, Stephen Jacobs, is the director of Open@RIT and serves on the Steering Committee of the TODO Group and served as a pre-board organizer of the O3DE Foundation. Open@RIT is an associate member of the Linux Foundation. 

What Is An Academic OSPO?

The academic space has begun to see activity around the idea of Open Source Program Offices at colleges and universities.  Like their industry counterparts, these offices lead or advise administrative efforts around policy, licensing compliance, and staff education.  But they can also be charged with efforts around student education, research policies and practices, and the faculty tenure and promotion process tied to research.

Johns Hopkins University (JHU) soft-launched their OSPO 2019, led by Sayeed Choudhury, Associate Dean for Research Data Management and Hodson Director of the Digital Research and Curation Center at the Sheridan Libraries in collaboration with Jacob Green with MOSS Labs. Other universities and academic institutions took notice.

Case Study: Open@RIT

I met Green at RIT’s booth at OSCON in the summer of 2019 and learned about JHU’s soft launch of their OSPO.  Our booth showcased RIT’s work with students in Free and Open Source humanitarian work. We began with a 2009 Honors seminar course in creating educational games for the One Laptop per Child program. That seminar was formalized into a regular course, Humanitarian Free and Open Source Software. (The syllabus for the course’s most recent offering can be found at this link)

By the end of 2010, we had a complete “Course-to-Co-Op lifecycle.” Students could get engaged in FOSS through an ecosystem that included FOSS events like hackathons and guest speaker visits, support for student projects, formal classes, or a co-op experience. In 2012, after I met with Chris Fabian, co-founder of UNICEF’s Office of Innovation, RIT sent FOSS students on Co-Op to Kosovo for UNICEF. We later formally branded the Co-Op program as LibreCorps. LibreCorps has worked with several FOSS projects since, including more work with UNICEF. In 2014 RIT announced what Cory Doctorow called a “Wee Degree in Free,” the first academic minor in Free and Open Source Software and Free Culture. 

All of these efforts provided an excellent base for an RIT Open Programs Office. (more on that missing “s” word in a moment) With the support of Dr. Ryne Raffaelle, RIT’s VP of Research, I wrote a “white paper” on how such an office might benefit RIT. RIT’s Provost, Dr. Ellen Granberg, suggested a university-wide meeting to gauge interest in the concept, and 50 people from 37 units across campus RSVP’d to the meeting. A subset of that group worked together (online, amid the early days of the pandemic) to develop a “wish list” document of what they’d like to see Open@RIT provide in terms of services and support. That effort informed the creation of the charter for Open@RIT approved by the Provost in the summer of 2020.

An Open Programs Office

Open@RIT is dedicated to fostering an “Open Across The University” as a collaborative engine for Faculty, Staff, and Students. Its goals are to discover and grow the footprint, of RIT’s impact on all things Open including, but not limited to, Open Source Software, Open Data, Open Science, Open Hardware, Open Educational Resources, and Creative Commons licensed efforts; what Open@RIT refers to in aggregate as “Open Work.” To highlight the wide constituency being served the choice was made to call it an Open Programs Office to avoid being misread as an effort focusing exclusively on software. The IEEE (which Open@RIT partners with), in their SA Open effort , made the same choice.

In academia, there’s growing momentum around Open Science efforts. Open Science (a term that gets used interchangeably with “Open Research” and “Open Scholarship”) refers to a process that keeps all aspects of scientific research, for the formation of a research plan onward, in the Open. This Scientific American Op-Ed (that mentions Open@RIT) points to the need for academia to become more Open. Open Educational Resources (I.E., making course content, texts, etc., Free and Open) is another academic effort that sees broad support and somewhat lesser adoption (for now).

While the academic community favors Open Science and Open Educational Resource practices, it’s been slow to adopt them. This recently released guide from the National Academies of Science, Engineering, and Mathematics, a bellwether organization, adds pressure to academia to make those changes.

What’s Open@RIT Done Since The Founding? Drafting Policies and Best Practices Documents

Policy creation in academia is and should be slow and thoughtful.  Open@RIT’s draft policy on Open Work touches every part of the research done at the university.  It’s especially involved as it needs to cover three different classes of constituents.  Students own their IP at RIT (a rarity in academia) except when the university pays them for the work that they do (research assistance ships, work-study jobs, etc.), Staff (the University owns their IP in most cases), and Faculty. The last are a special case in that researchers and scientists are expected to publish their work but may need to work with the university to determine commercialization potential.  It also needs to address Software, hardware, data, etc.

Our current draft is making the rounds to the different constituencies and committees, and that process will be completed at some point in academic year 21-22.  In the meantime, parts of it will be published as Open@RIT’s best practices in our playbook, targeted for release before the end of Fall semester. Our recommendations for citing and supporting Open Work in Tenure and Promotion will also be part of the playbook and its creation is supported by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation grant and by the LFX Mentorship program.

Faculty and Staff Professional Development

In October of 2020, The Alfred P. Sloan Foundation funded a proposal by Open@RIT funding some general efforts of the unit and, in particular, a LibreCorps team to support what we’re now calling the Open@RIT Fellows Program. We’re charged with supporting 30 faculty projects over two years and already have twenty-one that have registered, with about one-third of those project support requests completed or in progress. In many ways, the Open@RIT Fellows program could be considered an “Inner Source” effort.

This Zotero curated collection of articles, journal papers, book chapters, and videos on various aspects of Open Work and Open scholarship is the first step in our professional development efforts. It includes links to drafts of our recommendations around releasing Open Work and on building your evaluation, tenure and promotion cases with Open Work. We hope to offer professional development-related workshops in late fall or early spring of the coming AY.

Student Education

Open@RIT is wrapping up our “Open Across the Curriculum” efforts.  While we’ve had several courses and a minor in place, they mostly were for juniors and seniors.  Those classes were modified to begin accepting sophomores, and some new pieces are being brought into play.

At RIT, students are required to take an “Immersion,” a collection of three courses, primarily from liberal arts, designed to broaden students’ education and experiences outside of their majors. The Free Culture and Free and Open Source Computing Immersion does just that and opens to students this fall.

Within the month, Open@RIT will distribute a set of lecture materials to all departments for opt-in use in their freshman seminars that discuss what it means for students to own their IP in general and, specifically, what Opening that IP can mean in science, technology, and the arts.

Once the last pieces fall into place, students will be able to learn about Open as Freshmen, take one or both of our foundational FOSS courses Humanitarian Free and Open Source Software and Free and Open Source Culture as Sophomores and then go on to the Immersion (three courses) or the Minor (five courses) should they so choose.

Advisory Board and Industry Service

Open@RIT meets three times/year with our advisory board, consisting of our alums and several Open Source Office members from Industry and related NGOs.

Open@RIT is active in FOSS efforts and organizations that include IEEE SA Open, Sustain Open Source’s Academic and Specialized Projects Working Group and CHAOSS Community’s Value working group.

Next Steps

By the end of 2022, Open@RIT will complete all of the points in its charter, hold a campus conference to highlight Open Work being done across the university, and complete a sustainability plan to ensure its future.

The post Open@RIT: The Birth of an Academic OSPO appeared first on Linux Foundation.

Appwrite’s new open-source fund could offer a novel path to sustainability  TechRepublic