EIFL: eIFL-FOSS Blog

The first Evergreen International Conference, 2009 Athens (USA) – report

The first Evergreen International Conference was held in Athens (USA) on May 20-22, 2009. I submitted a presentation “Evergreen in Armenia” and after acceptance of the paper by the Conference Organizing Committee, eIFL sponsored my trip and Conference participation.More than 150 participants (most from USA and Canada) were attending this meeting, and according to overall ...

The Square of Engagement

Recently I was thinking about institutional engagement with free and open source software (FOSS). I had been asked to open a day-long workshop on the relevance of a FOSS integrated library system (ILS) for academic libraries. The more I thought about it, the more I realized that libraries have a vast array of FOSS they are busy deploying. Everything from Apache web servers, to Drupal content ...

Documentation: not just another pretty face

I have always thought that documentation was a vital component of any FOSS project. But recently the value of documentation was illuminated for me in a new way. This has me rethinking the basis of the importance of documentation for a FOSS project at nearly any stage of development.Let me describe the case that prompts this reflection. A long-term (2 to 3 year) user of an enterprise software ...

Free Software and Open Source Symposium 2008, Toronto - report

I was struck by a number of thoughts during the recent FSOSS 2008 event at Seneca College in Toronto. First, one cannot attend an event like this without coming away feeling as though FOSS is totally mainstream these days. The four parallel sets of presentations running over the two days of FSOSS 2008 showed FOSS in many lights. As well as a number of talks about integrated development ...

Community Liaison - the intersection of FOSS users, developers, and businesses

The recent appointment of K.G. Schneider - prolific blogger on librianship, writing and everything else, since 2003 - as Community Librarian for Equinox marks a significant milestone. It is significant both for the FOSS development community behind the Evergreen integrated library system (ILS), and for the company that employs the majority of the Evergreen developers and provides installation and ...

IRC: information on tap

Internet relay chat (IRC) is a familiar communication tool in FOSS development and user communities. It can be vibrant, fast-paced, friendly, exceedingly geeky, and ideal for getting a quick response to a hard question you just haven't been able to sort. If you have not tried it previously then now is as good a time as any. You could start by exploring the IRC channels, or chat rooms, that ...

Open Translation Tools, day 3

The final day of Open Translation Tools 2007 found us tired yet eager for more. We followed a similar pattern to day 2 with parallel sessions dominating, punctuated by another SpeakGeeking session. By this day, I had a much clearer idea of what I needed (at least in regard to the challenges ahead for the eIFL-FOSS ILS project). Nevertheless it was still a hard choice to decide which sessions to ...

Open Translation Tools, day 2

Day 2 at Open Translation Tools started bright and early. And just as interactive as day one. Now that we all had a bit more knowledge under our belts, it made sense to go around the room again and ask each participant to identify something specific they definitely wanted to get to before the end of the next day. For me that was easy. I wanted to at least have set up an environment on my machine ...

Open Translation Tools, day 1 concluded

Day 1 finished off the way it had begun, with plenty of interaction amongst the participants. We started by dividing into two groups, those who had use-cases describing content in need of translation, and those who had translation tools to discuss and enumerate. I was in the group attempting to characterize clearly differentiated use-cases. The challenge with such work is to be as granular as ...

Open Translation Tools 2007, day 1

I am in Zagreb, Croatia, today with a fabulous collection of folks passionate about open content and FOSS translation tools. Open Translation Tools is organised by Aspiration and the Multimedia Institute [MI2]. It brings together software developers working to develop translation tools with projects that have particular use-cases for translation. Together we are going to learn from ...

Free Software & Open Source Software Symposium - Toronto (day 2)

Day 2 of this conference started better than day 1 since I didn't get lost getting here. First up for me today was a talk entitled The Development Commons: A Virtuous Circle of Software Production for Virtuous Organisations. The presenters for this were Jason Cote and Julian Eglestaff, both of Freeform Solutions. They provide IT solutions for not-for-profit organisations. They use free software ...

Free Software & Open Source Symposium - Toronto (day1)

I have the good fortune, for once, of living close enough to Toronto to participate in this year's Free Software & Open Source Symposium. Two days of talks on subjects ranging from Open Content: Shared Curricula in a Web 2.0 World, to Reading and Reviewing Code, to Open Source Education in South Africa, and Community Management as Open Source's Core Competency. All that as well as the ...