Week 8

Monday February 29

Topics:

  • FOSS and the Open Web
  • Open Design

Readings (4):

What is the Open Web? (webpage)

In this article, Tantik takes an honest stab at attempting to define what the Open Web is. He mentioned three powerful things we can do when the Web is "open," and relates them to content, software applications and open standards. He stated that, "Yes, with a few dollars a month and a few hours, you can publish and reach hundreds of millions of people. I call that revolutionary." Despite free access (and marginal costs) of the tools that can help you reach millions, very few of us choose to run our own software on the Web. Social networking websites make it easy for us to create profiles and share content online, but what are we losing by committing all of our content inside these walled gardens on the Web?

Why Facebook's new Open Graph makes us all part of the web underclass

This article was directly linked from Tantik's article that describes what the Open Web is. Consider how the author relates different classes of citizens to having your online profiles and content housed in different places. If you run your own software on your own hosting plan, you may have more freedoms similar to what Tantik described. If you choose to bypass using your own software and use an off-the-shelf option (like Wordpress.com, Tumblr, etc), you may have fewer freedoms. And if you forego having anything to do with the software that manages your profiles and content (think Facebook, Google+), you have even less control. At this point in the semester, you likely have a better idea about the software supporting the Open Web than you did when we first started. How might your heightened understanding affect how, where, and what content you publish on the Web?

ToS:DR, About (webpage)

When we use free (gratis) services that run on other people's software, we often hand over many of our rights as we walk in the door. Unfortunately, many of us also do not read the Terms of Use (TOS) or Terms of Service (TOU) that accompany these services. Scan the list of services on the main page of ToS;DR and find one you use often. What rights have you grants to the service provider? Are any surprising to you? In some cases it is impossible to delete your account, in others you've given away all copyright to content you create on the platform...or share content you created elsewhere.

Open Design Now: Why Design Cannot Remain Exclusive, select articles

This book, or rather this project, is an example of co-creation in for the form of a curated resource that provides examples and commentary on open design. This is some meta stuff. In the first article, the author makes judgment statements about educational dynamics, open pedagogy, and how this bleeds into society. How might themes like co-creation and shared exploration of creativity (not limited to design) overlap with your own understanding of education and learning? How might this affect they way you go about gaining new skills and knowledge?

In the second article, the author touches on the idea of the end-consumer becoming part of the design process, and how open standards emerged to allow more free exchange of ideas. Though it may seem a gross oversimplification, "...Wikipedia is nothing more than a common standard template that can be filled in, duplicated, shared and edited over and over again." FOSS powers much of the Internet, and the Web (as we've come to know) relies heavily on open standards to facilitate this open exchange and co-creation. Consider this idea as you continue to use various software tools on the Web and otherwise. Does it seem likely that the creator of the software intended the end-user to be part of the creative process? Or simply to consume the content, and be the end of the line?

Assignments:

FOSS Timeline contributions (5)

Your assignment for this class is to come prepared with five distinct events in FOSS history. You may use the Wikipedia Timeline of Open Source Software for ideas, but bring at least 2 new events that have not been included in Wikipedia. For each event, include the following:

  • Title of event
  • Person(s) involved
  • 2-3 sentence description
  • 1 image that relates to the event
  • Location of event
  • Source name (ie Wikipedia)
  • Source website (ie wikipedia.org)

Our collaboratively-constructed timeline lives here:

http://timemapper.okfnlabs.org/billymeinke/foss-event-timeline

Student will be sent a link to the Google spreadsheet that holds the data for our map.

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