Open Tech Exchange Podcast

Over the past two weeks, I've been working to organize a CrisisCamp in Calgary.  It was the 1 of 4 happening in Canada this weekend.  Based on Barcamp, the focus was on solutions to aid the NGO"s and responders on the ground in Haiti. The code base is all open source and can be modified for other disasters that may occur globally.

Is capacity building just more buzz words used by NGO's to further their agendas in developing countries?  Over the course of 2009, I have engaged with many FLOSS advocates who believe that with the use of Open Source solutions, that this indeed can be a reality.

After a bit of downtime, Mark and I got back together to catch up on life in the open source world.  Both of us have been immersed in some cool projects and now are finally catching our breath.

Mark has been configuring and hacking away on some IP tables and routing, all based on the flexiblity of Linux.  We talked briefly about the key points that Mark found interesting and are planning to dedicate a future podcast to the topic.

Over the past weeks this topic has been blogged, posted, twittered, etc by many different parties.  Previously I had thought myself pretty middle of the road when it came to waving the feminist flag.  Having been the lone female on the team for most of my IT career, I have come to accept that this is still a non-traditional path for most women. 

This past week, I read an interesting blog post regarding Linux's future on the desktop. http://bit.ly/yoUqn  A keynote speaker at LinuxCon, openSUSE Community Manager Joe Brockmeier, used a musical analogy to portray his vision regarding mass adoption of the Linux desktop. 

In our last episode of OTE, we had the pleasure of speaking with Fred Yeboah from the Kofi Annan Institute in Ghana.  Mark had met Fred at a 2 week OSS " train the trainer" seminar, which was focused on increasing in-country capacity around FLOSS & ICT.  Fred gave us good insight regarding how his department is leveraging open source, by offering courses in server administration, and programming.

After my brief glimpse of VMworld, I flew into Chicago to be part of the Redhat Summit.  The open source based company, where I am currently the International Partner Development Manager, had an exhibit.  As well, I gave a presentation about our software.

On Monday, I spent the day checking out the exhibits at VMworld in San Fransisco USA.  While the key focus was on VMware and many of the companies present focused their product support on the MS platform, it was encouraging to see a strong representation by enterprise level companies such as Canonical, Redhat and Novell.  While it is common knowledge that probaly 75% of the servers around the world run on a Unix platform, there are still Microsoft holdouts.

As a proponent of open source programming, I recommend that users install the Firefox browser as the first step in the migration to software choice and freedom.  Besides the obvious reasons of speed and compatiblity with current web standards, I also promote Firefox because of the following reasons:

Our 3rd episode discussion points were varied indeed!  We shared our opinion on whether the take down notice that Mark recieved was indeed valid, and why was this Orwellian approach was taken, instead of going to the source of the website in Russia.