Three boys are smiling and gathered around together looking at a phone screen held in the hands of the boy in the middle of the group.

XPOST: Spurring new Digital Public Goods

On 27 September 2022, I authored an article on unicef.org highlighting my work with the UNICEF Venture Fund in providing mentoring to startup companies pursuing compliance with the Digital Public Goods Standard. Discover the UNICEF Technical Assistance programs and the Venture Fund mentoring strategy in the last year.

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Six flowers of various stages in blooming are arranged in ascending order. The image is captioned, "sustainable investments."

4 metrics to measure sustainable open source investments.

“Sustainability” is almost a buzzword now. But how do you measure it in an open source ecosystem? This post shares four CHAOSS metrics to help shape the next year of open source data exploration in the UNICEF Open Source Mentorship program.

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"Open Source Dependencies" is written in big text against a blue background. Next to the next are tiles from the board game Scrabble, together writing: "In lifting others we rise."

What if Open Source dependencies weren’t software?

I often wonder how to best measure and communicate Open Source value. The collective focus of the industry goes into quantifying dependencies; that is, how one software relies on other software in order to complete its primary function. The vocabulary to measure dependency usually includes words like “imports,” “licenses,” “bugs

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Black and white picture of an American protest with a banner of a Muslim woman wearing a hijab styled in the American flag, with a caption below "We The People." Author added a caption overlay, "Why FOSS is still not on activist agendas"

Why FOSS is still not on activist agendas

On December 13th, 2006, author Bruce Byfield reflected on why he thought Free and Open Source Software (F.O.S.S.) was not on activist agendas. My interpretation of his views are that a knowledge barrier about technology makes FOSS less accessible, the insular nature of activism makes collaboration difficult, and FOSS activists

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Throwback draft: Integral of a community

Recently, I reviewed my unfinished blog posts to see what was left. This post is my oldest draft, last modified on April 19th, 2016. I drafted this near the end of my second semester of freshman year in college. This was a pivotal time for me for various reasons: family

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Sustain OSS 2018: quick rewind

Sustain OSS 2018: quick rewind

This year, I attended the second edition of the Sustain Open Source Summit (a.k.a. Sustain OSS) on October 25th, 2018 in London. Sustain OSS is a one-day discussion on various topics about sustainability in open source ecosystems. It’s also a collection of diverse roles across the world of open source.

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The UNICEF Office of Innovation releases software under free and open source licenses

Humanitarian open source work: My internship at UNICEF

In December, I received the happy news of an offer for a internship position at UNICEF in the Office of Innovation. The Office of Innovation drives rapid technological innovation by rapid prototyping of new ideas and building full-stack products to make a positive impact in the lives of children. This

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Open source civic projects at annual Election Night Hackathon

Election night hackathon supports civic engagement

This article was originally published on Opensource.com. On November 7, 2017, members of the RIT community came together for the annual Election Night Hackathon held in the Simone Center for Student Innovation. This year marked the seventh anniversary of a civic tradition with the FOSS@MAGIC community. As local and state

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2016 – My Year in Review

2016 – My Year in Review

Before looking too far ahead to the future, it’s important to spend time to reflect over the past year’s events, identify successes and failures, and devise ways to improve. Describing my 2016 is a challenge for me to find the right words for. This post continues a habit I started last

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Students and professors work across the aisle during Election Night Hackathon

This post was originally published on Opensource.com. On Tuesday, November 8th, 2016, the FOSS@MAGIC at the MAGIC Center at RIT held the annual Election Night Hackathon. Over 140 students from across campus and across departments gathered together to work on a range of civic projects as the election night results

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