Introducing the UNICEF Open Source Mentorship programme

2020/2021 in Open Source at UNICEF Innovation Fund

Open Source is a means to collaborate and solve common problems; during the COVID-19 pandemic, open data and tools proved useful in quickly tailoring and deploying life-saving services. How has the UNICEF Innovation Fund kept up with latest Open Source innovations? The UNICEF Innovation Fund invests exclusively in Open Source

Continue reading
"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

Continue reading
Introducing the UNICEF Open Source Mentorship programme

Introducing UNICEF Open Source Mentorship

This post was co-published on the UNICEF Innovation Fund blog. 2020 saw the launch of a formalized Open Source Mentorship programme for the UNICEF Innovation Fund, built up on two years of work from RIT LibreCorps expertise and consulting. The Open Source Mentorship programme includes five modules about Open Source

Continue reading
2021 OSI Board of Directors statement of intent

2021 OSI Board of Directors statement of intent

This first appeared on the Open Source Initiative Wiki. In light of the election update this year, I am republishing my statement of intent on my personal blog. No culture can live if it attempts to be exclusive. Mahatma Gandhi I believe in the value of upholding the Open Source

Continue reading

What is Freedom?

When I first saw the letter asking for Richard Stallman and the FSF Board of Directors resignations with merely five signatures, I knew I had to sign. Not because I knew it would be the popular thing to do. But because it was what was true in my heart. Only

Continue reading

How Mozilla Open Source Archetypes influence UNICEF Open Source Mentorship

In May 2018, Mozilla and Open Tech Strategies released a 40-page report titled, “Open Source Archetypes“. This blog post is a recap of how this report influences the Open Source Mentorship programme I lead at the UNICEF Innovation Fund. I joined the UNICEF Innovation team in June 2020, although this

Continue reading
Cryptographic Autonomy License (CAL-1.0): My first license review

Cryptographic Autonomy License (CAL-1.0): My first license review

The bookmark was creeping on my browser’s toolbar for months. “Cryptographic Autonomy License” CAL-1.0 on the Open Source Initiative webpage. But today, I decided it was time to do my first amateur license review. This is a fun exercise (for me). Remember, I am not a lawyer and this does

Continue reading
How did Free Software build a social movement?

How did Free Software build a social movement?

The Free Software movement is rooted to origins in the 1980s. As part of a talk I gave with my colleague and friend Mike Nolan at FOSDEM 2020, we analyzed how the Free Software movement emerged as a response to a changing digital world in three different phases. This blog

Continue reading
CopyleftConf 2020: quick rewind

CopyleftConf 2020: quick rewind

CopyleftConf 2020 took place on Monday, 3 February, 2020 in Brussels, Belgium: This will be the second annual International Copyleft Conference. Participants from throughout the copyleft world — developers, strategists, enforcement organizations, scholars and critics — will be welcomed for an in-depth, high bandwidth, and expert-level discussion about the day-to-day

Continue reading
The day open source died: a story about Minecraft, Bukkit, and the GPL

The day open source died: a story about Minecraft, Bukkit, and the GPL

Once upon a time, when I was a teenager, I volunteered in the Minecraft open source community. I volunteered as a staff member of the largest open source Minecraft server today, called Spigot. Spigot is a fork of the Bukkit project. This blog post is a story roughly covering 2010

Continue reading