Open Source Bridge

Open Source organizations and projects are driven by the strength of its community. We have often seen but how big communities fall because of wrong ways of handling it or mismanagements. My talk will be around the lines of how a community leader or manager can take a few extra responsibilities to keep a community healthy.

While only a handful of social networks like Dreamwidth and Quirell explicitly prioritize diversity, there are plenty of lessons to learn about what to do — and what not to do — from Facebook, Twitter, and others. Best practices include counter-oppressive politics, embedded in the community guidelines and norms; and the right tools, technologies, and policies. This session will look at what does and doesn't work in a variety of online environments.

Even in an email list, moderation isn't limited to setting the entire email list to require approval before messages are posted. You can create rules which reflect the culture you'd like to see, and call attention to ways that the community differs from that culture. You can point out when a particular post doesn't fit with that culture -- publicly or privately, whichever you think will do the most good. You can point out when a particular post exemplifies something great about the culture. You can point out particular rules that everyone needs to keep abiding by, without calling out a specific post. If a specific person, or a specific handful of people, have trouble with the rules, you could put them in particular on moderated posting for some time. If someone keeps breaking the rules, that person is a good candidate for being removed entirely. There are limits to what the rest of the community and the moderators should have to deal with, even though your project may choose to keep that as a last resort. Sometimes the problem can be solved by redirection. If the main email list is getting cluttered with off-topic posts, consider a just-for-fun or off-topic side list to divert threads to once they wander off code and into sports, kittens, beer, or knitting. It's easier to say "You shouldn't do that here" than "You shouldn't do that, period"; it's even easier to say "You shouldn't do that here, but it would be great right over there." And most of us could use a sports, kittens, beer, or knitting break every now and then.

Micropub is an emerging open API standard that is used to create posts on your own domain using third-party apps. Web apps and mobile apps can use Micropub to post notes, photos, bookmarks and many other kinds of posts to your own website, similar to using a Twitter client to post to your Twitter account.

Learn about the moving pieces of Mapbox GL, an open source framework for rendering beautiful maps based on OpenStreetMap-based data on Android and iOS. Find out what goes into making completely configurable world maps that are always up to date and always available in your pocket.

How do we track ourselves and what does it mean for the places we live? What mapping tools can help us to quickly understand the data we're collecting?

Robocallers are very annoying. Even when the Do Not Call list works, it doesn't cover all robo callers. This talk is about combining Asterisk (an open source PBX) running on a BeagleBone and some inexpensive hardware to really stop these annoying callers.

As a project's public IRC channel or forum grows, it's hard to keep it friendly. People get frustrated with each other, people have "different" senses of humor, disagreements escalate...oh goodness, it can be a mess. This isn't great for retaining community members or welcoming new ones. I'll share my strategies for dealing with problems, learned at the scale of hundreds of forum threads, tens of thousands of forum visitors, and dozens of IRC chatters every day.

What happens when an online service you use freezes your account, loses your data, or goes out of business? Have you ever used a service by a company that suddenly went under, stranding your data? Do you own your own identity or does somebody else? What happened to the web in 2003, and how did we get where we are today? This talk will teach you how to post on your own site and optionally syndicate to other sites (POSSE), how to authenticate with your own domain (IndieAuth) and steps to take data ownership back into your own hands.

You use OAuth every time you log in to Facebook or Twitter, but what if you could use it from your own website? What if your own domain became a source of data, and you had your own personal API? By decentralizing authorization to your own domain instead of a silo, you control when, how, and to whom your data is shared.

Git isn't just for code. What about CAD files? Experimental test data? How do you manage a multidisciplinary project with git? Last year Portland State Aerospace Society, a relatively large open source rocketry project, moved all their work onto github. I'll share my experience with the switch from a few self hosted git repos to a full fledged github presence. What worked, what hasn't, github's features for non coders, and a little on the future of open science.

GPS is more than just letting your phone tell you where you are. I believe GPS is a contender for "most amazing piece of engineering in the history of humanity", and I'll show you why.

When our company was acquired we needed a way to see everything that was done each day all in one place. Teams were using different methods to do this: standups, written reports, emails and meetings. Nothing stuck. Done reports introduces a simple IRC command: !done. Team members say !done and what they just did. These !dones are put into a daily report. !done becomes a part of everyday at work, not a strained task that’s easily forgotten.

FirefoxOS is Mozilla's response to the problems that it sees with the mobile space. Walled gardens, platform fragmentation, and single-purpose SDKs in non-web programming languages threaten to close off the open web from the mobile space. In this presentation I will be covering the basics of FirefoxOS, and how it is the only mobile OS that answers to nobody but you.

pump.io is a platform for people who love writing social software and hate ever-changing terms of service. It's an Open Source, federated social network that works! And it's fun, too.

Have you ever wanted to track your movements, sleep, what you eat, who you spend time with, and all sorts of other personal data? In this talk I'll describe the tools I've been able to successfully use to track aspects of my life.

Lately everyone loves pushing: you get push notifications on your iOS device, cloud to device messages on your Android device, and something about web sockets. Pushing seems natural. "Hey! I have some data for you, let me send it to you," says the pusher. Too bad it doesn't scale effectively.

This electric discussion will journey through several available methods of replication using PostgreSQL.

Studying and building hardware is easier than you think. Using software concepts as a metaphor, I will reverse-engineer the 1982 arcade game machine "Robotron: 2084" and reimplement it in modern hardware.

Team dynamics are tricky. They're different when you're volunteering your time, when you're working for someone, or when you're trying to build something and invite someone else to build other good things too.

Search-first writing makes you think about the structure of your document and product as a series of topics, instead of a big book. The days of linear documentation are over, or at least numbered. Users are much more likely to come to documentation through searches. As an open source creator, you may not have a writer to help you out with this, so how can you maximize their return on your minimal investment?

The true life story of switching database backends in our application.

Learn about Terraformer, an open source Geometry toolkit for Javascript

Handling user passwords safely is hard, but replacing passwords on the web in a reasonable way is even harder. Really, this should have been in the browser all along. This is where Persona comes in.

'Programmer' and 'Manager' are two different titles for a reason: they're two different jobs and skill sets. If you have managerial aspirations (or have had them foisted upon you), come to this session to learn some of the tricks of the managerial trade.

The physical world contains huge amounts of data that are underutilized by most people. The vision is to build a sensor network platform that can act as a hardware extension to a person’s identity — importing data about their environment, activities, energy/resource usage, and others into a personal data locker.

MapBox is a company building beautiful maps and open source tools. At the heart of our work are open software and standards, and at the heart of that is a file format for storing maps called MBTiles. We'll talk about where the need for this format came from, how it was created, and what problems it solves.

Sick of writing sign-in code? Not sure whether to support Twitter logins, Facebook logins, or both? Try IndieAuth! IndieAuth, built on top of OAuth, is a new way to sign in to websites online using your own domain name. This talk will show how OAuth and OpenID paved the way for IndieAuth, and will provide details about how to use this on your own websites.

Google will release a wearable heads up display this fall, and it may help to usher in a new era of augmented reality and wearable computing. What does this mean for us? How do we build for the next generation of machines? Who was here before us, and how can we learn from them?

You've seen a million best practice talks. This is quite the opposite: I'll instruct you in the ways I've failed over twenty years of software development, and advise you how not to make the same mistakes.

Let's make an IRC bot together. A room of people will either come together, or break up into teams to create an IRC bot within the context of a session. What the bot will do, is up to the people in the room. The outcome is different every time, but it will surely teach us something about technology, and human nature.

Meet the pioneers of the new Indie Web, learn what's changed, and how you too can reclaim your content, your data, your online identity. Join our panelists as they debate a variety of different approaches and learn how you too can get started and join the new Indie Web.

A web action is the user experience, code, and service for taking a specific discrete action, across the web, from one site to another site or application. You've all seen the buttons: Share, Read later, Follow, Like, Favorite, etc. More than any one social site or service, web actions are the emergence of a whole new hypermedia building block. This talk will give an overview of the anatomy of a web action, discuss web action user flow, and highlight best practices for both publishers and service providers.

How Pub/Sub helped my IRC bot stop living in the past and live in the moment. Also, special bonus features for polyglots!

CASSIS is universal JavaScript (JS) that works on the client and the server for scalable application logic. Developed as an immediate to near-term solution until typical web hosting companies make it easy to run JS on the server (e.g. Node.js), CASSIS is a fast functional open source JS-subset and framework you can use today to implement application logic once and have it run both dynamically in browsers with JS, and on the server for when JS is not supported (search engines), is disabled (security), or slow (mobile).

What OSS database to use is an important decision, but recently languishing in the shadow of the sexier "what framework should I use" talks - or underplayed as though the battle were only SQL v noSQL. If your understanding of data storage tops out at "Mongo is webscale" or "mysql + memcached = win" then this talk is for you.

An introduction to the cryptocurrency system called Bitcoin. The cryptography, the economics of currency bootstrapping, and the traction its getting today.

Virtual hosting providers are particularly enticing for startups and new opensource projects, but they come with large and sometimes unexpected drawbacks. Learn what to expect and how to mitigate the worst performance issues you’ll face deploying your services in the cloud.

See! The Amazing Future of Human-Computer Interaction! Behold! The Awesome Power of Open-Source Libraries and Cheap Video-Game Accessories! Fake Beards!

So often we’re solely focused on the performance of our production systems. When disaster strikes, your team needs to know when error conditions begin, where they’re coming from, frequency, and an indication of the last time they occurred. Parsing logs isn’t fast enough, and email can’t keep up or preserve metadata.

How to use the new NO-SQL MariaDB features from SQL.

Methods of communication are constantly evolving, and traditional phone systems can not keep up. Open source phone systems allow for infinite possibilities for customizing the way we interact with each other. This session will walk through setting up your own Asterisk IP PBX from bare-metal to making calls.

Do you generate, manage, or analyze a lot of data? Do you develop software? Do you like pretty pictures? If your answer was "yes" to zero or more of these questions, this talk is for you.

Open source folks are naturally lazy. Anything mundane task they can automate, they will. So what does an open source developer do when faced with planning, planting, and tediously watering a garden? Automate!

Many geeks are uncomfortable interacting IRL with clients or audiences but you don't have to be. There are some simple physical tricks to keeping an audience (of 1 or 1k) engaged and not undermining your skills and yourself.

Have you ever wanted to automatically turn on your lights when you get home, or turn them back off when you leave? What about controlling your lights by SMS or IRC? This presentation will teach you how to automate your life with location-based hacks and SMS.

Join Michael Richardson, a cofounder of Urban Airship, as he elaborates on the decisions around creating a startup outside of Silicon Valley, how to keep your head above water, and how to find and manage a team during explosive growth.

If you've ever written any code to authenticate wtih Twitter, you may have been confused by all the signature methods and base strings. You'll be happy to know that OAuth 2 has vastly simplified the process, but at what cost?

Get an introduction to what these projects are, how they can help you with your personal data, and what kinds of exciting things are being built atop them.

A look at the tools and practices used at Facebook to support the #2 site in the world.

It may seem obvious to some, but the socialist imagery that Mozilla uses isn't accidental. Nor is the grounding of Activity Streams in socialist theory. What do these things have to do with open source an its future? A lot, and I'll paint a picture to tell you how it should play out.

Creating a redundant yet scalable virtualization environment is often difficult and expensive. Ganeti is an open source project which offers many solutions to simplify a clustered virtual machine environment while enabling you to use low cost hardware. This session will walk through Ganeti covering its basic design goals/features, installation architecture, and production implementation.

Current state of Drizzle.

From creating remote-sensing CubeSats to analyzing aerogel: how the public is hacking into open source space exploration.

HipHop transforms PHP source code into highly optimised C++ and then compiles it using g++. It allows developers to continue writing complex logical directly with PHP but leverages the speed benefits of using C++. Currently, HipHop powers the majority of Facebook servers, making this more than just a theoretical exercise. This session will cover how HipHop works, how to setup HipHop and the small changes that may be required to applications to allow it to work with both PHP and HipHop.

Dropbox, the leader in online storage and synchronization, is good, but not good enough. Find out how you can hack together your own equivalent that's more flexible, secure and convenient.

Augmented Reality and Geolocation have been hot topics this year, but there has often been a confusion between aesthetics vs. practicality, and fantasy vs. reality. This presentation will highlight the advantages and disadvantages of visual and non-visual augmented reality. We'll tell stories from our experiences building location-aware social networks with custom proximity notification.

Curious about OAuth? Ever wondered why OAuth has steadily gained popularity among major API providers such as Google and Twitter? Ever wondered how OAuth helps streamline consuming data from other providers? Learn more about OAuth the specification and how to implement OAuth with PHP5. The session will cover the basics of OAuth, and follow up with an OAuth implementation using php.net/oauth.

What kind of database do you need? Thanks to new database projects like CouchDB, TokyoCabinet, Solr and others, there are more non-relational database options available than ever for developers. Yet good information on how to choose what kind of database you need is still scarce. We'll cure that in this talk.

Is your Wordpress site too slow? What's this HipHop PHP thing? How do I write really fast PHP apps? Drop by to get the answers to these questions.