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See the following -

Amazon Web Services Outage Reveals Critical Lack of Redundancy Across the Internet

Nat Levy | Geek Wire | February 28, 2017

The digital snow day is over, as Amazon Web Services has fixed the issues with its Simple Storage Service, or S3 for short, that crippled significant chunks of the internet Tuesday. Starting a little after 9:30 a.m. Pacific time Tuesday, and lasting close to five hours, the S3 cloud storage service started experiencing “high error rates.” This outage knocked out access to a litany of websites and apps that run on AWS, including but not limited to Expedia, Slack, Medium, the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. The outage even temporarily affected the AWS service health dashboard, which displays outages and events...

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Black Duck Announces Open Source “Rookies of the Year”

Press Release | Black Duck | March 14, 2016

Black Duck...today announced the eighth annual Open Source Rookies of the Year, recognizing the top new open source projects initiated in 2015. The selected projects show how diverse and ambitious open source software development has become. From communications to healthcare and beyond, they offer innovative solutions to a range of consumer- and enterprise-grade problems. The 2015 Rookies class reflects three industry trends shaping the future of open source software...

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Global Group Communication and Culture Tips

If open source needed a new slogan it whould be: Think Globally, Act Globally. Probably with a semicolon instead of a comma, but what slogan uses a semicolon? A semicolon is slogan poison. Just like thinking locally is open source poison. The thing is, when you create a tool you need and decide to throw a Creative Commons license on it to allow others to add to it or make fun of your lousy source code, you can't be thinking locally. You know that it will now reach anywhere and everywhere. And, if you didn't realize that, then you're probably on a different Internet than me...

Has Open Source Gone Mainstream?

Adam Shepherd | IT Pro | September 8, 2016

Open source has officially made it. While open source advocates may have faced an uphill battle to convince their colleagues in the past, the technology has now become a legitimate component of the mainstream technological scene. That's according to GitHub's senior director of infrastructure engineering Sam Lambert, who told IT Pro that open source software is no longer the niche field it once was...

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How Time-series Databases Help Make Sense of Sensors

Infrastructure environments' needs and demands change every year and systems become more complex and involved. But all this growth is meaningless if we don't understand the infrastructure and what's happening in our environment. This is where monitoring tools and software come in; they give operators and administrators the ability to see problems in their environments and fix them in real time. But what if we want to predict problems before they happen? Collecting metrics and data about our environment gives us a window into how our infrastructure is performing and lets us make predictions based on data. When we know and understand what's happening, we can prevent problems, rather than just fixing them...

How to Grow Healthy Open Source Project Infrastructures

In 2013 I joined the OpenStack Infrastructure team. In the four years I spent with the team, I learned a considerable amount about the value of hosting an infrastructure for an open source project in the open itself. In 2014 I gave a talk at All Things Open and was interviewed by Jason Baker about how we'd done our systems administration in the open. My involvement on this team led me to advocate for systems administrators to use revision control and learn about tools for working with a distributed team. At the OpenStack Summit in Austin in 2016, our team did a talk on navigating the open source OpenStack Infrastructure...

Obama’s Surprising Answer on Which Part of Obamacare Has Disappointed Him the Most

Sarah Kliff | Vox | January 9, 2017

There was this moment, about 50 minutes into our interview with President Barack Obama last week, that genuinely surprised me (and surprised other health care journalists, like David Nather, too). My colleague Ezra Klein had asked the president a question about which part of the law had overperformed his expectations, and which part of the law had underperformed. The president gave a surprisingly frank assessment of something his administration has tried, and failed, to do: Get doctors off paper and on to digital medical records...

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Open Source Project Management Can Be Risky Business

Our digital lives are powered by programming philosophers who choose to develop their code out in the open. All programs begin with lines of instruction. When ready for execution these lines of instruction are converted to a binary format that the computer can execute. Open source programs are programs where the human readable code is accessible to anyone. This philosophy of openness and freedom has allowed these projects to impact the lives of everyone. The Linux kernel is the core of all Android devices, and nearly a third of all Internet traffic rides on just one openly developed project, Netflix...

Open Source Software Has to Sell User Experience

Mattermost does open source the right way. Open source software that is to succeed in this new world is going to have to be better than anything else. You can't sell just openness anymore; it is added value, not a unique selling point. Open source software now has to sell user experience. In a way it is a simpler metric, and probably one that is going to change open source forever—for the better. An exemplar of this new way is Mattermost, the open source messaging platform. Sure, they weren't first to the game, because Slack blazed the trail...

The Secret History of FEMA

Garrett M. Graff | Wired | September 3, 2017

FEMA gets no respect. Consider: The two men who are supposed to be helping run the federal government’s disaster response agency had a pretty quiet late August. Even as a once-in-a-thousand-year storm barreled into Houston, these two veterans of disaster response—Daniel A. Craig and Daniel J. Kaniewski—found themselves sitting on their hands. Both had been nominated as deputy administrators in July, but Congress went on its long August recess without taking action on either selection—despite the fact that both are eminently qualified for the jobs.

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Towards a New EHR Metaphor - Or, How to Fix Unusable EHRs

News flash: docs hate Excel! In a recent study, which included researchers from Yale, the Mayo Clinic, Stanford, and the AMA, physicians rated it only at 57% on a usability rating, far below Google search (93%), Amazon (82%), or even Word (76%). But, of course, Excel wasn't their real problem; the study was aimed at electronic health records (EHRs), which physicians rated even lower: 45%, which the study authors graded an "F." If we want EHRs get better, though, we may need to start with a new metaphor for them.Lead author Edward Melnick, MD, explained the usability issue: "A Google search is easy. There's not a lot of learning or memorization; it's not very error-prone. Excel, on the other hand, is a super-powerful platform, but you really have to study how to use it. EHRs mimic that."

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Trends in Corporate Open Source Engagement

In 1998, I was part of SGI when we started moving to open source and open standards, after having been a long-time proprietary company. Since then, other companies also have moved rapidly to working with open source, and the use and adoption of open source technologies has skyrocketed over the past few years. Today company involvement in open source technologies is fairly mature and can be seen in the following trends...

Disaster Crowdsourcing Exchange - FEMA's Disaster Hackathon

Event Details
Type: 
Conference
Date: 
October 21, 2017 - 10:00am - 5:00pm
Location: 
Federal Emergency Management Agency
500 C Street Southwest Conference Center
Washington, DC 20024
United States

Disasters like Hurricanes Harvey, Irma, Maria and the California Wildfires have unprecedented impacts on our Nation, but digital volunteers can be a powerful force in helping with the disaster response and recovery efforts! Come participate in FEMA's Disaster Crowdsourcing Exchange on Saturday, October 21. Learn about FEMA's current crowdsourcing coordination efforts, participate in building new projects, experiment with new tools, and shape the future of crowdsourcing in emergency management.

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