Feature Articles

LEDs are on everything, and almost everyone you know has at least tried a FitBit or similar device, whereas Google Glass didn't really take off. Despite several years of growth, whether wearable electronics are a fad, or here to keep growing from fun to truly functional is too early to tell. Judge for yourself—read through a few of our favorite wearable projects from 2016. You might even get inspired to start creating...

During my career I have spent a lot of time packaging other people's code, writing my own, and working on large software frameworks. I have seen projects that still haven't released a stable version, never quite hitting 1.0, while others made 1.0 releases within months of beginning development, and then quickly moving on to 2.0, 3.0, etc. There is quite a variance in these release cycles, and this coupled with maintaining large projects can make things difficult. I will go through some of the decisions we have faced in projects I have worked on and the pressures on the project. On the one extreme, users would like to have a stable API that never changes, with dependencies that don't specify a minimum version so that they can choose whatever version works best...

Humans are driven quite a bit by emotions. You may be a rational human being, but your emotions will still drive many of your choices. You can be excited, angry, interested, or sad about things—it doesn't matter—you'll react to those emotions and you'll very often leak that into your communications. You'll likely leak your emotions, and so will other members of the community. If you think humans should suck it up and act like nothing is happening, I'm afraid you are living in a bubble. That is not how humans operate. That's not how humans interact...

Moodle is the de facto standard in open source learning management systems. It is described as "a learning platform designed to provide educators, administrators and learners with a single robust, secure and integrated system to create personalised learning environments." Plus, Moodle is free software, licensed under the GPL. Martin Dougiamas, Moodle's founder and lead developer, generously took time from his busy schedule to have a good, long talk with me about why he created it, where it is today, and what's next in open education. First let me give you a little background. I was introduced to Moodle in 2005 while visiting a public school district in Portland, Oregon, which was using Moodle as part of their instructional delivery...

Open source isn't just about opening up your code—it's also about building a supporting infrastructure that invites people to contribute. In order to create a vibrant, growing, and exciting project, the community needs to be able to participate in the governance, the documentation, the code, and the actual structures that keep the project alive. If the overall "hive" is doing well, it attracts more individuals with diverse skills to the project. Although many projects strive for "open everything," infrastructure is often closed to contribution. Usually, only a few people run the infrastructure and keep the lights on. They're sometimes unable to recruit help because, well, you can't really give the keys to the kingdom to everyone. A certain level of trust is needed before granting a contributor access to project infrastructure...