Feature Articles

In 2016, I adopted my first carnivorous plants, a Venus Fly Trap and a Pitcher Plant, which my Facebook friends named Gordon and Bananarama, respectively. I quickly discovered that the health of Gordon and Bananarama was closely connected to the environment I provided as much as to their ability to catch the occasional bug and get energy from the sun. In this article, I'll pull from my experience working with open source communities—and a few months of experience keeping Gordon and Bananarama alive—to explain how caring for carnivorous plants is much like caring for a community...

To start with a confession, I like dashboards. A lot. I've always been fascinated by finding new and interesting ways to bring meaning to data with interactive visualization tools. While I'm definitely a geek for numbers, the human mind is simply much better at interpreting trends visually than it is just picking them out a spreadsheet. And even when your main interest in a dataset is the raw numbers themselves, a dashboard can help to bring meaning by highlighting which values matter most, and what the context of those numbers is...

We announced earlier this month that Open States—a project covered on Opensource.com in 2011—is now being maintained by the original creators of the project, a community of Sunlight Foundation alumni and other volunteers. After a year of scant staffing culminating in the closure of Sunlight Labs, we expect that getting Open States fully operational again will take a significant effort, and we know from experience that maintaining the menagerie of scrapers into the future isn't easy either. (That's why we're looking for volunteers and donations.) So why, despite the challenges, are we taking on this project? Why do we think that Open States matters so much? And where do we plan on taking this tool going forward?...

In the humble beginnings of the GNU and Linux projects, open source was a primitive and narrowly defined idea. It applied only to programming, and was a largely legal designation that sought to guarantee that source code remained available to users even as others augmented it through subsequent contributions. Now, thirty years later, "open" is sweeping the enterprise. On top of "open source," we also have "open data," "open management," "open design," "open organizations,"—and even just "open," which we often take to imply something vague about a progressive policy. This has all gotten a little confusing, and I believe it would be useful to step back and consider what "open" really means.

On May 12, 1996, like a benevolent mad scientist, Brewster Kahle brought the Internet Archive to life. The World Wide Web was in its infancy and the Archive was there to capture its growing pains. Inspired by and emulating the Library at Alexandria, the Internet Archive began its mission to preserve and provide universal access to all knowledge. On October 27, 2016, the Internet Archive celebrated its 20th birthday with a party at its beautiful headquarters in San Francisco. According to an article in the San Francisco Chronicle, over 600 people gathered to pay their respects and hear about the latest projects and features of the Archive...