Projects
This list is insanely incomplete.
Community-centered projects
Each of these links will take you to a page describing the projects I work on within each community. In alphabetical order, because I couldn’t really think of a better one. I’ve got to get better descriptions of these projects; the current ones are mostly cribbed them from the “about” pages of each group.
- Appropedia is a peer-generated resource library for appropriate technology development initially inspired by the desire to reduce duplication of effort between engineering groups working on similar problems.
- Fedora has a Community Architecture team who I am privileged to be working with this summer (talk about a dream apprenticeship – these folks are my heroes!) Better yet, I’ll be working on the first run of the POSSE program, which coaches professors through designing and teaching open-source classes at their universities, merging my love of open-source with my passion for post-secondary education reform.
- The Internet: Issues at the Frontier (IIF) is a Spring 2009 Harvard Law seminar with Profs. Jonathan Zittrain and Terry Fisher. It stands for “The Internet: Issues at the Frontier” and is a student-run class experimenting with different technologies for discussion as we debate internet-related topics from a legal perspective. Though the semester is over, we had so much fun we decided to keep going as an informal discussion (and beer) group over the summer.
- One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) is a volunteer community working alongside the organization of the same name to improve educational opportunities in the developing world via 1-to-1 deployments of rugged laptops running open-source educational software in support of a Constructionist learning paradigm.
- The Open Mobile Consortium (OMC) is a coalition that works on bringing together groups working on initiatives in the open-source mobile development space, formulating best practices and standards and generally working to bring this fragmented industry a little closer together. I’m working on this through the UNICEF Innovation Team with RapidSMS as a primary first project.
- Sugar Labs (SL) is the community organization behind the Sugar Learning Platform, a free and open-source educational software project originally developed for the OLPC XO-1 netbook and now used every school day in 25 languages by almost 1,000,000 children in more than 40 countries. Regional, autonomous “Sugar Labs” around the world work to tailor Sugar to local languages and curricula.
Engineering-centered projects
This is an incomplete and very, very bad list. I’m not proud of everything listed here, mind you. But it’s up for the time being.
- Tracbacks is a plugin that provides internal trackback functionality between tickets in a Trac instance.
- IRC is a Sugar Activity for Internet Relay Chat originally authored by Eduardo Silva. I maintain the version within the Sugar Labs Activity infrastructure.
- Larry is a Sugar Activity for language study originally authored by Melanie Kim and extended by Yifan Sun. I am working on packaging and cleaning up the program for migration to the Sugar Labs infrastructure.
- aipycrust is a robotics simulation toolkit for genetic algorithms. It was written with Andrew Bouchard and Matt Tesch for a robotics course project and is pretty much abandonware at this point (the code is small, ugly, and worked only for our specific project).
Event-centered projects
- LifecampNYC is a half-day lifehacking unconference that will occur on April 11 in Manhattan. Website coming soon.
- Hackathons are a specialty of mine, everything from planning to facilitating to training others how to plan and facilitate. Someday I should post details.
- Brainstorm facilitation and training is also something I do a fair amount of. Someday I should post details.
Learning-centered projects
In some sense, all my projects are learning-centered; I’ve never had a project I didn’t learn from in some way. These projects, however, have no preset outputs or outcomes other than… learning. Being exposed. Reflections on how I’m growing in that particular domain.
- Jazz piano
- Martial arts
- Improvisational gourmet cooking
Location-centered projects
- Maker House (current website woefully inaccurate; that was the 2007 incarnation of Maker House) is something I’ve been working on since I was 11; it’s “the place I want to live where I grow up,” a community workshop location maintained by a rotating group of live-in residents. Since that age, every move I’ve made has had to fulfill the requirement of bringing me one step closer towards living in Maker House.
- ILXO was an independent skunkworks lab for OLPC grassroots groups based in Chicago, IL during Summer 2008 with an aim of being effective enough to render ourselves obsolete by September of that year. (Someday I’ll make an “old projects” page and move things like this to that archive.)
Product-centered projects
- The World Is Too Much With Us is a sci-fi novel I’ve been writing on and off for the last few years. It started as a dare from a friend to write a love story (I have a pronounced flinch reaction to sappiness) that I countered by avoiding romance altogether. The premise runs something like this: children born into an intellectual sect based on the heritable fine line between genius and insanity are required to, for a time, forego the medication and therapy regimen that has been customized for them since birth in order to be considered for full adult membership to the community.
Research-centered projects
- Hackronym is my (…I’m working on the site going live, yes) research site on undergraduate engineering education. Since 2007, I have been working on an ethnographic and pedagogical comparison of the tacit and explicit practices and curricula of learners in two types of communities: undergraduates and TAs in formal engineering education programs in accredited, degree-granting universities and newcomers and apprentice mentors in open-source communities of practice. In general, I want to see how academic programs can learn from and adopt practices from open-source communities (and vice versa if applicable). My current focus is on how relationships between TAs and undergrads and newcomers and apprentice mentors (mentors who are themselves mentored by others) build pathways to legitimate peripheral participation.
- Mind the Gap is a collection of interviews of students who took a “gap year” before, during, or immediately after their undergraduate education.
