Projects
This list is insanely incomplete.
- Radically transparent research (RTR) is a change initiative and an emergent qualitative research methodology inspired by the radical realtime transparency practices of open communities such as Free and Open Source software, hardware, and content projects. It results in public and collaboratively constructed artifacts with the potential to broaden awareness of and participation in research while creating a compendium of stories that can be shared with other practitioners considering similar transformations to their own practices. I’m driving the development process of RTR through its first implementations in actual research projects like the “Changemakers” investigation of Purdue’s XRoads research group under Robin Adams or the Teaching Open Source project “Sage on the Stage, Guide on the Side” with Sebastian Dziallas.
- A Blogger Is You! is a workshop on academic blogging.
- Programmabilities is a UNICEF project exploring whether the text-based and asynchronous nature of open communities can provide deaf youth in the developing world with opportunities for cognitive apprenticeships in a STEM community of practice. I’m driving the research and development of the project as a consultant.
- Olin College’s Open Access Policy is a work in progress that I’m driving forward alongside Dee Magnoni, the head of Olin’s library. Purdue librarian Amy Van Epps has been a constant source of mentorship and support.
- The Great ABET Roadtrip is a quest to find out what effect engineering college visits have on high school students who consider themselves prospective engineers, in terms of their engineering identities, impressions of engineering, and future engineering (or non-engineering) trajectories. It’s also a research project withe Melanie Kim.
- POSSE is a workshop that introduces professors to the world of teaching open source and the art of coaching their students through their journey as novice contributors in thriving, distributed technical communities of practice that the professor may never have seen before. I was in charge of the entire POSSE program, from curriculum design to advertising to budget management to execution to buying whiteboard markers when we ran out of ink, from 2009-2012 as part of my job at Red Hat, and continue leading it today as a volunteer. I taught at all but one of the POSSE workshops during that time, including the first-ever POSSE, POSSEs in Cape Town and Doha. In less than 3 years, POSSE reached over 1000 undergraduates through the courses of about 100 professors, and its impact continues to spread.
An incomplete list of past projects in no particular order
- 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. I was a volunteer advisor to the project, largely on technical-related issues, from approximately 2007-2009.
- Fedora is a Linux distribution; among other things, I served as the Marketing lead in 2009-2010, running the first Marketing FAD (Fedora Activity Day) in Raleigh in 2010. One of the coolest parts of my tenure in Fedora was watching Robyn Bergeron go from brand-new Marketing Team volunteer to Marketing Team Lead to being hired as the Fedora Project Leader in a 3-year timespan. I also converted FUDCon (the Fedora Users and Developers Conference) from a specialized job that could only be done by the project leader into a bid process that empowered local teams to guide themselves through taking on the job on behalf of the international community. In order to test out that process, I co-organized the 2009 FUDCon in Toronto, then watched someone else do it for the next North American FUDCon in Tempe, Arizona. I’ve served as the community point of contact for multiple professors who’ve had their students work on Fedora as a class project.
- The Internet: Issues at the Frontier (IIF) was a Spring 2009 Harvard Law seminar with Profs. Jonathan Zittrain and Terry Fisher. It was a student-run class experimenting with different technologies for discussion as we debated internet-related topics from a legal perspective. Once the semester was over, we’d 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 nonprofit dedicated to improving 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. I started volunteering for OLPC in 2006 by deciding that they needed a hackathon, then proceeding to run it; the event (Boston Jame Gam 2007) spawned an entire “OLPC Jam” phenomenon that has since hopped across multiple continents. I built and ran a Summer of Content internship program based on Google’s Summer of Code program, but focused on content and open to teams from around the world, represented OLPC at conferences around the world, started the college chapters program coached numerous college chapters through kicking off local deployments, spent countless hours on volunteer recruitment, wiki administration, and lightning-fast meeting management, and more. They funded me off and on as they could, and finally hired me full-time as an engineer in 2009. As a full-time employee, I fielded support questions from everywhere between Alabama and Mongolia while facing the task of testing an entire hardware/software stack in the 2.5 months before the first production versions of the machine debuted. I managed the testing task by recruiting, training, and leading a test team entirely composed of volunteers from around the world. Shortly after launch, OLPC had to cut 50% of its employees, including nearly its entire engineering team, for financial reasons, but I continued to volunteer in order to wrap up and pass on all the projects I’d started.
- 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 coached the UNICEF Innovation Team through setting up RapidSMS as an open source community, and now they’re off and running.
- 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. I ran the Marketing team, served as a member of the 2nd elected board of Sugar Labs, and was one of the original core members of the Sugar on a Stick project team.
- Tracbacks is a plugin that provides internal trackback functionality between tickets in a Trac instance; I’m the original developer.
- IRC is a Sugar Activity for Internet Relay Chat originally authored by Eduardo Silva. I was its maintainer for a while.
- Larry is a Sugar Activity for language study originally authored by Melanie Kim and extended by Yifan Sun. I worked on packaging and cleaning up the program for migration to official Sugar Labs infrastructure. It is effectively abandonware at this point, but it was fun while it lasted.
- 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. Still, it’s an amusing look back to my early days in software engineering.
- Maker House was a residence in the Boston area from 2007-2008 that served as a living and working space for a group of hackers. We’ve all since moved out and moved on, but the concept of Maker House something I’ve been working on since I was 11 and plan to resurrect again; 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. We were a young bunch, ranging in age from 12 to 23 at the time we started the office.
- The World Is Too Much With Us was a sci-fi novel I started writing in college. 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. It’s probably abandonware at this point, but a lot of folks have asked me to pick it up again, so who knows?
- Rhomeo and Julihat was a mathematical play based on Shakespeare’s “Romeo and Juliet.” I wrote it. It was the type of play that had lines like “But soft / what flux through yonder plane doth break / It is the E-vector / and Julihat is the source!” and got a standing ovation when we performed it at Olin College on what happened to be my 18th birthday.
- Thing was an EMG-controlled robotic hand; you put electrodes on your forearm, and they’d pick up the electrical signals sent by your muscles when you opened and closed your fist, and the robotic hand would do the same. It was named after the Addams Family character, and I built it with Lilly Cho and Hans Borchardt when I was 17. It was my first electronics project.
