August 29, 2018
FrOSCon 2018 # A more general summary: https://tech.europace.de/froscon-2018/ of the conference written in German. Below a more detailed summary of the keynote by Lorena Jaume-Palasi.
In her keynote “Blessed by the algorithm - the computer says no!” Lorena detailed the intersection of ethics and technology when it comes to automated decision making systems. As much as humans with a technical training shy away from questions related to ethics, humans trained in ethics often shy away from topics that involve a technical layer.
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April 19, 2018
DataworksSummit Berlin - Wednesday morning # Data strategy - cloud strategy - business strategy: Aligning the three was one of the main themes (initially put forward in his opening keynote by CTO of Hortonworks Scott Gnau) thoughout this weeks Dataworks Summit Berlin kindly organised and hosted by Hortonworks. The event was attended by over 1000 attendees joining from 51 countries.
The inspiration hat was put forward in the first keynote by Scott was to take a closer look at the data lifecycle - including the fact that a lot of data is being created (and made available) outside the control of those using it: Smart farming users are using a combination of weather data, information on soil conditions gathered through sensors out in the field in order to inform daily decisions.
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April 17, 2018
Apache Breakfast # In case you missed it but are living in Berlin - or are visiting Berlin/ Germany this week: A handful of Apache people (committers/ members) are meeting over breakfast on Friday morning this week. If you are interested in joining, please let me know (or check yourself - in the archives of the mailing list party@apache.org)
April 17, 2018
FOSS Backstage - Schedule online # In January the CfP for FOSS Backstage opened. By now reviews have been done, speakers notified and a schedule created. I’m delighted to find both - a lot of friends from the Apache Software Foundation but also a great many speakers that aren’t affiliated with the ASF among the speakers. If you want to know how Open Source really works, if you want to get a glimpse behind the stage, do not wait for too long to grab your ticket now and join us in summer in Berlin/ Germany.
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March 23, 2018
My board nomination statement 2018 # Two days ago the Apache Software Foundation members meeting started. One of the outcomes of each members meeting is an elected board of directors. The way that works is explained here: Annual Apache members meeting. As explained in the linked post, members accepting their nomination to become a director are supposed to provide a nomination statement. This year they were also asked to answer a set of questions so members could better decide who to vote for.
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March 8, 2018
An argument against proxies # Proxies? In companies getting started with an upstream first concept this is what people are called who act as the only interface between their employer and an open source project: All information from any project used internally flows through them. All bug reports and patches intended as upstream contribution also flows through them - hiding entire teams producing the actual contributions.
At Apache projects I learnt to dislike this setup of having proxies act in place of the real contributors.
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February 13, 2018
FOSDEM 2018 - recap # Too crowded, too many queues, too little space - but also lots of friendly people, Belgian waffles, ice cream, an ASF dinner with grey beards and new people, a busy ASF booth, bumping into friends every few steps, meeting humans you see only online for an entire year or more: For me, that’s the gist of this year’s FOSDEM.
Note: German version of the article including images appeared in my employer’s tech blog.
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January 23, 2018
FOSS Backstage - CfP open # It’s almost ten years ago that I attended my first ApacheCon EU in Amsterdam. I wasn’t entirely new to the topic of open source or free software. I attended several talks on Apache Lucene, Apache Solr, Hadoop, Tomcat, httpd (I still remember that the most impressive stories didn’t necessarily come from the project members, but from downstream users. They were the ones authorized to talk publicly about what could be done with the project - and often became committers themselves down the road.
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December 6, 2017
Trust and confidence # One of the main principles at Apache (as in The Apache Software Foundation) is “Community over Code” - having the goal to build projects that survive single community members loosing interest or time to contribute. In his book “Producing Open Source Software” Karl Fogel describes this model of development as Consensus-based Democracy (in contrast to benevolent dictatorship): “Consensus simply means an agreement that everyone is willing to live with.
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October 29, 2017
Open Source Summit - Day 3 # Open source summit Wednesday started with a keynote by members of the Banks family telling a packed room on how they approached raising a tech family. The first hurdle that Keila (the teenage daughter of the family) talked about was something I personally had never actually thought about: Communication tools like Slack that are in widespread use come with an age restriction excluding minors.
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