As an open source company, it was a natural fit for us here at SilverStripe to take part in Software Freedom Day on September 19.
Software Freedom Day is a worldwide celebration of Free and Open Source Software (FOSS). The principles behind FOSS are underpinned by the users’ freedom to run, copy, distribute, study, change, and improve the software. To quote the Software Freedom Day website:
Our goal in this celebration is to educate the worldwide public about the benefits of using high quality FOSS in education, in government, at home, and in business – in short, everywhere!”
Rainer Spittel shows off our work
New Zealand events were held in Auckland, Hamilton, Tauranga, Wellington, Christchurch, and Otago. As well as being one of the sponsors of the event in Wellington, we were also represented by our head of development, Rainer Spittel. He talked about the work we’ve been doing with the National Institute of Water and Atmosphere Research and Land Information New Zealand on the Ocean Survey 20/20 Bay of Islands portal project. We’re very excited about the way it publishes geospatial data to the public in a transparent and standardised way, and will be writing a blog post with more details about the portal soon.
Of course, the day wasn’t just about us talking about our own achievements - it was also about learning from others.
Tim McNamara gave a presentation on Freebase, an online collection of structured data that was acquired by Google earlier this year. One of our development managers, Ingo Schommer, was really interested in how Freebase worked.
“It’s promising to see initiatives that strive to bring the semantic web and open data closer to the average user with intuitive interfaces. As developers, we really dig the powerful search language, and endless mashup possibilities through the built-in Acre app editor.”
The Ministry of Education spoke about how their core development team supports the learning management systems that schools can use. Moodle was the most popular, but they also use a couple of bespoke systems. Our information architect Terrence Wood could see how their work might have influence over future versions of SilverStripe CMS.
“The highlight was listening to the story about how they integrate open source software into their everyday workflow - and how this enabled real time collaboration like having multiple authors updating documents in real time.
“Of particular interest was learning about Mahara, and how they used that for curriculum planning, social networking with pupils, teachers, and parents. The ability to put together custom views on a per-project basis was particularly interesting. We can see potential for SilverStripe CMS being used in the same way using a drag and drop front end - an idea Mark has had in gestation for the past few months - see his website composer”.
Many thanks to everyone who participated in the day, especially the amazing crew who organised it all. You know how every day is Earth Day? Well, there’s software to be freed every day as well, and we’re working on it. Meanwhile we’re already looking forward to next year’s event.