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Opinion
Invest Locally
A community source leader's thoughts on how to break down the barriers to open source adoption.
3/28/2007
Yuba Community College District (YCCD) has contracted with AT&T to provide wireless Internet access to the 11,000 students attending the district's two Northern California colleges, Yuba College in Marysville and Woodland Community College. Migration to virtualization won't be the quick transition that some technology evangelists have predicted, according to recent surveys by two IT security companies. Nor is virtualization as secure as many might want it to be. The intrusion last month into Vice Presidential candidate Sarah Palin's e-mail highlighted the frailty of some types of data security measures. What are the lessons for the rest of us? A new report from the National Academy of Sciences, part of which was co-authored by an Indiana University School of Law-Bloomington professor, casts doubt on the effectiveness, lawfulness, and appropriateness of using data-based tools such as data-mining and biometrics to fight terrorism. Physicists at South Africa's University of KwaZulu-Natal are set to install a quantum communication security solution over the eThekwini Municipality fibre-optic network infrastructure in Durban. Cedarville University in southwestern Ohio has implemented SonicWALL firewalls to provide high-speed gateway firewall protection for its 3,000 students.
Over the last
several years I've begun to pay a lot more attention to what my family eats,
and where it came from. Recently, I've become very interested in sustainable agriculture--both for
my family's health, and to make a positive contribution to the health of the
planet. I've found ways to buy more locally produced food through community supported agriculture (CSA)
organizations and community buying clubs. I've come to the conclusion that food
produced locally using sustainable agriculture practices tastes better, is
healthier, and is better for the planet. But it's also harder from a consumer
perspective. The dilemma we face is that if we choose massively industrialized
food because it's easier and appears cheaper, the money we spend goes elsewhere and
sustains that system. If we spend locally, our dollars are invested in the
local community. As more people do this, and more money flows into the local
community, the services and distribution channels will develop and make the
better choice an easier one. This will lead to more people making the choice,
more investment, better services, and … you get the idea.
The sustainable
agriculture movement is a lot like the open source software movement in higher
education today--simply replace "better food" with "better
software." Okay, it's not quite that simple, but there are a lot of
similarities. Communities like
Sakai, Kuali, uPortal, Moodle, and others are
taking advantage of a better way to build software through open source
communities. Interest in these communities is growing rapidly, certainly
outpacing the capacity of these communities to provide all services necessary
for new community members to be successful with the software. Additionally,
within these communities there are key underdeveloped or entirely missing
services that exist in other software communities (vended software) that help
users mitigate risks, particularly in production use, and ensure long-term
sustainability of the products.
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