hpr-knowledge-base/hpr_transcripts/hpr1644.txt

Episode: 1644
Title: HPR1644: Opensource.com: Benetech, OpenStack and Kumusha
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr1644/hpr1644.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-18 06:15:28

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its first May 20th of November 2014. This is an HBR episode 1644 entitled Open Source.com,
Manatech, OpenStack, and CumaShirt, and is part of the series' newscast. It is hosted
by semiotic robotic, and is about 22 minutes long. Feedback can be sent to Brian at semiotic
robotic.net or not leaving a comment on this episode. The summary is, Manatech CEO OpenSup,
a Challenge of OpenStack product management, and CumaShirt takes wicked.
This episode of HBR is brought to you by AnanasThost.com. Get 15% discount on all shared hosting
with the offer code HBR15. That's HBR15. Better web hosting that's honest and fair at AnanasThost.com.
Hey there Hacker Public Radio. This is semiotic robotic bringing you another OpenSource news break
from OpenSource.com. Joining me today to provide their invaluable insight and experience are
OpenSource.com content manager Jen White. Straight up. And OpenStack aficionado Jason Baker.
Hello. Here are a few stories. The OpenSource.com community has been discussing lately.
Well, first let's talk about Jen's recent interview with Jim Frickerman, who's CEO of Benatech,
a nonprofit that develops technology for the social good. Of course, they prefer developing
applications the OpenSource way. Frickerman notes that Benatech's Go Read, an OpenSource
e-reader for Android optimizes texts for visually impaired readers, is built in the popular
and also OpenFB reader. Another Benatech-backed tool, Poet, is a web-based tool for crowdsourcing
descriptions of images and audio books that uses the daisy standard. Frickerman explains how it
reduces the cost of both producing image descriptions for content creators as well as the
delivery time of the described images for end users. Benatech discovered OpenSource thinking in
the 1990s when it was building affordable reading systems for people who were blind. We stumbled
onto OpenSource without even knowing the meaning of the term Frickerman told Jen. We didn't know
about OpenSource licensing. We just shared the code to be helpful. And so helpful it has been.
Yeah, that's a great quote. I love that. Yeah, it's a great quote. It was a fun interview to do
and we had some good feedback from our readers on this one. Particularly, we have a quote or a
comment actually on the article from David Goldfield and I was just going to read it for you guys.
That's great. I'm a visually impaired user of Bookshare and I was so thrilled to read this
excellent interview. By the way, I'm wondering if OpenSource.com has ever had an article about the
OpenSource in VDA screen reader for Windows, which has been a real game changer for blind people,
making Windows computers accessible to individuals who otherwise wouldn't be able to afford the
expensive cost of other screen readers. If it hasn't been written, I'd be happy to assist if anyone
is interested. So of course, I jumped on that. Please share your story with us and so I did
reach out to David and he got back to me and we've been having some good back and forth on
this potential article but also on, you know, the different products that are out there,
the different OpenSource and free projects that are out there for visually and auditorily
impaired folks. Right. And so I think that, you know, we're going to try to cover some more
articles on this topic because it's definitely the absolutely. We've gotten a good sort of study
in flux of assistive technology, OpenSource assistive technology, stories lately, have we not?
I mean, it seems to me like that's picked up a little bit. It has picked up a little bit. A few,
every few months. I mean, thinking back to the Enable articles. I mean, those were really
impressed and, you know, we got to see those in person and it seems like the assistive technology
stuff has just been, I don't want to say more in the news, but certainly a lot more on everyone's
radar in recent weeks and months. And I think that's a great thing. It's great
for OpenSource to be able to help that community. Absolutely. Definitely.
So in your discussion with the commenter, have you hit on an angle for the upcoming article?
Is he going to write for us? Have you? I think he's going to cover the NVDA app.
Fantastic. Well, that's what we like to see at OpenSource.com. Stories that help people,
draws people out and helps them tell their OpenSource story too. Yeah, I mean, I think a big part
of what we do, too, is how can other people who maybe aren't the status quo get involved?
Right. Right. And so we're seeing a lot more of that in general with women and minorities and
transgender getting them into OpenSource and coding and software in general. And so this is just
kind of like another area where we can help people get involved. Sure. Sure.
Next, we should bring to your attention in recent piece by Cloud Technology Consultant Jim
Hasselmeyer who wrestles with the role of the product management function in the OpenStack
development process. Hasselmeyer says OpenStack has reached an inflection point.
Its developer base has achieved a kind of critical mass and non-developer parties are
interested in using it for day-to-day operations. But how can the OpenStack project manage the
relationship between these parties, particularly in light of the fact that it's an OpenSource project?
Would product management for OpenStack be wise or foolish? Hasselmeyer asks.
Actually, he concludes, it's both. No single person should have de facto decision-making capability,
but the project does need some go between to relay customer needs to the development community.
Yeah, I really enjoyed working with Jim on this piece. For those of you out there in
Listerland who might not be familiar with OpenStack, OpenStack is a sort of set of software tools
that help you build and manage cloud infrastructure. It's sort of the OpenSource equivalent of
Amazon Web Services or Google Cloud or some other public providers who, while you can certainly use
their infrastructure as running non-open software. And so the OpenSource community starting with
RAC space and NASA working together created this project and released it out to the world and
since grown immensely. But one of the downsides of working with an immense project and something
of this scale is that it's hard to find direction and something like that. OpenStack is now
grown to the point where it gets as many commits a month as the Linux kernel, for example. They're
actually comparable in community sizes at this point. And I think what Jim's getting at here is
the users of this type of software are largely large corporations or other entities who come to
providers and ask for a certain set of requirements. They might go to their contact and say,
hey, we'd love to use OpenStack, but we need it to do X. And the difficulty is in getting that
information from the product managers at the companies who are working on this over to the
developers and making just true that chain of communication works for the project of this scale.
Yeah, because I guess a somewhat standard line and some OpenSource.com. Some OpenSource communities
is, well, if the feature is not there, the beauty of OpenSource is that you can code it yourself.
But what if you are a large enterprise whose business is not software, who doesn't have that kind
of talent in the pool, who is not interested in investing resources in enhancing the tool,
but wants to deploy it, what do you tell that person? How do you get that person's
request to the people who can actually fulfill it? Because now, I guess that's what he means by
the by OpenStack reaching and flexion point, right? There's enough people that are interested in
this, that it's becoming large enough, it's becoming significant enough for folks who aren't even,
you know, who aren't developers, who aren't part of the developer community, etc.
I'd say that's fairly accurate. You know, the growth and the flexion point that Jim's talking about,
we really have seen, I think it was really evident when I visited the OpenStack Summit in Atlanta
last May. The user community is finally there, you know, for months and months and years even,
people have been talking about this OpenStack project, the commentators in the tech media were saying,
okay, but where are the users? Well, they're here now. And I think that what we're seeing from them
is that they're enjoying the project and they're asking for new features and we just need to make
sure that the community continues to work in a way that those can communicate to the right people.
Thanks Jason. And finally, we bring you an article by Francois Xavier Adah,
contributor to the online publication Rising Voices, who writes about the Camuscia Takes Wiki project,
which works to give underrepresented sub-Saharan African communities a voice online.
This digital divide means some African communities are underrepresented on the web,
without a well-developed online presence, misinformation about them can spread relatively
unchallenged. Camuscia Takes Wiki mobilizes various Wikipedians in residence to help communities
contribute and edit Wikipedia entries about their local environments and their heritage.
The word Camuscia comes from the show, the show, the language of Zimbabwe and means, quote,
the place where one comes from. Camuscia Takes Wiki is part of the Wiki Africa initiative,
which, quote, encourages individuals and organizations to create, expand, and enhance online content
about Africa, its history, its people, its innovations, and its many contemporary realities
on the world's most-used encyclopedia Wikipedia. So I like this piece a lot. Adah really
does a good job of laying out sort of why it's important to put editing power in the hands of the
people who need to control the way that people see them, right? And I think that seems to me to be,
if it's not already coded into sort of our language for how we talk about social justice,
I mean, to have control over the means, to have control over the tools that people use to
represent you seems to me to be right up there on the agenda today. So I really like the way
this project takes Wikipedia as its sort of home base and begins from there and tries to help
these folks learn how they can have a hand in the way that they represent it online.
It's really important because I sort of think of the situation for some of the third-world
countries as sort of being the chicken in the exendrum, especially for folks who, you know,
in a lot of these countries speak languages which are not a predominant language or Wikipedia.
You know, so what if you have access to internet through a global device or something if there's
no content there for you to consume, no way to be able to use it and no way to understand what's
already been written about, you know, yourself and your own people. So, you know, this really
struck me as an interesting article because it sort of creates that incentive for a lot of people
to try to take the next step and to do what's necessary to be able to get online and to have
something to do when they get there. And I think that sort of back and forth is really great.
Yeah, I think that's a really good point. Also, the page online is really well laid out.
There's four different languages to choose from to work on the project and then there are
several different tabs to walk you through the project and get you started. So, it does seem
like they put a lot of work into making this easy to use and hopefully there'll be a lot of new
knowledge that gets added every day. A couple weeks ago on the podcast, we talked about another
project that we featured on opensource.com called Wiki Project Med. And it's a similar situation.
Jenna, I think you shepherded that one through that was from Shawna Gordon McKeon if I'm not mistaken.
That's right. Who was writing about this project, Wiki Project Med, which does something similar
for medical information online, right? So, how can we connect doctors with sort of with
capidians in residence or how can doctors become more aware of the way that certain medical
information is presented online and is explained online so that folks who use Wiki
to Google their symptoms actually find relevant, accurate information about what they're experiencing.
And I'll say it about this project, Komisha takes Wiki, the same thing I said about
about Wiki Project Med. And that is, I really like the idea that these projects are sort of
meeting people where they are. It's not creating, we're going to do something that's better than
Wiki Pedia. We're going to create another space because this space isn't serving us.
No, they're taking, they're going to where people are. And as it says, it's the world's most
used in cyclopedia as a dollar reminds us. And so instead of just creating something different
and coordinating that stuff off, forming those stories off in their own little sector of the internet,
they're going straight to the world's largest, most used electronic in cyclopedia, Wiki Pedia,
and trying to change that. And the same goes for Wiki Project Med, right? Instead of creating
our own little gateway medical and cyclopedia online, we're going to Wiki Pedia,
going to where people already are and helping them there. How can we pull the knowledge out of the
community onto the internet, onto Wiki Pedia, where people are already looking for this information?
That's right, that's right. And then free access to it. That's right, absolutely.
And the infrastructure too, I mean, large projects aren't probably difficult to host.
So, you know, it's great to be able to kind of plug into some of these existing projects,
to take advantage of some of the resources, you know, and of course something like Wiki Pedia
is funded by people all over the world. But it allows them to take some of the funding that's
probably largely comes from some of the more developed Western nations and really bring it back
home without having to find a new funding source. That's a great point. Excellent point.
Yep. Well folks, that brings us to the end of another open source news break from opensource.com.
Don't forget, you can get your daily dose of open source news from opensource.com.
And of course, you can also find us on various social media, including Facebook and Twitter,
where we can be found at open source play. Finally, we'd love to hear your open source story,
share with us at opensource.com slash participate. Until next time, Hacker Public Radio,
this is semiotic robotic, wishing you peace, love, and open source.
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