Episode: 1614
Title: HPR1614: An Open Source News Break from Opensource.com
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr1614/hpr1614.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-18 05:51:02

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Hey there Hacker Public Radio.
This is semiotic robotic bringing you another open source news break from OpenSource.com.
With me once again is OpenSource.com content manager Jen Wike and for the next quarter
hour we'll recap for you some of the most popular stories we've featured on OpenSource.com.
We begin today with an article by Charlie Reisinger, IT director at Penn Manor School District
of Lancaster County, Pennsylvania in the United States.
Reading a riots about his dissatisfaction with the way US came through 12 schools address
internet safety issues as part of their computing education programs.
To satisfy federal requirements and in response to traditional local attitudes and opinions,
public high school internet safety curriculum typically addresses a narrow set of cyber safety
topics Reisinger says.
For example, Reisinger explains, students might learn how to avoid downloading and installing
malicious software, how to manage their passwords appropriately, and how to manage their online
reputations, particularly with regard to social media.
But Reisinger says that issues like these, while important, don't necessarily prepare
students to think critically about their relationship to digital technologies today.
He proposes a different set of topics for public school students learning about internet safety,
which introduces items like technology ethics and privacy.
The fundamentals of digital rights management, online surveillance, tracking and record
keeping, and open document formats.
Love this story from Charlie.
Charlie is a great writer and he's a great speaker.
He did a talk TEDx talk that can be found in our show notes.
And the thing that stuck out to me the most from that talk was two things that he really
focuses on with his students.
And one is trust, trusting them to take on more responsibility to teach their fellow
students how to use technology and software and their computers and laptops from the school
system.
And then the other thing is just the simple idea that the students deserve it.
They deserve that level of trust and responsibility.
Yeah, this is an interview near, or an article, I should say near and dear to my heart having
lived in Lancaster County, right near Penn Manor school district for the several years
before moving to North Carolina.
That's great.
And Penn Manor has a reputation for being very progressive with its, you know, in-house
IT and its relationship to information technology and its students.
But for those of you who haven't seen Charlie's talk and are wondering, you know, are
clamoring for more details about what Jen's talking about, just several weeks ago, maybe
a month or two ago at this point, actually, or at the time of recording versus the time
of that you will hear it.
But several months ago, we'll say it to be safe.
When Charlie gave his TEDx talk, it's a TEDx Lancaster sponsored by my alma mater, Miller's
ville University of Pennsylvania.
He talks about the way that they did one of, I think it's one of the largest open source
laptop deployments in history.
The school has a one-to-one program, and that one-to-one program put laptops in the hands
of about 1700 high school students, and all those laptops are running open source software.
And what's more, and this is what Jen was hinting at earlier, which I think, you know, I agree
that this is a huge takeaway from the article and from Charlie's talk, is that all students
have rude access on their machines.
They all have administrator access, so they can hack away at whatever they want, and
there are no restrictions placed on their laptops.
And I think that that just is really great, and this talk got a lot of attention online.
The laptops are Ubuntu laptops, and canonical actually did a white paper on this deployment
for their company blog and their company website.
And it's just gotten a ton of attention, but Jen was also mentioning sort of the students
helping students aspect if I'm not mistaken.
What Charlie does is he leads a team of about, what did he say, like five, six or so, sort
of like, it's like the open source genius bar at Penn Manor High School, where it's
actual peers helping their peers troubleshoot their laptops.
So students can bring their laptops into the shop, and students are there ready to help
them troubleshoot their Linux issues.
Right.
So this group helped prepare the laptops to give to all of their fellow students classmates,
then they get to actually troubleshoot and teach them about how to use them and then
how to fix their problems.
And so from start to finish, they're the ones in control of the program and in charge.
Yeah, it's fantastic.
And if you want to read more about the program, you can check out Penn Manor's blog.
I'll put it in the show notes at penmanor.net, that's P-E-N-N-M-A-N-O-R dot net.
And I suggest you go there, if for no other reason, then to see what a pile of 1700 laptops
ready to deploy looks like and the aftermath, what a pile of 1700 cardboard laptop boxes
ready to go out to the recycler looks like.
Which might raise a whole nother issue, but we'll talk about that in another podcast.
That's another podcast.
Yeah.
But congratulations to them.
Congratulations for Charlie.
And a really forward thinking piece here, trying to get people thinking about not just going
with the status quo when it comes to technology issues, not just teaching students to properly
handle today's technology, but to think ahead and to think progressively about their rights
online and where technology might be going.
And as one person said in the comments for the story, what Charlie's talking about is
the form that civics classes should take today, right?
How to understand civics and civic engagement and citizenship in a digital age.
So I think this is just was a great story for us to feature.
That's a great point.
All right.
Next.
Brian recently published an interview with Karen Sandler, executive director of the software
Freedom Conservancy.
It's a wide-ranging interview.
They chatted about Sandler's history in free and open-source software.
Her passion for software freedom, her time as executive director of the GNOME Foundation,
and her priorities for the software freedom conservancy as she assumes her latest leadership
role.
But central to their conversation was what Sandler calls open sources identity crisis.
In free and open-source software, we all wear many hats, Sandler said.
We used the term we to mean a nonprofit community of volunteers one moment, and then we, to
mean our employers the next.
Free software needs its contributors to be honest with themselves and each other about
what their interests are and who they are speaking for at different times.
How can we actually change the world if we don't know who we are and we're willing to
let corporate influence overrun us?
Ultimately, Sandler says we need to think about how we talk about software freedom and
how we connect that issue to other important struggles for social justice if we're going
to advance the calls.
Very interesting interview with Karen Sandler.
Yes.
Love Karen Sandler.
This was an interview, no lie, dream come true for me.
I'm not going to unabashedly a Karen Sandler fan.
And she is just one of those people who is so nice and so gracious and so incredibly,
incredibly sharp.
It was just an honor and a pleasure to interview her for this piece.
And like you said, Jen, the interview was very wide-ranging.
We talked about her time at the software freedom law center.
We talked about her time at Gnome.
We talked about her plans for conservancy and what she's going to do at the software freedom
conservancy now that she's a executive director there.
And she's just one of those folks who I think embodies open source spirit and has a great
open source story.
So she told me in her interview that her passion for open source and free software freedom
most generally comes from her desire to understand how her pacemaker defibrillator works, right?
So she has that embedded in her and she realized she can't see the source code for it.
That's a big deal.
So she has this interesting part of her personal life that relies on open source, but then
she also has this career history that just is impressive and very interesting in terms
of open source enthusiasm and promoting it.
So tell us more about her career.
So career path?
Yeah.
So Karen started at the software freedom law center and she did some work there and then
moved to executive director of the Nome Foundation, where she was up until earlier this year.
And she was really instrumental in their women's outreach program there and did a lot of
work on that and did a lot of good work advocating for the Nome project.
And now she is at software freedom conservancy where she works as executive director and
she tells me in the interview that that conservancy has always been very near and dear to her because
she started it basically.
She sort of initiated that organization years ago, right?
So now she gets to head it up and really play a more active role there and then one of
that organization does of course is help fund open a free software, free software projects
that need it, right, that need help, need advocates, right, need legal counsel, etc.
So conservancy does those things for them.
Of course Bradley Cune is there as well as the outgoing director, I believe that was his
position formally.
Now he's distinguished technologist there but they have a podcast called Free is in Freedom
where they talk about software freedom issues and I encourage our listeners to listen to
that podcast if you're interested in free software because you will not hear too sharp or
more passionate people talk about software freedom issues.
But I really like where Karen goes in this interview too and this is sort of the drum she's
beating now and that is, look, we need to really, really think about how we talk about software
freedom and how we talk about software in general.
And if we're going to make it resonate with people in their daily lives, right, and she
says in the interview, I don't care if we call it for software, I don't really call it
care if we call it open source, I don't care.
But if this thing calls software freedom, we need to really pay attention to the language
we're using to describe those issues and the way that we basically stay on message, right,
how do we connect the issue of software freedom to other social justice issues and how do
we make it resonate with people who are very passionate about social justice issues, how
do we get those folks to see that the software, that they use, the digital platforms they
use and the free and open nature of those things or the close proprietary nature of those
things makes a critical difference to the way we live and the way that we can live.
And so that's where she's going in this interview.
Wow, that's great.
So it occurs to me that the way that we talk about issues is right up your alley as a PhD
student at UNC Chapel Hill in communications.
So does that really resonate with you because you're studying these types of language barriers?
Absolutely, absolutely.
Interpersonal styles.
Right, I call it a discourse, I call it a discourse, a manner of speaking about free and open
source software, right, I mean to use the term, to use the technical term discourse
to really be to describe a way of speaking about something that organizes the way we can
think about it, right, and the way that a thing gets organized and the way we speak about
it does influence how it can connect up to other important issues socially.
And that's really important because the more those linkages you can make, the more you
can galvanize support for a cause, right?
And so what Karen is very, very keen on doing is addressing the way that, I mean some people
would say the way that we sort of stay on message, but I don't like that PR, I don't like
that term.
It sounds very PR-ish.
And Karen's talking about something broader here.
She's talking about the way that we talk about something that influences the way we conceptualize
how it connects to other social justice issues in any kind of social formation, any kind
of social body or populace.
So yes, that's one of the reasons I just adore Karen, if I may, and her work, because
I think that she's doing this, tackling a very, very important issue right now, and I'm
very excited to see where she goes with it.
That's great.
It's so important how we talk about things.
We can get lazy when we talk about issues, and especially in terms of open source software
and freedom and software, so it's a great cause for her to be taking up, and we wish her
love.
Yes, absolutely.
All right, and finally, in our life channel, Jen brings us an interview with Jennifer
Davidson, program manager at ChickTech, a United States nonprofit organization, with a mission
to create a community of support for women and girls pursuing tech careers.
We started ChickTech because we've experienced firsthand the lack of gender diversity in
tech careers, Davidson told Jen, without this gender diversity, women don't have a workplace
that helps us feel like we belong.
So we decided to create a nonprofit that would change that by creating a community of
support for women and girls, provide them with fun and exciting workshops to improve
their confidence and abilities and change tech culture for the better.
ChickTech chapters are popping up all over the United States, and Davidson explains that
members are specifically targeting high schoolers, with a program that gathers hundreds of
teenage girls for multi-day technology workshops.
Of course, the organization promotes open source software.
We want to lower the cost barrier to entry for these girls, Davidson said.
We want them to be able to install and use these tools when they get home to continue
their projects.
Great interview, Jen.
This was a fun interview, because it talks about such a big issue, and just something
that's top of mind for it, I feel like a lot of people in tech right now is we don't
have enough women in tech, and we also don't have enough women in open source.
Jennifer really touches on that issue, and she talks about how ChickTech is a nonprofit
that's based in Portland, that's expanding across the U.S. and really gaining some momentum
with the way that they're involving girls, and probably their mothers and other women
associated with these girls, they're multi-day hackathons that they're doing, and
I think also just their style of approaching it, where women can compete with other women
in these environments and really feel like they belong and comfortable, so that they
can go out into the world and take what they've learned in these comfortable environments
and compete with the rest of the world, and learn even more beyond that, so it was
a neat interview to do with Jennifer.
The article talks about I think two initiatives, one is ChickTech high school, and one is
initiative for women who already have established careers in technology sectors, so what's
the second one besides high school, what does the other one do?
Do you remember?
I think it had something to do with Arduino training, right?
So the way that I understood is that there's the high school one for younger women, and
then there's the careers side of it for older women.
I see, okay.
So those are the two main initiatives, sort of broken down into age groups.
And right now, what Jennifer talked to you most about was the ChickTech high school initiative,
right?
I think they're interested in getting more chapters of ChickTech open throughout the country.
We got one in San Francisco, for example, and they seem to be rolling out nationwide,
which is fantastic, and I think they're interested in targeting more young women so that they
can do these sort of two-day hackathons, and do to sort of gather that sort of young
enthusiasm for tech.
Right.
Making an investment in the younger generations with the future, right?
Because they really believe that a diverse tech industry is a better tech industry.
So the founder, Janice, makes a comment in one of her profiles online about how she realized
that it wasn't going to happen on its own.
Anyone interested in making software tech, open-source, a more diverse place should do their part.
They should be part of the movement.
You can mentor young girls and young guys.
I think that they're also welcoming of the male gender, but they focus on the female
gender just because they feel like there's been a disadvantage there, or maybe just less
of a focus.
Yeah, sure.
I love this quotation from the interview that Jennifer gave you.
It says, she's talking about the Chick-Tech high school advance, and she says, quote,
we fill a university engineering department with 100 high school girls.
More girls than many engineering departments have ever seen.
The participants can look around the building and see that girls from all backgrounds are
just as excited about tech as they are.
Just love that image.
I love that too.
It's me because it talks about the impact that this has on the girls themselves, but also
the impact that this has on everyone else.
It's important for everyone to see this happening, and also the girls to go through it themselves.
Absolutely.
Yep.
Story did really well on open-source.com, Slash.picked it up.
So we've got a little bit of interesting worldwide attention on this story, which was really
great for us.
Feels good to be on Slash.
Hey, you're your first Slash dot.
My first one.
Yeah.
It's first Slash dotting.
You heard it right here first, folks.
Great response to the story and a lot of interest here, and we wish Chick-Tech lots of luck
in the future.
Well folks, we've come to the end of another open-source news break from open-source.com.
You can check out the links we've placed in the show notes for this episode.
And you can follow along on social media at open-source way on Twitter and like it's
on Facebook.
And if you'd like to contribute an open-source story, find us at open-source.com, Slash
Participate.
Yes.
Very important page there.
And until next time, Hacker Public Radio friends, this is semiotic robotic, wishing you
peace, love, and open-source.
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