How to manage casual contributors to open source projects

Increasingly, people want to contribute to projects casually—when they want to, rather than adhering to a schedule. This is part of a broader trend of "episodic volunteering" noted by a wide range of volunteer organizations and governments. This has been attributed not only to changes in the workforce, which leave fewer people able to volunteer with less spare time to share, but also to changes in how people perceive the act of volunteering. It is no longer seen as a communal obligation, rather as a conditional activity in which the volunteer also receives benefits. Moreover, distributed revision-control systems and the network effects of GitHub, which standardize the process of making a contribution, make it easier for people to contribute casually to free/libre/open source software (FLOSS) projects.

5 ways to invigorate education with Raspberry Pi

A couple of years ago, I was talking to PayPal senior director of software development Harper Reed at All Things Open in Raleigh, N.C., when he suggested that the best way to invigorate education would be to purchase Raspberry Pis en masse and put them in public libraries. Although many schools have made sizeable investments in classroom technology, those investments have done little to advance students' understanding of how the technology works. That's where the Raspberry Pi comes in, as it's the ideal vehicle to demonstrate the educational efficacy of open source software and open hardware in the classroom.

System76 Unveils First Release of Pop!_OS Linux Distro, Based on Ubuntu 17.10

System76, the maker of Linux-based computers, is proud to announce the first-ever release of Pop!_OS Linux, its own GNU/Linux distribution based on Canonical's Ubuntu OS.

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