PUBLIC MARKS with search give

an interesting conclusion about how to turn new and casual contributors into long-time community members: the key is to distribute ownership.

To wrap up, there were several things that motivated me to stay active in the Mozilla community: * A belief in the mission of the project — to create a web browser that supports and promotes the use of open standards * An interest in the technology — initially with the Gecko logo as my hook * The feeling of belonging in a community of people with similar interests * The desire to give something back to a project that gave (and still gives) me the best browser in the world for free * The experiences gained by managing a website — HTML, CSS, server configurations, and perhaps most importantly, the English language * The recognition and respect from Mozilla project members for my contributions * The pride of being responsible for an important piece of the project

Look at your computer setup and imagine that you hooked up a 3D printer. Instead of printing on bits of paper this 3D printer makes real, robust, mechanical parts. To give you an idea of how robust, think Lego bricks and you're in the right area. You could make lots of useful stuff, but interestingly you could also make most of the parts to make another 3D printer. That would be a machine that could copy itself.

RepRap is short for Replicating Rapid-prototyper. It is the practical self-copying 3D printer shown on the right - a self-replicating machine.

Experiment and iterate. This is the web; you can be nimble. Risk is okay as long as you are always testing. Here’s the Iridesco process for a new feature:

1. Sketch

2. Photoshop

3. Test

4. Static HTML prototype

5. Test again

6. Working prototype

7. Test again

8. Tweak

9. Launch quietly

10. Get Feedback

11. Tweak

12. Get Feedback

13. Tweak

14. Get Feedback

15. Tweak…

Iterate constantly. You need a culture of experimentation.

RDF is a data standard that is both expressive enough to represent any type of data that’s connected to the server and also flexible enough to handle new data sources incrementally. URIs provide a foundation for minting identifiers that don’t clash unexpectedly as new data sources are brought into the fold. Named graphs give us a simple abstraction upon which we can engineer practical concerns like security, audit trails, offline access, real-time updates, and caching.

Murmur Study is a work-in-progress that examines the rise of micro-messaging technologies such as Twitter and Facebook Status Updates. One might describe these messages as a kind of digital small talk. But unlike water-cooler conversations, these fleeting thoughts are accumulated, archived and indexed digitally by corporations. While the future of these archives are still to be seen, the sheer volume of publicly accessible personal expression should give us pause.

ShouldIBackupMy.com – A project for Open Hack 2009

Cristiano Betta talks us through how he built the wonderfully funny "ShouldIBackupMy.com". In this project he uses The Guardian Content API to give him information to "predict" the longevity of things you might be concerned enough about to back up.

This project involves creating a Persistence Of Vision (POV) device for mounting on a bike wheel. There are a few of these devices already on the market (and we've bought a couple to experiment with); this project differs in that it combines a basic bike meter with the POV readout. The device will display speed and total distance travelled. Unlike standard bike computers, this information isn't displayed for the cyclist but broadcast to other people in the street. By making this information public we give the cyclist's activities greater 'visibility' within the urban environment.

This is a simple example to illustrate the use of python-graph. This should give you a feel about how the API is.