Weblogs
- Copyrighteous: My personal weblog. It's a combination of short reflections (often humorous) and essays that tend to focus on issues of free software, copyright, and issues of free culture and knowledge.
- Revealing Errors: A weblog where I try to reveal the power and influence that technology has on our lives by unpacking and analyizing errors that reveal the frequently hidden technological systems around us.
Organizations and Affiliations
- MIT Sloan School of Management: I work with the social scientist and innovation expert Eric von Hippel on research related to increasing the effectiveness of information commons like free software and culture communities.
- MIT Center for Future Civic Media: I am a Fellow at the C4FCM. a new center associated with the MIT Media Lab and the department of Comparitive Media Studies. This is an extension of my work as a graduate student in the Media Lab's Electronic Publishing and Computing Culture research groups.
- Free Software Foundation: In addition to being an Associate Member, I am a member of the FSF's Board of Directors. You can support my work at the foundation, and support the free software movement itself, by becoming an Associate Member yourself.
- The Debian GNU/Linux Project: I am Debian Developer
and maintain several packages and routinely sponsor the upload of several others. In the past, I have served
on the Project Leader Team (AKA Project Scud) and acted as the Hardware Donations Manager
(AKA
Project Quartermaster
) and Accountant tracking and managing funds and hardware internationally. My packaging work is documented here. - Ubuntu: I serve on Ubuntu's Community Council governance board and help direct the Ubuntu Foundation. I am involved in issues related community, policy and governance and technical issues of internationalization, language support, and non-Latin text rendering and input. During the Ubuntu project's first year, I worked for Canonical Ltd. doing Free Software activism and advocacy and helping build user and developer communities around the distribution.
- Wikimedia/Wikipedia: I am an active contributor to
several Wikimedia projects where I add content and edit frequently. I am not an administrator for any
Wikimedia projects. These include:
- Wikimedia Foundation: I am proud to serve on the advisory board for the Wikimedia Foundation, the non-profit organization that supports Wikipedia and other Wikimedia projects, with a number of other distinguished individuals.
- Wikipedia (English): I primarily edit articles
on free software, intellectual property, and a whole series of other articles of interest to me.
Links: My User Page | My Contributions - Wikiversity (English): I have contributed to
Wikiversity primarily through the creation of an extensive curriculum about software freedom.
Links: My User Page | Contributions | Software Freedom Curriculum - Wikimania 2006: To a small degree, I helped assist in the organization of Wikimania 2006 in Cambridge Massachusetts. I helped out the program committee for the conference and assisted with Wikimania Hacking Days.
- Definition of Free Cultural Works: Along with Erik Moeller from the Wikimedia Foundation, I founded this project to work with the free culture community to help provide a set of explicit goals to help the free culture movement development, inspire, and grow.
- One Laptop per Child: Building off my work at the Media Lab, I play a primarily advisory role with the One Laptop per Child project. I help out with issues of software freedom, software licensing, and maintaining the "hackability" of the system. I am also working on joint work between OLPC and the exploring both synchronous and asynchronous forms of collaborative writing.
- ACM Professionals Board: I serve on a new board within ACM and coordinated by Steve Bourne that aims to help ACM appeal more to computing professionals outside of the academy.
- Yukidoke Consulting: A small consulting company I founded that offers services involving Free and Open Source software project management, release coordination, development, training and more.
Please see my Additional Affiliations Page for a list of my older, dormant, more minor, and more advisory affiliations.
Free Software Development Projects
The vast majority of my free software works is contributions to large projects like Debian and Ubuntu. However, I have started several free software projects of my own. I currently maintain the following pieces of software (in alphabetical order):
- attachcheck: a small application that reminds you when you intend to include an attachment with an email but forget. (latest version: 0.1)
- Extension:EditImage: a extension to Mediawiki that makes it possible to do simple image editing entirely within a web browser.
- The Free Software Project Management HOWTO: The Linux Documentation Project's guide to managing a free software project (latest version: v0.3.3)
- PyBlosxom Hacks and Plugins: I didn't write the weblog system PyBlosxom but I use it for copyrighteous and I've done quite a bit of work on the software. I've written and maintain several patches, plugins, and improvements to PyBlosxom — all of which have their permanent home on this project page.
- Selectricity and RubyVote: RubyVote is an election methods library implemented in Ruby. It is designed to make it very easy to implement a variety of different types of elections in Ruby including relatively complex election methods. Selectricity is a powerful set of web, phone, and XML-RPS interfaces to RubyVote which make superior voting machinery possible to use in all sorts of everyday situations where it would otherwise be prohibitively difficult or costly.
- YouRule: YouRule is a simple web-based piece of software to generate on-screen rulers. Inititally developed for the OLCP XO-1, it allows anyone to create custom rulers for their screens and to save and share them with others.
- Miscellaneous Scripts and Configuration Files: This page contains a collection of smaller scripts (most of them associated with GPG, encryption, or keysigning parties) and a handful of configuration files that I am asked for frequently and so which I've decided to just put online.
I have also written many other pieces of software. Please see my my list of old, unmaintained, and deprecated software for applications that I have written but no longer maintain. I no longer use this software but in many cases, many other people do. I am happy to transfer responsibility for software on this page to anyone that is interested in taking it.
Art and Activism Projects
- Art, Activism and Other Fun Page with information and links on some of the recent fun projects I've taken on.
- Property of Pierre-Joseph ProudhonPierre-Joseph Proudhon is the nineteenth century
French anarchist and mutualist most famous for saying, "La propriété, c'est le vol!" In English: "Property is
theft!" I made t-shirts reading "Property of Pierre-Joseph Proudhon."
Available: Blog Post, Printfection Store - Unhappy Birthday Interview I did an in-character interview as a copyright
high-protectionist about Unhappy Birthday on the CBC show WireTap.
Available: Unofficial Podcast
Books
I have written and published two books to date. Both were co-authored and technical in nature. You can find them here:
- The Official Ubuntu Book (1st ed. 2006, 2nd ed. 2007, 3rd ed. 2008): I am the
first author of all editions of the best-selling Official Ubuntu book co-written with several
contributors from the Ubuntu community. Parts of the book are distributed on official ubuntu CDs and the book is
released and distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Sharealike license which allows for royalty-free
copying, distribution, and modification. The book is published by Pearson's Publishing and has been translated into
several languages.
Third Edition Book: Amazon | Complete List of Sources
Second Edition Book: Amazon | Complete List of Sources
First Edition Book: Complete List of Sources
Incomplete List of Translations: German | Spanish | Japanese - Debian GNU/Linux 3.x Bible (2005): I am the first author of a book
co-written with David Harris and Jaldhar Vyas and with the help list of other contributors and editors
from the Debian community. The book is geared primarily at beginners and helps introduce Debian's
sarge distribution with information on running software on the desktop, on a server and geared
either toward an Internet or intranet environment. The book has been translated into several languages.
Find/Buy Books: Complete List of Sources
Publisher's Info Page: Link
Recent Publications and Essays
My Writing Projects Page contains a full list of the projects I've posted on the web.
- Book Review: Decoding Liberation by Samir Chopra and Scott D. Dexter: A short book
review of the book on free and open source software published in Minds and Machines.
Published Online: Link
Downloadable Pre-Print: Plain Text - Revealing Errors: This article makes the case for increased attention to and
analysis of errors in humanist studies and by technology activists. It describes how errors can reveal
invisible technologies and gives a number of examples. I used the publication of this piece to launch the Revealing Errors weblog. The piece was the featured article in the issue on errors of the Media/Culture Journal edited by Mark Nunes.
Published Online: link
Recent Talks
My Talks and Presentations Page contains a more complete list of my talks with descriptions of most talks.
- Revealing Errors, 2009-01-06, Razmajena Vjestina skill-sharing meeting at MAMA in Zagreb, Croatia..
- Voting Machinery for the Masses, 2008-10-20, IEEE Boston Section Society on Social Implications of Technology at MIT Lincoln Labs in Lexington, Massachusetts.
- Free Software In Your Pocket, 2008-09-20, Software Freedom Day Boston in Boston, Massachusetts.
- Advocating Software Freedom by Revealing Errors (Keynote), 2008-07-25, O'Reilly Open Source Convention (OSCON) in Portland, Oregon. (Abstract: Link | Video: Link)
- Creative Commons Panel, 2008-07-19, Wikimania 2008 at the Bibliotecha Alexandrina in Alexandria, Egypt.
- Free Network Services, 2008-07-19, Wikimania 2008 at the Bibliotecha Alexandrina in Alexandria, Egypt. (Abstract: Link)
Other Webpages
- Wikipedia User Page: My "user page" is similar to a homepage but it's in more flux (it's a wiki after all) and tends to focus on items that are interesting to me in Wikipedia.
- My Kuro5hin diary which is lots of short little descriptions of ideas I have. It's a lot less serious, useful (and hopefully) boring than the site you're reading right now. (no longer updated)
- My Advogato Page where I keep a (very infrequently updated) diary of my work on free software projects. (no longer updated)
- GPG Keys for use in secure communication with me.
Contact Information
Email:mako@atdot.ccVisit my contact information page for information on how to reach me via the following methods:
- snailmail
- phone
- IRC
- instant messaging (several flavors)