FOSS Archives - ross spencer :: exponentialdecay.digipres

Image from July 2021 depicting the fields around Ravensburg in Southern Germany. There is a sign with some graffiti on which depicts a car sliding off the road, presumably because there is very little curb and it's likely you will career into the grass if you're not careful.

When you can’t pay for things the currency of payment is psychic…

Contributing back to the commons in digital preservation hasn’t been for everyone.

We know the famous XKCD that touches on the underappreciated work of maintainers in obscurity. When you, or your institutions, or services are using free and open source software, or other information and data in the commons, and you’re not contributing back, you’re perpetuating this, and what’s more, there’s a virtuous cycle that we’re missing out on.

I read something the other day and it felt like a red flag.

Silver birth tree in Ravensburg featuring its characteristic eye-like bark.

Code as memory?

It is very poetic to think about code as it containing the memory of its maintainers. I don’t entirely disagree with the idea, but it’s overly poetic and the reality of maintenance on systems that have become too unwieldy is anything but poetic.

Information Maintainers talk: Something something twenty years open source…

It was back in May, yes, way back when, that Jordan Hale of the Information Maintainers group put the following to me:

I write today to ask if you’d be interested in being our special guest on the next Information Maintainers call … we thought your perspective on working within and maintaining decentralized, small-group systems and development infrastructures would be really rad to hear about. What do you think?

I am a big fan of the Information Maintainers and so I was pretty stoked to be asked. Of course, I jumped at the chance and wrote about “Something something twenty years open source…”

OPFCON: How has OPF contributed to the international digital preservation community? Where would this community be without OPF?

Last Wednesday and in another life, pre-COVID pandemic, I would have been visiting Vienna again. I visited for the digital preservation conference iPRES for the first time in 2010, and lived there for a short period of time last year.

Now, we’re in the midst of a pandemic and the Open Preservation Foundation (OPF) 10th Anniversary Event could not happen in person but the OPF found a way anyway, and so 9-10 June 2020 became the online event OPFCON.

Fortunate enough have an abstract of mine be considered worthy of a panel towards the end of the event I was able to reflect on the last 10 years. My notes on those and the panel can be found below.

Tag: FOSS

When you can’t pay for things the currency of payment is psychic…

Code as memory?

Information Maintainers talk: Something something twenty years open source…

OPFCON: How has OPF contributed to the international digital preservation community? Where would this community be without OPF?

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