Project Update

I was inspired by the humanitarian FOSS project that we covered in class this past week and so the journey down the rabbit hole began. I started exploring the Social Impact page of GitHub. I found a lot of great projects that seemed abandoned. Some of the most recent of the pull request had been there for a year or so without being merged. I kept sifting through projects and found one called Refuge Restrooms that provide safe restroom access for transgender, intersex, and gender nonconforming individuals. I looked through the issues and there’s was one that seemed manageable. The challenge is that the application is coded in ruby but the issue involves adding images so that an upside. I then commented on the issue to both contact the maintainer and to gauge the staleness. I forked the repo and cloned it onto my local machine. I want to use sites like wiki commons, unsplash and other free image sites for the addition to the project. The project had instructions on downloading the environment. As it stands I have to learn how to add images on a ruby application. I am excited to work in this project the impact seems very real and tangible.

Election fraud: Is there an open source solution?

The safety and security of our election be it local, state, or federal has been questionable for many years. In almost all regions in the US there seems to be a distrust with how the ballots are accounted for and the accuracy of the machine we use to count the. The aforementioned article by Jeff Macharyas speaks to what an opensource solution could do for our elections system. Throughout the article they make mention of how dated the technology how it left people mistrusting. George Miller, the COO of OSET Institute, adds “that one of the most important aspects of public technology is that it must be entirely trustworthy.” I think this can be attained but not as quickly as one might hope. If the previous system can be hacked then this new system can be hacked. I think with the help of other sectors, like education, licenses involving themselves in opensource technologies and solution we can converge to trust. This way familiar can inch people towards being trusting of these election management systems. Miller goes further to explain the issue with open code and how governments have heavy regulation on systems security.

Weekly Update

1. Covered some Linux commmand in class
2. Made a contribution to the FOSS Wiki page
3. Created a Sandbox for an artist