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Today, transparency is a critical aspect in all areas of government. With Internet access, citizens are looking for more information about what is going on in their cities and are looking for more ways to hold their government representatives accountable. One of the best ways to provide transparency and make it easier for citizens to obtain the city services they require is to become an open source city. An open source city is one that uses a variety of new tools, including apps, to make information availble to citizens and interact with them as well. Following are 10 tools to help open source cities maintain transparency.

By day, Red Hat product manager Burr Sutter works to make developers more successful and productive with open source tools, technologies, and techniques. So it's no surprise that he wants to ensure his own children know how to solve technical problems as well. So when summer vacation rolled around this year, Sutter encouraged his son to complete some courses on CodeAcademy and to sign up for a couple of iD Tech Camps. In this interview, Sutter talks about why he wants his children to know how to fix the tech tools they use every day, how he balances that with other "kid" activities, and more. Parents who are looking for a way to get their children to learn code, to fix their computers, or just learn how online communities work may pick up some tips from Sutter's experiences.

Digia announced an Android and Linux-targeted embedded version of its cross-platform Qt GUI framework called Qt Enterprise Embedded that combines a Qt Creator based IDE with a new embedded Boot to Qt stack. The Digia-backed Qt project also released the beta of Qt 5.2 with a new Scene Graphic renderer and the first production-ready support […]

Major telecommunications companies are intent on transforming the Internet – from an information center for all of us to a profit center for them. They want to charge consumers extra for use of the websites and applications we want most.

First phone to launch with Firefox OS 1.1 South Korean electronics giant LG has joined the likes of Alcatel, Geeksphone, and ZTE by offering a handset based on the Mozilla Foundation's open-source Firefox OS platform.…

Educators in the US and worldwide are increasingly preoccupied with: 1) how children learn, 2) how best to prepare children for the future, and 3) what role digital technology plays in the classroom—all of which is controversial and widely debated. Various theories and models of education and intelligence have played a large role in shaping this discussion. Noted developmental psychologist, Howard Gardner of Harvard's Graduate School of Education, has been instrumental for many years.

Artila Electronics announced the release of an 80 x 50mm computer-on-module (COM) that runs Linux or Android on an ARM Cortex A8-based Freescale system-on-chip. The M-5360A module plugs into application baseboards via three bottom-side headers carrying numerous I/O interfaces including dual LVDS, VGA, SATA, Fast Ethernet, SD, USB 2.0, serial, and CAN bus. The credit […]

I get asked a lot by people who are interested in helping out open source projects, but have absolutely no programming skills. What can they do? Well, here’s a few ideas how non-programmers can contribute to open source projects. It is worth noting that it is best to contribute to software that you actually use yourself. That way you feel the benefits.

In 2009, our friends at Development Seed launched a pretty revolutionary concept—a completely open source intranet-in-a-box called Open Atrium. It was regarded as a giant leap forward for open source, for social collaboration, and for Drupal. Way back then (okay, it was just four years ago), an open source solution that could stand toe-to-toe with proprietary solutions like Basecamp and SharePoint was unprecedented. Open Atrium came on the scene and directly into the limelight because for the first time, a distribution of the open source Drupal code base felt really and truly like an all-in-one product.

If your Linux computer fails to boot after a kernel upgrade, disk swap, or other system change, you're not helpless. The Grand Unified Bootloader (GRUB) gives you ways to control the boot process and recover. Or, if necessary, emergency boot disks that you create with an external tool can come to the rescue. Learn procedures and GRUB commands that can help you boot in problem situations, and find out about a life-saving external tool for BIOS-based systems.

The Raspberry Pi has replaced the textbook at the State University of New York at Albany in the class, Information in the 21st Century. Ethan Sprissler is the instructor for the 900 student class (split into two sections, 400 and 500 students respectively). He uses the Raspberry Pi instead of the traditional textbook in order to:

Having a built-in navigation system in your new car is pretty common place now (that is, if you want to pay for it). These days many new car owners can just type in the address of where they want to go in to their in-vehicle infotainment (IVI) system and a 2D map will pop up with some simple graphics showing them how to get there, or possibly a 3D map if you have a luxury vehicle that offers it.But how is that 3D mapping data collected and updated? And who can access it? Marek Strassenburg-Kleciak is one of the key people behind collected 3D mapping data for OpenStreetMap (OSM), which has been billed as the Wikipedia of maps. As the senior manager for new business development at Elektrobit Automotive, one of the things he loves most about his work is putting technology visions into practice.

For nearly as long as the three of us have known each other, we have talked about the things we would make when we had our own company. The seriousness of that statement grew and waned over time. But early this year, a friend who was just getting into working with the Arduino microcontroller platform built an 8-bit binary counter and an idea was born: Why not make a bigger counter? Why not make it a clock? This idea became the start of Maniacal Labs, a company that we plan to run by following the ideals of open source software and hardware.

This article is part of an interview series highlighting the speakers of the upcoming All Things Open 2013 conference in Raleigh, NC The Eclipse Foundation supports a vibrant an open source community. Those who work on their projects are focused on building an open development platform comprised of extensible frameworks, tools, and runtimes for building, deploying, and managing software across the lifecycle. Started in 2004, the Eclipse Foundation has an interesting history ( about it here), beginning with The Eclipse Project at IBM in 2001. Currently, Mike Milinkovich is the Executive Director at the Eclipse Foundation, and I caught a moment of his time for a few questions. His talk at the All Things Open conference this week will be about how foundations can stay relevant along with their open source communities. Get to know Mike and the Eclipse community better in this interview.

This article is part of an interview series highlighting the speakers of the upcoming All Things Open 2013 conference in Raleigh, NC It's official: Twitter is a global phenomenon, and it's hard to argue against the numbers supporting that statement. What started as a small, quasi-micro-blogging company in 2006, gained steam in 2007 with the service generating around 400,000 tweets per quarter, or roughly 1100 tweets per day, and exploded to worldwide service with a staggering 400 million tweets per day by 2013.

An interview with The Yocto Project community manager Jeff Osier-Mixon is a community manager at Intel for The Yocto Project, an open source collaboration project that provides templates, tools and methods to help you create custom Linux-based systems for embedded products regardless of the hardware architecture. Basically: The Yocto Project allows development to happen without the worries of what hardware the code will run on. He will be ensuring the success of The Yocto Project Developer Day on October 23. There will be two tracks, so both new and experienced users are welcome. And then, Jefro will be speaking on Friday, October 25 at Embedded Linux Conference Europe in Edinburgh, Scotland. (Note: LinuxCon Europe is from October 21- 23.) We learned more about Jeff and his job with Intel in this interview. His Twitter profile says he's an anatidaephilic and an enchiridionophile—so, of course, we asked: Which one is worse?

This article is part of an interview series highlighting the speakers of the upcoming All Things Open 2013 conference in Raleigh, NC Jason Hibbets wears many hats. One is red—he's a project manager for the open source leader, Red Hat. And, the rest are for newly defined roles in open source—including local government open source advocate and contributor. But, one of the biggest ways that Jason takes open source beyond technology is by highlighting the ways using open source software, hardware, and methodologies is changing business, education, government, law, and many more areas of our lives on Opensource.com.

Open source news this week: October 14 - October 18, 2013 What other open source-related news stories did you read about this week? Share them with us in the comments section. Follow us on Twitter where we share these stories in real time.

At the most recent LinxuCon, IBM announced it will invest $1B in Linux and related open source technologies over the next five years. This is not the first time IBM has made such a significant commitment to Linux. Back in 2000, IBM invested $1B and dedicated about 1,500 engineers to work on Linux. That investment paid off handsomely: by 2003 IBM was already getting returns of about $2B per year by revitalizing its mainframe business. Deploying Linux on IBM servers had made the offering a lot more attractive for organizations interested in keeping control of their data centers. By 2003, IBM's revenue from Linux related services grew to be twice as much the revenue of patents licensing: a hint for the business models that make the most sense in a knowledge economy.

This article is part of an interview series highlighting the speakers of the upcoming All Things Open 2013 conference in Raleigh, NC Angie Byron is an advocate for Drupal. Commonly known online as webchick, she is a Drupal core co-maintainer. She has her finger on the pulse of the community, helping to manage over 1,600 contributors from all over the world. In this interview, Angie shares the top five things she loves about the Drupal community, how she got started in open source, her passion for getting more newbies and women involved in open source, as well as her best tips for community management. Plus, she's speaking at the upcoming All Things Open conference in Raleigh, NC and gives us a sneak preview to her keynote and session talk.