Consilience

Well, I will call that a success.

First, we all traveled through the blizzard conditions to get to the event. No one was hurt.

When we arrived we set up quickly and got to work. The only hitch was the wireless at the library was effectively non-existent. Luckily, we had a hub and cables. Our turn out wasn’t the highest (I blame the weather) but our spirits were high.

Everyone there was really putting a lot of good effort into doing some quality triage today. Had lots of good questions asked (and answered!) and judging from the stats at the end of the event, we kicked some butt!

(sidenote: I’m not sure what is up with the stats now, because I’m pretty sure the michigan team did not touch over a thousand bugs today).

Be sure to check out the pictures taken by Craig, another Michigan LoCo member, and his blog post about the event: linky.

And speaking of pictures, so far I am the only one to have uploaded pictures to flickr with the tag of “ubuntu-global-bugjam-february-09” as outlined on the GlobalBugJam/Stories page; get your photos up there!

So I just showed up to the Michigan LoCo Global Bug Jam event after making the hour drive through blizzard conditions to get here.

But after figuring out the networking situation (thanks Clinton-Macomb Public Library for the ethernet cable!) we had the first big reward of the day.

A guy walked by our conference room and popped his head in, “Hey, is this a Linux User’s Group?”
Me, “Yeah, pretty much.”
Guy notices I am running Ubuntu, “Is this specific to Ubuntu?”
“Yep, we’re the Michigan Local Community Team for Ubuntu.”
“Oh, cool!”
“Yeah, we doing a Bug Jam right now.”
“Good deal”
Guy walks away to go be with his kids.
A little later he walks back by the conference room with his wife and kids and says “Hey kids, those people in there are who make Ubuntu better. They’re working on the new release, 9.04.”

Wow! That is a reward in and of itself.

First, a review of a neat new tool that provides a cool function for many academics:

GPeerReview is a very simple Open Source tool that lets you write a review of a work, embed a hash of the work in your review, and sign that review with your digital signature (using your GPG key). The last two things are pretty neat. The hash allows you to be sure that people know which version of a paper you reviewed. Or at least, they will know if the version they have matches the version you had. This would be useful in the case where major changes are made to the paper that contradict your review.

Then, signing your review so that the author (and their publisher/advisor/dean/what have you) knows it is actually from you is pretty neat, and an obvious use of gpg. In fact, GPeerReview is essentially just a wrapper around the GnuPG command-line tool (see the FAQ).

I think this is a pretty interesting tool that could have some great uses, especially if we integrate it with the work-flow of academics (somehow). Step one of that implementation would be to move it from the CLI to some sort of Word/OpenOffice.org plugin. Or, even better, would be to provide a web-based service for this.

Crazy Idea
Launchpad for Scholarly Articles and GPeerReview

Going back to my crazy idea of a Launchpad for Scholarly Articles: basically a service that provides users the ability to link published articles, whether open access or not, with pre-prints or author deposited versions in Institutional Repositories. The killer feature of this service would be to provide a way for people who DON’T have access to the expensive scholarly journals a way to read and be informed via the pre-prints written by the authors that are not restricted by the overzealous journal publishers.

Then, add on the ability for readers of those articles to make comments on and provide useful reviews of the material. Even adding this ability to places like arxiv.org would be great; it provides a mechanism to build community. And as we all know, the community is what makes any service an important resource for people. Without community the service is just a collection of tools.

But, I’ll be honest with you, I don’t know all of the various web-based services out there for scholarly communication; maybe someone has already implemented something like this. Leave a comment if you know of anything out there like this.

Of course the Michigan LoCo Team will be participating with the Global Bug Jam, once again.

Here are the details:

• Place: Clinton Macomb Public Library
• Address: 40900 Romeo Plank Road – Clinton Township, MI 48038
• Contact: Craig Maloney
• Hours: 2pm – 6pm
• Non-residents, please be prepared to register for a one-day card. Cost is minimal (under $5)
• Wired ethernet will be available

For more information check out our event page.

Also, see what we did last time: first story on this page.

Be ready for another awesome and rocking bug jam with the Michigan LoCo!