This week I had the pleasure of attending All Things Open, which is always a restorative, inspiring experience for me! I love meeting the people, and my favorite thing of all is to learn how others are innovating with Open Source. It is the main reason I use Open Source and a cause I heartily believe in. I often wish that I was doing more good with my open source skills and All Things Open shows me ways that I can help!
My favorite talk last year was by Charlie Reisinger at Penn Manor talking about the Open Source classroom. He told us about how they had open sourced their classrooms at the local hospital and given a Linux-powered laptop to every student. Students and Faculty worked on the Linux environments that were necessary after consulting with teachers about what their needs might be and including those tools in the software package. Laptops backed up remotely to prevent data loss, and the students were given root level access to make changes as they saw fit. In addition to all of this, students were the driving force of the help desk. They supported fellow students and were free to learn and innovate. This program was a huge source of pride and accomplishment for everyone involved!