Weblogs
- Copyrighteous: My personal weblog. It's a combination of short reflections (often humorous) and essays that tend to focus on issues of free software, copyright, and issues of free culture and knowledge.
- Revealing Errors: A weblog where I try to reveal the power and influcence that technology has on our lives by unpacking and analysizing errors that reveal the frequently hidden technological systems around us.
Organizations and Affiliations
- MIT Media Lab: I am currently working as a researcher in the Media Lab's Electronic Publishing and Computing Culture research groups.
- Free Software Foundation: In addition to being an Associate Member, I am a member of the FSF's Board of Directors. I plan to be closely involved in a series of FSF projects in the future in this role. You can support my work at the foundation, and support the free software movement itself, by becoming an Associate Member yourself.
- One Laptop per Child: Building off my work at the Media Lab, I play a primarily advisory role with the One Laptop per Child project. I help out with issues of software freedom, software licensing, and maintaining the "hackability" of the system. I am also working on joint work between OLPC and the exploring both synchronous and asynchronous forms of collaborative writing.
- The Debian GNU/Linux Project: I serve on the Project
Leader Team (AKA Project Scud), act as the Hardware Donations Manager (AKA
Project Quartermaster
) and Accountant tracking and managing funds and hardware internationally. Additionally, I maintain the following Debian packages:- libtemplate-perl (Template Toolkit) - a popular and powerful templating system written in perl especially well-suited to dynamic and static web content
- libtemplate-perl-doc - extensive HTML documentation for libtemplate-perl
- most - a pager (like less or more) written with s-lang
- mairix - a powerful and popular mail search tool
- aub - a program to assemble USENET binaries
- Ubuntu: I serve on Ubuntu's Community Council governance board and help direct the Ubuntu Foundation. I am involved in issues related community, policy and governance and technical issues of internationalization, language support, and non-Latin text rendering and input. During the Ubuntu project's first year, I worked for Canonical Ltd. doing Free Software activism and advocacy and helping build user and developer communities around the distribution.
- Software Freedom International: I serve on the board of directors for SFI which organizers Software Freedom Day and coordinates other free and open source software advocacy.
- ACM Professionals Board: I serve on a new board within ACM and coordinated by Steve Bourne that aims to help ACM appeal more to computing professionals outside of the academy.
- The Yukidoke Project: I founded this small non-profit project devoted to providing free resources to projects for free software advocacy and development.
- Yukidoke Consulting: A small consulting company I founded that offers services involving Free and Open Source software project management, release coordination, development, training and more.
- Wikimedia/Wikipedia: I am an active contributor to
several Wikimedia projects where I add content and edit frequently. I am not an administrator for any
Wikimedia projects. These include:
- Wikimedia Foundation: I am proud to serve on the advisory board for the Wikimedia Foundation, the non-profit organization that supports Wikipedia and other Wikimedia projects, with a number of other distinguished individuals.
- Wikipedia (English): I primarily edit articles
on free software, intellectual property, and a whole series of other articles of interest to me.
Links: My User Page | My Contributions - Wikiversity (English): I have contributed to
Wikiversity primarily through the creation of an extensive curriculum about software freedom.
Links: My User Page | Contributions | Software Freedom Curriculum - Wikimania 2006: To a small degree, I helped assist in the organization of Wikimania 2006 in Cambridge Massachusetts. I helped out the program committee for the conference and assisted with Wikimania Hacking Days.
- Software In the Public Interest: SPI is a non-profit organization which was founded to help organizations develop and distribute open hardware and software. Debian, OFTC, PostgresSQL and a number of others are SPI member projects. I am a contributing member of SPI and active on the organization's trademark committee. I served three years (2003-2006) as an elected member of the SPI board of directors and more than a year as the organization's Vice President. I recently decided to take a break from the board.
- Debian-NP (Debian-NonProfit): A (now mostly dormant) custom Debian distribution geared to fill the needs of small nonprofit organizations in a variety of areas. I helped found and lead the project.
- Linux User Groups: I have founded and helped lead a number of Linux User Groups as
I have moved around. For the most part, I have stayed active in these groups even after I've moved away.
- Debian NYC: A community and a mailing list that organizes social meetings, keysignings, lectures, and bug squashes for the Debian developer and user communities in New York City. I founded the group.
- Debian Seattle: A community and a mailing list with goals identical the Debian-NYC but based in Seattle, WA. I founded the group.
- Debian Boston: A community and a mailing list with goals identical the Debian-NYC but based in Cambridge and Boston, MA. I revived the group after a period of dormancy.
- The Five College Linux User Group: I am a founder and member.
Free Software Development Projects
The vast majority of my free software works is contributions to large projects like Debian and Ubuntu. However, I have started several free software projects of my own. I currently maintain the following pieces of software (in alphabetical order):
- AttachCheck: a small application that reminds you when you intend to include an attachment with an email but forget. (latest version: 0.1)
- The Free Software Project Management HOWTO: The Linux Documentation Project's guide to managing a free software project (latest version: v0.3.2)
- PyBlosxom Hacks and Plugins: I didn't write the weblog system PyBlosxom but I use it for copyrighteous and I've done quite a bit of work on the software. I've written and maintain several patches, plugins, and improvements to PyBlosxom — all of which have their permanent home on this project page.
- RubyVote: RubyVote is an election methods library implemented in Ruby. It is designed to make it very easy to implement a variety of different types of elections in Ruby including relatively complex election methods like Condorcet. It could be useful for any sort of election, poll, or decision making. (latest version: 0.1)
- Miscellaneous Scripts and Configuration Files: This page contains a collection of smaller scripts (most of them associated with GPG, encryption, or keysigning parties) and a handful of configuration files that I am asked for frequently and so which I've decided to just put online.
I have also written many other pieces of software. Please see my my list of old, unmaintained, and deprecated software for applications that I have written but no longer maintain. I no longer use this software but in many cases, many other people do. I am happy to transfer responsibility for software on this page to anyone that is interested in taking it.
Art and Activism Projects
- Art, Activism and Other Fun Page with information and links on some of the recent fun projects I've taken on.
- Overprice Tags:For National Day of Action for Open Access, I
took a page from the Seeing Red project
at Brown University and labeled MIT's 100 journals that cost more than $5,000 USD with price tags to
highlight the skyrocketing cost of journals and some of the very bad deals that these prices translate into
for research institution like MIT and for the public.
Available: Webpage - Mathematically Constrained Wedding Vows: When Mika Matsuzaki and I were married, Mika had the idea to write
our wedding vows using a mathematical constraint. Other than the constraint, they are normal vows. You
can read the vows, and read about then, on the page on the vows in the page on the vows in our wedding
wiki.
Available: Wiki Webpage
Books
I have written and published two books to date. Both were co-authored and technical in nature. You can find them here:
- The Official Ubuntu Book (1st ed. 2006, 2nd ed. 2007): I am the first author of
both editions of the best-selling Official Ubuntu book co-written with Jono Bacon and many other
contributors from the Ubuntu community. Parts of the book are distributed on official ubuntu CDs and the book is
released and distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Sharealike license which allows for royalty-free
copying, distribution, and modification. The book is published by Pearson's Publishing and is currently being
translated into several languages.
Second Edition Book: Amazon | Complete List of Sources
First Edition Book: Complete List of Sources
Translations: German | Spanish | Japanese - Debian GNU/Linux 3.x Bible (2005): I am the first author of a book
co-written with David Harris and Jaldhar Vyas and with the help list of other contributors and editors
from the Debian community. The book is geared primarily at beginners and helps introduce Debian's
sarge distribution with information on running software on the desktop, on a server and geared
either toward an Internet or intranet environment. The book has been translated into several languages.
Find/Buy Books: Complete List of Sources
Publisher's Info Page: Link
Recent Publications and Essays
My Writing Projects Page contains a full list of the projects I've posted on the web.
- Revealing Errors: This article makes the case for increased attention to and
analysis of errors in humanist studies and by technology activists. It describes how errors can reveal
invisible technologies and gives a number of examples. I used the publication of this piece to launch the Revealing Errors weblog. The piece was the featured article in the issue on errors of the Media/Culture Journal edited by Mark Nunes.
Published Online: link - Free Culture Advanced: A short article published in the FSF Members bulletin making
a call for a free culture movement that parallels the free software movement. (Summer 2007)
Republished here: HTML | PDF | LaTeX Source
Recent Talks
My Talks and Presentations Page contains a more complete list of my talks, presentations, and speaking engagements.
- Cooperation in Parallel: Lessons from Ubuntu and Debian (2007-11-26) This
talk revisited (and was closely based on) my To Fork or Not To Fork lecture given several times in
2005. The talk was given in Kiberpipa in Ljubljana, Slovenia.
Slides: PDF | ODP Source
Talk Notes: HTML | ReST - Hacker Culture (2007-11-20) I worked with my friends from mi2 in Zagreb, Croatia to give a talk on a panel discussing hacker culture and geared toward a general audience. The panel was framed by the System.hack() — an exhibition that mi2 was traveling with and presenting throughout the Balkans and which I helped write material for. On the panel, I talked about why hacking (both the transgressive and wholly constructive forms) is essential to society and to non-hackers. The talk was delivered at CK13 in Novi Sad, Serbia. In addition to several lengthy media interviews, I gave a redux of the panel and talk given at CK13 at the television station B92's Cinema Rex in Belgrade, Serbia.
Other Webpages
- Wikipedia User Page: My "user page" is similar to a homepage but it's in more flux (it's a wiki after all) and tends to focus on items that are interesting to me in Wikipedia.
- My Kuro5hin diary which is lots of short little descriptions of ideas I have. It's a lot less serious, useful (and hopefully) boring than the site you're reading right now. (no longer updated)
- My Advogato Page where I keep a (very infrequently updated) diary of my work on free software projects. (no longer updated)
- GPG Keys for use in secure communication with me.
Contact Information
Email:mako@atdot.ccVisit my contact information page for information on how to reach me via the following methods:
- snailmail
- phone
- IRC
- instant messaging (several flavors)