Building open communities and useful, usable tech for good.
Ever since my partner and I bought a house several years ago, I’ve wanted to throw a themed Star Wars party here. We’ve talked about doing a summer movie showing thing, we’ve talked about doing a Star Wars TV show marathon, and we’ve done a few birthday parties—but never the full-on themed party that I was dreaming up. Until this year! For some reason, a combination of rearranging some of our…
A few months ago I joined ROOST (Robust Open Online Safety Tools) to build our open source community that would be helping to create, distribute, and maintain common tools and building blocks for online trust and safety. One of the first events I wanted to make sure we attended in order to build that community was of course FOSDEM , the massive annual gathering of open source folks in Brussels,…
This past year has been an exceptional one for GNOME. The project released two excellent releases on schedule with GNOME 48 in March and GNOME 49 in September. Contributors have been relentless in delivering a set of new and improved default apps, constant performance improvements across the board benefitting everyone (but especially lower-specced hardware), a better experience on high end…
A couple of months ago I shared that I was looking for what was next for me, and I’m thrilled to report that I’ve found it: I’m joining ROOST as OSS Community Manager! What is ROOST? I’ll let our website do most of the talking, but I can add some context based on my conversations with the rest of the incredible ROOSTers over the past few weeks. In a nutshell, ROOST is a relatively new nonprofit…
For the past three and a half years, I’ve done the most rewarding work of my life with Endless Access (formerly Endless OS Foundation). I’ve helped ship Endless OS on computers to tens of thousands of people in need around the globe—people who might not otherwise have access to a real computer and especially reliable access to all of the offline knowledge and tools that come out of the box. I’ve…
It’s everyone’s favorite time of year, election season! …Okay, maybe not the most exciting thing—but an extremely important one nonetheless. For anyone who doesn’t know, GNOME is comprised of many parts: individual contributors and maintainers, adhoc teams of volunteers, a bunch of open source software in the form of apps and libraries, a whole bunch of infrastructure, and—importantly—a nonprofit…
Update: Thanks for all of the feedback and discussion on Mastodon and Matrix! I’ve revised this post a bit with some more nuance and context based on feedback. I apologize if my writing style was divisive; I wrote the first draft of this post pretty hastily based on some frustrating conversations and wanted to get all my thoughts out into one place rather than retreading the same thoughts in…
If you follow me on the fediverse ( @cassidy@blaede.family ), you may have seen me recently gushing about ROTA , a video game I recently discovered. Besides the absolutely charming design and ridiculously satisfying gameplay, the game itself is open source , meaning the developer has published the game’s underlying code out to the world for anyone to see, learn from, and adapt. As someone…
This week Threads announced it is rolling out wider support for connecting with “the fediverse,” and it’s a no-brainer to opt in to this feature if you’re on Threads. What is the fediverse? The fediverse, sometimes referred to as “the open social web,” is a network of individual social networks that interoperate with one another using open standards. This includes social networks like Mastodon ,…
It seems like every few months my work Dell XPS 13 just… dies. Or at least, it seems like it for a few minutes, making me panic about being able to do my work and wondering about backups. And then I remember that it just likes to play dead for no reason—maybe I recently did a BIOS update, maybe I had to open its chassis for some reason (like a jittery trackpad… another blog post I need to write),…