I volunteer at a club that runs a technical museum, providing an open laboratory for school children. It offers them the chance to repeat some fundamental physics experiments that are crucial to our world view. We're using mostly Free Software, but there are some niches where we have to rely on non-free stuff. I have noticed that using some proprietary commercial tools, we are able to work far better and easier than when using their free counterparts.
What would you suggest to do in such a case? Do you think it's better to compromise on freedom and work more efficiently, thus providing a more interesting experience to our visitors, or to divert our (very, very limited) funds and manpower to improving the Free Software tools out there, thus neglecting our core mission but ultimately benefiting a different community?
At the last Chaos Communication Congress, Helga Velroyen discussed this and other topics around hearing aid evolution. You can find her talk at ftp://ftp.ccc.de/congress/2011/mp4-h264-HQ/28c3-4669-en-bionic_ears_h264.mp4 and a corresponding blog project at http://blog.hackandhear.com/ . While I do not have to rely on hearing aids and thus have not looked very deeply into her activities, I get the impression that she is one of the most knowledgeable persons regarding this topic in the European hacker scene.
As a volunteer for the club that restored Germany's first radio telescope (see http://astropeiler.de/ ), I am certainly quite biased, but I think that technical, hands-on museums would also be a good target. Check your area for volunteer-run astronomical observatories, open electronics labs, private physics labs... essentially places that are open to everyone interested in science, give people a hands-on experience with old (or current) technology and where everyone can repeat important experiments that shape our world-view. For example, we offer everyone the chance to repeat the measurements by Oort et al. from 1958 that show that the Milky Way has a spiral structure, and hope to support and promote an evidence-based world view by doing so. (And, besides, it's just great fun to operate your own radio telescope!)
For all the non-hams reading this, it should be pointed out that SSTV transmits images based on the same technical principles as television, but that it's not video. The transmission of a single "frame" takes several dozen seconds.
This has several advantages, however. The greatest is probably that the requirements for signal quality and receiving equipment are much lower than for TV, meaning that anyone interested will be able to pick up those images with relatively little tech on the ground.
Why indeed. I always feel that publishing content on those mass-audience sites with bad signal-to-noise ratios was not adequate for "better" articles / videos / soundbites that took a lot of work.
It's the same with Knol, somehow: If I invest the time and effort that is needed for a good article, why shouldn't I put it on my own website where it's more obviously linked to my person? Wikipedia allows anonymous edits, so you could at least do something for your ego and say "ok, I'm feeling generous today, I'll give those 14 pages to the community and won't take credit for it". I still wonder where Knol fits in...
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I volunteer at a club that runs a technical museum, providing an open laboratory for school children. It offers them the chance to repeat some fundamental physics experiments that are crucial to our world view. We're using mostly Free Software, but there are some niches where we have to rely on non-free stuff. I have noticed that using some proprietary commercial tools, we are able to work far better and easier than when using their free counterparts.
What would you suggest to do in such a case? Do you think it's better to compromise on freedom and work more efficiently, thus providing a more interesting experience to our visitors, or to divert our (very, very limited) funds and manpower to improving the Free Software tools out there, thus neglecting our core mission but ultimately benefiting a different community?
At the last Chaos Communication Congress, Helga Velroyen discussed this and other topics around hearing aid evolution. You can find her talk at ftp://ftp.ccc.de/congress/2011/mp4-h264-HQ/28c3-4669-en-bionic_ears_h264.mp4 and a corresponding blog project at http://blog.hackandhear.com/ . While I do not have to rely on hearing aids and thus have not looked very deeply into her activities, I get the impression that she is one of the most knowledgeable persons regarding this topic in the European hacker scene.
As a volunteer for the club that restored Germany's first radio telescope (see http://astropeiler.de/ ), I am certainly quite biased, but I think that technical, hands-on museums would also be a good target. Check your area for volunteer-run astronomical observatories, open electronics labs, private physics labs... essentially places that are open to everyone interested in science, give people a hands-on experience with old (or current) technology and where everyone can repeat important experiments that shape our world-view. For example, we offer everyone the chance to repeat the measurements by Oort et al. from 1958 that show that the Milky Way has a spiral structure, and hope to support and promote an evidence-based world view by doing so. (And, besides, it's just great fun to operate your own radio telescope!)
For all the non-hams reading this, it should be pointed out that SSTV transmits images based on the same technical principles as television, but that it's not video. The transmission of a single "frame" takes several dozen seconds. This has several advantages, however. The greatest is probably that the requirements for signal quality and receiving equipment are much lower than for TV, meaning that anyone interested will be able to pick up those images with relatively little tech on the ground.
Why indeed. I always feel that publishing content on those mass-audience sites with bad signal-to-noise ratios was not adequate for "better" articles / videos / soundbites that took a lot of work. It's the same with Knol, somehow: If I invest the time and effort that is needed for a good article, why shouldn't I put it on my own website where it's more obviously linked to my person? Wikipedia allows anonymous edits, so you could at least do something for your ego and say "ok, I'm feeling generous today, I'll give those 14 pages to the community and won't take credit for it". I still wonder where Knol fits in...