TED Community » Warren Huber

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• A comment on Conversation: If you could open-source one piece of technology, what would you choose and why?

  Jan 18 2012: Yeah... maybe. But you need to have money for materials and tools.
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  A reply on Conversation: If you could open-source one piece of technology, what would you choose and why?

  Jan 18 2012: Redundant efforts are not /necessarily/ bad (within reason), since multiplicities of ideas, viewpoints, and experiences do actually improve the system - part of exactly why open sourceing is so important so that people working in similar veins can learn from each other and flow those experiences to each other faster and freer.
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  A reply on Conversation: If you could open-source one piece of technology, what would you choose and why?

  Jan 18 2012: There is an open source car project or tow out there, but they lack funding (or much in the way of success). They also have an issue of making a vehicle is still pretty expensive, even if you know everything you need to do.
  
  All that being said, hells yes I want to have the knowledge at my fingertips to be able to build my own vehicle!

• A reply on Conversation: If you could open-source one piece of technology, what would you choose and why?

  Jan 18 2012: There are a couple of journals going in that direction that I've seen in my college research (but for pay, of course). Very refreshing and much easier to navigate, read, cite, and use.

• A comment on Conversation: If you could open-source one piece of technology, what would you choose and why?

  Jan 18 2012: How about TED?
  
  I'd like to be able to have more than 3 levels of nested 'reply's in a threaded discussion, for instance...

• A reply on Conversation: If you could open-source one piece of technology, what would you choose and why?

  Jan 18 2012: Has that been invented yet? How would you open source something like that if it doesn't yet exist?
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  A reply on Conversation: If you could open-source one piece of technology, what would you choose and why?

  Jan 18 2012: Those are simply out of copyright, and most of them don't work.

• A reply on Conversation: If you could open-source one piece of technology, what would you choose and why?

  Jan 18 2012: One can argue about the threshold, but the concept is great.

• A reply on Conversation: If you could open-source one piece of technology, what would you choose and why?

  Jan 18 2012: http://www.khanacademy.org/
  
  Open education in progress. They could use some more funding too, however they /did/ just get a large grant ($3Mil, I think) that has made them much more stable going forward.
  
  I love their system too, and so do many classroom teachers who have begun adding time in Khan courses to they grade-school curriculum (like assigning it as homework, having stations in their classrooms and including the students' progress in KA into their grading rubrics....)
  
  (I'm a big supporter of Khan Academy, can you tell?)

• A reply on Conversation: If you could open-source one piece of technology, what would you choose and why?

  Jan 18 2012: When I worked at a small bookstore (now closed - sadness), I frequently went online to Amazon and Google to figure out what book a customer was looking for in order to grab the correct title or ISBN to see if we had it i nthe store.
  
  The kind of database cooperative you're talking about is pretty trivial, to the point of not really needing to be "open sourced" - it's just common knowledge in the computing world. What libraries NEED is to all get together into one interconnected system. (I think Google Books is interested in this kind of cooperation, you should see about talking your library into joining that project and linking your internal catalogue to them.)