Phil Shapiro

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Creating Affordable Solutions with Open Source Tools

Open source is often the heart of many civic technology solutions because using open source leverages the minds of many. Small web solution providers, in particular, often turn to open source as a way to deliver services without having to reinvent the wheel. I recently found out about Digital Deployment, a civic web solution provider in Sacramento, that leverages open source, and so I asked them to share their story with me. I chatted on the phone with Chief Operating Officer Sloane Dell'Orto and Lead Software Engineer Dennis Stevense...

Does Open Source Boost Mental Health?

Open source is as much a philosophy of living as it is a method of creating software. Part of this philosophy is that everything designed by the human mind is improvable. This is a hopeful philosophy and in some cases an intoxicatingly hopeful philosophy. Open source practitioners spend no time worrying about what cannot be done. All of their mental energies attune to what can be done. If you love open source, you live in a constant state of wondering. You delight in the fact that you need not worry about the barriers between what you hope can be built and what can actually be built. Read More »

When Linux Is the Face of Kindness

My late father, Lou Shapiro, was an early leader of UNICEF, so relief work was baked into the genetics of my family. His work was centered on emergency relief for the survivors of earthquakes and other natural disasters. Whenever there was an earthquake in the world, I knew dad would be coming home late from work—and I was so proud that some family experiencing trauma would be sleeping in a dry tent, with warm blankets and clean water, because of my dad's work...

Why Public Libraries Need to Support Open Source

People turn to public libraries for answers, and a lot of times libraries are superb at providing them. But when it comes to providing answers about open source, libraries have an uneven track record. What can we do to make this better so that more people can turn to their public library to learn about open source software, hardware, and principles? Right now, if you walked into my public library and pelted me with questions about open source—like, "What is it?" "How does it work?" "How can I use open source?"—I'd rattle off answers so fast you'd be walking out with a new tool or technology under your belt. Open source is a big world, so of course there are some things I don't know, but guess what?...