Open Source

There are conferences, and then there is OggCamp. For two days in Manchester I sat in rooms full of people considerably cleverer than me, had conversations that will fuel months of work, joined the Open Rights Group, gave away a few Heltecs to strangers, and came home with an alarming number of new Raspberry Pi projects. This is the story of my third pilgrimage to this awesome gathering, but more importantly, my first real gathering of high order geeks since the infamous year of 2020.

A blog post about Paulo Freire, the banking model of education, and why No Worries IT does things differently. 

Your software bill is a choice, not a fact of life. We've migrated hundreds of users off costly proprietary licences, repurposed laptops the council had written off, and built community computing infrastructure for next to nothing — all on open source. Here's what's possible when you stop paying the rent.

From handloom weavers to the Linux kernel, the story of open source is older than the internet. We trace the parallel between the historic enclosure of the commons and today's corporate capture of the digital world — and ask who really controls the fences in your technology stack.

There's a particular kind of person who walks into a Heritage Hackers dropin session for the first time. They've usually been talked into it by someone. They're not sure it's really for them. They sit down quietly, watch what everyone else is doing, and say something like "I'm not very technical."

That was Paul Owen, not so very long ago.

Your data isn't really yours — not while it lives on someone else's servers, governed by terms nobody reads and monetised in ways nobody admits. But the open source movement has spent decades building the alternatives: from encrypted email and self-hosted file storage, to open food data, open hardware, and community mesh networks built by and for the people who use them. This is what digital sovereignty looks like — and once you start pulling that thread, there's no going back.

Digital inclusion is important. But are we really empowering people — or just plugging them into the matrix and calling it a win? Paul Woodhead makes the case for genuine adult retraining, and asks whether Rochdale could be the next Silicon Roundabout.