Do stuff with and for your neighbors
Introductions
I figured it might be nice to introduce ourselves and talk a little about some of the stuff we work on.
I'm Matt. I'm pretty new to JP, and I'm a giant nerd. Computers and technology are at the heart of everything I do, and magically, I get paid for some of them.
- Free Software Foundation — this is my day job. Here I'm a campaigns manager, which is a mixture of technical and activism work. I also run and maintain the FSF websites for our various campaigns and generally oversee the website for the organization.
- GNU operating system — this is the original reason the FSF was set up, and I'm very proud to be a contributor to this project. GNU is both a general ethos of computer user freedom, and a series of software that makes up a complete operating system. Today, millions of computer users have been liberated by using GNU, usually in conjunction with a program called Linux. In 2008, to celebrate 25 years of GNU, I wrote and produced a short movie about software freedom with Stephen Fry, the British comedian and author.
- GNU social and GNU FM — these are my two projects in GNU. GNU social aims to be a social network, much like Facebook or MySpace. Right now, we're roughly on par with Twitter in terms of functionality. The big difference between GNU socal and Twitter, is that you can run your own GNU social server and communicate with people across other servers, so it works much more email where people have different email providers, and much less like AOL where everyone does not. GNU FM is a piece of software you can use to run a music community website. At some point, I'd like to make a music community for JP residents using GNU FM, but until then, you can check out Libre.fm — home to the world's largest collection of free music — music you can download, share and remix legally.
Away from all that, I have a cool small business of my own, publishing small books and making fun little records with some of my friends and worry about the lack of the E line.
Replies to This Discussion
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Permalink Reply by Joseph Porcelli (Chief Neighbor) on
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Hey Matt, thanks for the great intro. You've done some very cool and important work.
I'm also consider myself a geek but don't think I really deserve to be called one.
I first got my geek on in the early 2000's when I was an ACT! Certified Contact Management consultant. That counts right?
In 2006, I built my first blog when I worked a BPD as a community organizer. In 2007/2008 with help of Jon Rivers, customized this Ning network to make this site what it is today. For work, I'm a community engagement strategist. I recently blogged about the story of my career on JosephPorcelli.com.
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Permalink Reply by Matt Lee on
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I really like what you've done here with N4N. I only found out about it a few days ago, but I'm already getting people I know in the neighborhood to sign up.
It's good that you make yourself find time to blog. I seem to spend less and less time doing that lately :(
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Permalink Reply by Michael Hoy on
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Hi folks --
I can’t say I’m really a geek (yet) though much of geekdom fascinates me. I’ve only very recently become interested in programming languages and website development. Right now I’m doing some small-ish freelance work (Drupal websites), and also working with a graphic designer who’s from the print era and needs help doing web stuff.
One geeky thing I seem to enjoy is reading programming books, perhaps because I never took a real computer science class in college. I’d love to have some recommendations. If anyone would like to borrow from my nascent library, I wrote a little web app to list my books here: http://bookdir.heroku.com/users/mjhoy
Joseph -- thanks for setting this site up! I’ve only just joined, but it looks to be quite a good resource.
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You are welcome, and thanks for introducing yourself!
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