A presentation on The Commons Initiative at SF State University. Presented to a visiting group of students from Hilltop High School, Chula Vista, CA

1. The Commons Initiative
at San Francisco State University
http://commons.sfsu.edu
Unless noted otherwise
Sameer Verma, Ph.D.
Professor, Information Systems
College of Business, San Francisco State University
San Francisco, CA 94132 USA
http://verma.sfsu.edu/
sverma@sfsu.eduPresented to:
Hilltop High School
Chula Vista, CA
http://hth.sweetwaterschools.org/

2. 2
SF State University (1899 - present)
• 29,000 + students
• Colleges: Business, Creative Arts, Education,
Ethnic Studies, Health and Human Services,
Humanities, Science and Engineering
• Campus:
O Main Campus: 1600 Holloway Ave. San Francisco
O Downtown Center: 835 Market St., San Francisco
O Romberg Tiburon Center, Tiburon
http://www.sfsu.edu

3. 3
Information Systems
• Data
• Information
• Knowledge
• Information Systems vs Information Technology
• Information Systems Department at SF State
O http://is.sfsu.edu

4. 4
Commons Initiative - Mission
• Two-fold:
O To connect people, so they can communicate their ideas,
and collaborate on projects in the digital commons space at
SF State. (inward)
O To foster an environment where SF State commons can
participate in the commons worldwide. (outward)
http://commons.sfsu.edu

5. 5
Digital Commons
• Free and Open Source Software
• Creative Commons media
• Open Data

6. 6
Two-fold mission
Drupal
at
SF State
Drupal Worldwide
for instance...

7. 7
Did you know...
...that Whitehouse.gov runs on Drupal?

8. 8
Upstream - Downstream
Campus
projects
Worldwide Commons
for instance...
How?

9. 9
Not a committee
A community initiative.
Open to all:
Students, Staff, Faculty

10. 10
Lenses
• Education
O How to bring “commons” into the classroom.
• Technology
O Neat stuff happens on campus. Share!
• Outreach
O Sustained collaboration and participation.

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Advisory Board
Upstream connections

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Alexis Rossi, Internet Archive

13. 13
Alolita Sharma, Wikimedia

14. 14
Asheesh Laroia, Openhatch

15. 15
Brian Behlendorf, Apache

16. 16
Stefano Maffulli, Openstack

17. 17
Tim Vollmer, Creative Commons

18. 18
Projects

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3D Printing
• Length (X), width (Y) and depth (Z)
• Icing on a cake.
O Make a flower from butter and sugar icing.
• Affordable
O Printrbot (http://printrbot.com)
O $500

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OpenData
• Hackathons
O National Day of Civic Hacking (http://hackforchange.org )
• Code for America (http://codeforamerica.org )
• Code for the Caribbean (http://codeforthecaribbean.org )

21. 21
One Laptop per Child
• 8 years of OLPC San Francisco (http://olpcsf.org )
O Hosted at SFSU
O Projects
 Jamaica
 India
 Madagascar

22. 22
Internet-In-A-Box
• http://internet-in-a-box.org
• 1 Terrabyte
O Wikipedia in 37 languages
O 40,000 Books
O All of OpenStreetMap
O All videos of Khan Academy
O All videos of TED Talks

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RACHEL
• http://worldpossible.org
• Similar to Internet-in-a-Box
• 64GB
• Content for schools
• Solar powered!

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HTML5 for Mobile
• HTML5 apps
O Sugarizer (http://sugarizer.org )
O HTML5 apps from OLPC/Sugar project.
O Run as an Android app or directly on the Web!
• Ubuntu mobile
O Apps and Scopes
O HTML5

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Cloud Computing
• OpenStack
• Build your own cloud platforms
• Virtual machines
O http://virtualbox.org/
• Cloud on a laptop (devstack)
O http://docs.openstack.org/developer/devstack/

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Commons Initiative
• http://commons.sfsu.edu
• commons@sfsu.edu
• Sameer Verma (sverma@sfsu.edu)