When I have the time one of my favourite things to do is be involved with and contribute to Open Source and community projects. I'm not much of a programmer so typically my involvement revolves around finding and reporting bugs, making usability and feature suggestions, writing documentation and participating in the support forums to answer questions.
Current Projects
Shmoo Group
The Shmoo Group is a non-profit think-tank comprised of security professionals from around the world who donate their free time and energy to information security research and development.
In addition to all of our internal projects, (ShmooCon, AirSnort, Rainbow Tables to name a few), our work extends into some of the most widely used infosec software (and books!) around. From Lord of the Rings, to Mixmaster, to Apache, to PGP, to Snort, to OpenSSL, to StackGuard/FormatGuard ... the list goes on and on. Oh, and sometimes you can catch us teaching, preaching, and expounding various topics we find interesting at conferences around the planet.
Wireless Commons
The Wireless Commons was an idea inspired by Lawrence Lessig and his dreams of revitalising and reclaiming the commons from the corporations. We took his ideas and applied them to the ideals of community wireless and came up with a manifesto and a definition to reframe the discussion surrounding community wireless. The manifesto was signed by over 240 people and resonated around the blogosphere for a few days. Despite the fact that it never gained the traction that I had hoped for, it remained a powerful exercise and I'm still very proud of what we created. It was translated into several languages including German and Indian and republished in many different publications all over the world. Personal Telco still uses it as one of their promotional tri-folds. Originally it was hosted at wirelesscommons.org, but the domain has since lapsed and fallen into disuse.
WordUp
WordUp is the mailing list I've been running since 2001. It's basically a forum for me to share anything I think is particularly interesting with subscribers. My primary interests are the politics of computer freedom and privacy, patent and copyright law, freedom, and the random and bizarre. A couple of years ago I got kind of sick of all the bad news that I had to share and have been trying to focus more on things with a positive slant. This combined with increasing responsibilities at work has sadly reduced the frequency of posts down from one a day to more like one a week, but hopefully it is still providing interesting content to everyone that is involved.
I've been thinking about converting the mailing list over to a blog for a couple of years and have finally got around to it. You can still receive posts via email by subscribing to the old mailing list and access the archive of previous posts.
All suggestions and criticisms are gratefully received and can either be mailed to me directly or left as comments to the relevant post.
Software Projects
I've been a Unix system administrator for the majority of my career and have spend a huge portion of that time working with Open Source projects. Some of my current favourites are Debian and Ubuntu, ikiwiki and Mercurial.
Past Projects
Free Networks
Free Networks initially was an informal cooperative collective of the early community wireless organizations on the west coast of the United States of which I, and Personal Telco, was one of the original members. From those beginnings it rapidly grew into trying to help organise and represent community wireless groups all over North America and the world.
Personal Telco Project
Personal Telco is a community based nonprofit organisation with the eventual goal of building a free and open metropolitan area wireless network in Portland, Oregon. I created Personal Telco with the help and support of many volunteers and saw it grow from its grassroots to a federally tax exempt nonprofit which support over a hundred free internet hotspots. My time there was the most rewarding, most inspiring and most frustrating period of my life, I learned an incredible amount and encountered a ridiculous amount of kindness during my stay that it still baffles me when I recall it all.
Stragophy
The term stragophy (strag for short) was coined by my friend Craig after a long discussion between the two of us on the odd culture of sending strange and often lascivious content via email to peers in your office. The thing that struck us was that somehow email made it socially acceptable for people to send material which would otherwise have been completely inappropriate in the workplace.
After a late night (and probably some beer) we decided to start a mailing list to officially spread the use of the term and have a bit of fun sending out the bizarre and random photos and movies that other people subjected us to.
Eventually I closed the list down because I had plumbed as deep as I cared to into the depths of the internet's underbelly and really didn't need to see anything more. Honestly, I'm still a little scarred from the whole experience.