[Freedombox-discuss] Joining the Community, Leaving the Cloud

[Jerad Bitner]

Hi all! Starting to get intrigued with this project and would love to
help where needed. I've been an OSS contributor to the Drupal project
for around 5 years now and have some experience in cat herding that
could possibly help out here. I know it certainly seems like getting
info organized in order to help people understand actually *how* to
contribute seems like it would be a good area to start. Especially
since that is what I'm trying to do right now, so as I figure that out
I can at least write down my experience and hopefully that will help
others. If anyone has advice on this, I'm all ears!

But I also wanted to mention where my interests lay.

http://wiki.debian.org/FreedomBox/LeavingTheCloud has a great list of
popular cloud services and their OS alternatives, but what I've yet to
see discussion of (and I'm still searching through mail archives, so I
apologize if perhaps this *has* been discussed already) is the very
important first step in getting all of your personal files, contacts
and other info *out* of those services first so that they can then be
put into the alternative systems.

While I was researching FBx stuff, I also, rather fortuitously, came
across this article posted by a coworker:
http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/look_out_future_ubuntu_cto_matt_zimmerman_joins_lo.php

It talks about Singly and the LockerProject which goals align quite
well with FBx's I think and would be great for accomplishing that
first step of actually obtaining all of your own data from these
social networks such as Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, etc. Part of (I
think) FBx's initiative then, would be to create the connectors that
could take all of the data gleaned by Locker and then import to
whatever OS alternative is chosen for inclusion into FBx.

Anyway, these are just some of my initial thoughts... glad to have
found this project and I look forward to interacting with you all!

-- 
~Jerad Bitner
Lead Developer and Drupal Trainer at Lullabot
www.lullabot.com
lb.cm/sirkitree

P.S. I used FBx for FreedomBox instead of FB (which I've seen used in
a couple other messages) because I've seen FB used for Facebook many,
many times and was confused at first. FBx is a nice distinguisher in
this context I think. Sorry if it rubbed anyone the wrong way.