Mr. Salzberg (Photo: Darren McCarra via Sociable.co)

Earlier this month, Diaspora cofounder Max Salzberg told Betabeat that the team would turn away from the highly-anticipated, but daunting enterprise of building the anti-Facebook and instead devote its "main focus" towards Makr.io: a photo remixing tool that makes sharing and creating image macros more social. (All your memes are belong to friends, etc.)

It sounded an awful lot like the dreaded p-word to us, but Mr. Salzberg framed it as a natural evolution for an open source project. To that end, the team, which is working on Makr as part of Y Combinator's current class, posted a message entitled, "Announcement: Diaspora* Will Now Be A Community Project," on the company's blog today.

On the phone with Betabeat this afternoon, Mr. Salzberg compared Diaspora to Wordpress or Mozilla. "Lots of open source projects are community run," he explained, referencing two incredibly successful standouts. "Some people are like, 'Oh, you're leaving?' But that's not it at all. We can have side projects."

Devoting the majority of your time to another venture sounds like more than just a side project, but Mr. Salzberg insisted that "It's like people in bands can have multiple bands. [Diaspora is] something I did and I'm really proud of it. It's bigger than just me. We're never going to stop making cool stuff, we're not really a one trick pony."

In fact, Mr. Salzberg framed handing over the keys to Diaspora's Pivotal Tracker as a sign of the initiative's progress. "It speaks to the maturity of the project and that there are stakeholders other than the two guys who started it. Thousands of people love and use Diaspora everyday so the community needs to have some decision making power itself."

Mr. Salzberg said he wasn't sure exactly how many people were using Diaspora. "I don't actually know because there are thousands of installations around the world," he said. "People can run it and I'm not sure what they're doing to it."

Now that's it opened up to the community, he added, they can be in charge of things like feature development and launching fellowships. "This is how noncommercial open source projects work," he argued, adding that "Diaspora will probably have some foundation that's the steward of the code."

"It was never supposed to be a startup or something," said Mr. Salzberg. Despite once telling New York magazine that the attention from the early success of its Kickstarter project "almost paralyzed us,” he told Betabeat that the team was "just sort of doing something for fun."

Would a leaderless community be able to put in place the kind of governance structure an open source project needs? "I don't think we're going away, but there's never been a third seat to the community," Mr. Salzberg said.

Here's how Mr. Salzberg and his cofounder Daniel Grippi described it on the Diaspora blog (emphasis theirs):

Today, we are giving control of Diaspora to the community.

As a Free Software social project, we have an obligation to take this project further, for the good of the community that revolves around it. Putting the decisions for the project’s future in the hands of the community is one of the highest benefits of any FOSS project, and we’d like to bring this benefit to our users and developers. We still will remain as an important part this community as the founders, but we want to make sure we are including all of the people who care about Diaspora and want to see it succeed well into the future.

If you look around, you’ll see that we’ve made an effort to open up to the community more to help better serve it. We’ve opened up our Pivotal Tracker for community developers help join in (You can sign up here), we’ve launched a tool that deploys one-click installations to the Heroku app hosting service, and we’ve updated joindiaspora.com to be more community-centric, showcasing other pods a user can join.

(Photo: YouTube)

How about a little propaganda controversy for your Monday morning? A clip from the Disney kids' sitcom Shake It Up is making the rounds on social news sites this morning, with some claiming that the writers of the show are purposefully spreading "fear, uncertainty and doubt" about the integrity of open source code. Scandal, you guys.

"Did you use open source code to save time and the virus was hidden in it?" asks a bespectacled Bill Gates-child clone in the clip. (Computers: only for the argyle-sweater-wearing among us.) "Rookie mistake."

Discrediting the open source community by claiming code taken from it is especially prone to viruses? The Internet will not stand for that.

But why would Disney want kids to think that open source is evil? The hope that they'll grow up believing in patents and copyright and thus not illegally download episodes of Shake It Up seems like a rather tenuous argument.

More than likely, the writers of the show just had no idea what "open source" actually means. It's a buzzword that, when uttered by a nerdy-looking little kid, sounds like believable computer speak. Wouldn't be the first time TV show writers bungled larger academic concepts.

Of course, as The Register points out, "Freetards are, at the time of writing, yet to erupt in protest, but that can't be far off."

Too cute. (Via: Littlebits.com)

Local maker-minded startup LittleBits just announced a $3.65 million Series A, led by True Ventures. Also participating were Khosla Ventures, O’Reilly AlphaTech Ventures and Lerer Ventures.

Founder (and MIT Media Lab alum, and TED speaker) Ayah Bdeir told Betabeat that the round will help the company to--pardon the expression--kick it up a notch. "The first phase was really sort of a proof of concept," she said. The response did not disappoint: LittleBits sold better than expected, "so that we actually now know it's time to press the peddle."

The company describes itself as "an open source library of electronic modules that snap together with tiny magnants for prototyping and play." And what does that mean, precisely? Think wired Erector Sets.

The namesake "little bits" are small modules that snap together to create larger projects, like this car that goes when hit with a light or this "fire-breathing" Komodo dragon. The projects do not require a PhD in electrical engineering and are simple enough that a kid can assemble one without driving herself (or her parents) to distraction.

And those kids are exactly where LittleBits sees its biggest opportunity. While "open source" and "electronic modules" might trigger visions of enthusiastic geeks, Ms. Bdeir said that 60 to 70 percent of their sales are individuals who are "outside the circle."  "They're not hobbyists. They're not geeks. They're not engineers," she told us. Hence she's looking to education and educational toys as their largest potential market, and she's already pushing hard on why LittleBits is better than whatever throwaway tchotchke becomes this year's must-have:

"The toy market is a very large market, but the toy market unfortunately has been really sort of dominated by companies that are more interested in selling plastic toys that break than things that are of value."

That's where the open-source aspect comes in. Ms. Bdeir explained the approach is rooted in a desire to "make the very individual bricks of electronics available, accessible and allow them to be creative tools," with the aim of creating a relationship to technology that's "very symbiotic and very creative."Considering it's practically impossible to so much as change a carburetor any more, that goal seems both noble and much easier said than done.

And then there's the matter of scaling. Asked about how the company's growth changes the open source element, Ms. Bdeir told us, "It changes in a good way." Without elaborating, however, she shifted gears into the challenges such an approach presents.

"When you say you're open source, the number of investors that are interested starts to shrink." But the VCs that ultimately signed on "got involved because they believe in the mission. It wasn't an afterthought," she added.

It sounds like the number of orders really did catch the team by surprise. Ms. Bdeir also emphasized that LittleBits is "ramping up our production to really meet demand, demand which we really didn't expect so fast." To that end, company is handing over production to supply chain management company PCH International, while the LittleBits team will be focus on product design, marketing, and so forth.

With a Series A in the bank, Ms. Bdeir told us, the company can begin building out its product line, with new modules and kits already in the works. LittleBits will also be expanding its "really small" team of eight people with hires in education, sales and distribution, engineering--"really every facet," Ms. Bdeir said.

The Internet Committee's work space at Occupy Wall Street

This is a guest post from Melissa Gira Grant.

***

“Hi, everyone. I’m Drew. With the Internet.”

It’s midway through the General Assembly down at Occupy Wall Street. Radiohead failed to show up and overrun the revolution, but the park is still packed. Two rows of people behind me echo Drew’s words – “with the internet” – serving as a human mic, as cops have forbidden the protestors the use of amplified sound. Liberty Plaza is allowed a generator, which runs the laptop and webcam that’s livestreaming the Assembly.

Now that he’s been introduced, Drew continues for us and the cameras, pausing after each few words to give the human mic a chance to keep up: “Right now. Our website. Is having some problems. If you know how to fix those kinds of things. Come find me. After the GA.” The General Assembly crowd is thick, and as soon as he’s done speaking, Drew is lost within it. One night he gives his report back on the Internet Committee while wearing a hideous holiday-inspired sweater, so he’s easier for potential volunteers to spot.

For a protest movement born of the internet, Occupy Wall Street’s technical situation is at times precarious. There are always three or four people hunched over laptops at the center of the camp, circled by cables, hard drives, and on occasion, fresh netbook boxes. If the rain is pelting down, they’re still there working with umbrellas drawn over their faces and keyboards, posting meeting minutes, tending to blog comments, and archiving massive amounts of video. But for the first few days, Occupy Wall Street didn’t even have their own internet connection in the park. Anonymous reportedly hooked them up with a little wifi to tide them over until hotspots were deployed.

It was through Anonymous that Brian, one of the guys who’s now holding down the internal online communications, first found out about the occupation. Almost immediately, he started hitch-hiking here from Washington state, and a month later, he arrived at Liberty Plaza, where he’s been staying for the last eight days.

Brian served in the Marine Corps, he tells me, and he’s skilled in “security and strategic tactics.” On Sunday night, when we meet, he has an earpiece dangling from his neck and his plastic poncho covers a bulky backpack. He and Drew have convened an internet committee meeting just off-site at a friendly bar. They both sit at what ends up being the head of the table. Like others who speak up here, they don’t want to be seen as leaders, even if they hold the Wordpress login info.

Who controls the Occupy Wall Street web presence, at this point, probably doesn’t matter. Even if the official website, which is nycga.net, was hit by a denial of service attack, the protest still occupies enough hashtags, twitpics and YouTube videos to get the message out. The idea is, if you don’t rely on a single gatekeeper, you also don’t have one person bearing all the vulnerability -- which mostly works.

On Saturday, when news arrived at the park that hundreds of protestors faced imminent arrest on the Brooklyn Bridge, a member of the media team asked any of us who held a phone with a video camera to install an app on the fly and head down to the bridge to bear witness by livestreaming it. The work of monitoring potential arrests was now shared among the few dozen of us who made our way to the bridge, tapping through unfamiliar and seemingly unending sign-up screens as we hustled towards a potentially volatile confrontation.

The next night, when I ended up at Brian and Drew’s internet meeting, the group is far more racially and gender diverse than your everyday New York internet event, but the white dudes still dominate the conversation. One guy’s suggestion that we promote a Twitter hashtag to ask for material donations to the camp is met with pushback from another guy who wants us to abandon “corporate tools” for a custom Drupal solution developed by the occupation’s Open Source team. It’s kind of charming: instead of the usual circular debate on the minutiae of different strands of anarchist thought, these guys are having it out over GPL licenses and RSS scraping. Meanwhile, online supporters across the country and the world just want to know how to send us socks and pizza.

Chris, who’s been at the park for five days, joined the internet committee after the mass arrests on Saturday, as he watched people on the Occupy Wall Street Facebook page – which is not officially administered by the occupiers – freak out when updates stopped coming. “They thought we’d been removed from the park,” he says. In reality, it was just a glitch with the official Occupy Wall Street site, which cross-posts to Facebook.

Late that night after the meeting, Julie, a 21 year old New York University student from Harlem, launches a Tumblr to aggregate firsthand stories from occupiers. She’s studying globalization, which took her to London last winter, just as the student occupation against budget cuts took hold. What she’d been studying in the classroom –the Egyptian and Syrian uprisings – was now playing out in the streets below. “So over the weekend,” she says, “when I saw there had been over 800 arrests, I knew I had to come down and try to help.”

Still, that we connected at all in the park is mostly an accident. “Yesterday I just came down to the media table and asked if I could get more involved,” says Julie. “The internet meeting was the one happening next.”

As we talk at the perimeter of the media table, we notice a guy next to us with a clapperboard and another guy holding a shotgun mic. One mentions an internship he had at Comedy Central.

“Who are you guys shooting with?” Chris asks them.

“For the website, I think,” the former intern says.

“You know, we’re working on that,” Chris replies. “We should exchange information.”

Mr. Naylor.

On July 6, the Federal Communications Commission put up a blog post entitled "Contributing Code Back: FCC.gov’s Open-Source Feedback Loop," articulating the agency's commitment to open source and open source development. "Here at the FCC, we're always excited when we can contribute to open source software," new media fellow and developer Ben Balter wrote. At some point between then and this week, the FCC deleted the blog post and the Google cache. Some open source developers found this alarming, given that the agency changed leadership around the same time--ex-Microsoftie Steven VanRoekel left the agency in June to become the nation's CIO and was replaced by Robert Naylor, previously CIO at the Small Business Administration.

Mr. Balter declined to comment when Betabeat asked him what was up with the vanishing blog post, referring us to the office of media relations. When we called this morning, the FCC scrambled to get back to us. And about four hours after we first spoke with press secretary Neil Grace, the FCC put the post back. "We put it up a little early," was Mr. Grace's explanation. "There was just some miscommunication here on process. They just said there was a miscommunication on getting stuff up. It's August here in the federal government, some folks are out of the office and didn't get a chance to see it." The FCC is still committed to open source--a few months ago it switched its notoriously-bad website over to the open source platform Drupal--as well as open source development, he said, and the text of the post was not changed (Betabeat could not confirm this as the cache had been cleared, but the first paragraph, which was excerpted on other sites and was not pulled from the FCC's Facebook page, appears intact). Since then, the agency has released a few "code snippets" and a Wordpress plugin.

When Mr. Naylor was announced as the FCC's new CIO, the FCC emphasized keeping the agency "agile, responsive and effective in the high-tech space it serves" and shifting more data securely to the cloud. "As CIO, Mr. Naylor will continue to guide the agency's investment in tech infrastructure, reducing costs and empowering FCC employees to deploy innovative solutions inside the agency," the statement said at the time. Betabeat could not find any public statements made by Mr. Naylor on the topic of open source development.