Have you ever wondered what we actually do at ETHZ? So here is an effort of illustration: For the upcoming Maturandentage at ETHZ our chair had to compile some posters illustrating our research at MTEC. Thanks to Peter’s design skills and Martin Krafft’s hints on drawing Debian graphs with dotty I created a poster portraying our research project on reuse in open source software by sampling libraries from the Debian distribution. Below the screenshot. If you’re interested in the 18MB high-res PDF file, let me know ;)

This weekend is full of interesting events on development cooperation: On Friday, I visited the DEZA annual conference, this year on “partnership”. Unfortunately time in the workshop didn’t allow asking the Nestlé representative why they don’t keep Max Havelaar labelled products yet… Then yesterday, there was the second StopArmut 2015 volunteer meeting where we discussed the coming-up activities. Also, we planned a media-attractive launch (together with parliamentary Heiner Studer) of Fairteilen on October 17th, the UN International Day for the Eradication of Poverty. Today there is a ChristNet event (film on asylum situation in Switzerland) which I’ll probably skip because of recreation need ;) And tomorrow, the local StopArmut team is meeting for the 4th time, planning its activities of October 15th.

Tanja Köppel from TearFund Switzerland just informed me that Swiss national television will show a short documentation of the StopArmut 2015 campaign in the Fenster zum Sonntag on September 23rd, 2006.
PS: Don’t forget to send some brainy statements on fair trade to participate in the Fairteilen contest of StopArmut.

Today I received the information that the HICSS mini-track about open source software, chaired by Kevin Crowston, accepted our paper on sampling and software reuse in Debian. Here is the abstract: (and here the PDF)

“Sampling in Open Source Software Development: The case for using the Debian GNU/Linux Distribution”
Research on open source (OS) projects often focuses on the SourceForge collaboration platform. We argue that a GNU/Linux distribution, such as Debian, is better suited for the sampling of projects because it avoids biases and contains unique information only available in an integrated environment. Especially research on the reuse of components can build on dependency information inherent in the Debian GNU/Linux package tracking system.

Heard last Sunday on Swiss radio station DRS3, we followed an interesting audio documentary about the limitations of capitalism when it comes to management salaries (also available as MP3/Podcast). Interestingly enough, I watched a documentary from 2003 on arte just the day after, critically investigating the role of Fidel Castro and how he maintained power only by fooling the people for decades. Such “real world examples” about economic systems interest me a lot since they show how the currently available ones aren’t yet working properly.

Tomorrow we’ll leave for one week of camping in Cudrefin. Thanks to Anita’s papi we’ll live like in a *****-hotel in his caravan, he’s telling us ;) So if you’re interested in how our current weather is, just check this (private) webcam in Cudrefin.

Update: Camping was great, especially driving around Lionel with the Cougar