As a matter of principle, the OER Foundation makes use of Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) wherever possible. Partnering with the Foundation provides an opportunity to share the experience of an organisation with hands-on experience in hosting all its technology infrastructure using FOSS.

The foundation has implemented a component-based approach selecting “best-of-breed” open technologies for assembling the OERu’s Digital Learning Environment (DLE) rather than providing learning materials through a single application like a Learning Management System (LMS).

In light of the current global pandemic, there's lots of interest out there on "working remotely" or "working from home". We've been doing a for years, and it has a lot of advantages... here's how we do it....

For relatively lightweight applications that are either in development, or single user, or have limited requirements for concurrency and massive data sets, SQLite is a superb, full-function, but compact, almost ubiquitous database (it's used on every mobile device, for example).

I have previously provided an in-depth explanation about NextCloud with Collabora Office Online and how we've installed it on Ubuntu 16.04. This is an update both of the process, and of the technology.

Because the collaboration of an open community is its real history, I place a high value on backing up the Rocket.Chat servers I'm responsible for, and especially the data they generate, held in MongoDB files (on the host) managed by a MongoDB container.

To do that reliably, I have set up a bash script which does an hourly backup of all MongoDB "databases" and automatically maintains 24 hourly, 7 daily, 4 weekly, 12 monthly, and 7 yearly snapshots of the databases.

With the recent release of Rocket.Chat 1.0.x (after a couple years undergoing development at a fairly blistering pace), it's time for many of us to upgrade!

Previously, I showed how to install Rocket.Chat via Docker Compose but that was a much earlier version of Rocket.Chat and version 3.4 of MongoDB, which is now quite old (by FOSS standards at least). And it turns out upgrading everything has a few gotchas, so here's how I managed to do it.

Rather than write a slide-based presentation for the Open Education miniconf at Linux.Conf.AU 2019, I thought I'd try an approach that seemed to work quite well recently: write my presentation as a blog post and make it available for posterity, before and after. You can find this post quickly by going to oer.nz/lca if you want to look at it on your own device.

As I prepare for the 2018 OERu Partners' Meeting, I'm working how to convey the depth and breadth of the OERu open source technology stack - our infrastructure and applications - to our partners and other attendees.

Over the past year, we've had our first live OERu courses allowing learners to work towards a formal exit qualification (our "1st year of study"), and our infrastructure has worked as intended throughout, so I'm chalking that up as a win.

One of the distributed tools that the OERu makes available as part of its open source distributed digital learning environment is WEnotes. I've described what it is and how it works previously.

I've been asked to speak about the OERu to my former colleagues at Catalyst IT's Christchurch office as part of their monthly "Pizza Thursday" talks. Amusingly, this talk will be on a Friday, and lunch will be curries rather than pizza :)