OSPOCon is an event dedicated to creating better, more efficient open source ecosystems.

SAN FRANCISCO, March 23, 2020 — The Linux Foundation, the nonprofit organization enabling mass innovation through open source, along with co-host the TODO Group, an open group of organizations who collaborate on practices, tools and other ways to run successful and effective open source programs and projects, has opened its Call for Proposals for OSPOCon.  The event will take place September 29 – October 1 in Dublin, Ireland, alongside Open Source Summit + Embedded Linux Conference 2021. The TODO Group has also launched an OSPO Landscape as a resource for the community to learn more about OSPOs. The community is encouraged to contribute to the landscape.

OSPOCon is a new event, dedicated to those working to create a center of competency for open source in their organizations in order to join together to overcome challenges through sharing experiences, best practices, and tooling. Open Source Program Offices (OSPOs) face many obstacles, such as ensuring high-quality and frequent releases, engaging with developer communities, and contributing back to other projects effectively. Collaborating together with others working on the same concerns helps the entire ecosystem improve.

“I am thrilled to be a part of the inaugural OSPOCon and see it brought to life to support the many hardworking and dedicated people involved in creating and sustaining OSPOs,” said Chris Aniszczyk, co-founder of the TODO Group and CTO at The Linux Foundation. “The impact OSPOs are having grows every day as they become a strategic function for organizations, from companies to governments to research institutions. Their contributions are tremendously valued and we look forward to furthering their abilities to collaborate, grow, and learn from each other.”

Proposals to speak at OSPOCon are being accepted now through June 13 at 11:59pm PDT.

Submission types requested include:

• Session Presentation (~40-50 minutes in length)
• Panel Discussion (~40-50 minutes in length)
• Birds of a Feather Session (BoFs are typically held in the evenings, (~45 minutes – 1 hour in length)
• Tutorial (~1.5 hours in length)
• Lightning Talk (~5-10 minutes in length)

Suggested Topics include:

Open Source Program Management

• Creation and Best Practices of Open Source Program Offices (OSPOs)
• Consuming and Contributing to Open Source
• Managing Competing Corporate Interests while Driving Coherent Communities
• How to Vet the Viability of OS Projects
• Internal vs External Developer Adoption
• Handling License Obligations in Organizations
• Open Source Corporate Sustainability

All interested parties are welcome to submit proposals. Those submitting will be notified of a decision by Thursday, July 22. To learn more and/or submit, please click here.

OSPOCon will be presented as a hybrid event – attendees can join and participate in person or virtually. Registration will open in late Spring 2021.  To receive an email alert when registration opens, please click here. The Linux Foundation provides diversity and need-based registration scholarships for this event to anyone that needs it; for information on eligibility please click here. Visit our website and follow us on Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn for all the latest event updates and announcements.

Sponsor:
OSPOCon offers two sponsorship levels for your consideration, Co-host and Supporter.  To see all sponsorship benefits, please click here or email us here.

Members of the press who would like to request a media pass should contact Kristin O’Connell.

About The Linux Foundation
The Linux Foundation is the organization of choice for the world’s top developers and companies to build ecosystems that accelerate open technology development and industry adoption. Together with the worldwide open source community, it is solving the hardest technology problems by creating the largest shared technology investment in history. Founded in 2000, The Linux Foundation today provides tools, training and events to scale any open source project, which together deliver an economic impact not achievable by any one company. More information can be found at www.linuxfoundation.org.

The Linux Foundation Events are where the world’s leading technologists meet, collaborate, learn and network in order to advance innovations that support the world’s largest shared technologies.

The Linux Foundation has registered trademarks and uses trademarks. For a list of trademarks of The Linux Foundation, please see our trademark usage page: https://www.linuxfoundation.org/trademark-usage.

Linux is a registered trademark of Linus Torvalds.

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Media Contact:
Kristin O’Connell
The Linux Foundation
koconnell@linuxfoundation.org

The post The Linux Foundation and the TODO Group Announce Call for Proposals for OSPOCon and the OSPO Landscape appeared first on Linux Foundation.

It was discovered that Privoxy incorrectly handled CGI requests. An attacker
could possibly use this issue to cause a denial of service or obtain sensitive
information. (CVE-2020-35502, CVE-2021-20209, CVE-2021-20210,
CVE-2021-20213, CVE-2021-20215, CVE-2021-20216, CVE-2021-20217,
CVE-2021-20272, CVE-2021-20273, CVE-2021-20275)

It was discovered that Privoxy incorrectly handled certain regular
expressions. An attacker could possibly use this issue to cause a denial of
service or obtain sensitive information. (CVE-2021-20212, CVE-2021-20276)

It was discovered that Privoxy incorrectly handled client tags. An attacker
could possibly use this issue to cause Privoxy to consume resources, resulting
in a denial of service. This issue only affected Ubuntu 18.04 LTS,
Ubuntu 20.04 LTS and Ubuntu 20.10. (CVE-2021-20211)

It was discovered that Privoxy incorrectly handled client tags. An attacker
could possibly use this issue to cause Privoxy to consume resources, resulting
in a denial of service. This issue only affected Ubuntu 20.04 LTS and
Ubuntu 20.10. (CVE-2021-20214)

It was discovered that Pygments incorrectly handled parsing SML files. If a
user or automated system were tricked into parsing a specially crafted SML
file, a remote attacker could cause Pygments to hang, resulting in a denial
of service.

Over the past several decades farmers have been depending increasingly on groundwater to irrigate their crops due to climate change and reduced rainfall. Farmers, even in drought-prone areas, continue to need to grow water-intensive crops because these crops have a steady demand.

In 2019, as part of Call for Code, a team of IBMers came together and brainstormed on ideas they were passionate about – problems faced by farmers in developing countries due to more frequent drought conditions. The team designed an end-to-end solution that focuses on helping farmers gain insight into when to water their crops and help them optimize their water usage to grow healthy crops. This team, Liquid Prep, went on to win the IBM employee Call for Code Global Challenge. 

Liquid Prep provides a mobile application that can obtain soil moisture data from a portable soil moisture sensor, fetch weather information from The Weather Company, and access crop data through a service deployed on the IBM Cloud. Their solution brings all this data together, analyzes it, and computes watering guidance to help the farmer decide whether to water their crops right now or conserve it for a better time.

To validate the Liquid Prep prototype, in December 2019, one of the team members traveled to India and interviewed several farmers in the village Nuggehalli, which is near the town Hirisave in the Hassan district of Karnataka, India. The interviews taught the team that the farmers did not have detailed information on when they should water their specific crops and by how much, as they didn’t know the specific needs on a plant-by-plant basis. They also just let the water run freely if the water was available from a nearby source, like a river or stream, and some were entirely dependent on rainfall. The farmers expressed a great interest in the described Liquid Prep solution as it could empower them to make more informed decisions that could improve yields.

A prototype is born

After winning the challenge the Liquid Prep team took on the opportunity to convert the concept to a more complete prototype through an IBM Service Corps engagement. The team was expanded with dedicated IBM volunteers from across the company and they were assigned to optimize Liquid Prep from August through October 2020. During this time the team developed the Minimum Viable Product (MVP) for the mobile solution.

The prototype consists of three primary components: 

• A hardware sensor to measure soil moisture
• A highly visual and easy-to-use mobile web application, and 
• A back-end data service to power the app. 

It works like this: the mobile web application gets soil moisture data from the soil moisture sensor. The app requests environmental conditions from The Weather Company and crop data from the plant database via the backend service deployed on the IBM Cloud. The app analyzes and computes a watering schedule to help the farmer decide if they should water their crops now or at a later time. 

Partners

Liquid Prep has a developed a great working relationship with partners SmartCone Technologies, Inc., and Central New Mexico Community College. Students in the Deep Dive Coding Internet of Things (IoT) Bootcamp at CNM are designing, developing, and producing a robust IoT sensor and housing it in the shape of a stick that can be inserted into the soil and transfer the soil moisture data to the Liquid Prep mobile app via Bluetooth. The collaboration gives students important real-world experience before they enter the workforce.  

“SmartCone is honored to be part of this project.  This is a perfect example of technology teams working together to help make the world a better place, “ said Jason Lee, Founder & CEO, SmartCone Technologies Inc.

Additionally, Liquid Prep will work together with J&H Nixon Farms, who largely grow soybeans and corn crops on about 2800 acres of agricultural land in Ottawa, Canada. They have offered Liquid Prep the opportunity to pilot test the prototype on several plots of land that have different soil conditions, which in turn can expand the breadth of recommendation options to a larger number of potential users.

Now available as open source

Liquid Prep is now available as an open source project hosted by the Linux Foundation. The goal of the project is to help farmers globally farm their crops with the least amount of water by taking advantage of real-time information that can help improve sustainability and build resiliency to climate change.

Participation is welcomed from software developers, designers, testers, agronomists/agri experts/soil experts, IoT engineers, researchers, students, farmers, and others that can help improve the quality and value of the solution for small farmers around the world. Key areas the team are interested in developing include localizing the mobile app, considering soil properties for the improvement of the watering advice, updating project documentation, software and hardware testing, more in-depth research, and adding more crop data to the database.

Get involved in Liquid Prep now at Call For Code

The post Liquid Prep intelligent watering solution now hosted by the Linux Foundation as a Call for Code project appeared first on Linux Foundation.