I had an idea to show kind of human computer interaction during my Fosdem talk. I may not use that, because I will not have time to polish it, but it works quite well if you want to use it.

The Idea
The idea is to control slides only by moving my hand, without any devices in it.

The plan:
0. My web-cam should detect my move
1. After detection an event should be triggered
2. As a final action the slide should move to the next one

Motion detect

$ git clone https://github.com/sackmotion/motion.git
$ cd motion
$ ./configure
$ make & make install

Configure it

Motion comes with a great almost working config file, so just copy it to make it “official”:

$ cp  /usr/local/etc/motion-dist.conf /usr/local/etc/motion-dist.conf

Open it, search for those values, edit them and read what are they for:

;on_event_start value
event_gap 60

to become:

on_event_start xdotool key Right /OR xdotool search "Mozilla Firefox" windowactivate --sync key --clearmodifiers Right/
event_gap 1

Event triggering

You may need to install xdotool using your package manager. This tool allows you to emulate keyboard action in different combinations, but I will need to emulate pressing the right arrow key.

How it works:

When web-cam detects movement an event emulating ‘right arrow’ key is pressed. Since I am using HTML5 DZslides from here, this allows me to move to next slide only with moving my hand in front of my webcam.

Run

Run it and move your hand in front of your camera. You may want to turn on the logging to see the motion detection and the event detection if it’s not working at first.

$ motion

If you have any questions, please let me know.

What is RUST?

Rust is an experimental, concurrent, multi-paradigm, compiled programming language developed by Mozilla Labs. It is designed to be practical, supporting pure-functional, concurrent-actor, imperative-procedural, and object-oriented styles. /wikipedia/

How to install it on your Gnu/Linux box?
Pre-requirements:

• g++ 4.4 or clang++ 3.x
• python 2.6 or later
• perl 5.0 or later
• gnu make 3.81 or later
• curl

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Finding a way to stimulate/encourage your community to do stuff can be a very difficult task.  I will show you an Agile-like approach to do that and actually it works pretty well, but remember:

Don’t try to control your community, try to manage it.

Create the infrastructure

• Get an account in Trello.
• Define your basic iteration period. Let say 2 weeks.
• Define tasks.

Don’t try to find people who want to contribute.

“What? Are you serious?”

Hell yeah. Try to create tasks first. Put anything you think can be doable in the next 2 weeks (This is your main task).

You can start from “we need someone to tweet using our account” , “we need a new wiki” or something more interesting like “we need someone to be responsible for beer giveaways”

Ready?

Invite

Ok, now invite ALL community members to create an account and to look at the task.

Let them:

1. Vote for the tasks.  See how community see the importance of the tasks.
2. Add themselves to a task. It’s a common mistake project manager/leader/the big boss to assign someone to a task. Don’t do that!

Teams

Now you can see which people are willing to work together on a certain task and you can create a new board for them.

Let say you have a task website on the main board:

And there are 10 people that want to contribute to it. Move them to another board and let them create tasks, with a simple workflow:

Todos > Working on > Done:

Meetings

If you have well working community or some kind of core contributors, you can start every iteration with a meeting and to define all the tasks together.

Why?

• This approach will help you a lot to do things faster. Remember define only tasks that can be done in 2 weeks (or 3 weeks). It’s much easier to create a simple skeleton of your website with most, most important functionalities (like who we are and join us) than to plan and create whole website in 2 months.
  
• Step by step
• Build a community and respect your community member’s skills.
• Invite anyone to join and to help. It’s kind of easy to find someone to write a post in a forum or to contact a media representative, because this takes 3-4 minutes.
• Get things done!

I have spent most of my free time in last 2 years to teach people how to use web and technology for their own causes. Unfortunately I have a very limited ‘free’ time and I can only “start the fire” and to let people to develop the idea by them selves, with little push (or kick) from time to time.

I was a speaker to a very amazing group of art students and right now they have very short idea on what they can do on the Web, except hanging around on Facebook or downloading a movie from a torrent site. We had a great practical session together and I think they think differently about web right now. I’d love to do that again.

Forbes mentioned me in an article about remixing the web and using the the technology to fight for our own rights and for freedom of speech. I have “fired” our prime minister by creating a copy of the official government webpage with a surprising news The news was on every news e-paper in Bulgaria on the same day and on every hard copy edition on the next.

On the next day even the PM mentioned that “action” on the TV

Change can happen in seconds, especially with the tools and technology at our disposal