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Open culture

In this page I will share several life experiences that have shaped my personality and a part of my philosophy of life. These are related to different aspects of open culture (communities, open knowledge, open source, ...), which have become deeply rooted in me, to the point of making me an evangelist of it.

Communities​

The first thing the Internet did for me, was open the doors to meet fantastic people who helped me selflessly when I needed, and even mentored me. So, when I had the chance, I started doing it too.

I think, I did initially because I liked and admired those who helped me and I wanted to be like them, but what I didn't know, was how good I was going to feel doing it, becoming almost addictive. This is what made me very passionate about communities, and helping/supporting anyone who needed it. I guess, I have the hope that by doing so, they will have a similar experience to the one I had, and they will also end up helping other people... contributing to a more solidary and healthy society.

Below I will name some of those that I consider to have had the greatest impact on my personal and professional development and the roles I have played in them:

Over time I have discovered that there are many types of communities, with different motivations behind them, what is clear to me now, is that for me, the best are still those that maintain the original spirit that I experienced, where members help each other selflessly, there is a good atmosphere and the issues and limits are set by the members themselves.

Related: In "Consejos para dinamizar comunidades" (Tips for community building) I shared almost all of my experience in this matter (translation t.b.d. 😅).

Share knowledge​

It wasn't almost until I started university, when I started to participate more actively in public forums.

Later on, especially after joining the Free Software Office of the University of Granada (2009), led by @JJMerelo, I understood the importance of sharing code, content, ... openly. Since then, I have tried to continue to share openly as much as I can, talking in public but also sharing online content, like presentations, recordings of talks, code, tutorials, courses, knowledge in forums, audios, images, etc.

Note: when I joined Esri Inc (~2021), one of my job responsibilities is to train, facilitate and encourage engineers at the company to share more (great) tech content openly. That's one of the reasons I added channels blogs, channels, etc accepting contributions to Educational developers channels, for those that do not want to start their own blog/channel or want to consider contributing to a third party channel.

But things are proven by facts and not by words, so even though many of those contents have disappeared... as well as the platforms where they were hosted, here I will try to compile things I have been doing:

Note: I have always disliked creating content and resources and leaving them in a drawer, so in the digital brain section I'll be sharing the resources I have been creating. But this will be very time consuming, and will probably take years, so I decided to create this issue to compile many of these resources 📦. My intention is to be able to publish & translate some of them as blog articles