With 1.4 billion people connected, the Internet is the greatest collaborative network that mankind has experienced. One of the consequences of the growth of this network is a shift in the way knowledge is being created and distributed. As we move to an interconnected world, the balance of power is shifting from old, proprietary models of knowledge creation to the open source model that emphasizes collaboration and sharing. From management gurus to consulting firms to leading business schools, everyone is taking note of this new phenomenon that goes by various names like ‘Collaborative Innovation,’ ‘Open Innovation,’ or ‘Distributed Co-creation.’

The open source movement has pioneered the Collaborative Innovation trend, and it is no surprise that the rapid growth of the Internet and the equally rapid growth of the open source community have mirrored each other. The Linux® operating system and Wikipedia website are both good examples of open source projects that embody the ideals of Collaborative Innovation. And those in the technology industry aren’t the only ones to take notice. Policy makers and corporate leaders in all markets are exploring how this powerful trend can be harnessed for social and economic development.

Let us take Linux as an example. In September 1991, Linus Torvalds released 10,000 lines of source code under the General Public License (GPL). The GPL gives users four freedoms:

1. The freedom to run the program, for any purpose
2. The freedom to study how the program works, and adapt it to your needs
3. The freedom to redistribute copies so you can help your neighbor
4. The freedom to improve the program, and release your improvements to the public, so that the whole community benefits

Over the years, thousands of volunteers contributed to the code released by Torvalds. It is estimated that Linux now has around 100 million lines of source code and that the commercial value of this source code is approximately eight billion dollars. ^[1] This represents an enormous wealth of knowledge that is freely available.

The innovation that is possible through the efforts of thousands of people collaborating on the Linux source code is a powerful (and constantly growing) advantage for open source software. In the next few years, we may see the pace of innovation in open source outstrip anything that proprietary vendors and their closed group of paid programmers can produce.

Explaining this phenomenon, Tim O’Reilly says that, “Sustained innovation is no longer just about who has the most gifted scientists or the best equipped labs. It’s about who has the most compelling ‘architecture of participation.’”

Henry Chesborough, author of the book Open Innovation explains the contrast between the open and closed innovation models with this chart:

The term “Collaborative Innovation” may be new, but the concept and the practice have been part of Red Hat’s corporate philosophy since the company’s inception. For 15 years, Red Hat has applied this framework to successfully compete with proprietary software vendors who have built multi-billion dollar empires using the closed innovation model. The Fedora® Project is a prime example of Red Hat’s Collaborative Innovation strategy. Red Hat engineers work with the open source community to develop cutting-edge technologies for Fedora. When these innovative technologies mature, they are incorporated into Red Hat® Enterprise Linux.

By working with smart people inside and outside Red Hat, the company is able to create a transparent, cost-efficient model of technology development. Despite having just 2,600 employees, Red Hat has been able to build and provide world-class solutions that are deployed in demanding environments like the New York Stock Exchange and the Federal Aviation Administration as well as large government and private deployments across the world. While Red Hat does not generate all of the code that makes up Red Hat Enterprise Linux, the company is able to create value by providing services, training, and support around open source software. This is no mean feat considering that the primary operating system competitor is a deeply entrenched company that employs more than 50,000 people.

Eager to take full advantage of its possibilities, thought leaders across the world are applying the collaborative innovation model in areas like content (Wikipedia), medicine (Open Source Drug Discovery), scientific publishing (Public Library of Science), flexible copyrights (Creative Commons), and many other areas. Red Hat’s greatest contribution to the Collaborative Innovation movement–so far–has been its success in building a business model around open source software that can be replicated in other fields. With the Internet becoming an integral part of our lives, Collaborative Innovation is set to become one of the most important aspects of our future.

Related links

• Design Thinking, part 1 and part 2

About the author

Venkatesh Hariharan is Corporate Affairs Director at Red Hat and works on open source, open standards, and other policy issues. He is interested in the impact of technology on society. He co-founded IndLinux.org in 1999 and pioneered localization of Linux to Indian languages. He blogs at www.osindia.blogspot.com and his photos are at www.flickr.com/photos/venky7.

My name is Adrienne, and I’m a graphic designer at Red Hat—I create meaning using type and image. The other day I stumbled upon a story involving music, sustainability, and open source. Needless to say, I was intrigued.

Brian Crabtree and Kelli Cain are the artists and creators behind Monome. At first glance, this cool device is simply a white square with a grid of buttons. It produces music and the buttons light up. It seems random, but the lights and music are synchronized.

Monome is a musical interface that connects to a computer–and is controlled by the applications the computer runs. It respond to the keys being pressed, and the LEDs light up–it is, at its simplest, a programmable controller for music, video, games, or art.

The beauty of an open process allows people to build on the idea, creating more than anyone could originally imagine (just like Fedora). People have manipulated Monome to do a number of things.

Max/msp is the programming environment for most of the Monome applications. This environment gave Crabtree and Cain the flexibility they needed to compose live art and video performances. Open source technology was better than the conventional methods they tried previously, because they could use and manipulate technology the way they wanted.

Monome was born to help express music and art. But instead of hiding the idea, Crabtree and Cain decided to share with the world. So far, the work has been incredibly successful and a large community has formed, building upon the Monome idea. So far they’ve constructed 3 models:16 x 16 inches, 16 x 8 inches, and 8 x 8 inches. Each time they have sold out quickly.

I love this line from their blog:

“We believe that open source is commercially viable and mutually beneficial for our collective and the consumer. In opening our software we eliminate wasteful, redundant coding for ourselves by incorporating proven libraries and frameworks.”

The Monome duo believe in sharing and sustainable practices. Even the name, Monome, is derived from their belief in minimalism. They make everything from the musical interfaces to the screenprinted shipping boxes in their loft in Philadelphia. They follow sustainable practices that use local sources for raw materials and services. They sell kits so people can build their own. Their business is based on the open source model.

Like the Fedora Project, Monome also has a growing community of artists and programmers that actively contribute—whether it’s writing software or finding new ways to use the interface. This community has released a wide range of videos, showing everything from creating the actual machine to playing live performances.

Perhaps their blog says it best:

“We seek to actively facilitate community participation and encourage sharing.”

At Red Hat, we do the same.

More information

• Monome’s Wikipedia entry
• Official Monome website
• A Video and Text Interview with Monome from Cycling ‘74
• YouTube videos of mono in action can be found here and here.

If you’ve ever gone looking for legitimately free fonts, you’ve probably found that there are a lot of really bad ones. But there’s also a lot of discussion out there about “open source fonts.”

Some who post about open source fonts are really just talking about free-as-in-beer typefaces. Some, however, have embraced the open source philosophy as applied to typography. From the Free Font Manifesto:

A small but growing number of designers and institutions are creating typefaces for the public domain. These designers are participating in the broader open source and copyleft movements, which seek to stimulate worldwide creativity via a collective information commons.

Also see the related Free Font Manifesto blog. Through that project, Ellen Lupton spent about a year disucssing the idea of free fonts with other designers. Comments are now closed, but you can still go read what was said.

A few examples

SIL International is an organization founded for the study of lesser-known languages and to promote literacy around the world. The SIL Open Font License (OFL) is “a free and open source license specifically designed for fonts and related software based on our experience in font design and linguistic software engineering.”

Gentium is one of the better-known fonts released under the OFL. It was originally designed by Victor Gaultney as a part of his master’s degree work at the University of Reading. He first released it as a free-to-use font, but you couldn’t modify it. The project has since been turned over to SIL, and it can now be modified and redistributed. The font has also been recognized by the Association Typographique Internationale (ATypi). Read more about the history and development of Gentium.

Then there’s Bitstream Vera, which was released under a similar license that Bitstream created with the GNOME Foundation. Unfortunately, despite being out for four years and available to everyone, Vera hasn’t gotten a lot of momentum past the Linux crowd.

Go forth and download

If you’re just interested in getting a variety of good, free-as-in-beer (but not necessarily open) fonts, Smashing Magazine is here for you with an article about 40 free fonts. If you want good+free+open, you’ll see that they include one of our favorites, Liberation, which can be redistributed under a GPL+exception license.

In his article “Painless dual-booting with Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 and a MacBookPro,” Noah Gift shows how to install RHEL 5 on a Mac. This article shows you some customizations that will make your newly installed Red Hat system look like Mac OS X.

The items required do not ship by default but are available at www.gnome-look.org.

Changing default login screen

Download the Aqua GDM theme. This is a theme for the GNOME display manager (GDM) which presents the login screen. To install it, follow the instructions below.

tar -xzvf aqua.tar.gz
su
Password: [your root password]
mv aqua/ /usr/share/gdm/themes/

Navigate to System > Administration > Login Screen and choose the new theme.

Changing default desktop theme

Download the MacOS-X Aqua theme. Make sure you download all three files: the theme itself, the icon theme and the wallpapers, then follow these steps for installation.

mkdir ~/.themes
tar -xzvf 13548-Gnome_MacOS-X_Aqua_Theme_20040730.tar.gz
mv MacOS-X ~/.themes/

mkdir ~/.icons
tar -xzvf Gnome_MacOS-X_Icon_Theme_20040730.tar.gz
mv MacOS-X ~/.icons/

Open System > Preferences > Theme, and select the new theme.

To reorder the buttons for the window border start gconf-editor, navigate to /apps/metacity/general/, and edit the button_layout key to:

close,minimize,maximize:men

If you don’t have gconf-editor installed, which was the case with my system, edit or create the file ~/.gconf/apps/metacity/general/%gconf.xml and make it look like this:

<?xml version="1.0"?>
    <gconf>
	<entry name="button_layout" mtime="1183235731" type="string">
	    <stringvalue>close,minimize,maximize:menu</stringvalue>
	</entry>
    </gconf>

If you edit the file manually, log out and log in again for changes to take effect.

Changing desktop wallpaper

Extract the wallpapers that you downloaded in the previous step:

tar -xzvf MacOS-X_Aqua_Wallpapers.tar.gz
mv MacOS-X_Wallpapers/ ~/.mac_os_x_wallpapers

1. Right click on the desktop “Change Desktop Background”
2. Click “Add Wallpaper”</li
3. From the file open dialog choose your home directory
4. Right click in the right pane “Show Hidden Files”
5. Navigate to `.mac_os_x_wallpapers’ directory
6. >Select all files and click “Open”
7. Choose your desired background and click “Close”

The result

Now you have a GNOME desktop which looks pretty much like your Mac OS X one.

A few things are missing to recreate a 100% Mac OS X experience. I hope they will be shipped in the next release so Mac fans won’t have an excuse for not using Red Hat Enterprise Linux anymore.

• For the Mac OS dock (toolbar), you will need gdesklets and the StarterBar desklet. Replace the standard bottom panel with it.
• A Mac style menubar merges the main menu with the menu of the current application.
• Finally, you’ll want a nice bootsplash theme. Two themes are available at gnome-look.org: MacAqua Bootsplash and Aqua for Splashy.

Here’s a tour of the pre-alpha demo release of GNOME Online Desktop included in Fedora 8. Learn more about what it does and how you can get involved in the project.

What is it?

GNOME Online Desktop is an alternate “mode” or flavor of the GNOME desktop. We’re experimenting with a few different things here.

1. The overall concept of tightly integrating the web into the desktop, as described at live.gnome.org/OnlineDesktop/Vision.

2. Specific user interface ideas, such as a desktop sidebar called BigBoard.

3. A set of platform components that support web integration–these can be used with any application or UI, including the more traditional GNOME desktop flavor.

The platform components are hard to see in the screenshots, of course. But this tour shows off some of the user interface ideas.

Trying it out

Install the packages “online-desktop,” “mugshot,” and “bigboard.” This should mean there’s a session for Online Desktop available from the login screen (gdm). An easy way to try things out is to add the User Switch applet to your panel and create a new user account. Then use the User Switch applet to switch to your new user, and choose the Online Desktop session on the login screen.

Once you log in, you’ll have to create an account on online.gnome.org and sign in to that account. When your browser is logged in to online.gnome.org, the rest of the desktop will use the browser cookie to authenticate as well.

If at any point the sidebar seems seriously confused, don’t be afraid to press Alt+F2 and run bigboard --replace to restart it.

Overview

This screenshot shows a typical desktop just after login. Moving counterclockwise:

• Sidebar with search box, file list, applications, people, calendar, photos
• Applet with a show/hide sidebar button, and mini-launcher icons to start apps without opening the sidebar
• Mugshot Stacker application in the tray
• Firefox, with the new Fedora start page

More detail follows.

“Self” Area (top of sidebar)

At the top of the sidebar, you’ll see your own photo (avatar) and name. The idea is to show who’s logged in, which is handy if you use user switching. Clicking on this area opens a little menu with options to open the control center, log out, etc.

The small Flickr, Picasa, and LinkedIn icons underneath my picture are quick links to go to my page on those sites.

Search

The search box on the sidebar shows results from each of the widgets on the sidebar. In this shot, you can see file results from the Files widget, application results from Applications, people from People, and so forth.
The search box can be used to run applications, open someone’s profile page, or open a file.

Files

The Files widget shows your local recent files in the same way the regular GNOME panel does, but it merges in any documents you’re working on using a web service. Right now, it only supports Google Documents. I use Google Documents for most of my word processing, but I also have PDFs and similar files on my local system. The Files widget combines all these documents into one searchable list.

If you click “More” on the Files widget, a detailed window opens to search through your recent files.

Application Launching, Discovery, and Installation

Application launching and simple desktop-oriented “package management” are integrated into a single design.
If you want to launch one of your commonly-used apps, just click.

If this is your first time logging in–perhaps because you’re using a USB key or live CD distribution–the apps you usually use might not be installed. But since this is the online desktop, it knows which apps you usually use anyway. Say, for example, you forgot to install Nibbles:

Just click, and it will install the missing program.

If you want to search through all apps (including those not yet installed), open the app browser.

You can also browse online.gnome.org/applications.

You might notice that the app browser makes suggestions. For example, it tells you about the new Gourmet Recipe Manager in this screenshot. This is not an application you have installed; it’s an application from the online.gnome.org/applications database that other people have been using.

In the future, we’d like to extend online.gnome.org/applications to support star ratings, user comments, and so forth. For now it ranks apps purely based on how often they’re used.

(Technical details: If you enable application tracking, the online desktop looks at the currently-focused window to decide what you’re using. It will count each application only once per day. It does not send any information about your windows or window titles to the server. It identifies the app on the client side and sends the name of the package you used to the server to be counted.)

People

The People widget should become a lot more elaborate over time. It’s very simple right now, just a quick way to go to someone’s homepages on the sites they use (photo sites, blogs, etc.)

The idea is that this will become a “supercharged” IM buddy list showing presence on multiple IM networks, activity on multiple sites, what music people have playing, and so forth. Much of the infrastructure and information is already on the server (and shows up in the Mugshot Stacker application), but the People widget user interface hasn’t been completed. Showing everyone’s current music track is one of my favorite features.

If you click More on the People widget, there’s a people browser window that opens up. This lets you see everyone you know, rather than the few people who fit on the sidebar.

One future direction would be to integrate the People widget with file management and other sharing-your-stuff scenarios, so you can drag a file onto someone’s picture to offer it to them, or open a remote desktop session to help them debug a problem.

Calendar

The calendar widget is pretty self-explanatory. Right now it only supports Google Calendar, but the idea would be to support whatever people use.

One problem with web-based calendars is that they can’t use the desktop APIs to give you a notification when events are coming up, so the online desktop includes a notifier that watches your Google Calendar events.

A great thing about a web-based calendar program is that you can access it from any computer and even your cell phone.

Email

There’s no widget for email yet, but Bryan Clark has design mockups at live.gnome.org showing the concept.

In the meantime, we have already implemented mail notification bubbles for Google Mail.

Minimized Sidebar Mode

It can be annoying to keep a sidebar open all the time, especially if you don’t have a widescreen monitor.
The applet in the bottom-left corner of the screen supports using the sidebar in “Minimized” mode. You can enable this mode from Sidebar Preferences by clicking on your picture at the top of the sidebar. In Minimized mode, the sidebar is normally hidden but pops out when you press the Windows key or when you click the panel applet.

The panel applet also includes the same application launchers shown in the Applications widget on the sidebar. This lets you quickly launch apps without opening the sidebar.

Preferences Sync – Behind the Scenes

There’s a small daemon called online-prefs-sync-daemon, which uses whitelists kept in /usr/share/online-prefs-sync/ to store certain gconf settings on the online.gnome.org server. These settings should be instantly applied across any computers running the online desktop. So changing something like your desktop background would change it on all systems.

Lots of fine-tuning remains to make this work perfectly, but if you change your desktop background, you should see it in action already.

Learn More or Get Involved

We’re hacking on this at live.gnome.org/OnlineDesktop and on the mailing list.

For background, see the vision page and slides from the GUADEC presentation.

Luis Villa is working on a slide about how we can preserve free software values in a world where “cloud hosted” software is a reality. In the meantime, here’s a blog entry he wrote with relevant links.

At least two commercial products, Zonbu and gOS, have appeared recently, showing how the Online Desktop might be offered to consumers. These companies are using one-off software, though, since the mainstream distributions and desktops don’t have a solution in this area yet.

Because Online Desktop can keep your preferences and documents online, it’s ideal for a live CD, and we’d love to have someone keeping a recent snapshot available in live CD form.

We aren’t defining this project narrowly. Our goal is “the perfect window to the Internet: integrated with all your favorite online apps, secure and virus-free, simple to set up, and zero maintenance thereafter.” That leaves quite a bit of work to do.

About the author

Havoc Pennington is a long-time Red Hat, GTK+, and Linux desktop developer who is currently working on the GNOME Online Desktop project.

Fedora 8 test releases have a surprise for all users interested in graphics: a release candidate for the new GIMP 2.4, meaning the final version will get the stable GIMP 2.4¹. This is exciting news, as the previous major release, GIMP 2.2, is several years old, and a lot of new features were added in the meantime.

In this article, we’ll take a look at some of the most visible new features, but beyond them, there are tons of less visible things: speedups, a decrease in memory consumption, better importing and exporting, a better print plugin, better EXIF support, changed scripting language for plugins, zoomable preview for plugins, many bug fixes, and more.

If you’d like to see a more practical application of these tools, take a look at my article on improving portraits with GIMP.

Note: You can click on any image in this article to see a larger version.

Interface

The improved graphic interface is one of the first new things you’ll notice. There’s a new icon set (based on Tango), the menu is reorganized with a better structure (the cryptic Script-Fu and Python-Fu have disappeared, with the functions moved to a more logical place), and the dialogs now better follow the GNOME HIG.

Color management

Color management was introduced in this version. You can use ICC color profiles, load and adjust them, get your image on screen looking exactly as it was produced by your camera or scanner, and have the final results printed just as they look on screen. GIMP will even make use of the color profiles embedded in images.

Selector Tool

The Selector Tool has been improved. With both Rectangle and Ellipse selections, you can easily modify the size and position of your selection. With one click inside the selection, you can switch between edit and move modes. As usual, watch the status bar for additional modifiers to perform special tasks. For example, press Alt+Ctrl to move the content of the selection and Alt+Shitft to move a copy of the selection).

A nice touch is the possibility to round the corners of a rectangular selection, so you don’t have to use the old workaround of shrinking and growing it back.

Crop tool

The Crop Tool no longer shows an annoying dialog over your image. It works similar to the Selector Tool, allowing you to modify its size and position.

My favorite function is the option to show guides, which help you make a useful artistic crop (like using the rule of thirds). It’s also available in the above-mentioned Selector Tool. These two tools have a lot of options in common.

Healing tool

The new Healing Tool is awesome for photo touch-ups and surgery, like removing imperfections on someone’s skin. It works somewhat like the well-known Clone Tool, but it will average the values from the source and destination, and the cloning is softer and non-obvious.

Perspective clone tool

The new Perspective Clone Tool is a variation on the classic Clone Tool, but it lets you work on perspective images by defining and cloning a perspective plane from the original image. The cloned image will follow the correct perspective.

Red eye removal

For a long time, the GIMP developers resisted adding a red eye removal tool, explaining why such an automatic tool is far from perfect and pointing to tutorials about how to do it manually (and how to avoid the red eye effect in the first place), but now it has been added. For better results, don’t run the tool for the entire photo. Make a selection around the eyes, and then use the tool.

Foreground extraction

The new Foreground Extractor, based on the SIOX algorithm, is an easy way to cut the subject from an image and remove the background. Select the zone of interest with a lasso-like tool, then mark parts of the sure foreground with a brush. Press the Enter key, and your selection is done. You will still have to make small adjustments using the classic selection tools for a perfect result.

Lens distortion

Among the new filters introduced is Lens Distortion, which allows you to correct the barrel distortion or vignetting caused by bad lenses or filters on your camera. I am sure this filter has a lot of potential to be abused for weird effects.

Also note the zoomable preview in the image below. This feature is also available now in many plugins.

Text

The Text Tool has its share of enhancements. It is possible to preview the font in the edit area for immediate feedback, to put your text on a path, or to transform it in an editable path on which you can edit nodes, edit fill or stroke, and transform it to a selection.

Brushes

Brushes are also improved. You can change their scale (for both parametric and bitmap brushes) with a slider or keyboard shortcut, without opening the brush editor. You can add jitter for a more natural and realistic look in drawing and import Adobe Photoshop V2 brushes (.abr).

Alignment

With the Alignment Tool, it’s easy to align (top, bottom, middle, left, right, center) layers and other objects relative to the image, other layers, selections, or to precisely position them with coordinates.

Color Picker

The Color Picker can now take a color sample not only from a GIMP image window, but also from any element on your desktop: background, window of another open application, anything, so you don’t have to take a screenshot of the desktop or a window and import it into GIMP just to sample a color.

I hope you’re excited about the upcoming Fedora 8 and its included GIMP 2.4. I, for one, can’t look back at the old versions. If you like using graphics applications and like Fedora, join the Fedora Art Team and create graphics for your favorite distro in a collaborative way using free tools and an open community.

¹At this time, GIMP has gone to a third release candidate. It is likely that this will be the version packaged with Fedora 8 and that the official release will come in an update.

This tutorial explores a few simple techniques to improve a portrait using GIMP. In particular, you’ll see a couple of new features introduced in the new GIMP 2.4, the Healing Tool and the Red Eye Removal filter.

We will start with the boring image on the left and get to the shining one on the right. Note that all images in this tutorial are available in a Flickr set.

Crop to the most interesting part of the photo

Don’t be afraid to cut the photo down to the most interesting part. Use the Crop tool to select the part of the photo which is meaningful for the viewer, in this case, her face. Here I activated guides for the Crop Tool using the rule of thirds to help me with the selection. (See the toolbox for activating these guides.)

Note: The rule of thirds is a guideline used in the composition of images, including in painting and photography. Dividing an image in thirds both horizontally and vertically will create four points of intersection that can be used to align the image to create more tension, energy, and interest.

Remove red eye

If the subject has red eyes, use the Red Eye Removal filter (Filters > Enhance > Red Eye Removal). Zoom in and adjust the slider as needed.

The best option is to not need the red eye removal tool at all. The red eye effect is created by the reflection of the camera’s flash light in the inner part of the eyes. Avoid using the flash when you can, or use your camera’s portrait mode, which will minimize the red eye effect.

Adjust the levels

Improve the dynamic range of the photo using the Levels dialog (Colors > Levels). If you know how to use the tool, move the black and the white sliders for Input Levels to cover the histogram values and the middle sliders to the left or right if you want to enhance the white or black. If you are not familiar with histograms, the Auto button is your friend. It will automatically adjust the levels to what GIMP thinks they should be. This can, however, be wrong, so it’s a good idea to play with the sliders to get a feel for adjusting them yourself.

Adjust the color curves

You can enhance the photo further by adjusting the Color Curves ( Colors > Curves). For a natural image, an “S” curve will do wonders. Of course, you can do a lot more with this tool, such as adjust brightness and darkness, or use it to adjust each color channel (red, green or blue).

Roll over the palette to see the results of the adjustment.

Remove imperfections with the healing tool

Next, correct large skin imperfections (wrinkles, blemishes, pimples) with the Healing Tool. It works similarly to the Clone Tool by defining a source and a destination area, but it will average the values for a smooth result. Zoom in and choose a brush size as needed.

Note: It’s useful to change the source area (by clicking while holding Ctrl) frequently, to have the source as similar as possible with the destination.

Roll over a small image to enlarge it. Choose the healing tool. After using the tool. Results of healing.

Enhance detail

To enhance the photo details, use the Unsharp Mask filter (Filters > Enhance > Unsharp Mask). Use small values.

Roll over the palette to see the results of the adjustment.

Adjust color balance

The face in this picture is a little too red, so I used the Color Balance dialog ( Colors > Color Balance) to reduce the redness a bit. As the opposite of red is cyan, the photo turned somewhat blue, so I then reduced the blue a bit.

Whiten teeth and eyes

To whiten teeth or the whites of eyes, use the Free Select Tool (lasso) with Feather edges (a value of 5 is enough) so you don’t need very precise margins, and select the area to whiten. Then Desaturate (Layer > Colors > Hue-Saturation) them a bit.

Roll over a small image to enlarge it. Select the area with the lasso. Desaturate the area. Results of desaturation. Results on full image

Smooth skin

The next step is to make the skin smoother, but be warned, this is a dangerous tool. Abusing it may destroy your photo. Turn on the Quick Mask (Select > Toggle Quick Mask), and with a black foreground and white background, use the Eraser to remove the red mask covering the skin, while avoiding the mouth, hair, eyes, and eyebrows. If you delete too much, reapply that part of the mask using a brush. When you’re ready, turn off the Quick Mask, and you’ll see the skin selected. Use the Selective Gaussian Blur (Filters > Blur > Selective Gaussian Blur) with small values to smooth the skin.

Roll over a small image to enlarge it. Use the eraser. After erasing skin. Results of erasing with area selected. Add Gaussian blur. Results of Gaussian blur.

Note: If you use large values for the Selective Gaussian Blur, you may get an artificial “plastic” effect. If the photo is very noisy, try a Selective Gaussian Blur over the entire photo, but be careful not to destroy the small details and get an even worse “plastic” result.

Add some glow

One last step: add some glow to the photo. Duplicate the layer (Layer > Duplicate Layer) and apply some Gaussian Blur (Filters > Blur > Gaussian Blur) to the duplicate. Also on the duplicate layer, adjust the Color Curves (Colors > Curves) and make the image very bright. Then set the Layer Mode to Soft Light. (Also try other modes for different effects). You can see in this example how the effect can make the photo very bright. When the result is too strong like this, reduce the opacity of the upper layer to tone it down a bit.

Roll over a small image to enlarge it. Add gaussian blur. Adjust the curves. Results of blur. Set layer to “Soft light.” Final results.

Remember what we started with and see what we got as end result. The differences are quite amazing.

It’s not hard to enhance a photo, and you should do it with all those photos you care about. A few small steps can make a difference, and GIMP has all the tools you need for the job. But be careful not to abuse them and get something worse. Remember that you don’t have to use every step in this tutorial for every picture. You may choose to use only one, or nearly all, dependent on your photo.

Will democratizing sustainable housing be enough to change Canada? It’s too early to tell, but there’s a start. Open source can make sustainable designs available. Nobody owns it, everybody can use it, and anybody can improve it. The Now House is one sustainable housing design project created by one small team. What would happen if one hundred teams created projects like this?

Toronto-based firm Work Worth Doing created Now House™, a project whose mission is to turn a 60-year-old WWII house into a near zero energy home—one that produces as much energy as it uses. The idea for this one house, coupled with the benefits of open source, has the potential to affect millions of homes and demonstrate how open source thinking can be applied to one of the biggest problems facing the world today. Canada shoulders its own share of this burden and is currently way off-track from meeting its Kyoto Protocol goals.

Over the next ten years, how could open source thinking continue to play a role in the Now House project?

The process for retrofitting one house to become a near zero energy home, will serve as the basis for future phases of the project.

The homes within a wartime housing community are similar in structure, making the national rollout of the Now House model possible. There are an estimated one million wartime homes across Canada (see figure 1). As the project gains momentum, the scale will necessitate the participation of many different players located throughout the nation. Creating an open source platform allows multiple partners–builders, governments and homeowners–to contribute input and provide resources.

Sources for the data in figure 2:

• About 12 million occupied homes in 2004. Source: “Population and dwelling counts, for Canada provinces and territories, 2006 and 2001 censuses — 100% data,” Statistics Canada.
• 57% are single detached homes, equaling 6.84 million homes. Source: “Improving Energy Performance in Canada” page 17, Figure 3-1.
• GHG emission reduction per year in tons: The residential sector produces 77 mega tons of GHG emissions. Source: “Improving Energy Performance in Canada” page 17.
• 57% of the residential sector (single detached homes) produces 43.89 mega tons of GHG emissions. 43.89 mega tons of GHG emissions x 60% estimated Now House GHG reduction for detached housing.

In the hypothetical rollout to all existing houses, the retrofitting teams could apply their wartime housing knowledge to other single-detached homes (see figure 2). By creating a platform for participation, there’s an opportunity for a community of collaborators to build on past work because of open source knowledge. Could this knowledge empower Now House participants to create a sustainable, profitable marketplace while positively changing Canada’s GHG emissions?

Canadians may want to spend more time saving the environment given their current ecological footprint, which would require four planet Earths to sustain if everyone on the planet lived like them. It takes 7.6 global hectares of resources to support each Canadian according to the latest World Wildlife Fund’s Living Planet Report (see figure 3). An open source platform for sustainable housing could pull groups from all over Canada and provide them with vibrant connections and resources through which they can share ideas, best practices and make a living through creating near zero energy homes. The Now House team thinks that small changes can equal big results. Small changes and collaboration on a national scale through an open source platform is one way to do just that.

Figure 3: Ecological footprint. Source: WWF International. 2006 Living Planet Report, 3.

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