Recent Books

Recent books produced by Book Sprints

British Columbia in a Global Context

The main scope of the book is to apply the fundamental geographical approach of understanding our globally changing world by looking at the local processes. These local processes and events are intrinsically linked to the same processes and events elsewhere, for example mining and its affects are a global issue and we can see how these unfold in BC. A further example is the recent apologies to First Nation peoples on the residential school treatment, as similar events occur in the US, Ireland and Australia. Processes of urbanization, a phenomenon which people all over the globe are experiencing, can be seen in Vancouver with our discussion of the city’s development to now being rated the second most expensive city in the world to purchase a home. Geography students, indeed all first year students, need to know and be able to critically assess their own contexts and environments in order to properly engage with our continually globalizing world.

How labs cultivate change through experimentation and collaboration

Labcraft book now available.

The struggle to solve local and global issues often appears to pitch large corporations and governments against activists, artists, workers and ordinary citizens. But what happens when these entities consciously join forces and share resources to create social change?

It’s happening more than you might think—in a growing phenomenon known as innovation labs. And Labcraft offers an intimate picture of this new and evolving landscape—where seemingly disparate stakeholders network and align as learning communities who collaborate for positive change.

Innovation labs do what we expect laboratories to do—invent and experiment. But their “test tubes” are real-world challenges. And as they explore new connections, new ideas, and new initiatives, they often generate new perspectives and promising solutions.

OpenStack Operations Guide

This book is for those of you starting to run OpenStack clouds as well as those of you who were handed an operational one and want to keep it running well. Perhaps you’re on a DevOps team, perhaps you are a system administrator starting to dabble in the cloud, or maybe you want to get on the OpenStack cloud team at your company. This book is for all of you.

This guide assumes that you are familiar with a Linux distribution that supports OpenStack, SQL databases, and virtualization. You must be comfortable administering and configuring multiple Linux machines for networking. You must install and maintain an SQL database and occasionally run queries against it.

How to Understand Mining Contracts

Drawing from several of the contracts on ResourceContracts.org, “Mining Contracts: How to Read and Understand Them” is a new book created to highlight strong contract clauses and explore how others could be improved. It goes beyond legal considerations to explore the policy questions and company interests underlying contract provisions—issues that are crucial for understanding and negotiating contracts, and for monitoring their enforcement