Amber Graner is a community manager for the Open Compute Project and co-author of the Official Ubuntu Book. An open source enthusiast, she says the journey towards open hardware begins with the desire to change.

According to Graner, one of the greatest joys of the Open Compute Project is iterating on the existing equipment designs and making them better or more suitable for particular use cases, then contributing the results back to the community. As an example, she retells the story behind the Bridge Rack designed by Fidelity, which can be configured to support either the traditional (or as she puts it, ‘legacy’) 19” hardware or the latest gear that conforms to OCP’s ‘Open U’ standard.

The conversation took place at the DCD Internet conference in San Francisco, which concluded last week.