OSEL Blog

The OSU Engineering Expo, held in Kelly Engineering Center, gave this year’s graduating seniors a venue for showcasing their senior design projects, including the OSL’s capstone students Peter Sandin and Andrew Cunningham.

Both Peter and Andrew worked diligently to write a preliminary video chat application for the OLPC using the helix media player and helix server.

While focused on senior design projects, the Engineering Expo also offers the College of Engineering and the general student population a chance to show industry representatives, high school students, and parents what interesting engineering innovations are happening at OSU.  The OSEL was there to represent Open Source at OSU by talking about the OSL, work with the One Laptop Per Child Project, OSU’s Linux computing facilities, and general Linux use in the College of Engineering.

Jack Aboutboul, Redhat’s community engineer, came to Oregon State on Monday to meet students involved in the open source community as well as share his experiences in open source and at Redhat.

The day started with a tour of the EECS department, focusing on Carlos Jensen’s work with social computing and Tim Budd’s involvement with open source education.  After lunch, Jack visited the Open Source Lab then met the director of EECS.

 For many, the highlight of Jack’s visit was his colloquium presentation in Kelly. Students literally lined the walls to listen to Jack talk about what he describes as how a billion little collisions define everything.   In the case of open source, many small events have compounded to make a huge impact.

The March issue of the OSEL newsletter “Open Sources” has been released, the pdf version is available here. This issue centers on the Corvallis Beaver BarCamp that took place on Saturday, March 1st in the Kelley Engineering Center at OSU. Also, another article covers IBM’s generous grant towards the continuation of the OSEL.

The Open Source Education Lab is hosting a BarCamp at OSU. Friday, February 29th at 6:30pm for introductions, reception and conversation, Saturday, March 1st at 9am for the real deal. You are welcome to come to one or both. The two day Beaver BarCamp conference is free to register for and is welcome to all community members!

What is a BarCamp? Unlike traditional (read: lame) conferences that do silly things like make schedules ahead of time, at BarCamp the schedule is created throughout the day by popular consensus. Anyone who wishes to lead a talk on any relavant topic can do so. We have enough rooms to host a bunch of different tracks going at the same time. Pick what is most interesting at the time, jump between sessions or just run one yourself!

Want to talk OLPC? Done. Learn more about Python web development with Django? Not a problem. PHP module development for Drupal? Cake. How about mirroring the success of our own Open Source Lab at other universities? Go for it! Anything that you want to talk about is fair game, just signup for one of the conference rooms in the lobby and whoever wants to partake in that discussion will join. Sound fun? It is! BarCamps in Seattle, Portland and throughout the world have had phenominal success with these “unconferences.” Their flexibility and fresh material makes for a fun, thought-provoking day. Come see what all the hype is all about: 9am at Kelley Engineering Center at OSU with a smile on your face.

Sponsors include: Software Association of Oregon Corvallis Chapter, MyStrands, Jive Software, Sanda Communications, WoodstocksPizza, OSU College of Engineering, Insights Now!, Microsoft, Mozilla

Students Mike Burns and Justin Gallardo have been getting a lot of good press lately, with stories in the Eugene Weekly and the Corvallis Gazette Times. Mike and Justin helped forge the connection between the United Nations sponsored OLPC project and OSU. Mike made the initial connection, and Justin ported the word processor for the OLPC. That has led to many more connections to the project. Picture shown is from the Corvallis Gazette Times article.

The March/April issue of “Open Sources”, the OSEL newsletter, is now available as a pdf download. This issue features articles on students visiting Australia for Linux.conf.au, open source classes at Oregon State University, a profile on Darcs author David Roundy and more.

Would you like to be on the “Open Sources” mailing list? Email us at osel@lists.oregonstate.edu.

Michael Leibowitz, OpenOffice.org developer, gave an overview of the tools and processes used in developing OO.org. Particularly he concentrated on the steps a developer must take to get a patch into the project. A video of the presentation can be found on Google Video.

Eclipse Foundation members Bjorn Freeman-Benson and Ward Cunningham came to OSU to give a presentation in Professor Budd’s Open Source Development class. The title of the talk was “Software Creativity the Wiki Way.” Ward Cunningham is, of course, the inventor of the wiki-web concept, as well as being coinventor (with Kent Beck) of CRC cards, and part developer of the ideas of extreme programming. After the talk Bjorn blogged some nice comments on the experience, which you can read here .

Update: a video of the presentation can be found here.

Four OSU students successfully fund raised for a trip to the best free software conference in the world, linux.conf.au. The trip is now complete and all the travel log can be found at their homepage, http://pleasesendustolinuxconfau.info/.