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.

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 winter 2007 edition of the Oregon Stater, the OSU Alumni magazine, includes an article profiling Corey Shields and the Open Source Lab. The article also discusses the OSEL, our OSEL student evanglists Brandon Philips and Alex Polvi, as well as one of the students projects the OSEL is involved with, the Open Laptop per Child project and student Mike Burns.

Shown at left is Dennis Wolverton, photographer for the Oregon Stater, making friends with Tux at a LUG Hacking social during the preparation of the article.

You can find an on-line version of the article on the osu alumni web site.

The current issue of Red Herring names Scott Kveton, CEO of Portland startup JanRain, one of the magazine’s “Tech Tots: 25 Young Rebels Who Will Rock the World.” Formerly director of OSU’s Open Source Lab, and a member of the team that developed the concept of the Open Source Educational Lab, Scott left osu in June of 2006 to take the helm at JanRain. Way to go, Scott!

The Open Source Lab is engaging the One Laptop Per Child community by donating the time of a student developer. Starting next week Justin Gallardo’s full-time job will be making OLPC even better. For those unfamiliar with the OLPC project it aims to create a low cost laptop for students in developing countries. A few weeks before this announcement Justin had spent a weekend to finish a port of Abiword, a word processor, to the laptop. In the future Justin will be working to finish up the OLPC development board cluster hosted at the OSL and working with Red Hat’s team to create new activities for the platform.

Tux met some new friends (in this case, the women of Kappa Kappa Gamma), while representing LUG and the OSEL at the Beaver Community Fair, September 29, 2006. The folks manning the LUG table (which included representation from OSEL) also talked with many interested students. You can see more pictures on the LUG web site. Looks like the start of a good year.