Tech Symposium, results of Boing Boing? and More

After an action packed week of POSSE and FOSSCon, there was no slowing down this week. M-W was the NTID Tech Symposium where we delivered our paper on Open Video Chat. We also had a table for the length of the conference where we showed it off. Boing Boing picked up our Center for Student Innovation blog post on the RIT press release and ) several interesting things happened as a result (I assume) of the Boing Boing link...

Tony Anderson sent me an e-mail asking for some class projects in the fall including a typing game, a bingo vocab game, support for karma development and some work on Fez and Drupal. These all look like great initiatives and I'll be looking at the students enrolled in the Fall to see if we might be able to match some of them up.

Gerald Ardito, who I met when we presented at NYSCATE together last year, runs an OLPC deployment in a private school downstate, and has made it the focus of his PhD at Pace University. He asked if I'd be willing to come down to Pace and talk with folks there about what we're doing in Rochester, with the hopes of maybe helping them do something similar there. I'm looking forward to the opportunity to do so.

Kolawole Oreoluwa got in touch to ask about testing OVC for us in Nigeria. He'll be working with Adam to obtain some 1.5 for that very purpose and I look forward to hearing more about his program in general, in addition to finding out about his experiences with OVC.

Discussions in-channel with Collabora, the OVC dev team and members of the community during the symposium are leading up to a hackfest to attack problems with RTP, Gstreamer and Theora, to get the team up to speed with Telepathy-Farsight and to build some documentation for it that's currently lacking. We're shooting for a fest at OLPC headquarters the week of 7/12 and will be posting details once they firm up.

Last but not least we got to meet Kevin Cole of Gallaudet, who manned a table for OLPC and Sugar Labs at the event.

Many thanks to the FOSS@RIT dev team for all their great work and all the folks who got in touch with us this week!