Utah Open Source Blog

As announced on many mailing lists in the local area, the Utah Open Source Foundation has teamed up with the Fedora Ambassadors and the XO/OLPC project to promote the XO Developer Program.

Here’s the email being sent around.  Feel free to share it with anyone you like to help get them involved in bettering the learning tools available using Free and Open Source Software.  I have added a few word changes and a couple additional links to help.

The Utah Open Source Foundation has been working with the Fedora Ambassadors and the XO/OLPC folks to promote a new project.  Due to some recent changes in their structure, they’re looking for more developers and packagers for this project.

If you are a python developer, interested in helping children learn on a cool bit of hardware that is very hard to break, have time to code between now and August and are willing to commit to working on the xo project for [at least] 1 year, the Fedora Project will provide you with a free XO laptop to keep.

This project is fourth grade math curriculum for the XO/OLPC.  The idea being that once the major bits of this curriculum are developed, creating other versions will be much simpler.

The requirements are that you give monthly updates on your progress to the Fedora Ambassadors.  It should also be obvious that you will be working with others to get requirements completed and development in for testing and released to packagers.

If you are interested, I can provide you a laptop within 1-2 weeks as well as help you get a developers key and get started right away.  For more information visit these links:

• https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Fedora_developers_XO_program
• http://sugarlabs.org/go/Sugar_Labs <– Contact info for Sugar Labs folks
• http://sugarlabs.org/go/DevelopmentTeam <– info about development
• http://sugarlabs.org/go/User:Gdk/4th_Grade_Maths <– info about the modules being developed
• http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/fourthgrademath <– a new list for those developers joining up to help

The point of this email is to interest you folks who would love to develop something useful in the world.  To change the way kids learn and grow and show the way open source software can provide this change.  If you are seriously interested in participating in this project and have a few hours a week to give to it, please contact me off list.

If you are interested, contact me, <clint@utos.org> and we’ll get you started right away.

Cheers,

Clint

The Utah Open Source Foundation has been doing streaming for quite some time now, at least 1.5 years.  In that time, we’ve recorded and streamed many presentations as well as podcasted the Utah Open Source Conference twice.  I found the statistics on our streaming server tonight, they seem quite interesting so I thought I might share.  On our streaming server we served:

• listener_connections:  182  (total number of listeners on all streams)
• source_client_connections    48 (total number of streams created, or total number of recordings)

Comparing that with our podcast server:

• total podcasts: 41 (meaning we didn’t podcast every stream, probably due to technical difficulties or poor quality recordings)
• total listeners to all podcasts: 5939 (since September 2007)

It’s amazing to see how many people actually download our podcasts and listen to the Local User Groups.  I’m quite impressed with these numbers.  Many of the podcasts are from the Utah Open Source Conference (in both 2007 & 2008), but the podcast that has been downloaded the most is:   Ubuntu Utah: December 2007 Meeting.

To total this up, we could say that the Utah Open Source Foundation has had 6,121 listeners to over 48 different audio presentations, live or not.  We thank you for your participation and hope to see more connections in the coming years as we expand this coverage to include more and more sources around Utah Open Source Local User Groups (LUGs).

If your LUG is interested in streaming its meetings, we can help.  It literally takes a $7 microphone, a laptop with a microphone jack and a free software program called darkice.  Utah Open Source provides the server, the logins for the IceCast server, a couple bash scripts and training to get the stream running for your LUG.

Please contact us if you are interested in getting your group streamed and podcasted by the Utah Open Source Foundation.  Probably the easiest way is to email me, <clint At utos  org> with the subject “UTOS Streaming” and we’ll get you set up right away.

Cheers,

Clint

Greets all!

It’s that time again to start up Geek Lunches for this year, and we’ve decided to kick them off by having one in Utah County! (I have been sorely chastised for not having more events in Utah County – and look to amend that this year!)

This month’s Geek Lunch is going to be at The Smokehouse Pizza and BBQ in Orem. The event will be Feb 20 at 12:30p.

Address below: