February 2008
UTOS HackNight - Refactor ConMan
Tomorrow night, 7pm, in Murray at my house, we’ll be eating pizza and hacking on ConMan again.
If you are interested in joining the fun, please feel free to stop by and learn some kick-a** django skillz.
The last two HackNights were all-nighters and were very successful. Tomorrow’s HackNight is to refactor the views a little and build out the blog portion of the app as well. Feel free to come by and stay as long or as little as you like.
See you all there.
Cheers,
Clint
Posted by Clint on February 22, 2008 in Community, Conference, Events, Hackfests, Registration
Utah Open Source Conference 2008: HOWTO Diversify
The 2008 Utah Open Source Conference, to be held at Salt Lake Community College’s Redwood Campus August 28-30, 2008, will be a great opportunity for open source enthusiasts to gather, socialize, learn, and exchange ideas. In these ways, the 2008 UTOSC won’t be a lot different than the 2007 UTOSC. However, the planning and organizing team behind UTOSC 2008 does have some new and exciting changes for the 2008 conference.
In our previous blog posting, we described the theme the 2008 UTOSC is designed around: HOWTO. In this article, we’ll explain some of the ways we’re planning to abide by this theme.
Friends and Family
The 2008 UTOSC is designed to be more friendly to “newbies,” people who have only had a limited amount of exposure to the open source world, and to family members of those who eat, drink, sleep and roll around in open source every moment of their geeky lives.
Conference sessions on Friday, August 29, will include sessions targeted at those just getting their feet wet. Topics may include “Installing Linux,” “Using OpenOffice.org,” “Introduction to open source social networking tools,” and “Understanding SSH.”
The planning and organizing committee is excited about getting family members involved in what would ordinarily be considered fairly exclusive to geeks. There will be plenty of activities and conference sessions Saturday, August 30 targeting children and significant others so they can learn how open source may benefit them. We’ll have games and educational software for the kids like SuperTuxCart, SuperTux, Planet Penguin Racer, Gcompris, and KDEEDU. Session topics may include “Open source digital scrapbooking,” “Open source for the musician and music enthusiast,” “Open source and family history,” and “Open source artistry.” Great fun for the entire family!
To make this happen, admission on Saturday will be free to those who attend with a registered conference attendee.
Bar what?
Earlier this year, Utah Open Source Foundation (UTOSF) Head Cheese, Clint Savage, attended FUDCon, a conference for users and developers of the Fedora Linux distribution. One of the days of this conference was set up as a BarCamp, where attendees meet at the beginning of the day and decide, as a group, what conference topics and activities will take place that day. The BarCamp process is fairly informal, but there is one rule: Every attendee has to participate either by presenting or facilitating in at least one session.
Clint was totally amazed by this process and said it was one of the most satisfying conference experiences he’s had. He vowed that the 2008 Utah Open Source Conference would include one day of BarCamp. As a result, Thursday, August 28, the first day of the conference, will be held BarCamp-style. Be sure to show up early so you can participate in the entire process.
What now?
We’ll be posting more information in the days and weeks to come with more information about UTOSC 2008 including a Call For Papers and a Call For Volunteers. If you haven’t already, start thinking of topics you could present at this year’s conference with the above information in mind. Because this conference caters to a very diverse audience of varying levels of experience using open source or even using computers, nobody should feel they don’t have something to contribute.
Posted by Doran Barton on February 9, 2008 in Community, Conference
Utah Open Source Conference 2008: Location, Theme and Dates
For those of you waiting with bated breath, wait no longer. The Utah Open Source Conference volunteers have been hard at work year preparing an even more awesome conference for 2008.
Because 2007 was such a grand success, we’ve made some minor changes and improvements to help with a smoother conference. This year’s conference is at a different location and we’ve added a full day on Thursday.
The Utah Open Source Conference 2008 will be held at the Salt Lake Community College, Redwood Road campus August 28 - 30, 2008.
This years theme is HOWTO. The concept is that within the technology, education, community and business tracks, there will be plenty to talk about.
- HOWTOs will help others get started
- HOWTOs will help families use open source together
- HOWTOs will provide a stepping stone along the road to technology mastery
- HOWTOs will let those that are masters get together and make the products better.
These are just a few of the many things that HOWTO theme will accomplish during the Utah Open Source Conference (UTOSC) 2008.
The Salt Lake Community College Computer Science department is excited to be a sponsor of the 2008 conference and will be using it to improve students’ awareness and understanding of open source software.
The Utah Open Source Foundation is also re-dedicating itself to ensure the pricing structure remains reasonable for those who’d like to come and are on a budget. The pricing structure right now is tentative, but no major increases in the fees are planned for attendees.
We currently have a tentative plan on our wiki, so feel free to have a look. If you have suggestions, please join the chat anytime in the #utos channel on irc.freenode.net or email clints at utos dot org with your comments.
Watch closely over the next week for the Call for Papers, updates on the basic schedule, and the Call for Volunteers among other exciting announcements, including our keynote speakers.
See you all in August.
Clint Savage
Founder, Utah Open Source Foundation
Posted by Doran Barton on February 6, 2008 in Community, Conference, Events, News, UserGroups
Utah LUG Meetings: Feb 3-9, 2008
This week’s Local User Group meetings:
- Layton.rb - Feb 4, 7pm - Topic unavailable
- BYU UUG - Feb 7, 7pm - Basic DNS With Bind by Stuart Jansen
- Ubuntu Utah - Feb 9, 6pm - Debian/Ubuntu Packaging by Tim Riker
A special thanks goes out to TierFour for the streaming and podcast bandwidth to share these meetings. Please feel free to join the streaming discussion this week for the Ubuntu Utah meeting at http://stream.utos.org
Posted by Clint on February 3, 2008 in Community, Meetings, Streaming, UserGroups
UTOS ConMan: Becoming Awesome!
The UTOS Confrence Manager or ConMan, is really coming along. Tonight’s HackNight didn’t last quite as long as last weekend, but there was some definite improvements.
One of the really nice improvements was the addition of the logo by James Hancock who’s really good with his inkscape skills. Other improvements included a better gui, backend administration, refactoring much of the user creation to better accommodate future enhancements.
One of the best features that has been added tonight was the blog functionality by Kevin Kubasik of GNOME fame. When a conference is upcoming and during the conference itself, this feature will be front and center. Nice work!
Things that are left include registration, including payments with google checkout, paypal or a merchant backend. Sponsor management is another, as well as schedules for volunteers, speakers, attendees and sessions, bofs and events.
I’m even sure there are items not yet considered above, but that’s the functionality we hope to have in place within the next few months. Feel free to download the project, and submit patches back to us anytime, we dig the help.
We’re looking forward to deploying the Call for Papers components tomorrow or Sunday in our official call for papers announcement, so keep your eyes peeled.
Cheers,
Clint
Posted by Clint on February 2, 2008 in Community, Conference, Hackfests, UserGroups