OSUOSL News

GOSCON DC

11/02/09

This year, join us for a special one-day Government Open Source Conference (GOSCON) DC on Thursday, November 5 at the Ronald Reagan Building and International Trade Center. The program will focus on how federal agencies are using open technology in support of their agency mission objectives while reducing costs and creating a secure information technology environment. "Management", "Mission", and "Technology" tracks in the program feature outstanding agency and industry presentations. Government agency leaders and their key technology personnel as well as legal, procurement, planning, public information and social media staff should attend . Highlights from the program include:

Breakfast Keynote: David M. Wennergren, Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Information Management and Technology / Deputy Chief Information Officer US Department of Defense
Luncheon Keynote: David G. Boyd, Ph.D., Director, Command, Control and Interoperability Division Science and Technology Directorate, U.S. Department of Homeland Security

A short list of agency presenters include:

Brian Guertin, Chief Patent Council, NASA Goddard
Sue C. Payton, Former Assistant Secretary of the Air Force/Acquisition Former Deputy Under Secretary of Defense/Acting Director Defense Research and Engineering; President – SCI Aerospace Inc.
Daud Santosa, Chief Technology Officer, US Department of Interior
Vish Sankaran, Director of the Federal Health Architecture, US Department of Health and Human Services
Peter J. Tseronis, Deputy Associate Chief Information Officer, U.S. Department of Energy and Chairperson, Federal Cloud Computing Advisory Council

Three conference tracks and a hands-on lab address a full range of timely management and technology topics. Agencies presenting include DOD, DISA, HHS, GSA, EPA, DOE, Department of State, NASA, OMB, CIA, NSA, NARA, DHS. The full conference schedule and additional speakers can be found on the conference web site at http://goscon.org

Google Surpasses $1M in Donations to OSUOSL

8/11/09

Google has generously donated $300,000 to support the Oregon State University Open Source Lab. With this donation, the companies cumulative support of the Lab has now topped $1 million.

Google is a Platinum Sponsor of the OSL Alliance program which enables commercial vendors to financially support the expansion of computing infrastructure, hosting services, and software development provided to open source projects at the OSUOSL.

The full press release is available here: Google gift of $300,000 to OSU Open Source Lab raises Internet giant’s support to more than $1M

OSCON 2009

7/17/09

Being located so close to Portland, of course we at the OSU Open Source Lab were sad to see OSCON move down to the Bay Area this year. However, it remains a great convention not only for the abundance of wonderful sessions, but for bringing together so many open source contributors from all around the world. So, even though it means a bit of traveling for us this year, we'll be at OSCON next week -- not with are usual booth in the expo hall, but we will be participating in a number of sessions.

On Wednesday at 2:35, Lance Albertson will be giving a talk entitled Server Management and Source Control: The key to scalability and teamwork. Lance leads our systems team which hosts some of the most well-known open source projects and communities in the world. Lance's talk will give you a chance to see how we handle automation for our servers using cfengine and git to allow for all systems team members to easily collaborate and push changes to servers.

At 4:30 on Wednesday, Deborah Bryant will lead a panel entitled Bureaucrats, Technocrats and Policy Cats: How the Government is turning to Open Source, and Why. Other participants include Bjorn Freeman-Benson (DemocracyLab), Greg Lund-Chaix (OSUOSL), Clay Johnson (Sunlight Labs), and Aleksandar Totic (Open Source Digital Voting Foundation). This will be a great discussion on government moving to open source and transparency.

Thursday afternoon at 1:45 will be the much-anticipated State of Lightning Talks 2009 lead by Josh Berkus. Always informative and entertaining, the State of Lightning Talks give a handful of projects five minutes a piece to update everyone on what's currently going on in their project & communities. Jeff Sheltren will be there to give everyone the run-down on what's new at the Open Source Lab this year.

We look forward to seeing you there!

Catch us at Open Source Bridge

6/17/09

Open Source Bridge starts today and runs through Friday at the Oregon Convention Center in Portland, Oregon. Most of our full-time staff will be participating in the conference, so please stop us in the hallway and say hi!

Deborah Bryant will be speaking on Open Source in Government.

Lance Albertson will be speaking with ex-OSL'er, Narayan Newton (now at Tag1 Consulting) on using "layers of caching" to scale websites

Peter Krenesky will be leading our open in government" hackathon session at the Hilton Portland & Executive Tower.

Greg Lund-Chaix and Jeff Sheltren will be around to enjoy the conference and talk to people about what's going on at the Open Source Lab.

Hackathon at Open Source Bridge

6/15/09

The Open Source Lab is organizing a Hackathon (code sprint) at the Open Source Bridge conference, June 17-19th at the Oregon Convention Center in Portland. We’re bringing people together to help out Sunlight Lab’s Fifty States Project. If you’re interested in helping promote government openness and transparency, this is your chance.

What

Part of the non-partisan Sunlight Foundation, Sunlight Labs is an open source development team that builds technology to make government more transparent and accountable. They have been building the Fifty States Project with the help of volunteers around the country. The project aims to provide parsers and an API for legislative data from each of the fifty state governments in the U.S. This is a local version of their already successful OpenCongress.org which provides the same data from the federal government.

Where

The hackathon will take place at the Open Source Bridge conference. Open Source Bridge is a new conference for developers working with open source technologies and for people interested in learning the open source way. It is an entirely volunteer organized conference. Open Source Bridge is providing a Hacker Lounge, providing a great environment to hack in 24 hours a day during the conference.

The hacker lounge is located at the Hilton Portland & Executive Tower, 921 SW Sixth Avenue, Portland, Oregon

When

The hacker lounge opens at 9am on June 17th and is open round the clock until 12am, June 19th.

Project Intro: Anytime between 3pm - 8pm June 17th
Coding: any time till the end of the conference

Who

We’re looking for any programmers of any level, interested in promoting openness and transparency in government. No prior experience with the project is needed, but feel free to check out the project wiki. Fifty States is written in python but other languages are welcome as well.

RSVP

If you’re interested in attending RSVP at Upcoming

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