The OSL Team and Our Host, David Recordon, at Facebook’s Prineville Data Center We’ve been spending the past few weeks making our plans for the summer: specing out longer term projects for our student employees, sharing our knowledge at conferences and continuing our mission to grow and support the world of open source. While we’re busy looking forward and reviewing our progress thus far for 2011, we thought it would be the perfect time to bring the community an update on what we’ve been up to for the past few months since our last newsletter. If you’d like to receive more frequent news updates from the OSL, follow us on Twitter or find us on Facebook.

If you’ve been following the news, you’ve likely heard of the Open Compute Project, Facebook’s project to build the most efficient data center at the lowest possible cost and to share their knowledge with other companies. Last Friday, Facebook opened the doors of their Prineville, Oregon data center, inviting a host of dignitaries and members of the press to tour this newly opened facility and learn more about the Open Compute Project. The Open Source Lab crew was fortunate enough to be invited to join this august group for a tour thanks to David Recordon, Facebook’s Senior Open Programs Manager.

We’ve had plenty of good things happening at the OSL since we brought your our last newsletter, and as we’re busy gearing up for 2011 we wanted to take a few moments to share our good news with the community. First, the best news: We’re Hiring The OSL is hiring for a full-time software developer who will analyze, design, and test software code for Ganeti Web Manager, the Protein Geometry Database and several other homegrown Open Source Lab projects. For more details on the position and instructions on how to apply, check out the Analyst Programmer role on the Oregon State University Jobs page.

CrisisCommons is a global network of volunteers who use creative problem solving and open technologies to help people and communities in times and places of crisis. CrisisCommons is pleased to join several other humanitarian free and open source software projects hosted by Oregon State University’s Open Source Lab (OSL). The CrisisCommons community creates “CrisisCamp” events where volunteers of all skill levels can work across borders, languages and timezones to collaborate on projects, translate languages, build open source technology tools, and aggregate data to provide support for crisis response efforts. During the worldwide response to the Haiti and Chile earthquakes, this community organized 63 events across 8 countries with over 2,300 people participating to support such projects as Person Finder, a searchable database of missing persons, and Tradui, the first Creole translation application. The OSL has been part of the CrisisCommons community from the beginning, through the CrisisCamp Portland (CrisisCampPDX) event on January 23, 2010.

CORVALLIS, Ore. - High school students can soon participate in the Google Code-in Contest with the assistance of the Open Source Lab at Oregon State University. In this contest, which begins Nov. 22, students aged 13-18 will be provided with a list of tasks that could improve various open source software projects. The OSU Open Source Lab, one of 20 organizations participating in this initiative, will ask students to create logo artwork, write code, produce documentation, fix software glitches and do other tasks.

At the annual meeting of the National Science Digital Library in Washington, D.C. earlier this week, the TeachEngineering digital library received a “recognition of excellence” award from NSDL. The NSDL is the National Science Foundation’s online library of resources and collections for science, technology, engineering, and mathematics education and research. At the opening of this year’s annual meeting, chair Susan Jesuroga recognized the TeachEngineering collection as the most learning application-ready collection in NSDL. The recognition was based on an audit of quality criteria defined by NSDL as part of an assessment of the learning application readiness of NSDL’s 121 collections.

We are thrilled to have been selected as mentoring organization for the Google Code-in contest. Right now, we’re busy getting our task list up to date on the contest website, http://google-melange.com. News Greg Lund-Chaix has written a blog post aimed at educators about why he’s excited to participate as a mentor for Google Code-in. Greg is one of the key figures behind the Oregon Virtual School District program. Student Information Students can begin participating in the contest on November 22, 2010. In the interim, now is a great time to peruse the Official Rules and the contest Frequently Asked Questions pages. If you want to talk your would-be mentors at the OSL, you can find us in our online chat room, #osuosl on Freenode.

CORVALLIS, Ore. - The Oregon State University Open Source Lab is pleased to announce that Leslie Hawthorn has just joined the team as an Open Source Outreach Manager. An internationally known speaker and advocate for open source software development methodologies and community practices, Leslie Hawthorn brings more than 10 years experience in project management, marketing and public relations to her new role. She previously worked as a Program Manager at Google Inc, where she was responsible for the company’s open source outreach efforts, most notably the Google Summer of Code program and Google Highly Open Participation contest.

OSL Newsletter This newsletter contains updates of recent events at the Oregon State University Open Source Lab. We will continue to publish newsletters every 3-6 months in the future. Newsletters will be posted to our website as well as sent out to an email list. If you’d like to receive newsletters via email, please sign up at http://lists.osuosl.org/mailman/listinfo/osl-newsletter OSCON We were very excited to have OSCON back in Portland this year! Not only did this mean we got to share our wonderful city with many of our open source friends (Three OSLers live around Portland!), but Portland is also close enough to campus that we could bring up a number of OSL student employees and OSU CS students. It was great seeing our students meet people in the expo hall and share some of their experiences.

The Give 6 fund raising program which was launched last year has completed with great success. Friends of the Oregon State University Open Source Lab were invited to make a gift in honor of our sixth anniversary. Responses came from 88 unique donors representing 27 U.S. states and 17 different countries. Many donors added words of appreciation: “The support we’ve received, in hardware, bandwidth, and from the volunteers and employees of the Open Source Lab, have been outstanding.” “By supporting efforts like the Open Source Lab, the university is helping teach, innovate, and support our future.”