We are happy to announce that we’ve completed work on our OpenConferenceware-Android application to make it available for OSCON 2010. You can download the app to your Android phone to get access to OSCON schedule, maps, and more. Peter Krenesky, the lead developer of the Android application, has written a blog post with more details about the application including links to the code. You can also learn more from the OSCON blog post.

We’re always excited to see open source events happening, especially when they are in our home state of Oregon! Open Source Bridge will have its second annual conference June 1-4, and the Oregon State University Open Source Lab will be well represented at the event where five of our staff (plus one OSUOSL alumnus) will be speaking. We’ve got a lot of cool stuff going on at the OSUOSL and are excited to have a chance to share some of the things we’ve been up to.

As part a major effort and plan by the worldwide Nokia (Mameo project) and Intel (Moblin project) to share the MeeGo operating system code with the open source community, MeeGo has selected OSU’s Open Source Lab as its infrastructure home. Today MeeGo is an open source project hosted by the Linux Foundation that encourages community contributions in accordance with the best practices of the open source development model. MeeGo is an open source, Linux project which brings together the Moblin project, headed up by Intel, and Maemo, by Nokia, into a single open source activity. MeeGo integrates the experience and skills of two significant development ecosystems, versed in communications and computing technologies. According to the project’s web site, they believe “these two pillars form the technical foundations for next generation platforms and usages in the mobile and device platforms space.”

The Drupal Association is supporting the Oregon State University Open Source Lab to the tune of $15,000. Specifically, $10,000 is being directed specifically towards paying OSL student employees to work on drupal.org infrastructure tasks. Our students have been instrumental in setting up and maintaining the infrastructure for drupal.org and related sites, and we are very excited to be able to dedicate more time to this important project. Additionally, the Drupal Association has committed to make a $5,000 donation to the Open Source Lab general fund. This money is used to support all of our activities at the OSL, for specifics, please see our FAQ. It is great to see a project hosted at the OSL become large enough that they are able to support the Lab with a monetary donation, especially as we celebrate our sixth anniversary with the Give 6 program.

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:

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

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.

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.

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.

The Oregon State University Open Source Lab recently received a large gift in-kind donation from a local Portland company which included approximately 20 servers, two NetApp filers with approximately 14TB of disk space, load balancers, and more. This is a very generous donation which will help the OSL replace aging hardware and expand our current infrastructure to support even more services and open source projects. One of the donated servers (pictured here), an HP dl580 with 20GB of RAM and dual dual-core Xeon processors has already been put to use as a community database server. The OSL is currently running five such servers which run MySQL and PostgreSQL databases for our hosted partners. Our database servers power such community sites as phpBB, Mozillazine, Linux Plumbers Conference, OpenOffice Extensions, BusyBox, Gentoo Forums, Kerneltrap, OLPC Support Forums, and many more!