After attending BarCamp Portland, Alex Polvi was inspired to create a similar opportunity for Corvallis. At the time, Polvi was a computer science student at Oregon State University, and he approached Associate Professor Timothy Budd about creating a BarCamp on campus. After driving up to Portland with some students in order to see a how a BarCamp is organized, Budd began creating the first Beaver BarCamp, with the help of his students and Corvallis community members from the Software Association of Oregon. The first Beaver BarCamp was held on March 1, 2008.

The Open Source Lab (OSL) recently kicked off its 10 year celebration at the O’Reilly Open Source Conference in Portland July 23 - 26. Over the last decade, the OSL has contributed much to the recent growth of the open source community and is using this milestone to reflect on its past accomplishments and to create goals for the future. By focusing to ‘Build The Future’ in three key areas: education, outreach, and research and infrastructure, the lab will strengthen its position as an open source leader.

With the open source conference season well underway, OSL students and staff were excited to attend Open Source Bridge at the Eliot Center in downtown Portland from June 18-21. Now in its fifth year, the conference provided a unique opportunity for the open source community to connect and share with each other. Besides great vegetarian food, one of the ways conference organizers promoted a feeling of community was with the hacker lounge, sponsored by Intel. Comfortable seating, plenty of power strips and wifi, a 3-D printer and a Lego table added to the atmosphere of creativity. For OSL Director Lance Albertson, the hacker lounge was the most important part of Open Source Bridge.

Students from India, Poland and the United Kingdom will work on projects for the OSL this summer. The Oregon State University Open Source Lab has accepted four college students from around the world as Google Summer of Code 2013 participants. The four students will work on projects for the OSL over the summer with Google’s sponsorship and OSL staff members’ mentoring and supervision. The OSL has not had four GSOC students since 2010. OSL Director Lance Albertson attributes this year’s increased number of students, compared to only one in 2012, to a greater variety of available projects.

Open Source Lab staff members attended DrupalCon May 20-24 at the Oregon Convention Center in Portland. OSL attendees welcomed the opportunity to contribute and learn during the many sessions and social events. “It was so good to see everyone in the open source community, meet new people and reconnect with people I only see once a year,” says Rudy Grigar, senior systems architect. The OSL presented Put the Ops in Dev: What Developers Need to Know about Devops, a session to teach developers what they need to know about operations to improve the maintainability of their code in production. Grigar said that the session was fun to present, because they had good participation.

Below is a summary of the Open Source Lab’s tri-annual newsletter. To receive this newsletter in your inbox, visit our sign up form. Letter from the Director Dear Friends, After working for nearly six years as the Oregon State University Open Source Lab’s lead systems engineer and the associate director, I became the lab’s new director in January. My involvement in the open source community began in 2003 with the Gentoo Linux distribution, and I am excited for the opportunity I will have to continue promoting and supporting FOSS in my new role. The OSL is unique for its heavy reliance on a student workforce to power the lab, and I plan to find new ways to further develop and expand our students’ abilities.

More than 150 Oregon State students, community members and students from other Oregon universities gathered in the Kelley Engineering building April 20 to attend the Open Source Lab’s Beaver BarCamp 11. Attendees presented nearly 50 sessions on a wide range of topics ranging from the technical to the recreational, including successful system administration, mead brewing and how to turn a T-shirt into a tie.

This year will be the lab’s seventh straight as a GSOC mentor. Open Source Lab staff are excited to announce that the lab has been accepted as a Google Summer of Code mentoring organization for the seventh year running. GSoC is a valuable opportunity for collaboration between the lab and young programmers around the world. In the past, the lab has worked with students from China, Portugal, Venezuela and Poland, offering them mentorship and guidance as they complete tasks to advance projects at the OSL.

Real-world work experience is one of the most valuable things an employer can provide to students preparing to enter the job market. At the Oregon State University Open Source Lab, that experience is readily available to 19 part-time student employees who balance their coursework at Oregon State with a job that offers them professional training. But the lab’s influence on ambitious students reaches beyond Oregon State, and even the United States, through Google’s Summer of Code program.

On Oct. 13, more than 150 people gathered in Kelley Engineering Center to attend the Oregon State University Open Source Lab’s Beaver BarCamp 10. Beaver BarCamp is a semiannual unconference that brings together students as well as community members to discuss technology, recreation and ideas in an interactive setting. Beaver BarCamp 10 featured attendee-led sessions on a variety of topics and was sponsored by Mozilla, RackSpace and the Oregon State University School of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science. In addition to sessions held by students on topics ranging from whistling to virtualization to playing poker, Mozilla employees presented three sponsored sessions on Web security, writing for the Web and building open Web apps.