Week 6 i (Spring Break 3/10/2010)
Thanks to Luis Ibanez of Kitware, who suggested that I attend,participate and contribute to HFOSS ( http://www.hfoss.org ) - Humanitarian Free and Open Source Software (hence the acronym HFOSS) workshop held in conjunction with SIGCSE (http://www.sigcse.org/sigcse2010/ ACM Computer Science Education Conference in Milwaukee, Wisconsin for year 2010). This was a delightful experience for me. Going to Milwaukee during a spring break from Troy may not be that enticing, but attending and participating in this workshop was a fantastic experience. I found a lot of kindred people sharing the same goal of developing (or help students develop) open source software for humanitarian purposes. In that sense, I found my roots!
HFOSS is organized by people from Trinity College (Hartford CT), Wesleyen University, ( Middletown CT) and Connecticut College (New London CT). The workshop was supported by NSF, Google and ACM. There was a good turnout for this workshop. I join Greg (redhat) in saying woohoo!
The workshop program can be found here
The format was that we had a key note speaker, a panel discussion and a breakout session followed by summary. There was a lot of twittering activity going on during the workshop. Please take a look at this to get a feel of what was going on during the workshop.
Hal Abelson (MIT and Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs (SICP) author) was the key note speaker.
Here are the notes from Greg (copied from his twitter feed and reversed and edited by me)
university curriculum changes one grave at a time
usc's *purpose* is to promote and foster the creation of intellectual property." Source: usc dean.
our *responsibility* as cs academics to resist the intelectual property stampede
open infrastructure is key
keeping cs open is vital because it's the instrumentality for everything else
dspace @ mit, institutional research archive sharing
the conflict between free expression and ip at universities is growing
general counsel of UT notes that taking notes implies a personal use license to create derivative works
read Ms. McSherry(Stanford Law School, currently at FSF), "who owns academic work?"
we are, right now, determining the future of knowledge in the information age.
academic authors give their papers to journals, who then own all rights to it forever.
university libraries are prohibited by licensing agreements to mine data from journals.
endgame of scientific publishing industry: monopolistic control by elsevier
generative platform! Read Zittrain (Harvard Law Professor and currently at Oxford) "the future of the internet"
for all microsoft woes, you need no permission to write and share pc software. The same is not true for iphone/ipad
are we instilling the values of "tinkerability" in our students?
will the mobile infrastructure be tinkerable?
working on the google app inventor to keep mobile platforms tinkerable.
google app inventor looks suspiciously like scratch - It is in fact scratch.
imagine a tenure committee that demands urls for open publications
I participated in the panel discussion along with people from RedHat, Google, RIT, Sahana foundation (an open source disaster management system ) and a number of educational institutes.
Industries complained about lack of knowledge of Faculty members on open source software and practice; Educational Institutes complained about lack of speed of assimilating open source software in their curriculum; Every one complained about lack of diversity and K-12 educational system. There was a lively discussion afterwards.
My job was simple. I just spoke about the outstanding work and projects done by students. I think people are impressed with all the projects (number, quality) and the dashboard to boot.
Here are my slides (I was not allowed to use slides - I used them as guidelines for my brief position statement)
Rcos Hfoss
View more presentations from mskmoorthy.
During lunch, enthusiastic and energetic students and faculty members (from Wesleyen, Connecticut college, Trinity College, Oregon State University, North Carolina State University) gave poster presentations. They answered all questions and showed their passion for HFOSS. I wish that I had the resources to bring our students to this workshop and show off their projects (may be next year!)
After lunch, we had three breakout sessions:
A. Curriculum: A Certificate Program (Allen Tucker)
B. Community Building: HFOSS Chapters (Ralph Morelli)
C. Town and Gown Collaborations (Leslie Hawthorn)
I participated in Community Building and Town and Gown Collaborations (as we are allowed to participate in at most two out of three). RCOS is already doing (or attempting to do) this. We need support from every level - more faculty member participation, a kinder administration and cooperation from city, state and federal governments. These are not easy to come by - We have to keep trying and make our efforts sincere - some day things will change.
It will be nice to have HFOSS chapter here at RPI and RCOS be a part of it. Hope that happens sooner than later.
All in all, it was useful (I met a number of people, learned about new projects, made people aware of our projects and RCOS).
A lot of photos are taken during the workshop - As soon as I get a link to them I will post.
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