Week 8: Activities Galore

Week 8: (7/16/2010)

Like last week, we had talks both on Wednesday and Friday. On Wednesday we had students present their progress with their projects. We had talks by

1) Nicholas Steele
2) Sean Austin and Griffin Milsap,
3) Ryan Baltazar
4) Ryan Dignard

Nick is progressing along with his vote box. He has made the ballots and his user interface is coming along. He is trying to build a device that is easily accessible to people with disabilities.

Sean and Griffin have made design changes to their droidViz project. They are planning to create a visualization libraries (efficient and powerful). They are currently repackaging their code. Their previous code has been downloaded 3000 times.

RyanB talked about map-server project with JumpStart international. Most of the pieces are in place in his trial server. He has a new hardware (thanks to the generosity of Moorthy and Rob ), where he is installing the server, and documenting his efforts. He is also planning to write shell scripts to make this installation easier for other people.

RyanD talked about his Database for donors for NGO's based on CanKid project. He has been making excellent progress. He is currently working on the look and feel of the browser where the donors make donations.

On Friday (7/16), we had two visitors (Prof. Ralph Morelli and Trishan deLanerolle) from Trinity college in Hartford. They talked about their work on Humanitarian FOSS (HFOSS) efforts. They have a NSF grant and they have done phenomenal things building community, educating people, and students doing excellent projects of community/social value. In particular they talked about Sahana (Disaster Emergency Management System), Collabit (Collabbit aims to facilitate inter- and intra-committee communication in case of a disaster or other event that requires coordination between multiple organizations or individual users) and POSIT (tracking with android and building ad hoc networks). It was a fascinating talk aided by lots of multimedia presentation.

Two students from RCOS are working on HFOSS project this summer. Steve presented his and James's work on making Sahana Eden (Python version of Sahana)easily installable. Steve and James has almost completed the project. they are now doing the suggestions from the feedback they received from Fran (the main developer of Sahana Eden). Steve and James are planning to develop an additional module (GIS) for Sahana Eden.

Thanks to everyone for their great work.