It was indeed a golden (ratio) week with an unconference of NY State Government Open Source efforts held at the Legislative building at Albany, NY. With an enlightened NY State senate CIO, NY state government has been going full steam with their open source efforts. Like whitehouse , the ny state senate is going the open source drupal (version 6) way (with web 2.0 technology). NY State legislative offices provide open API to get to the legislative data. All the conferences were streamed live and archived. Please visit this site to get more information (if you are interested in getting involved).
The NY State CIO is all for open source software efforts. You can watch him in this youtube video. One of the leading tech employees at the CIO office is a RPI alumni and hence provides greater opportunity for RCOS students involvement.
One of the summer 2010 RCOS students, Graylin Kim worked with NY State CIO office to get some of these efforts moving forward. In fact he was mentioned as a super intern!
This link gives the detailed program of the barconference.
During the first day there was a developers workshop where people talked about the current projects and what they have accomplished. You can see in this photo Graylin giving his talk.
I learned a lot from attending these talks (remotely) through live streaming.
On Friday, I attended the unconference (or barconference) - We had key note talks by NY State CIOS (Andrew Hoppin, Dr. Melodie Strawberry-Stewart, Rico Singleton) as well as an enlightening talk by a grass root manager Philip Ashlock.
This was followed by various small discussion groups:
I attended their drupal efforts, what should be in the IT policy of the next governor, NYState thruway system and open video. I learned a lot of things from these talks. Accessibility of web and accessibility of data were discussed at length.
The following were some of the useful links that I could jot down.
State thruway (traffic, transit)
CIO OFT
openplans
percentmobile
drupalgardens
open 311
open 511Municipality
On a lighter vein I can put a tick mark to a column saying that I too attended a bar conference!
All in all it was a worthwhile event and very useful too!
No comments:
Post a Comment