Our Fall semester has started with a bang for RCOS. There has been a lot of enthusiasm among students to participate and write open source code. At the same time, a few get intimidated by the past RCOS students and their accomplishments. It is my duty to encourage these students and mentor and guide them gently.
This week we had two talks.
1. Prof. Ben Chang (GSAS and Arts Department - RPI)
2. Mr. Ken Zalewski '89 '91 and Mr. Graylin Kim '11
Ben gave a fantastic tour de force of his research - on games, art and immerse art with videos and his slides. Please look at his website Ben Chang for a lot of his work. His main comment was that open source software is needed for artists - for longevity of the art, the custom software is too expensive, there is no vendor lock in. Ben practices what he preaches. Ben did mention the software development overhead associated with developing open source software. Ben suggested some tools that some of RCOS students can develop.
Ken Zalewki talked about he open source initiatives in NY State Senate and Assembly. They use a lot of open source tools and also contribute back. Main goals of their efforts are to make government transparent, efficient and useful to constituents and elected officials. NY Senate website runs using Drupal 7 which in turn enables the elected officials (trivia information - NY State has 62 senators) and their offices to make easy changes to their websites. Ken's group (part of dotCIO office) also encourages elected officials to maintain facebook, twitter and other social media. This enables the constituents to contact them for expressing their concerns (Ken mentioned about the recent marriage equality bill and the volume of messages). Some of the open source software they use include Linux, as well as Apache, PHP, Java, MySQL, Lucene/SOLR, Drupal, CiviCRM, and Squid.
For more information, please look at http://www.nysenate.gov/open. Their source code repository is in https://github.com/nysenatecio
Graylin who currently works at NY state CIO, started to work on their projects as his RCOS project. He now works there. This is yet another instance of RCOS contributing to the economic well being of NY State!
We are off to a great start and hope the momentum keeps going.
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