Community

The Information Technology group at the Department of Family Medicine, McMaster University developed OSCAR in 2001. It is a fully functional Electronic Medical Record (EMR) that is currently supporting all the academic teaching units within the department and many other large and small clinics across Canada. OSCAR has been certified by OntarioMD under the Physician IT Program. Its ongoing development is being supported by a large group of developers from Brazil, Australia, USA and Canada.

Unix Philosophy #12, Rule of Repair: "When you must fail, fail noisily and as soon as possible." This applies to both code and culture; when someone gets stuck and hollers for help, they are helping their community find and fix a participation process bug. However, the new contributor on-ramp pipeline is particularly tricky to debug; potential participants often struggle in silence, giving you no indication of their presence, let alone why they were unable to begin working with your project community.

KDE 4.3 was released in August, 2009, the most recent update to the KDE 4 series. It is a community effort geared towards daily computer users and developers and comes complete with a set of software packages including those for graphics, multimedia, programming, networking, education and gaming. KDE 4 and a wide variety of additional applications are available for Linux, Unix, MacOS X, and Windows under Free Software licenses.

Apache Qpid is an enterprise grade messaging solution with a proven track record and a growing community. It is currently in live production in several large scale financial institutions. Qpid is a multi language implementation of the AMQP protocol (www.amqp.org) with brokers in c++ and java and clients in c++,java,python,ruby and c#. It provides infrastructure for scalable, reliable, secure, low latency messaging that can be used in a myriad of applications not just enterprise messaging.

Netbooks are all the rage lately and there are a plethora of choices of what to run on your netbook. In this talk I will demo the newest versions of the Ubuntu Netbook Remix and the Ubuntu Moblin Remix and highlight the features of both environments. This talk is meant for people who might be new to Linux and want a glimpse of what's happening with netbooks.

While somethings require luck and timing, nothing happens unless we make an effort to be present when people are gathering. In this presentation we'll cover techniques you can use while we discuss actual events. Answering the question... How did one seemingly random meeting result in Rochester Institute of Technology students being some of the first to receive FOSS development course work as part of their formal education?

This talk provides tips for improving your self-promotional skills and you'll learn how tooting the horns of your colleagues can help you network. Topics include: getting ahead by getting outside your comfort zone, imposter syndrome, the fine line between assertiveness and aggressiveness, networking by drawing positive attention to colleagues, and daily affirmations for women in tech.

Developers write documentation. Technical authors write manuals. But in a perfect world, your users read software self-help guides. Consumers expect documentation to reflect the sophistication of the software they are using, and will abandon an application if they cannot easily find the answer to their problems. If we really want world domination of free and open source software, we need to have the self-help guides worthy of our code. In "Self Help Guides for World Domination" we'll take a look at the strategies and tools needed for really awesome documentation.

My presentation is both a call for the Ontario government to act socially responsibly and adopt F/OSS whenever possible and an examination of the obstacles to that both here and abroad as I know them.