www.johndbritton.com

Yesterday, I posted "More Than Code, It's a Community Too" on the Google Open Source Blog. The post is about my recent experience with GSoC students in India, go check it out!

Madison, Wisconsin based Douglas Whitfield is organizing OpenCamp: an Open Everything Event to be held on April 18, 2009 (that's the same date as Open Everything NYC). If you're in the area you should definitely stop by.

I'm happy to announce the first of two featured speakers for Open Everything NYC 2009. The event is just under a month away and space is limited, so please register. Don't forget to tell your friends!

Leslie Hawthorn

Leslie Hawthorn is a Program Manager for Google's Open Source Programs Office, where she's the Community Manager for the Google Summer of Code community. She recently conceived, launched and managed the Google Highly Open Participation Contest, the world's first global initiative to get pre-university students involved in all aspects of Open Source software development. Leslie has also organized more than 100 open source conferences and hackathons, most held at Google's Corporate Headquarters in Mountain View, California, USA. When not wrangling FOSS developers, she's usually speaking about Open Source, FOSS in education, and community building or writing for the Google Open Source Blog. Prior to joining Google, Leslie got her feet wet in Silicon Valley high tech at a small communications semiconductor startup, where she worked in Marketing and Public Relations. She holds a Honors B.A. in English Language and Literature from U.C. Berkeley and her personal website is http://www.hawthornlandings.org.

Open Everything NYC will take place on Saturday 18 April 2009 at the UNICEF headquarters in the United Nations Plaza, NYC. The event will run the full day, registration will open at 8:00AM and things will be in full swing by 9:00AM.

The event will be 100% free and open to the public on a first come first serve basis, online pre-registration is required. The main hall can hold up to 250 guests.

The event will consist of two keynote presentations (one opening & one closing) each of about 1 hour in duration. In the time between the two keynotes attendees will be in control of the program (Barcamp style). There will be a number of conference rooms available for individuals to hold talks & discussions on topics they see fit. Past events have included topics such as Open Publishing, Open Education, Government Transparency, Open Access, Open Research Data, Creative Commons, Open Hardware, and more.

From http://openeverything.net:

Open Everything is a global conversation about the art, science and spirit of 'open'. It gathers people using openness to create and improve software, education, media, philanthropy, architecture, neighbourhoods, workplaces and the society we live in: everything. It's about thinking, doing and being open.

Open Everything was started by a few people back in the beginning of 2008, and it has grown to include events in cities around the world. New York is going to be the next and we'd be delighted if you would participate.

This post is long overdue (September 2008); I just found it sitting in my blog's queue. I had been trying to polish it off and must have forgotten about it, sorry for the delay.

Thanks to the generous support of The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation I was able to travel from Hong Kong to Logan, UT for the Open Education 2008 conference.

I started off the trip with a layover in Seoul that I extended for a couple of days. While I was there I saw a Korea vs. Japan football match, went to the Korea Traditional Performing Arts Festival, and ate a live octopus. Suffice it to say that South Korea was an adventure of it's own.

I flew into Salt Lake City, UT where I was met by my amazing Couch Surfing host Anthony. He chauffeured me from SLC airport to his place in Logan. For the next three days I sat in on a ton of sessions, met great people, and shared my ideas for what I was calling "uOpenEd".

If you read my application to OpenEd 2008 (linked below), you'll see my reasons for attending and my goals for "uOpenEd". Apparently, I wasn't the only one who had these kinds of thoughts and on the final day of the conference, I sat in on a session entitled "The Peer 2 Peer University: Moving Forward". This session was different from all the rest. Rather than someone delivering a lecture, we had a brief intro and broke off into groups to discuss and solve problems. That was the icing on the cake, it was exactly what I was looking for, a team to work with to turn the idea into a reality.

The P2PU session was lead by Philipp Schmidt & Stian Haklev. Coincidentally, I had been emailing back and fourth with Philipp about Open Everything before the conference, and had no idea that we'd bump into each other (and end up working on the P2PU project together).

As per Stian's suggestion, I've posted my OpenEd 2008 Scholarship Application along with the Conference Proceedings, 86MB (zip).