We have some interesting projects that would benefit from participation. Each provides an opportunity for learning useful technology and skills that are portable.

Courses

With the generous support of the community, we have been sharing the knowledge of many presenters and speakers. The topics have covered web programming, Eclipse, OSGeo, Linux, and more. These talks have generally been in a format that is roughly 45 minutes in length providing an overview of a given technology or 5-10 minutes in length providing a quick how-to.

We would like to put together some longer courses (6 x 3hr class series and 12 x 3 hr classes). We plan to start with an introductory object oriented programming course which will teach Java, UML, Eclipse, and Ingres. The course material will work equally well on Windows, Linux (Redhat, Fedora, Ubuntu, OpenSUSE, SUSE), or MacOS.

The course will be offered through FOSSLC for a small fee to help raise funds to subsidize other activities. There has been interest by a few Universities internationally. If things go well, the course is expected to be picked up and taught at Carleton University in the winter of 2010.

If this project goes well, we plan to also provide similar courses covering Linux system administration, Database analyst skills, Network administration, and more. All will focus on open source technologies. All course material will be released under the creative commons attribution/share-alike license.

If you are interested in getting involved with developing these courses, please contact courses at fosslc dot org.

The first course teaching introductory object oriented programming using Java has a mailing list.

Podcast

We have a large amount of content recorded from events we have filmed. Some of this content is perfect for the FOSSLC podcast. We are looking for people who are interested in helping process the recordings, add introduction segments, and publish to the podcast area of the web site. We are happy to provide training. The software used is all 100% open source software. If you are interested in this, please contact podcasts at fosslc dot org.

Open Source News

This project is a fun project to create a brief segment each week reporting on the top news stories in open source. If you are interested in getting involved with this project, please contact news at fosslc dot org.

Capture station development

We have developed a capture station that runs on a laptop & Linux. This capture station is capable of recording audio, video, slides, or what ever content is sent to a vga device such as a projector or monitor. There are opportunities for testing, development, documentation, and more. See this blog for history and more details.

Translation

As we continue to grow, it is our strong desire to serve our communities in their native language. For this reason we have need to translate our web site into a number of languages including German, French, Mandarin, Spanish, Portuguese, and more. Fortunately, because we use Drupal, it provides some infrastructure for facilitating this already. If you are interested in helping, please contact translations at fosslc dot org.

Resume and Job search

We have noticed people have been finding work through our events and activities. This is fantastic and precisely what we hoped for. This project is to make it easier for people to find out about opportunities and employers to find good employees. If you are interested in getting involved with this project, please contact jobs at fosslc dot org.

Voice telephony

With people working with each other around the world, we have discovered we have a very important need for conferencing technology and voicemail. With this project, we hope to use asterisk to create a voip solution based on Asterisk to satisfy most of our needs.

We also plan to work with companies such as Dimdim, ePresence, and Blindside Networks to address our presentation needs.

If you are interested in getting involved, please contact telephony at fosslc dot org.

Open Source Group Directory

One of the key functions FOSSLC provides is facilitating people and helping them get involved with open source communities. This project is to create infrastructure for tracking local open source user groups around the world to make it easier for people to learn about what is going on in their neighbourhood. If you are interested in getting involved, please contact events at fosslc dot org.