Re: Oct 8th - Etherpad FAD at Olin College! (Outside Boston, MA)

[Colin Zwiebel]

Hey logistics, marketing, ambassadors, college ambassadors. The Olin College
FAD is ON! I'd like to open this invitation to the the wider Fedora
community. New to the Fedora community, java-devel is about the only list I
can spam, so kindly send this to relevant parties. You have my permission to
modify as appropriate.

On the Boston side, I would especially like to reach other colleges (MIT?
BU? BC? Wellesley? North-Eastern? etc.) Part of those communities or know
someone who is, tell me about it!

And always, would love to hear thoughts, praise, complaints, hopes and
dreams.

Cheers,
Colin


---------- ----------


[image: ep_fad_poster_x500.png]

Oct 8th starting 5pm - Oct 9th
We're holding a Hackathon / Fedora Activity Day at Olin College in Needham,
MA!

Etherpad is open source software for teams to type together on the same
document.
Join a team of students, alumni, and Fedora Linux hackers as we improve
Etherpad for ourselves and the world!

Cut to the chase: *http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Etherpad_FAD*


== What is EtherPad? ==
 Etherpad is pretty much the pinnacle of online, collaborative text editing.
If you're not familiar with EtherPad, take a look at this
video<http://www.viddler.com/explore/aaroniba/videos/1/>
.


== Backstory ==
EtherPad was acquired by Google in 2008 and the code was open-sourced
(yay!). Buuut the EtherPad code-base isn't exactly in a packageable state,
as demonstrated by SDZ, here <https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Etherpad>;. (SDZ
is an Olin student!)


Thus we plan to:
* Repackage EtherPad in a consistent, portable way, more best-practice form
* Create compliant, Fedora packages for EtherPad
* Setup EtherPad instance on Fedora Infrastructure (infrastructure managers,
sorry, quietly stop choking and shoot me an email so I can explain Fud +
EtherPad = awesome and discuss how to go about that)
* Teach non-Propeller-heads about OSS development and the technologies used


== When? ==
** *Friday, October 8th - Saturday, October 9th* **

 (and maybe early Sunday if we get some of the no-sleep crowd).
Dinner on Friday. Dinner and lunch Saturday.

Can attend in person? Remotely join us! See the
wiki<https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Etherpad_FAD#I.27m_far_away_.2F_ca...
.


== Us ? ==
Andy, Sebastian and I are Olin College students and long-time linux users,
and total EtherPad fanboy. We would love to give back to all three of these
communities and help people get involved in open source software.



Finally, there is generally just a lot of cool technical stuff inside
EtherPad? Server-side-JS? Scala? Comet? Collaborative diffing? Web-service
architecture? Your totally welcome to come and geek out on these topics, and
maybe learn a thing or two about how EtherPad works.


Check us out on the wiki and twitter:
https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Etherpad_FAD
http://twitter.com/olinetherpadfad


Cheers,
Colin, Sebastian, Andy

P.S. You've probably never heard of Olin College, but you should
totally look at the crazy higher-ed experiment we're running:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Olin_college