Invitation to EtherPad FAD at Olin College (near Boston, MA) -- October 8-9th

[Colin Zwiebel]

Greetings Fedora Java Propeller Heads,
I'm an Olin College student, a long-time linux users, and total EtherPad
fanboy. Talking with friends, we would love to give back to all three of
these communities. We're organizing a Fedora Activity Day and would like to
have you join us!

(cut to the chase here: https://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/>
.

== What do we plan to do at the FAD? ==
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 <https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Etherpad>;, here.

Thus we plan to:
* Repackage EtherPad in a consistent, Java standard, portable way
* 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.



Do you reside in the Boston area? Know a thing or two about Java build
systems? How about server-side javascript? Every touched Scala? Are you a
package master? We need you! Shoot me an email or add yourself to the wiki!



Aside from EtherPad, I'd like to convert some Olin Students to do more open
source projects (these engineering background people never seem to stray far
from Matlab =[ ). We're planning to do a talk to get people not versed in
J2EE excited and working on Fedora. If that sounds exciting, we'd love to
have you help.



Check out the wiki and talk page:
https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Etherpad_FAD
https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Etherpad_FAD


Cheers,
Colin