Recent Change to SoaS Spins Page (Intros)

[Sebastian Dziallas]

This is an email Mel originally wrote, but we wanted to make sure it gets
out before POSSE Doha wraps, so I'm sending it for her.

--Sebastian

-----

Hi, everyone - I wanted to explain some recent activity on the Sugar on a
Stick spins page that I've pushed. The patch updating the website for the
current release is actually the work of  Affan Syed, Saquib Razak andCitizen Ben
.

They're part of http://teachingopensource.org/index.php/POSSE_Doha, a
workshop in Qatar we're running for local faculty who are interested in
having their students contribute to open source projects as part of the
classes they teach. As part of this, we (Sebastian Dziallas and I) wanted
them to have the experience of making their own first contribution to an
open source project, so we asked them to update the website for us - and
they did.

The professors themselves may or may not (probably not, since classes start
again soon) continue to contribute to Fedora Websites, but they may be
bringing their students into the Fedora community next school year, so if
you're interested in talking with them about that, feel free to drop them a
line.

Saquib Razak saquibrazak(a)gmail.com - I teach introductory programming
courses and want to introduce open source development to students. (Mel
notes: If you're working on an open source project that could use the
efforts of about 20 new contributors who have completed basic programming
courses (but may be new to large-scale open source software development) for
a semester - maybe 5 hours of work a week per student - and are willing to
take the time to mentor/guide them and build documentation on how they can
get started with your project, email Saquib.)

Citizen Ben ctzenben(a)gmail.com - I work on Arabic human language technology
and am interested in expanding Arabic Wikipedia by Machine Translation. (Mel
notes: Ben's questions to Sebastian and myself over lunch centered around
community dynamics - they're machine-translation researchers asking "how can
our work with language engines be useful towards building an Arabic
Wikipedia community?" He and his team can automatically create Arabic
Wikipedia pages from English ones, and vice versa, and automatically analyze
the quality of a translation, but he doesn't have Wikipedia or open source
community experience to figure out how to make this work useful to the
relevant communities. If you can help him get started, let him know.)

Affan Syed (affan.syed(a)nu.edu.pk): I am an Assistant Professor in the EE
department at FAST-NUCES (Islamabad Campus
http://www.nu.edu.pk/Isbcamp.aspx.) <http://www.nu.edu.pk/Isbcamp.aspx.%29>;.
I wlll be teaching courses on Embedded Systems and Distributed Computing in
SP 2011. I am looking at Eucalyptus and similar open source projects as a
*possibility* to get my students to work with (but unlikely that they will
go beyond getting it deployed) for a FA2011 course on cloud and mobile
computing.  But I am open to other options for my above courses. (Mel notes:
if you're working on cloud and interested in academic collaborators, get in
touch with Affan - he's said everything else I would have written to
introduce him already. :-)

We've also been working with Bilal Zafar from USC who teaches more towards
the hardware side of things and is interested in what's going on with
teaching open hardware platforms (beagleboard, arduino, etc), so email
bzafar(a)usc.edu if you're interested in talking with a professor about that.

This has been your friendly semi-regular education-stuff interruption from
Mel and Sebastian. Carry on. :-)

--Mel