Michael Adeyeye (Ph.D)

The first day of the Teaching Open Source Summit (TOSS) was great. I tried catching up with what other folks at the Free Software and Open Source (FSOSS) symposium were doing, but it was not what I thought it would be. Really, I had earlier thought I would be able to do both.  But I missed out on a couple of interesting workshops at the FSOSS.  However, TOSS was awesome. I met with great people – Greg from Red Hat, Frank from Mozilla, Karlie from Webpath, Mel, Dave, Fardad and Chris from Seneca, to mention a few.

There was a lot of discussion about teaching open source around the globe. In addition, how Mozilla and Red Hat, as Open Source Software Companies, have been promoting Open Source Education was also discussed. At the end, we came up with a list of what we would like to have in TOS.

Our Needs at TeachingOpenSource (TOS)

No doubt, it was a great experience. For once, I could see the difference between a College/Polytechnic/Univ. of Technology and the conventional academia. And now, I am asking myself some questions – Where do I belong?, Where do I want to be?, Can I find a linkage between the two? I will be brainstorming on these questions in the next few days or weeks. For now,  I look forward to another great day today – FSOSS Presentations.

The second talk on the Mozilla Community and Projects took place on September 25, 2009. Like the first one, we had it at the University of Cape Town. The first one was on October 1, 2008, and here is a link to my blog post on it. We had close to 30 attendees in this year’s talk, and I was glad to meet guys, who have also been ‘hacking’ the Mozilla framework. A guy told he submitted a patch to the Mozilla on opening a new tab close to the current tab (like IE 8). Another guy said he had used the framework in the past to develop an application.

I played a short video on my work (The TransferHTTP extension) during the presentation and got a pointer from one of the attendees. Coincidentally, I got the Mozilla Service Week T-Shirts from the Courier few hours before the presentation; so, I had more giveaways for the attendees. The presentation lasted an hour, and they found it interesting, as mentioned by some of them. Check out the pictures on the Google Picasa, and here is a link to the updated slides, which now contain getting started and benefits. The previous slides are still available; they can be found here.

During the Mozilla Community and Projects talk