Thanks for attending this meeting of our OSUM Club. Today I will be introducing you to the benefits and activities of our OSUM Club. We will also explore the benefits of Free and Open Source Software for students and for society as a whole. We will then discuss the details of our OSUM Club and the OSUM Community. Then close with some suggestions on how all of us can get involved and participate.
Let's get started with an overview of our OSUM Club.
Our OSUM Club is being formed to promote the benefits of Free and Open Source Software here at our university. We will talk about these benefits a bit later in this presentation. We will have an active OSUM Club and will be meeting monthly so we hope that all of you will become active members of our OSUM Club. We will have many interesting technical demonstrations and talks during our monthly meetings to create greater awareness of how we can use FOSS technologies in our school projects. We'll also be providing you with information on special programs and resources that will help you to take advantage of new career opportunities with FOSS technologies. Of course, we want our club meetings to be fun so we'll also be organizing hands-on activities and providing goodies to members who attend our meetings. OSUM is referred to as a “Meetup” to emphasize the opportunity for all the open source and student clubs on campus to collaborate in the spirit of open source. Another great advantage of participating in our OSUM Club is that you will be able to connect with over 140,000 student coders from all over the world via the OSUM Community at osum.sun.com. We encourage all of you to join the OSUM Community and our OSUM Club at: (insert name of your OSUM Club page url
We'll now talk about the benefit of Free and Open Source Software
Free and Open Source Software provides many benefits for students so we say that it can “Change Your World.” Many of the most interesting and innovative companies use FOSS technologies to power their companies. As a result, students with demonstrated skills in these technologies are in demand by these employers. FOSS communities also provide an opportunity for students to contribute which is a great way to demonstrate technical skills to prospective employers. Contributing to FOSS communities is a great addition to your resume or CV. Since FOSS technologies are “Free” and “Open” it provides a unique opportunity for use in your projects. We'll be featuring these technologies in our upcoming Tech Demos to demonstrate how you can use these platforms and tools in your projects. Free and Open Source Software is powered by communities, people like us who participate and contribute. This opens up new opportunity learn apart from what is assigned to us in our courses. These communities also creates new avenues for us to collaborate with fellow developers from around the world. Of course, Free is always good, especially for students.
Free and Open Source Software provides many benefits for society as a whole, so we say that it can “Change Our World.” Since FOSS is open, it provides new freedoms that are simply not available with closed software. You can contribute to code (put back), participate in communities, freely use and deploy FOSS software under the open source licenses. Countries are also leveraging the benefits FOSS to create new economic opportunities in their countries. FOSS provides free access to intellectual property that can be used to foster economic opportunity by fostering the development of the IT sector that leads to expanded job opportunities and economic expansion.
Sun is the largest corporate contributer to FOSS on the planet. Sun is supporting our club activities. This slide highlights just a few of the technologies supported by Sun. MySQL is the most popular database in the open source world and the foundation for the leading Web 2.0 companies. OpenOffice is the most popular open source productivity suite. This is an Open Office, presentation, no need to pay for Power Point anymore. OpenSolaris is the major UNIX distribution and has many innovative features such as Dtrace and ZFS that are not available with other open source distributions. Sun has even open sourced its hardware with the OpenSparc which features the bleeding edge of multi-core, multi-thread chip architectures
Let's learn about the OSUM Community.
Our OSUM Club exists here at our university, but it also is a thriving social network of student developers that you will find at osum.sun.com This is the largest and most vibrant community of student coders anywhere. The OSUM Community allows students from our university to connect with over 140,000 students from all over the world who all have a common interest in IT. It is a global community of over 2,000 other student clubs like ours. The OSUM Community is where you will find information on free training, webinars and other learning resources to enhance our career opportunities. It is also a great place to connect with students who share our interest in IT from across our country or the world. It's a great place to make friends.
Our OSUM Club page is hosted as part of the OSUM Community (make sure to insert link to your OSUM Club page) This is where you will find up to date info on our club activities and information on the special free resources for students. Please join the OSUM Community and make sure to also join our OSUM Club Group. We hope that you will visit our club page often to get the latest info on our club activities. We can also use the OSUM social networking features to stay connected between our club meetings. We're looking forward to seeing all of your comments, photos and videos. We can also use our OSUM Club page to ask for and receive help with our class assignments and projects. We have a dedicated Forum for our OSUM Club Group where you can post your questions. You can also use the Forums for the OSUM Community to expose your questions to all OSUM members (more than 140,000 strong).
This is our OSUM Club page so we hope that we can count on all of you to help promote our OSUM Club. Please use the “Invite More” feature from our Group Page to invite your friends to join our Group. If you are connected with other student clubs, you may also want to invite them to join our club group as well. If you find other students from our university who have not joined our group, please send them an invitation to join.
OSUM is a community that relies on its members to post new and interesting information that will be of interest to the rest of the community. This is called a User Generated Content Model. The more relevant and interesting information you post, the more vibrant our community will become. This spirit of sharing is what open source is all about. We all have important information that we can share. When you learn something interesting that you think can help other student coders, we hope you will use the OSUM blogs and forums to share this information. You may also come across a technical resource that may help others. Please upload and share these resources so that others can also benefit. When you post something new, use the”share” feature to tell your friends.
We hope that you have enjoyed learning about our OSUM Club and that you will become an active member. Our next meeting is scheduled for ..... Please invite your friends to attend our next meeting and to join our OSUM Club. We are also looking for volunteers to help lead our OSUM Club. Here are some of the positions we are looking for: Someone to lead our membership drives and come up with fun, interesting and innovative ways to increase our membership. Someone who will be responsible for our OSUM Group Club page and keep the information current and interesting so our members have a reason to return often. Someone to coordinate the logistics of our monthly meetings including reserving rooms, scheduling speakers and promoting our activities. Thanks to everyone for attending. We hope you become an active member to learn all FOSS, make new friends and have fun!