09 April, 2006

Open Source Group @ the Hashemite University

As some of you dear reader have already heard, either from some guys around and about or yours truly, an Open Source group is developing inside the Hashemite University's Faculty of Information Technology.

Some thoughts and passions, along with other disappoints and frustrations, lead to forming this community in HUIT, with the listening ears and mind of Dr Khaled Tahat (chief of the Software Engineering Dept) and the support of a few number of instructors, thoughts were refined, compiled, and debugged in order to start the activities of the club slightly from the backstage halls deep inside the community of the students.

The Drs, the ones who got inside the whole thing from the beginning, are paying their duty in mentioning Open source Technologies in their lectures in each and every possible bit, taking advantage of the instructors credibility among student, especially those freshmen and 2nd year students, despite the fact that there are mainly only 2 Drs and a TA that got knowledge in Open Source Technologies.

The TA even volunteered to give a free Linux course along the semester.

Now We, Students, will are getting deeper inside the students community using an in-lecture evangelism method, that is, given the needed privileges, we have the right to get in any lecture, and giving a Open Source seminar in that lecture for its students in the scope of the course we have invaded, spreading our existence to the public, and capturing any passionate skills willing to work with the group for the benefit of the IT students community (delivering by that the fact that the groups members are the workers, and the whole community of students is getting the group's benefits).... building by that the base for our big bang desired to take place by the end of May 2006, which will be a full “Open Source Open Day” , a day on which technical and cultural open source seminars and sessions, installation fests, are aimed to take place, and a Multi-tech open-to-public lab will be hosting computers running different Open Source Operating Systems, Technologies, and Open Source Supporting Technologies just there for everyone to experience.

Enterprises and Individuals supporting, running, using, and spreading Open Source Technologies are also an objective for that day, Oracle Jordan is interested so far in presenting the way their RDBMS system and accessories are supporting Open Source Technologies especially using Java.

And if you my dear reader are one of those mentioned above, please drop me a line at nasimjo@gmail.com in order to have more information about participating in the Open Source Open Day, or supporting the group with Ideas or hot offers for students in the Open Source Technologies merchandise, ranging from books, workshops, courses, consulting free ideas, upto penguins ;) yeah ... geeky accessories ;) for real no, we'll be dying for a penguin doll ;)

Until then, more of lectures invasions will be on the way, spreading the word among the students. A lecture is done already, a 60 student Human Computer Interaction was introduced to the other level of 3D HCI delivered by Project Looking Glass 3D. topics to come vary from Open Source, Licensing, and Web 2.0 concepts upto JSF, MySQL, and Cairo (Hopefully) technical sessions.

So, stay tuned to get more and more about the OSG @ HUIT, and please, for any feed back or interests, you've got the comments and the mail..

Aiming for an IT students' community where everyone would feel being an IT STUDENT :)

Technorati tags: Open, Source, Group, Hashemite, Univeristy, Information

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