Rachel Zhang's Weblog

are you participating in opensolaris community today?

Last Wednesday (Aug 1st,2007), I went back to my alma mater, UESTC, for a visit.

In this trip, I delivered a preso about OpenSolaris community and OpenSolaris ongoing projects. Beyond my expectation, there were more students coming to the session than expected. It was the time of Summer break. Most students had been outside of university. It was really good to see so many students (around 50-60) students coming. And almost all of them were postgraduate students.

Before the preso started, I brought up some questions, just like a survey, to make sure how many students were aware of Solaris, OpenSolaris, OpenSolaris community. Unfortunately, the answer was no. Then I decided to deliver as much information as I can for them. During the speech, I think I was doing fine. When looking at those eyes from those diligent audiences, I felt quite confident with what I was talking. The preso was including following points:

 - what is opensource, why we need opensource, and current popular opensource community

- introduction of OpenSolaris, OpenSolaris community and ongoing OpenSolaris projects (esp introduced g11n project, nevada g11n, input method, open cluster)

 - how to build and install OpenSolaris

 - OpenSolaris campus programming contest, gave details of two AGC projects (encoding auto detection and pinyin markup)

- OpenSolaris discussion IRC channel and mail alias

- current OpenSolaris usergroup in China  and campus usergroup. Encourage them to set up UESTC user group

- information of Sun Campus Ambassador recruitment

- useful links, including os.o portal, cn.os.o portal, China SDN,docs.sun.com, BA multilingual hub etc

Besides above topics, I also gave them some detailed information about how to start to participate in OpenSolaris community, what they could help in this community although they are not familiar with Solaris. Some projects like starting translating starter kit or OS.o Chinese portal could be easy for them.

Overall speaking, I can see that some students were interested in some of the topics, like to start UESTC user group and Sun Campus Ambassador position. I think it could be a good start. My next plan is to find one or two students to work with the famous software website in UESTC and Chengdu's other university, Studenthome, to initiate a repository for OpenSolaris source image for downloading and building. This could be the first specific thing they could help before or after the UESTC usergroup available.

 Hope it works, since it's really a good thing for students to enhance their knowledge and technical ability, while raise their visibility inside this worldwide community.

 
BTW, I'm very thankful for teachers from CS school in UESTC, who gave me a lot of support to set up this session.

UESTC is a quite famous university for information science, especially computer science, telecommunication and EE. It is located in SouthWest of China, in Chengdu, the capital of SiChuan province. We can see that there are a lot of activities about OpenSolaris held in Beijing's universities. But I think we should consider these good universities as well, when we plan some activities in those big cities, like Beijing and Shanghai, since Chengdu also has a large knowledge base in West of China. Just like Jonathan used to say that, " Ignorance will definitely miss opportunities, competition does not play fair, and has no mercy."

Posted at 03:07PM Aug 04, 2007 by rachelzhang in Personal  |  Comments[3]