Unos días atrás tuvimos la visita de un grupo de ingenieros de SUN Microsystems que están realizando un tour por todo Latinoamérica visitando las diferentes universidades y grupos de usuario mostrando las últimas tendencias en el sistema operativo Solaris y Java.  Esta vez  le toco a la Universidad de Santiago ser host de esta conferencia que se extendió el pasado 12 de Noviembre  donde personajes como Tim Boudreau(Ingeniero y Evangelista de Netbeans) mostro a los alumnos y profesores presentes el futuro de Netbeans 6.0.  También contamos con la visita de Tim Jacobson, Bruno Souza, Mauricio Leal y Alvaro Lopez quienes dieron presentaciones de tecnologías como Sun Spot(http://www.sunspotworld.com/) , openSolaris (http://www.opensolaris.org/os/) y Java ME y Sun Studio.   Definitivamente fue una gran experiencia para todos aquí en Chile quienes pudimos compartir y participar en esta reunión que definitivamente enmarca el compromiso y el crecimiento que está teniendo este país en el desarrollo tecnológico.

Algunas otras imagenes las pueden encontrar en el weblog de Alvaro Lopez(http://www.alobbs.com/album/santiago07), muchas gracias a el por facilitarme estas imagenes. 

One of the biggest challenges when you drive into the Open Source initiative is to get people to participate and dedicate it’s time to innovation.   Here at Chile we have a big challenge we are in the process of introducing many new things, and like many new things in a community not used to risk and participate, it’s not easy.  One of the fist challenges we have it’s to raise a new Java community, but this community pretends to be ambitious, it will me mainly formed by University Students from all of the biggest Universities and Institutes in the Country like the UTFSM, USACH, DUOC, etc.  Maybe what we are willing to achieve it’s big, but we have the advantage to be the first attempt to do this in the country, and certainly will be a great challenge.  So far things are great and one the metrics we can use to say that is the amount of people participating in the open course we have every week at the “Universidad de Santiago”(University of Santiago)  where we have about 45 people actively participating and learning Java apart from their studies at the University.    

So far we have over a month of work in this and it’s gaining momentum, we have several projects on the way, among generation of open materials for students and more courses, aside of the fact of potential project to develop with Netbeans and Solaris.  We have very smart and enthusiastic people in the group and every day we have more people involved from all over the country.

Certainly we have a lot of work to do, but the most important thing to be successful it’s growing, which is participation, collaboration, and innovation.