Purdue trip report

[Sriram Ramkrishna <sri ramkrishna me>]

Hi Folks,

I thought I would send out a trip report while it is still fresh in my head.

I had two nearly full day meetings at Purdue University facilitated by the College of Science, alumni relations.  I was really blown away by how i was treated on this trip and I came away with some interesting follow ups.

I met with Dean of the college of science, and basicallly had a high level meeting about open source influence today in all fields related to science.  It was a good discussion, and I think he was properly sensitized to the industry need to have more people who understand how open source works.  I don't think it will lead ot anything actionable at least in the non-computer science fields.

My next conversation was with the head of the C.S. Dept, Dr. Sunil Probhakar.  That was a great conversation, and has lead into three concrete steps that we are going to take in order to get the C.S. dept more involved in exposing open source to their students.  The first is that he will be pushing for an open source class for spring semester, and I will help him set up a range of projects that students can participate it.  GNOME of course will be one of those project,s as we can provide a wide range of projects along the linux stack, but I'm sure there will be ohters who want to be involved in other projects like network security and what not.  The 2nd, one is about a project in Tanzania, where he has a project to help people who have physical disabilities and help them with advanced prosthetics.  I had suggested that these folks could also work writing the a11y software that drives the very hardware they are using.  He thought that was a great idea, and will look into how to do something like that.  Lastly, we had talked about giving programs like Outreachy and GSOC greater visibility within the department. 

My talk to the freshman science students went well.  In the sense that I did not bore them to tears.  Hopefully some of them will be interested in the community aspects of free software.  We had a great interactive discussion about building passion, helping people, and solving problems.  It's hard to talk about the mechanics to open source to men and women who have been in college for all of 1 month.  Too many other things going on.  But they were very articulate, and very diverse.  All of them, when asked why they are doing science - they want to help people, they want to solve problems, they want to know how things work where the main answers.  That's how we should model our home page.

The next was a talk with Research Center for Open Digital Innovation.  We had an amazing animated talk about open source, free software the metrics of community.  They've been doing research on measuring community on open stack.  The conversation was so animated that they really wanted to be more involved in the hackfests and conferences we've been doing.  As well, our discussions on community was also of great interest.   So a couple of followups - they want to do some research on GNOME's community and metrics to compare it against Openstack which is more industry driven and understand the differences in the dynamics.  The second is that they really want to host a GNOME hackfest, and will provide all the facilities for it.  They want to bring in students and faculty as well to participate.  I said that I would look into that.  So I might be shopping around to see if we can do a hackfest at Purdue considering that we will get top notch facilities and venue and GNOME will get exposure to some cutting research as well as student population who would be interested in the things we are doing.

The next day I met with a lot of graduate students, albeit I didn't really talk about open source so much, but we did talk about network security and various other things, but all of htem were familiar with GNOME.  Even some debate on GNOME 2 vs GNOME 3. :-)

I would say that my trip to Purdue was a big success, and I get to actually have some participation on the things that I have long been interested in.  Over time, you might see some new faces on engagement, and maybe on IRC as I help bring some of these folks in.  My next trip, I'll probably do some follow up with what needs to be done, and hopefully even teach the open source class if it becomes a reality.

I hope the information was helpful to you all.  I don't think there is anything actionable, but if you're interested in following along or wish to help with some of the work, let me know.  Most of these things I'm doing are personal projects of mine.

sri