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Matrix Resources hosts a number of the local users' groups. See their current month's calendar

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OSS Atlanta: Open Source News in the Atlanta, GA Area

Not Exacly Open Source

OK, this isn't exactly open-source, but readers may be interested in a local Atlanta meetup for Nerd Fun. Looks like they've had some interesting meetups. LAN party anyone?

WebRTC Conference & Expo

The WebRTC Conference and Expo will be at the Cobb Galleria on June 25 - 27th. What's WebRTC, you ask? From their site: WebRTC is a free, open project that enables web browsers with Real-Time Communications (RTC) capabilities via simple Javascript APIs. It's being supported by Google, Mozilla and Chrome. Pretty cutting-edge stuff, haven't seen any real-world apps built yet, but could be interesting.

Field Trip to Salvage Yard?

A few days ago, I stopped by Dixie Salvage outside of Gainesville, GA and took some pictures. I then suggested to the Freeside Atlanta folks to take a field trip. If you're interested, check out the discussion and join the caravan.

Northeast Georgia Linux Meetup Forming

This in today's email: there's a Northeast Georgia Linux Meetup forming, up in Gainesville. Check them out and eat some pizza at Stevi B's on Browns Bridge Road. See you there.

A Walk on the Freeside

After wanting to go to a meeting of FreeSide Atlanta, I finally went last night. FreeSide is our local hardware makerspace, where members meet to build and modify physical/mechanical/electronic objects. There were about 25 in attendance, and the list of current builds and meetings was varied and impressive: designing and building an off-road wheelchair, UAV hexacopter, tutorial meetings on getting your no-code Tech amateur radio license, and 3D printing. They're helping with the upcoming mini-maker faire in October at Tech. If you haven't been yet, you should. Open houses are Tuesdays at 7:30, and other meetings as scheduled. Check out their meetup.com page and join the fun!

Big Data Meetup Forming

Handling Big Data is often the perview of Open Source: Hadoop and its bretheren. There's a Big Data Meetup forming. From the intro:

The Atlanta Big Data Meetup group is a community dedicated to promoting the technologies, practices and innovations needed for organizations to get maximum value from massive amounts of data. With over 2.5 trillion bytes of data accumulating around the world every day, we are at the epicenter of the Big Data revolution. Through an exchange of BIG ideas, education and fresh thinking from employees, contractors and technologists, Atlanta Big Data aims to focus on the specific Big Data issues, architectures and solutions related to the Big Data to include security, privacy, analytics and support for real-time operations. The intent of Atlanta Big Data isn’t solely technical, the Group strives to discuss, discover and communicate how Big Data solutions can be used to advance and support national security, energy, transportation, media, logistics, financial services, law enforcement, health care and education and many other areas that serve the community’s interests.

Atlanta MongoDB Users' Group

For web-scale data activities, the non-relational databases are gaining ground. MongoDB powers bit.ly, foursquare, craigslist and a number of other popular sites.

This group is a place for developers to learn more about MongoDB, an open source, document-oriented, nosql database. If you are facing challenges with MySQL or Postgres or Oracle and want to explore a more flexible, scalable alternative, please join us at one of our monthly sessions. See their Meetup Page.

Atlanta R Users' Group

In the Mid-'70s in the hallowed halls of Bell Labs they developed Unix, C, and a lot of cool things. One of these was the S statistical programming language. Its modern implementations are S-plus and R.

R is an open source programming language for statistical computing, data analysis, and graphical visualization. While most commonly used within academia, in fields such as computational biology and applied statistics, it is rapidly gaining currency in commercial areas such as quantitative finance and business intelligence.

Among R's strengths as a language are its powerful built-in tools for inferential statistics, its compact modeling syntax, its data visualization capabilities, and its ease of connectivity with persistent data stores (from databases to flatfiles).

In addition, R is open source nature and extensible via add-on "packages" allowing it to keep up with the leading edge in academic research. For all its strengths, though, R has an admittedly steep learning curve; the first steps towards learning and using R can be challenging.

The Atlanta R Users Group is dedicated to bringing together area practitioners of R to exchange knowledge, inspire new users, and spur the adoption of R for innovative research and commercial applications.

Atlanta OpenStack Meetup

OpenStack is an open cloud computing platform founded by Rackspace and backed by NASA, see openstack.org. It's to counter the proprietary cloud offerings of Amazon's AWS and Microsoft's Azure. Ok, so maybe this doesn't exactly go under the 'operating systems' menu item, but it's pretty close.  From their meetup page:

This is the Atlanta OpenStack developer Meetup. We are a group of free software developers who are passionate about working together to help make the Openstack project a success!

Can't wait for the next meetup? Join us on IRC! We hang out on Freenode at #openstack-atlanta. See the Atlanta OpenStack Meetup page.

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