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 OpenStack Meetup

The Differnt Kinds of "Open"

Everyone in the open source commuinty remember the discussion a few years ago about what 'Free' means: 'free' as in 'beer' vs. 'free' as in 'speech.' Now it looks like we're embarking on figuring out the different kinds of 'open.' So I've written an article about the different kinds of open. Hope you enjoy.

Open Source and Jazz

See my latest personal blog post on Why Open Source Software is Like Jazz. Hope you like it.

So What's This Site All About?

This from my inbox this morning:

Can you tell me more about what you are trying to do with OSSAtlanta?

Fair Question. I replied:

I'm trying to do several things:

1. Provide a single jumping-off point for users interested in Open Source in Atlanta
2. In having been involved in user groups for 20+ years, I know one of the challenges is coming up with program material. By making it easier for user groups to find each other, I'm hopefully making it easier for the organizers to get ideas for future meetings. i.e. serving as a sort of 'speakers bureau'. An example is Mike Warfield's upcoming two-part IPv6 talks. The first part will be at ALE next month, and the second part will be at an upcoming AUUG meeting.
3. I'm trying to foster cross-pollination of ideas from one group to another. Example: I'm suggesting a couple of programs for the Joomla and Drupal users' groups: Drupal for Joomla Users and Joomla for Drupal Users.

His reply back was: Have you ever thought of having a list of speakers and topics that they have presented for organizers to look through. This way they can get ideas or just contact that person to come and speak.

I thought that was a great idea and I'll try to get that going in the near future. Keep those cards and letters coming in!