The most import thing about a BarCamp, however, are its participants – ours were amazing! We had presentations on just about everything. Just a little sampling: political lobbying, intellectual property, jQuery, 3d user interface design, robotics, multitouch, network security, OpenID, CPU Design (me!), the future of RF technologies, shellcode exploits, telephone-controlled web applications, board game strategy, One Laptop Per Child Initiatives at RIT (me!), XSLT, Grid Computing, and all kinds of other cool stuff. I learned a lot about a bunch of cool new stuff that people are working on, but my favorite part was all of the discussion that occurred. The level of participation and interaction between the presenter and the attendees for each of the talks is what made this BarCamp such a success. You could tell that everyone was legitimately interested in what they were there to hear about (even if they had never heard of it before!). A lot of the talks turned into more of a discussion of a topic than a simple lecture with a question and answer session, which really is the ideal format for this conference.

If you have never experienced a BarCamp before, I encourage you to give it a try. How can you go wrong with a bunch of smart people with a desire to learn and share knowledge? To give you more of an idea of what it was like, check out some of the pictures from this year and last. Not everyone uses flickr, so if you have a facebook account, roam around there and you should hopefully find some more pictures.

After such a great experience, I am looking forward to planning and hosting the next BarCamp. I liked it so much, I’m going to try to put together two of them next year – one in the fall, and one in the spring. So, be on the lookout for BarCampRochester4 and 5. If you are interested in helping out, shoot me an email! Again, thanks to the sponsors and the participants for making this such a great BarCamp!

This quarter I should have a lot more free time since I decided not to continue working as a grader. That said, I am going to spend this free time doing the numerous projects that I have wanted to finish up/start. I am really excited about this because I have been wanting to finish these projects up for quite some time. To start with, I have decided to work with a friend of mine, Heewa Barfchin, to start up a few new initiatives here at RIT.

There has been a lot of talk recently about the One Laptop Per Child project. After looking over the current state of the project, it is fairly evident that there is still an unmet need in the amount of software that has been ported to/created for it. There are a number of project ideas that I have related to this project, so Heewa and I decided to try to get the RIT CS department involved in OLPC. So far, we have a couple of professors interested in the project and now the ball is in our court. We plan to develop a fully-functional application by the end of the quarter that can be used as a “prototype” to showcase the potential of the project at RIT and potentially establish an OLPC lab at RIT.

Another idea stemmed from discussions with Heewa has brought light to a new club, the Society of Lectors. Check out our Google Groups page. Essentially the idea is to encourage collaborative education. It is impossible to learn every thing you need to know to be successful in your field by just going to your classes. A lot of my friends have specialties in a lot of different areas. Not only that, but sometimes I am not able to take a class on a topic I may be interested in. So, we decided to start a club that meets weekly and allows its members a venue to lecture one another on a topic of each individual’s choice. This society is not at all limited to RIT students. We encourage anyone to stop by and listen or to even give a presentation. Students, professors, industry professionals, researchers, community members, visitors to the area, etc. Our first meeting is this Wednesday. All the information on the meeting is available here.

In addition to all of that, I plan to develop a few individual software and hardware projects of my own. More on that will come as the ideas are further developed and realized. Though, I’ll mention one of them – I have an old wireless router and boombox that I plan to combine to make a portable wireless mp3 player.

Oh, one more thing – BarCampRochester3. If you don’t know what a BarCamp is, go check out the wiki. I agreed to help co-host the event this year at RIT (handling the finances and filling in wherever else). BarCamp is an excellent, unique opportunity to meet up with some cool people and discuss a large variety of topics. The idea is very similar to the Society of Lectors – a collaborative exchange of knowledge. Essentially it is a day full of presentations; the catch is you are not only an audience member, you are a participant. I’m really excited about this year’s BarCamp. The date is set for Saturday, April 5 10am until end in the Golisano College of Computing and Information Sciences at RIT. Check out the wiki page for all the details. Hope to see you there!