SFU Surrey Semester in Innovation

Imagine a class where students envision a future for their university and then design it — where design, technology and entrepreneurship intertwine, creating a new more engaged educational experience — from virtual classrooms to remote participation in fieldwork, online collaboration to unique interactions with members of community, industry and academia.

Thanks to James Peltier, COSTAR mirrors are now available for several open source repositories.

Google is once again offering hundreds of paid positions for students to participate in open source software projects through the Google Summer of Code program.  Apache, Blender, Creative Commons, Drupal, Etherbook, Facebook, GNOME and many others are among the mentoring organizations offering projects.    Graduate students may be interested in opportunities with GCC, JikesRVM and others.   

The City of Vancouver Open Data Initiative is hosting its second hackathon at the Vancouver City Archives from 5:00 to 10:00 p.m. on December 9, 2009.

Head on down to find out what its all about and how you can make great apps using Vancouver City data.

Check out the December 2009 edition of the Communications of the ACM containing the article Assessing Open Source Software as a Scholarly Contribution by our very own Lou Hafer and Arthur E. Kirkpatrick.

Open Web Vancouver is being held June 11-12 at the new Vancouver Convention and Exhibition Centre, featuring such topics as Women in Open Source, Open Messaging on the Open Internet and a presentation on the new City of Vancouver initiative involving open source, open data and open standards.

We have arranged for a limited number of COSTAR students to receive a special student admission of $40. Contact me for details (cameron at sfu).

M.Sc. Defence and Seminar
Ali Lotfi
BSc, Simon Fraser University, Burnaby, Canada, 2003

The focus of this thesis is on the discussion of Open Source Software (OSS) as a scholarly contribution. Boyers proposed model of scholarship with four components of discovery, integration, application, and teaching is used as a framework showing there are different forms of scholarly activities as it relates to OSS.

Seneca College is hosting the 7th annual Free Software and Open Source Symposium in Toronto on October 23-24. COSTAR convenor Rob Cameron will attend and participate in a panel discussion in the "Teaching Open Source" track, discussing the institution perspective.

I recently attended the Hollyhock Retreat of Open Everything as an invited participant. We discussed a wide range of intersecting open initiviatives including open source software, open standards, open content and open government. Although outside the domain of open source software, per se, I was quite impressed by the efforts and progress in the area of open content for education and wonder how much interest there is among COSTAR members in discussion of topics such as the Cape Town Open Education Declaration.

The painterly project consists of the creation of a toolkit for 'knowledge based' NPR painterly renderings from portrait photographs based on Prof. Steve DiPaola's research at the Intelligent Visualization Lab (http://ivizlab.sfu.ca/).   It uses typical photographs of people as input, along with an XML based script file that specifies a number of parameters based on cognitive knowledge of the open methodology that human portrait artist use.