Coup talk

Title:       Fame & Fortune from Open Source Development
Speaker:     Robert Coup
Date:        Thur, 15 May, 2008
Time:        11:00--12:00 noon
Venue:       Room 3.401, Engineering Bldg, 20 Symonds Street,  
Contact:     Patrick Hu, a.hu AT auckland.ac.nz, ext 84535

Abstract

Open Source Software is in use worldwide, and the majority is driven by small communities of passionate users and developers. Why would you want to get involved with an Open Source project? Who can do it? How do you get started, and what are the different ways of contributing? Once you're involved, what should you expect, and how long until the fame and fortune ensue? I'll aim to answer all these questions and give an insight into how open source projects work and why its in your interest to get involved more closely with the software you care about.

Biography

Robert Coup is the CTO of an Auckland internet startup Koordinates, whose aim is making geospatial data more accessible to professional map users. He's been a passionate user, developer, and evangelist of Open Source for a number of years. His primary project is the Dojo Toolkit (http://dojotoolkit.org) - a popular Javascript toolkit for building interactive web applications. For the last two years Robert has been involved with the Google Summer of Code programme, getting more university students worldwide involved with open source development. Robert received his BE (CSE) & BCom (Operations Mgmt) from the University of Auckland in 2003. His blog is available at http://rob.coup.net.nz