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Welcome to the Sig-OSL website!

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Sig-OSL
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We are an Open source interest group within ACM with ties to the future UIC Open Source Labs, and LUG, and as with UIC@OSL our mission statement is similar:

- To provide students a mechanism for easier participation in the Open Source Process
- To promote and foster the use of Open Source Software
- To educate students, faculty, staff, and industry about the Open Source Community, the use of Open Source Software, and how to contribute back
- To help bridge the gap between Open Source, Academia, and Industry
- To provide an environment that bolsters innovation, brings companies and open source communities to UIC, and increases the visibility of UIC students and faculty

With this in mind we will be lookign for a project[s] that will help us exploring out our mission.

Meeting Times:
Anyone interested in getting involved with Sig-OSL is welcome to come Tuesdays from 11AM to 12PM, at SEL 2262.

Target audience:
- Anyone interested in getting involved in an OSS project. - Anyone interested in Mobile software developmet using Java and Linux.
- Anyone intereted in system administration with Linux, power related issues (hardware for the solar aspect), mixed Networking over Bluetooth/Wifi, and software development in linux, etc. is welcome to join us.

This might be a particuraly good experience for EE, CE, CS, MCS, IDS, etc. that might want to get hands on experience in the avobe mentioned fields.

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Nemik's Sig-OSL Presentation from Oct. 11

Here is the link to Nemik's presentation:
http://lug.cs.uic.edu/downloads/osl-sms-presentation.pdf

Meeting Notes for Tue. Oct 9th

- Review last week's project.
- MIT idea was explained - internet over bike carrier.
- Nemik is going to have a presentation Thursday about the platform that he put together to blog over sms.
- We are postponing dicussion on http/html over sms to when Max shows up :-)
- Nemik is going to contact Engeniers w/o borders
- Roberto is going to contact Moto. to try and see if they would be interested in supporting our idea of blogging over sms.

Meeting Notes for Tue. Oct 2nd

As you can see on the following picture, from the last meeting, we did some burning of ideas to see how far we can go with the mobile platform concept:

It seems as if the idea originally proposed is a bit weak, and Nemik came back with an additional propposal - described bellow. Based on the discussion, we also came out with a few extra potential goals for projects, all of these connected with the general idea of providing an improved mobile platform as an alternative to traditional computing.

Project Proposals:

Nemik's Proposal #1 + more:

Work on improving Nemik's sms to blogging service "routing platform"

Nemik has a service that he provides for free, where indiviuals can submit sms's to a cellphone number where the messages are then routed to different "blogging services" defined in the user's profile. He has customers all over the world, and some are using this as a journalistic tool.

This platform is complitly based on Open Source tools and he would like for the project to be fully oss.

Three different things were propposed as possible improvements for Nemk's platform:
- Create a package version - a bootable cd?,- that facilitates the installation of new sms reception numbers - more local to the users,- so that a network of "sattelite servers" can be easily created for poor or conflictive areas. This idea would requiere some hardware: server, serial cable, cellphone, simm card.
- Create a packaged version running on an intelligent cellphone - nokia, linux cellphone. The idea would be to have a cell GPRS and SMS capable that could act as a routed to the sevice. Additionally the cellphone could be equiped with a small solar array for power independence.
- Create an MMS extension. To be able to route pictures and clips where available. Two additional ideas where mentioned worth keeping under consideration:
- Create a mobile browser capable of text/html/http over sms.
- Consider using Moto/Linux based device to implement some of the ideas.

Nemik's Proposal #0:

A mobile, solar-powered virtual library for poor rural locations which can communicate with cheap mobile phones over Bluetooth. Lenovo has announced realtively cheap solar-powered desktops but even cheaper salvaged desktops could perhaps be used by aid of a solar panel.

It would contain a 100GB or larger hard drive that could fit much of Wikipedia in the language of the region as well as English articles. A small J2ME (Java for mobile phones) application could be loaded onto mobiles with the desktop sending the app to phones that want it. This application will communicate with the server over Bluetooth and allow it to send queries for searching to the server and get back results. A primitive HTML rendering engine could display articles and their pictures for one to view on the mobile screen.

The reason for such a setup is that currently even older mobiles have Bluetooth and Java and can be procured for very low costs. On top of it, it will let the people access this knowledge on a mobile interface that they are already familiar with rather than learning new hardware. The phones also use much less electricity and are cheaper than laptops or workstations.

Bluetooth is more widely available and mainstream in mobiles than Wifi. Also, it would allow for concurrent access to the system without having to wait in line to use a workstation to access the information. By placing such a system in a central meeting point of a town or village, this would encourage an exchange of knowledge and interaction between the inhabitants. It is assumed that these location would be too remote or have inadequate resources for internet access. Therefore knowledge would not be live like the internet but more of a reference like a virtual library or encyclopedia, in this case powered by Wikipedia. Since this information would be on a hard-drive, this drive could ideally be swapped out with updated Wikipedia entries every few months as the location gets visitors or packages with the new data. Being like a libarary though, it would not mandate very frequent updates. Additionally, perhaps some work could done by the Wikipedia community to 'freeze' articles and make them available for such purposes rather than perhaps taking a snapshot of an article while it may be defaced for example.

Max also mentioned looking on to this article, from Technology Review , which should provide us with some extra inspiration about the potential of such a platform.