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OpenSesame-BarCamp-Lebanon-notes

Page history last edited by Samer N 10 years, 6 months ago

 

 

 

                    
                     OpenSesame BarCamp Lebanon Main Page - Feb. 09 Event - Nov. 09 Event

                OpenSesame BarCamp Lebanon Feb 2009:  Main - Notes - Press - Pictures

 

 

 

SESSION NOTES AND OTHER INFORMATION


Blogs, other websites, etc... 

Coverage

Leb Geeks: www.lebgeeks.com/forums/viewtopic.php?id=5241

Arab Crunch: www.arabcrunch.com

Code Vault: www.codedemigod.com/blog

Mediaoriente: www.mediaoriente.com

OpenSesame BarCamp-Lebanon Open Press Release: http://www.barcamp.org/OpenSesame-BarCamp-Lebanon-press 

Other

OpenStreetMap Lebanon Project: http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/WikiProject_Lebanon 

Welcome session: Setting the schedule of the day, etc...

Session 1A: Writing a How To statup for dummies (Samer N. K.)

Notes

Session 1B: Intellectual property laws (Donatela, Mustafa)

Notes

Session 1C: What exactly is Open Source?

Notes

Session 1D: Functional programming / LISP (Makram)

Notes

Session 1E: Archiving/ Sharing content (Eugene)

 

Session 1- Archiving

Attendants: Youssef- Solange- Sara-Firas-Raghad-Chantal-Mansur-Dr. Sensenig

 

 

·         Dr. Sensenig started by introducing the word Luddite that comes from Ned Luddite

·         Then he talked about the internet. Before surfing on the web was easier. Making a website early 90s, list surfs, sending e-mail. Dr. Sensenig sees himself as a historian, he wants to save history. The Christian Liberalism party had a website; the socialist party removed the website.

·         1998 there was a demonstration held about digital copy, all politicians want to know about their history

How can we save content?

In this case, we have two subcategories:

1.       Loosing archives,

2.       Loosing information that were never archived.

Now we will divide our discussion in two parts

1.        Saving Archives

2.       Saving Alternative source content

1. Saving Archives:

Firas: he was working in a communication company in Iraq. They wanted to know info about someone, but they couldn’t find in their archives,,,

Solange: she thinks that this depends on the institution; every institution has a different system to archive.

Now there is a transition from Paper to PC, then from PC to internet vs Personal control over data to not personal control.

Sensenig: Obama knew that George Bush had removed all e-mails that passed from last 2 years

2. Saving Alternative Source Content:

Mansur: he is interested in the idea that he wants to collect old data and make it public for all people

Example: some letters from a former US president to Cairo

It is an important step when we get records and make them public.

Secrecy and Private Issues:

Gave the example of LERC when they were taking things from people’s grandparents and analyzing some things in the past.

SU collapsed because they couldn’t keep up with the Technological advancements.

What can we do to keep our history safe?

1. Awareness:

We can start some awareness programs on Facebook, some DVD campaigns

2. Alternative Archiving

For example there is in Germany an Association for Alternative Archives

We must follow hand copy alternative archiving for digital content

A very big amount of sources is being lost very easily; we call this phenomenon the VV, Velocity and Volume

Finally we decided that each one of us present in the room, must go tell at least someone we know, and we must start applying it, and in this way we would at least have reached and awoke a small number of people.

                                                                        

Session 2A: Using the web for advocacy/ICT and politics (Jumana, Eugene)

 

Session 2- ICT and Politics

Attendee: Dr. Sensenig- Joumana-Dima-Sara-Firas-Elisabetha-Solange-Raghad-Anis-Wadih-Chantal

Joumana: How to get people involved in the community?

                  How to make Politicians listen to you?

David: Now before Elections in Lebanon, people are upset about Cedar Island Lebanon, how can we mobilize people and make pressure

Some questions:

1.       How to get the community to participate around number of topics through it?

2.       How new is ICT in activating grassroots politics?

3.       What are the most effective formats for Lebanon?

4.       The Use of ICT by government 

ICT: Information Communication and Technology, now we have added D for Development

Obama is using ICT to make republicans do or work with his agenda.

Sensenig:  Urban planning is good, because we are always using it.

Water:

Access to reliable consistent water

·         Awareness

·         Publicizing issues through media

·         Defining positions

·         Partnership/collaboration

·         Using ICT to make it more efficient

·         Publicizing on the web

Water issues, it’s all about data, no foundation of information we can work with.

The government will not give information it does not have, nor give information about things it does not want people to know about

Dima:

What is ICT?

Telling people through it

What are some teachable steps?

Gathering some existing data.

Now Obama has a website www.change.org this website is a sort of Obama meter to see the things he promised of, and see where he has reached to achieve them.

How can we set up or use the help of the “Shadow Government bodies” to build database mapping from which we can make decisions for democratic purposes?

Session 2B: Social media marketing (Gaith Saqer)

Notes 

Session 2C: Modern web frameworks, W3C standards, web templating (Tuomas, Samer, Ramsey) 

Modern Web Frameworks

Tuomas and Eqbal introduced the Django and Ruby on Rails frameworks respectively, and discussed the merits of each. The conclusion was that the two frameworks are roughly functional equivalents, and the choice of one over the other depends on personal taste more than anything else. 

Links

W3C Standards

Samer from LebGeeks, highlighted the importance of web standards for interoperable web design. He noted how local web developers/designers seem to ignore them completely, and instead design solely for Internet Explorer. Wessam, from Microsoft, responded by explaining that the differences between Internet Explorer and other browsers lie in differing interpretations of the specifications. He admitted that Internet Explorer 6 was a bad browser, and that Internet Explorer 7 was the one to talk about. Samer reminded him that Internet Explorer 6 was still widely deployed, and that web developers still had to worry about it despite Microsoft's recent efforts at producing a better browser. From there, the conversation spiraled out into a browser/specification debate.

 

Links

"fiddle" Web Templating Engine

Ramsey presented a template engine he developed that focuses on simplicity, ease of use and valid XHTML. He demoed his code on the projector, showing simple "Hello BarCamp" style examples as well as actual deployed code. 

I am looking for feedback on fiddle! If you think the project is interesting, make sure to download it and try it out. Praise, criticism, bug reports and feature requests are all things I'm hoping the commnity to give me. PHP hacker? Contributions to the source are more than welcome!

- Ramsey 

Links

Session 2D: State of computer/software education in Lebanon and the Arab region (Makram)

Notes

Session 2E: Regular, face-to-face meeting of hackers to discuss, compete, and colaborate (Raja Baz)

Ramsey and I had an idea about organizing face to face meetings of hackers(the good sense of the word, see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hacker_(programmer_subculture)). We both agreed that there was no real creative outlet for talented programmers in lebanon. We felt that it would be very fun, interesting and useful to orgranize regular, casual meetups where we can do all sorts of fun programming stuff. Programming competitions(a la google code jam), writing bots to play games and pit them against each other, pleac(http://pleac.sourceforge.net/) parties, etc...

I pitched this idea to the people who attended the session. We all agreed that we had too few opportunities to meet like-minded people, people who just enjoy programming and that such events would be a great place to meet, collaborate, compete, share knowledge and just have a good time(preferably with pizza involved). Alaa raised the all too common issue of people quickly losing interest(like what usually happens with such efforts) but I think that if we can keep the fun element up(which is why we want to have competitions and collaborative events and not just be a group of people who are interested in something like, say, linux) people won't lose interest and we can get something going.

We collected the attendees' emails with the intent of setting up a mailing list. We intend on meeting in the next 2 or so weeks to have everyone meet each other, plan upcoming events and maybe have our first fun event.

Everyone who gave me their email address should be getting an email from me soon, anybody else who is interested, you can find me on raja [dot] baz [at] lau.edu.lb

Session 3A: Lebanese talent and expert knowledge/managing talent pool. (Samer N.K., Nassif)

 

Session 2- Finding Taleny

 

Biggest Problem in Lebanon is Brain Drain

In Lebanon there are a lot of incompetents

There is a problem in:

·         Trying to find the right resource

·         Giving incentives

·         Asking them to quit their jobs

·         Getting to a point in which they feel they are part of an organization

How do we solve the issue of Brain Drain?

Where to look?

Competent people have a lot of ego

Experience:  is years in what you know.

Competence: willingness to say that I can learn

We only want fast solutions

Availability

Preach

Convincing

Money issues

So we do not always search for employees, we can have cooperatives or partnerships.

Session 3B: Use of ICT in education/ survival guides for students (Eugene, Dima)

Notes

Session 3C: Web and Network security and/or privacy (Christophe)

Notes 

Session 3D: Arabic web typography/Arabizing the web (Ramsey)

A lot of great ideas were introduced with respect to standardizing Arabic fonts on the web. Our plan of action was to start an alliance of the major Arabic content producers, namely newspapers, to back the development and distribution of a screen-readable Arabic font as good as what is available for Latin scripts. This would involve bringing together developers, typographers, calligraphists and eventually OS vendors. 

If you'd like to contribute to the effort, join our Google group: http://groups.google.com/group/arabic-font-alliance 

Session 3E: 3D Games and graphics in Lebanon (Abdallah)

Notes

Session 4: Where to from here? (Munir)

Ideas... more will be posted up soon.  Keep an eye on (http://www.barcamp.org/BarCampLebanon) for more information.

  • ICT in education
  • ICT in improving Lebanese politics
  • hacker meetups (competitions, challenges, etc...)
  • tech and human rights
  • green energy
  • recycling and environmental responsibility
  • Arabic on the web
  • Creative Commons and intellectual property rights
  • ICT and development, civil society, in Lebanon
  • ... and more!