At the Rensselaer Center for Open Source Software students develop open source software solutions to solve societal problems.
For example, at the HFOSS Symposium today I talked to Graylin Kim who is working on the New York Senate Open Legislation Service where people can look up any bill that is being discussed in the New York Senate, get a permanent url to share and discuss on their own websites or grab all the data via REST. The idea is to encourage more citizens to get involved in legislature. Developers can get involved at http://nysenate.gov/developers or #nyss_openlegislation @ Freenode.net for OpenLegislation
I also discovered that Ease, a slide share program for GNOME, that is currently being developed by Nate Stedman. (An earlier version, Glide, was created by an RPI student, Rob Carr.)
You can check out the RPI Center for Open Source and the other projects students are working on. The program was started by a grant from an RPI alum, Sean O’ Sullivan. He started MapInfo (now PBInsight) and JumpStart International (article).
They were at the HFOSS Symposium sharing how their program worked with other educators.
[Post edited for accuracy on March 9, 2011.]
I’m an RPI student, and I’d like to point out that the person who wrote the libSeed (the javascript bindings for GTK+) and he did a lot of work on GObject introspection.
Also, the slide show program is called Ease.
Thanks for pointing this out. I think RCOS does some really good work.
Thanks for sharing your appreciative comments about RPI students. Rob Carr’s Glide merged with Nate Stedman Ease. Nate is leading the efforts and Rob is trying to provide plugin support.
http://blogs.gnome.org/racarr/ Glides’ blog during summer 2010
Ease details re in
https://github.com/NateStedman/Ease and
http://www.natestedman.com/
RPI is awesome! I’ve met with RCOS students a couple of times at RPI now and we’ve had a few very active in Fedora. Go RPI!