The Weekly Squeak

The news is spreading that Auctomatic, a Vancouver-based startup using Seaside, has been bought by Live Current Media for $5 million. The company, which produces a tool to ease selling and inventory management for eBay sellers, was funded by a number of investors including Paul Graham’s technology investment company Y Combinator, and its staff including founders Kulveer Taggar, Harjeet Taggar and Patrick Collison will join the new owners. Lots more details are available from Phillip Kast’s blog.
It looks like Vancouver is becoming a very exciting place to be for Seaside developers!

[Edit: Corrected the information about Y Combinator]

Hi all Squeakers!

Ok, the Squeak Foundation Board Election 2008 ended 19 minutes ago -
promptly at 18.00 UTC, 8 March.

For this year we had 437 authorized voters of which 178 voted, that is
slightly more than 40% voting - a bit disappointing IMHO since we had
157 voting of 347 last year which gives above 45%.
On the other hand 178 is more than 157, so we had more voters and thus a
growing community, which of course is the most important aspect!

And without further ado I bring you the board for the following year
starting from NOW. The order reflects the ranking from the election:

1. Dan Ingalls
2. Craig Latta
3. Bert Freudenberg
4. Yoshiki Ohshima
5. Tim Rowledge
6. Randal L. Schwartz
7. Igor Stasenko

Read the rest of this entry »

Don’t miss this fun new video from Randal Schwartz and Leo about Squeak, EToys and OLPC.  Randal builds a very nice car demo.

Hi Squeakers,
Enclosed kindly find the information about International Squeak Live Video Conference in Nepal and Japan to be held Feb 28, 2008.  If you are interested to contribute or participate, you are most welcome.

Best regards,
Yogesh Shrestha

International Squeak Live Video Conference (pdf)

The Software Freedom Law Center just released a terrific readable guide to Free Open Source Software Legal Issues.

A Legal Issues Primer for Open Source and Free Software Projects (html / pdf)

Our thanks to the SFLC and all the terrific people there for their tireless efforts to support open source software communities!

———————————————————————
16th International Smalltalk Joint Conference - Call for Contributions

August 25-29, 2008 - Amsterdam, the Netherlands

http://www.esug.org/conferences/2008/
———————————————————————-

For the past 16 years, the European Smalltalk User Group (ESUG) has organised the International Smalltalk Conference, a lively forum on cutting edge software technologies that attract people from both academia and industry for a whole week. The attendees are both engineers using Smalltalk in business and students and teachers using Smalltalk both for research and didactic purposes.

As every year, this year’s edition of the largest European Smalltalk event will include the regular Smalltalk developers conference with renowned invited speakers, a Smalltalk camp that proves fruitful for interactions and discussions. Besides, this year will be held the 4th edition of the Innovation Technology Awards where prizes will be awarded to authors of best pieces of Smalltalk-related projects.

You can support the ESUG conference in many different ways:

* Sponsor the conference. New sponsoring packages are described at http://www.esug.org/supportesug/becomeasponsor/
* Submit a talk, a software or a paper to one of the events. See below.
* Attend the conference. We’d like to beat the previous record of attendance (116 people at Köthen, Germany in 2004)!
* Students can get free registration and hosting if they enroll into the the Student Volunteers program. See below.

The conference features the following events:

* Camp Smalltalk - There will be a Smalltalk camp the 23-24th of august
* Developers Forum
* Technology Forum

Developers Forum : International Smalltalk Developers Conference
——————
This year we are looking for YOUR experience on using Smalltalk. The list of topics includes, but is not limited to the following:

* XP practices
* Development tools
* Experience reports
* Model driven development
* Web development
* Team management
* Meta-Modeling
* Security
* New libraries & frameworks
* Educational material
* Embedded systems and robotics
* SOA and Web services
* Interaction with other programming languages

Submissions due on 1st June 2008
Notification of acceptance on 15 of June 2008 More information at http://www.esug.org/conferences/2008

How to sumbit?
——————
Pay attention: the places are limited so do not wait till the last minute to apply. Prospective presenters should submit a request to esug-info@esug.org
following the template below. Please use this template since the email will be automatically processed!

Subject: [ESUG 2008 Developers] + your name

First Name:

Last Name:

Email where you can always be reached:

Title:

Abstract:

Bio:

Any presentation not respecting this form will be discarded automatically

Technology Forum
——————
We are proud to announce the 4th Innovation Technology Awards. The top
3 teams with the most innovative software will receive, respectively, 500 Euros, 300 Euros and 200 Euros during an awards ceremony at the conference. Developers of any Smalltalk-based software are welcome to compete.
More information at http://www.esug.org/conferences/2008

Student Volunteer Program
——————
If you are a student wanting to attend ESUG, have you considered being a student volunteer? Student volunteers help keep the conference running smoothly; in return, they have free accommodations, while still having most of the time to enjoy the conference.
More information at
http://www.esug.org/conferences/2008

Esug Student Volunteers Program

We hope to see you there and have fun together.

Great video of the Waveplace XO Laptop Day.

Well I couldn’t resist. Aaron E. Walsh sent out an invitation to the Squeak - Croquet communities for an ad-hoc Immersive Education Meeting. The Boston Digital Summit held in January covered the Education Grid, this meeting was a chance to review this information for those that were not able to make it to the summit.

Second Life was quite an experience. I had to sign up and go through some training, figure out how to get to Sun’s virtual auditorium and sit down. It was quite amusing to see some people show up on stage and not know how to sit down either, so I didn’t feel so bad. Maybe I should have spent more time in the training.

Aaron, reviewed the details of the Education Grid. The Grid is an education content virtual repository focused on interoperability, standards, and quality educational content. The goal is to provide standards that allow content to be developed to operate in different virtual worlds. These standards must be open source to ensure that content can be made freely available.

Content is just a piece of the puzzle in education. Educators also need tools to be able to evaluate the progress of students. There are a number of general tools that should be developed and made available in a consistent way for each offering. Aaron mentioned, “While it is possible to record everything that happens in a virtual world there is no way an educator could watch everything a student did in an activity that might take 2 hours.” Tools that allow educators to evaluate raw data, to assess progress and to track grades, and to create content are essential.

Quality content will be assured by having a Peer Review of offerings before the become part of the grid. The peers will be selected from the community and people with special expertise will be sought to make sure that the education goals are met, the content is accurate, standards are followed, and licensing is compatible to be a part of the grid.

Licensing and interoperability were the major concerns once Aaron opened the floor to questions. Ownership of the content was also discussed. Aaron mentioned that a not-for-profit organization would own the grid, but that the grid would be virtual and would be hosted by multiple organizations. I’m not sure there was a full answer about the ownership of the content. I would have suggested that copyright stay with the author or developing organization, and that the grid would receive unlimited rights to distribute the content, much in the same way were are trying to organize the Squeak community.

Well I ran out of time but Aaron did a very nice job of wrapping it up just a few minutes over. Thank you! The concept is really a terrific idea. I hope that our communities will join together and support developing freely available virtual world educational materials. Aaron mentioned that other meetings will be held in Croquet, I look forward to that. I hope to see you there. Hopefully that meeting will be just as well attended as the SL meeting.

The European Smalltalk Users Group - ESUG has generously agreed to support international smalltalk presentations.

From Prof. Stéphane DUCASSE :

Hi all

as announced at Lugano ESUG is putting in place new action to promote the use of smalltalk http://www.esug.org/promotionactions/publicationpromotion/

PublicationPromotion
ESUG offers 150 Euros for each international conference paper whose concepts involves an implementation in Smalltalk

Rules
• After notification of acceptance, one of the authors sends to the ESUG board the article, a CV, and a brief explanation of how Smalltalk was used
• In case the ESUG board decides to support the promotion, the author has to send to ESUG after the camera-ready deadline a PDF of the article, where ESUG is referenced in the acknowledgment section, including a link to esug.org
• During the presentation at the conference, the author must mention ESUG support
• After the presentation at the conference the author sends to ESUG a PDF version of the slides, where there is a visible reference to ESUG (e.g. theESUG Logo). ESUG will put the slides on the ESUG website
• The author can then trigger the payment by sending an e-Mail to the ESUG board
• A maximum of 3 supported articles per year per institution is allowed

Prof. Stéphane DUCASSE [ | ]
http://stephane.ducasse.free.fr

Open Source Smalltalks: http://www.squeak.org, http://www.gnu.org/software/smalltalk/smalltalk.html
Free books for Universities at http://www.esug.org/sponsoring/promotionProgram.html
Online Free Books at http://stephane.ducasse.free.fr/FreeBooks.html