Happy 5th week! This week, former Compsoc System Administration Co-ordinator and self-proclaimed "interfering busybody" Dominic Hargreaves is speaking on Thursday. Also, scroll down for information about the AGM (including elections for the next committee!), and other miscellany.
OpenStreetMap, OpenGuides and friends =====================================
When: Thursday 15th February, 20:00 Where: Keble College, Pusey Room
The last few years has seen an explosion of interest in geographically-aware applications, especially web applications, powered partly by the availability of cheap GPS units. Flickr, a leading photo hosting provider, has integrated geo-tagged photo processing to its site, and Google Earth and Google Maps has popularised the use of high quality mapping and satellite imagery.
OpenStreetMap and OpenGuides are two projects that are harnessing this enthusiasm in the "Free" data and code spheres. Together, and with many other projects, they are helping us to describe the world we live in richly, and make this information availble to all in open formats and under open licences.
Dominic will be introducing both projects; giving an overview of their aims and processes; explain how to participate in the projects; and hopefully to show off some cool technologies and uses the data is being used with.
A few people at the Geek Night last week were using OSM information for neat things, and you may have seen me linking to the Oxford OpenGuide in the past. If you came to the EA talk last term, this is in the same place. If not, http://www.keble.ox.ac.uk/about/tour might prove useful. The Pusey room is on the Pusey Quad, roughly opposite the lodge. Someone will be hovering in the lodge to point you in the right direction in any case.
Annual General Meeting ======================
The AGM is this term, and we'll have elections for a new president, secretary and treasurer. If you want to stand for election, you'll need a proposer and a seconder, who both need to be at the AGM, as per the constitution[0] (5.6). The meeting will be either on Wednesday of 7th week or Tuesday of 8th week, depending partly on when a speaker we're arranging could come to Oxford, and will probably be in the Big Bang[1] (again!). If you want to come to the meeting and either day is particularly bad, or you'd rather not go to the Big Bang again, let us know.
[0] http://www.ox.compsoc.net/info/constitution.shtml [1] http://oxford.openguides.org/wiki/?Big_Bang
If you want to see more behind-the-scenes committee stuff and perhaps get involved (or maybe even just socialise), come hang out on our IRC channel: #compsoc on OxIRC (irc.oxirc.org). If you need an IRC client, you might like to try X-Chat on Windows[2], Colloquy[3] on OS X, and irssi or X-Chat or Konversation or whatever else takes your fancy on whatever Unix-like system you prefer (if indeed you do prefer one).
[2] http://www.silverex.org/news/ [3] http://colloquy.info/
Bits from the Sysadmin ======================
Michael tells me that the Reply-To address for compsoc-members mails was incorrectly set to csoc@ox.compsoc.net , which is an address that goes straight into the bin. We know we lost at least one reply into that particular black hole --- if you think we lost yours, resend it to compsoc-discuss@ox.compsoc.net . compsoc-members now has a sensible return address (we hope!).
He adds: "We now have a switch, and are just looking for rails [for Compsoc's server in Worcester]." If you can help out, send us an email. If you already _had_ sent us an email, see the previous paragraph. :-)
He concludes: "Urg, it must be 5th week."
Right, more from us later in the week. I might even have thought of an entertaining link to give you all by then.
Will -- Will Thompson, Oxford University Computer Society President Jabber: resiak@feayn.org; Mobile: +44 (0)7771 77 40 70 http://www.ox.compsoc.net