MEETING INTRODUCTION
** Note: Unigroup's meeting location has changed **
SPECIAL INSTRUCTIONS: --------------------- While RSVPs are not mandatory for this location, please RSVP if you know you are attending, or if there is a high probability that you will be attending. This will help us determine the correct amount of food and refreshments. Please RSVP by two days prior to the meeting day (the food must be ordered in advance). To REGISTER for this event, please RSVP by using the Unigroup Registration Page. This will allow us to have some automation in the registration process. Please continue to check the Unigroup web site and THIS page, for any last minute updates concerning this meeting. If you registered for this meeting, please check your email for any last minute announcements as the meeting approaches.
DIRECTIONS
Location:
The Cooper Union (http://www.cooper.edu)
School of Engineering
51 Astor Place (8th Street, between 3rd and 4th Ave)
East Village, Manhattan
New York City
Meeting Room: The Driscoll Room: 136E (1st Floor)
Located on the North side of Astor Place (8th Street), between 3rd & 4th Avenues.
Building lobby sign-in is required at the guard's desk.
Enter the building, check in with the guard at the lobby for directions
to the room. From the main entrance, keep going straight beyond the
guard till the end of the hall, make a left, pass the elevators (on
your left), keep going, and Room 136E will be on your right.
Nearest mass transit stations are:
'6' to Astor Place (stops right at The Cooper Union).
'R' to 8th Street, then walk about 2 blocks East.
'4/5/6/R/N/Q' to Union Square, then walk South and East.
'B/D/F/V' to Broadway-Lafayette, then walk North and East.
We believe free street parking becomes available at 6pm.
PRESENTATION OUTLINE
Topic: The Laconica Project and Micro-Blogging Based on XMPP Standards
Evan will be speaking on the Laconica project, the open source federated messaging system based on XMPP (Extensible Messaging Presence Protocol), which itself evolved from the Jabber project. He's expected to talk about the project (which is considered to be highly scalable and agile), its code base and lessons learned, a technical tour of it's API (Twitter compatible), it's multitude of features including how federation works (where messaging instances running on separate servers are able to remotely subscribe to each other), how all this provides extreme scalability, OpenID authentication, SMS integration, it's multilingual interface (using Gettext), it's AJAX-like interface, and discussing the system administration challenges of hosting a high traffic federated messaging system.
The Laconica Project Summary:
Laconica (http://laconi.ca) is an open source micro-blogging tool written in PHP that implements the OpenMicroBlogging standard based on XMPP (which came out of the Jabber project). Laconica was created as an open source, distributed alternative to Twitter, and was originally used by the identi.ca micro-blogging service (http://identi.ca), which has received a tremendous amount of buzz since it's release during the Summer of 2008.
Meeting Outline:
Web Resources
XMPP Standards
http://www.xmpp.org/summit/summit5.shtml
The Laconica Project
http://www.laconi.ca
Identi.ca Micro-Blogging Service
http://www.identi.ca
Control Yourself, Inc.
http://controlyourself.ca
SPEAKER BIOGRAPHY
Evan Prodromou is an Open Source developer from San Francisco currently residing in Montreal. Evan is best known for creating identi.ca, a micro-blogging site based on his XMPP messaging platform Laconica. He also did a short stint at Microsoft, and is the co-founder of Wiki Travel (http://wikitravel.org). Evan's home page is located at http://evan.prodromou.name/.
COMPANY BIOGRAPHY
Control Yourself, Inc. is a Quebec corporation headquartered in Montreal which builds Open Network Services sites that use Open Source software to create and distribute Open Content.
GIVEAWAYS
Addison-Wesley Professional/Prentice Hall PTR has been kind enough to provide us with some of their books, which we will continue to raffle off as giveaways at our meetings. Addison-Wesley also has a new end-user discount, available through their User Group program. We will be announcing the details at our next meeting!
O'Reilly has been kind enough to provide us with some of their books, which we will continue to raffle off as giveaways at our meetings.
Unigroup would like to thank both companies for the support provided by their User Group programs.
Note: The chances tend to be about 1 in 5, that any attendee of our meeting will walk away with a fairly valuable giveaway (ie. many of these books are valued between $30 and $60)!
As always, all of the books will be available for review at the start of the meeting.
FEE SCHEDULE
Unigroup is a Professional Technical Organization and User Group, and its members pay a yearly membership fee. For Unigroup members, there is usually no additional charges (ie. no meeting fees) during their membership year. Non-members who wish to attend Unigroup meetings are usually required to pay a "Single Meeting Fee".
Yearly Membership (includes all meetings): $ 50.00
Student Yearly Membership (with ID): $ 25.00
Non-Member Single Meeting: $ 20.00
Non-Member Student Single Meeting (with ID): $ 5.00
Cash, Check, American Express.
NOTE: Simply receiving Unigroup Email Announcements does NOT indicate membership in Unigroup.
FOOD AND REFRESHMENTS
Complimentary Food and Refreshments will be served. This includes "wraps" such as turkey, roast beef, chicken, tuna and grilled vegetables as well as assorted salads (potato, tossed, pasta, etc), cookies, brownies, bottled water and assorted beverages.
Please join us for this meeting, you won't want to miss it!
unilist