[clue-admin] [Fwd: Re: CLUE Web Site Contact Form - MIT Free Software Project visiting Colorado (Mon Aug 18 2008 04:25 pm)]

[Dennis J Perkins]

Jed, we have a change of speaker for September.  I was contacted by
Christina Xu about speaking while they are in Denver.  She has provided
the following info for you to put on the web site.  Thanks.


Topic: Bringing the benefits of the web to real-world communities

Summary: Communities these days often find themselves facing decisions
with impacts and complexities far exceeding their traditional
preparations and capabilities. extrACT is a project at MIT's Center for
Future Civic Media that investigates how these information- and
power-deficiencies can be mitigated through technology. During this
informal talk, we'll talk about our experiences developing software for
use by nonprofits and citizens' alliances, designing alternative
interfaces to web tools for non-connected users, and putting the whole
thing together with open source software. The talk will touch on the
languages and libraries we're using (Python, Django & GeoDjango,
Asterisk, Postgre/PostGIS) and how we're putting them all together.
There will be plenty of time for questions and technical ones to cover
any details you're curious about are, of course, encouraged.

Speakers: Dan Ring is the lead developer for the extrACT project.
Currently on sabbatical from MIT, he originally hails from South Dakota
and has been using Linux since he was 10. Prior to working for extrACT,
he was the lead developer for Buy it Like You Mean It, a non-profit
collaborative tool that promotes responsible shopping. Christina Xu is a
senior at Harvard who does a little bit of everything for extrACT (but
mostly break stuff for Dan to fix). She is involved with the Harvard and
MIT chapters of Students for Free Culture and was a founding organizer
of ROFLCon, a conference about internet culture.