On 2nd of May 2009 we had our 3rd Release Party at Intercollege Limassol. During the event we had two presentations in English. We started at 10:30 am to give the time for more people to attend and we did not do any workshops as we had problem installing Jaunty on the PCs due to lack of resources.
The Presentations: 1) Introduction and History of Free Software and GNU/Linux. Theodotos Andreou explained the conditions that spawned the Free Software Movement, the GPL and focused on the advantages of using Free Software and GNU/Linux. 2) Engaging in Free Software Development Process. Leonid Mamchenkov described the benefits of using Free Software by the student community and focused on the benefits for the students of Computer Science. The availability of the source code can help a CS student to learn and study the code from different projects and programming languages. He also pointed that free software development is not only programming and bug fixing but involves many phases like Testing, Documentation, Translations, Communication etc and students can get involved in whatever they feel they can help best. Contributing in a Free Software project not only makes you feel more valuable but can help a student acquire practical experience and enrich their resume. We had around 30 persons and some new faces. The reason for such a low attendance can be traced in the fact that we chose the middle of a long weekend for the event. Organising the event in the morning was also wrong and lastly the fact that we used only the web and email to advertise the event had its share. Nevertheless the meeting was useful because we gathered 22 signatures for registering the community as a non-profit association. Marinos Ioannou will take the signatures to the lawyer and start the procedure. We also had as a special guest Mr Kostas Tsakaloglou, a member of HELLUG, and we had some interesting exchange of views about how to attract the interest of more people and sponsors. He is going to represent us in the 2nd HELLUG Communities Conference and we gave him a brief presentation to show at the event. This Release Party was also innovative because for the first time we had presents to offer to the participants. The presents were donated by MNS Gadgets Center and we thank Mr Manos for the idea. The winners were Stelios Agapiou, Andrianna Hadjiefstathiou and Charalambos Leventis that won the Motorola mobile, the USB Stick and the wireless keyboard respectively. We would like to thank: Mr Kostas Perdikis (Intercollege) for organising the event. Mr Stefanos Sofroniou (Intercollege) for preparing the PCs at the lab Mr Andreas Charidemou (Intercollege) for preparing the PCs at the lab Mr Manos Tsachalidis (MSN Gadgets Center - www.gadgets-center.net) for the brilliant idea to offer gifts to the participants >From the Community we like to thank: Frangiskos Hadjigeorgiou of cystreets.com (Photos) Gregoris Chrysanthou (Organisation) Konstantinos Mikellides (CD Preparation - Labs) Leonid Mamchenkov (Presentation) Marinos Ioannou (Signatures) Theodotos Andreou (Organisation - Presentation) Andrianna Hadjiefstathiou (for bringing Kostas from Larnaka) We would like to thank all those that attended and those that could not make it. The next Release Party is going to happen somewhere in November probably in Nicosia.
