Adriaan de Groot will give a talk about the new KDE 4 release for the BCS Open Source Specialist Group (OSSG) on Thursday 1st November 2007 from 1830 hours at the BCS Central London Offices, First Floor, The Davidson Building, 5 Southampton Street, London WC2E 7HA.

The KDE 4.0 release is one of the most anticipated software events in the Free software desktop world today.

This talk, which in true OSSG style is open to all to attend, will take us on a tour of what KDE 4 will bring to your desktop with technologies such as Plasma, Solid, Phonon, SVG and more as well as take a look at some of the new and updated applications that will be arriving with KDE 4.0 including the Okular universal reader and the groupware Akonadi system.

We will wrap up with an overview of the community behind and around KDE at how you too can get involved in a variety of ways, ranging from software development to documentation to quality assurance to translating to promotion, and help KDE 4 be the best desktop the world has seen in the process.

Adriaan de Groot is a Canadian by birth and a Dutchman by training. He lives in the Netherlands and works in Greece with his German colleagues. As a researcher in (Free) Software Quality, he travels in Europe trying to spread the word on quality checking tools and Free Software.

Adriaan’s first Open Source project started in 1989 when visual editors on serial consoles were all the rage. He contributed bits and pieces to other projects until settling down with the KDE project where he works on synchronizing PalmOS-based handhelds with the desktop; he also works on FreeBSD and OpenSolaris portability. Free Software takes up most of his work day.

Adriaan is a member of the board of directors of KDE e.V. and a member of the board of directors of the NLUUG.

To book a place at this event please email your name to the events coordinator.

Free buffet and refreshments including wine available from around 1800 hours.

For further information please contact Paul Adams at chair@ossg.bcs.org

RT is an enterprise-grade ticketing system which enables a group of people to intelligently and efficiently manage tasks, issues, and requests submitted by a community of users. Book now: online or booking PDF. Tutorial is on 16th October 2007 and starts at 0900 hours and is planned to finish by 1700 hours. Venue is The Imperial Hotel, Russell Square, London WC1B 5BB
The RT platform has been under development since 1996, and is used by systems administrators, customer support staffs, IT managers, developers and marketing departments at thousands of sites around the world.

Written in object-oriented Perl, RT is a high-level, portable, platform independent system that eases collaboration within organizations and makes it easy for them to take care of their customers.

RT manages key tasks such as the identification, prioritization, assignment, resolution and notification required by enterprise-critical applications including project management, help desk, NOC ticketing, CRM and software development.

RT is used by Fortune 100 companies, government agencies, educational institutions, and development organisations worldwide.

RT is the leading open-source issue-tracking system. Designed to make it easy for your organisation to track any sort of “task”. Various organisations, ranging in size from large corporations to the smallest non-profit use RT across a wide range of business cases. Frequent uses include the tracking of software defects, customer service inquiries, internal workflow, project management, network operations and even youth counselling. RT is powerful, flexible and built from the ground up to adapt to your organization and needs.

This comprehensive session will cover:

• RT’s system architecture
• A guided tour of the RT source code
• Extension mechanisms you can use to customize RT
• How to tie RT into your existing authentication infrastructure
• Bulding your own tools that talk to the RT backend
• Automating common procedures
• Customizing RT’s workflow to match your own
• How to write custom reports based on RT’s data

Jesse Vincent — tutor: (President, Best Practical Solutions LLC)Jesse Vincent is the author of RT and the founder of Best Practical Solutions, LLC, a company dedicated to open source tools to help people and organizations keep track of what needs doing, when it gets done, and who does it. Before founding Best Practical, Vincent worked as the systems lead for a now-defunct dotcom and as a software designer at Microsoft.

Please note UKUUG state that places are limited and early booking is essential. Booking deadline is 8th October 2007.

For further details please visit: http://www.ukuug.org/events/rt/

2 docs for committee perusal.

Members may be interested in the following:

Amsterdam, June 11 and 12. With a pre-conference (mapping-party) and the
side-conference: 4 years after the ?motie Vendrik? (plea for
governmental use of open standards and open source software) in
collaboration with the open source taskforce of the Dutch political
Party GroenLinks. Location: the beautiful Aula of the University of
Amsterdam (at the ?Spui?), Singel 411, Amsterdam.

This year?s speakers include yet again some renowned experts in the
fields of open source software, open standards and open content including speakers from Vodafone, Yahoo,
Wikimedia, IBM, Google Earth, University of Leuven, European Schoolnet,
OpenStreetmap, European Union, Dutch government, Dutch schools and many
others.

For the latest information on the conference please see www.hosc.nl.

Zahl Limbuwala Chair and founder of the Data Centre Specialist Group (DCSG) will give a presenatation to prime debate on the question put forward bythe Open Source Specialist Group (OSSG) - Is Open Source more environmentally friendly? This will be a combined event between OSSG and DCSG.

Venue - BCS Central London Offices, First Floor, The Davidson Building, 5 Southampton Street, London WC2E 7HA

Time - 1800 hours for 1830 start.

Free buffet and refreshments including wine.

Please email your name to the events coordinator to book a place at this event.

For further information please contact Mark Elkins via email at mark_elkins@bcs.org

About Zahl Limbuwala (courtesy of the Data Centre Specialist Group website)

Zahl has been involved in information technology both from a career perspective and through personal interest over that last 15 years. Having started out as an electronic engineer he rapidly moved into software development, real-time system and embedded process control. He also embraced the systems, networks and security design and administration disciplines during the technical hands-on part of his career.
Since then Zahl has held a number of operational management and strategic planning roles with the managed services/service provider world. Zahl has been involved with the evolution of the data centre from the initial engineering approach to the slightly more scientific approach that’s taken nowadays.

Zahl founded the DCSG after having spent a number of years unsuccessfully trying to find a forum through which data centre skills, experience and best practices could be shared.