CSUN Hackfest and Exhibition: Call for Participation

[Eitan Isaacson <eitan ascender com>]

Hello fellow GNOME a11y folks.

On March 22-27 2010, GNOME will have a booth presence at the CSUN conference in San Diego. CSUN is one of the largest and most important gatherings on the topic of technology and persons with disabilities. This is going to be a great opportunity to bring the gospel of Free Software to a space and industry that is largely proprietary, and to a user base with special needs that sometimes could only be addressed with Open Source software. This is going to be über exciting!

Along with the booth and a presentation or two, we will also be hosting a GNOME assistive technology hackfest. The reasoning for this being the fact that this is an assistive technologies conference, so there really isn't a better place to draw inspiration, both by seeing the "state of the art" proprietary products first hand, and by talking with users who have needs that we could answer.

Are you a maintainer of one of GNOME's assistive technology modules? Are you developing an on screen keyboard? An alternative means for text input? A magnifier? Some trippy head-tracking app? Voice control? Switch access? Something new and exciting for cognitive disabilities? Are you hacking on new features for Orca? Are you working to provide users with disabilities unfettered access to GNOME?

If the answer to any of the above is 'yes', we hope you will consider joining fellow GNOME a11y folks at CSUN this year to help promote GNOME and to hack with fellow AT developers.

We hope to have funding for this hackfest, but we don't yet really know what that means. We know that we will have to be creative about it to pull it off, so hopefully once you made up your mind to attend, you could help figure out how to afford it, if your employer could pay, if you have student discounts, etc. We will do our best to make it affordable to people who should be there, but no promises. Hope to have specifics about that in the future.

Please reply to this mail, or contact me if you have interest in attending, or any other questions, suggestions or concerns.

Cheers,
  Eitan.