[Promotion-technology] CSUN Hackfest and Exhibition: Call for Participation

[Eitan Isaacson]

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.
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