CREDIL

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Biso will be presenting the next Lunch-and-Learn, in February, about Mobile Development. He has experience developing on various mobile platforms including Java Mobile, iPhone and Android.

CREDIL is hosting a series of lunch-and-learn talks. The talks are usually on the third Thursday of the month, from noon to one, on a variety of topics. Usually, one person talks on a topic that the others in the group are interested in.

All welcome! Please email us to let us know if you're coming. If a lot of people are coming, we'll reserve a larger room. Or, if you'd like to give a talk, we'll be interested to listen!

Today's talk is about "Belt-and-Suspenders", a way to keep in touch with your remotely deployed client machines. The presenter is Chris Meloche, the author of Belt and Suspenders.

Previous talks have been about i2c protocol and getting started with hardware hacking.

Justin is in the Sierra Leone, in the middle of the jungle to deploy an autonomous satellite connected camera systems. This system will relay pictures of the building of a 5000 person village. Our technology will be put to the test, we are looking forward to see the results.

The CRTL press conference was a success, making a proud display of the project and its promotional efforts. CREDIL makers were present to witness the launch of the new community hub for Linguistech, www.linguistech.ca. It also assists translation students with tutorials and excercises, and it links to the electronic classroom created by CREDIL.

CREDIL has created an electronic classroom for the Centre de recherche en technologies langagières (www.crtl.ca). Each workstation in the lab has all the software needed to do professional translation. The workstations are supported by custom dedicated servers at the backend, and allow students to communicate with each other and with professors while working on their assignments.

CREDIL employees worked closely with CRTL in bringing this project to fruition over the last year, and will be continuing to support the project in the coming months.

While the workstations are running Windows because some of the translation software only runs under Windows, the backend servers are running only free software. The backend servers host the virtual desktops that are presented in the classroom.

CRTL will be hosting a press conference at 10:30 on Sept. 6 to announce and demonstrate their new capabilities.

CREDIL offers expertise in open information technology. We provide staff members to projects or provide a team for an entire project. We embed ourselves as part time employees for the organizations we work for. This means casual contract for the federal government. As such we are an amazing deal because we bring expertise, knowledge transfer, we even provide a well equipped lab, we have our own offices and equipment!

Our current challenge is that we need more Government Departments to work with us. It is necessary because we avoid having any of our maker members do more than 2 days a week for any given sponsor. The reason for that is an objective of balancing a variety of projects and avoiding having "all our eggs in the same basket". Furthermore, with 90 days maximum a calendar year per department, casual employees would burn their days too quickly if they did more than 2 days a week. We also like the mix between private en public organizations. If we can find more Government Departments, we would be able to recruit people and assign them 5 days of work a week between 2 departments and a private company, for instance.

If any one knows of a Government Department interested in IT people skilled with Software Libre, let us know. We would be happy to present our model to them.

email: crm(AT)credil.org

Bienvenu à Mekki et Samir!

Notre façon de faire les choses et notre flexibilité semble plaire grandement aux ministères fédéraux. En effet notre mode d'opération offre une expertise recherchées a des coûts très intéressant. Et la demande augmente. En juillet nous allons ajouter deux nouveaux membres a notre équipe. Ce qui portera notre nombre a 10, dont 6 actifs dans des projets du gouvernement fédéral.

On May 23, Maxime moved from F3015 to F3017.
On May 25, 2011: Michael Richardson moved from F3015 to F3016. The arrangement of offices is now:

F3015: Biso Shrestha + guest.
 F3016: Michael Richardson and Justin Hornosty, includes a mobile hardware lab and one hotel space.
 F3017: Maxime Gauthier and Andrew Clunis, includes one hotel space.
 F3018: Brenda Butler and Christian Meloche, includes a mobile hardware lab.

We struggled with whether to expand to four offices, or whether or not to find a larger common (cubicle farm) space.
In the end we decided that we will expand slightly during 2011, but that in 2012 we will move to another location, perhaps to a "Maison de la Technologie".

Biso joined CREDIL a few months ago. He brings mobile expertise to CREDIL. He is currently busy conducting a study for HRSDC on mobile computing requirements and solutions. Maxime Gauthier also joined, he is doing support for our Language Technology sponsor. Justin Hornosty is back from school and we have several projects waiting for him including possibly an extreme computing project in the African Jungle!

In terms of sponsors, 4 of our maker members are actively busy working with the Government of Canada: HRSDC and TB. We have 2 new private companies as well: Nanometrics in Ottawa and Elite Venture in Dubai, UAE. We are still very involved with our other sponsor such as NovaVision Montréal (both Communication and Telecom divisions), CRTL (Language Technologies Research Centre) and IdéeClic here in Gatineau.

As a result of our growth we rented more office space. We are slowly tweaking our business model, we are very successful in bringing Open Source solutions to organisations and businesses and we do it very differently. We are hired directly, this helps the integration in the local teams and the knowledge transfer. We work on site a little but mostly out of our labs, so we bring value to our sponsors without disturbance. The fact that we are all involved in many projects means that we keep a better perspective and benefit from cross-pollination. Our challenge was to manage our projects and our teams well, thanks to RedMine open source project we are able to achieve our goals.

The next challenge is to control the growth an limit the fields that we are involved in. Currently, Networking, Multimedia systems and mobile computing with Android are where we want to focus but by ricochet we do a lot of Ruby on Rails and RedMine (now Chili Project) development.