Mentors of FOSS@RIT
Printer-friendly versionFOSS@RIT's staff and students are not in this alone. Over the course of our existence, we have partnered up with folks from a variety of organizations and places, who consider themselves mentors of our campaign.
Luke Macken
Senior Software Engineer, Red Hat Inc.
Co-Founder, CIVX Inc.
Luke graduated from RIT in 2007 with a bachelors degree in Computer Science, with concentrations in Operating Systems and Computer Security. While at RIT, Luke was a member of Computer Science House, and contributed to a variety of Open Source projects, including Gentoo Linux. His first co-op involved writing image processing software for the U2 spyplane. Luke is currently a full-time Fedora developer, and works on a vast plethora of technology, including developer tools, package management, liveusb, realtime web, wsgi, and all-things python.
Links
Walter Bender
Founder and Executive Director, Sugar Labs
Co-Founder, One Laptop Per Child
Director, MIT Media Lab
Walter Bender is founder and executive director of Sugar Labs, a non-profit foundation. In 2006, Bender co-founded the One Laptop per Child, a non-profit association with Nicholas Negroponte and Seymour Papert. As director of the MIT Media Laboratory, Bender led a team of researchers in fields as varied as tangible media to affective computing to lifelong kindergarten. In 1992, Bender founded the MIT News in the Future consortium, which launched the era of digital news.
Onno Kluyt
Community Builder & Software Developer
Onno Kluyt managed Apple's developer relations program in Europe and was an evangelist for many of the Mac OS technologies. After joining Sun Microsystems he led the Java community and chaired the standards organization for Java, the Java Community Process. Onno was a key member of the team at Sun that open sourced the Java technology. He worked closely with many free and open source organizations such Apache Software Foundation, Free Software Foundation, Java Libre and Eclipse.org. In 2004 he was the recipient of the "Outstanding individual contributor to the Java community" award by JavaPro magazine. He is a co-leader of the Rochester Java User Group. Currently, Onno develops software for iPhone, iPad and also Java applications for desktop and the cloud. And last but not least he advises companies and organizations on open source software strategies.
Links
Mel Chua
Community Architecture Team, Red Hat Inc.
Colleague, Sugar Labs
Mel is a hacker. Over time, Mel has progressed from hacking hardware (electrical engineer) to code (software developer) to organizational cultures (community QA team lead). She now hacks communities of practice as a member of Red Hat’s Community Architecture team. These days, Mel spends most of her time on open source in education, teaching professors how to teach open source, leading the Fedora Marketing team, and generally getting things out of the way of people who want to Get Stuff Done. In her hypothetically existent amounts of free time, she volunteers for Sugar Labs and works on undergraduate engineering education reform, occasionally at the same time.
Her Links:
Charles Proffit
Systems Administrator, Pittsford Central School District
Charles Profitt is an Information Technology professional currently working as a systems administrator at Pittsford Central School District. He is also the lead contact for the Linux User Group of Rochester (LUGOR) and the New York State Ubuntu Local Community. An advocate for the use of Open Source in education at all levels, Charles has given presentations at EdTech Day, NYSCATE and FOSSCON on the topic. He is both an Ubuntu Member and a Fedora Ambassador.
Charles has been published in several magazines including being a regular columnist for Games Retailer Magazine.
Links
Ralph Bean
Systems Administrator, RIT Research Computing
Ralph Bean is a 2009 graduate of the RIT GCCIS Computer Science program with both bachelors and masters degrees. He completed his thesis on the control of nonlinear and chaotic neural networks. He is currently employed by RIT as a Systems Administrator within the Research Computing Department.
Ralph spends most of his time hacking on ToscaWidgets and TurboGears. You can follow Ralph's work through his github page or through his infrequently updated and much lamented blog.
