OpenCon 2017 builds leadership and outreach skills
March 30, 2017
NCSU Libraries hosts OpenCon 2017, a full-day student conference to build leadership and outreach skills, on Saturday, April 1 from 10 a.m.-4 p.m. in the Talley Student Union. Students will learn how to market themselves and their work to prospective employers, how to connect with other students, and how to use and create "open content"—work that can be freely accessed, used, and shared by anyone. Participants will leave with the skills to make their own work open, advocate for openness, and market their open experiences to potential employers or collaborators.
OpenCon is a global platform for furthering Open Access, Open Education, and Open Data. The NCSU Libraries’ satellite event shows its commitment to these ideas and values.
During the first half of the day, participants will receive an overview of "open" and hands-on experience with open tools for sharing their own work, such as Creative Commons licensing, Wikipedia editing, and GitHub Pages. During the second half of the day, participants will have the chance to meet local professionals who have used "open" to grow their career and learn tips and tricks for how they can do the same.
The NCSU Libraries staff will teach workshops throughout the day. Instructors include Will Cross, Director of Copyright and Digital Scholarship Center; Todd Stoffer, Digital Technologies Development Librarian; and Libraries Fellows Lillian Rigling and Danica Lewis.
Tom Callaway will be the keynote speaker at OpenCon 2017. Callaway has been at Red Hat since 2001, where he is currently the University Outreach lead, working to help students and educators understand, use, and contribute to open source efforts. He is a founding contributor to the Fedora Project, handles all Fedora Legal issues, and currently maintains more than 300 software packages in Fedora. In his (limited) spare time, he enjoys gaming, geocaching, pinball, hockey, and 3D printing. Tom Callaway is the author of Raspberry Pi Hacks (O'Reilly, December 2013)
Visit the OpenCon site to see the day’s schedule and to register.