Slash Roots Developers Conference Opens today: What’s on the two day Agenda?

The Breakthrough Developer’s Conference Slash Roots opens today at the Faculty of Law building on the University of the West Indies, Mona campus.

There over two days – Thursday February 24th and Friday, February 25th, developers from Jamaica, Trinidad and Cuba along with academic professors, tech industry professionals, college and high school students converge to code, talk business and innovation- on  how a country, an industry, a company can use technology to drive innovation that can make things better.

This first of its kind event, will see on Day one – the Keynote address on Data Visualization and The Power of Open Data delivered by Skye Bender-DeMoll; the launch of an Agriculture Open Data API; A Code Sprint Competition; A Workshop on Python Game development for One Laptop Per Child Programme by Felipe Otamendi, Lead game developer for Trojan Chicken Game Studio, Uruguay; and a workshop on How to contribute to open source: from download to contribution David Bain, Open Source Enthusiast / UWI Lecturer / CEO Alteroo.

On Day two, the conference moves away from Coding and delve more into the business of innovation. The Theme for that day is Localizing Innovation: Create.Share.Apply. The keynote address for that day will be given on Open Data Initiatives, Aspirations and Limitation by John Wonderlich, Policy Director for the Sunlight Foundation.

Before lunch the Cuban contingent shares via a panel on the Cuban Experiences in Open Source Adoption. Panelists are:
1. Angel Goñi Oramas, Founder and former leader of Nova Cuban GNU/Linux Distribution.
2. Allan Pierra Fuentes, Head of the Operating System and Open Source Technologies Department and Cuban Government’s Assessor in Free and Open Source Software migration.

It will be followed by Institutional Approaches to Innovation, Education and Idea sharing where Ross Shield fom the Jamaica Observer gives their story on they Transformed their Business Process through Technology, in this case…with the use of Social Media.

Next will be a presentation from Dr Maurice McNaughton, Director Of Center Of Excellence, Mona School of Business, UWI Mona on “From Users to Creators–Approaches to Technology Adoption.” He’d be followed by Dr. Haniph Latchman, Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering, at the University of Florida, Gainesville who’ll present an Innovation Case Study: Building security-hardened, lightweight but scalable and highly available communications appliances with Asterisk, FreeSwitch and Kamailio using the Alpine Linux platform. We know that sounded mighty geeky to us too.

The second day of this idea festival rounds out with a panel on Building Innovative Capacity. Here doctors and the entrepreneurs meet: Dr Kenrie Hylton, Director at Northern Caribbean University, Dr Daniel Coore, Department of Computing UWI; Ingrid Riley, Entrepreneur/Founder of Connectimass & KingstonBeta and Dr Sameer Verma share their ideas and success stories.

There will also be a demonstration of the One Laptop Per Child Project which has been in Alpha stages here in Jamaica.

Before the day ends, the winners of the Code Sprint competition are announced and of course like any great conference, there is an after conference lyme.
The cost is a mere $1,000 for everyone except students who pay $500 per day.

Want to know more about the conference. Watch the video interview with the founder Matthew McNaughton
What is Slash Roots Developers Conference and who is it for ?
Are You Game for The Code Sprint Competition @ Slash Roots Developers Conference ?
Who’s coming to Slash Roots Developers Conference ?