The FOSDEM 2013 was a huge success and especially the Free Java room was a very interesting place to be. A report and pictures can be found in this blog.

FOSDEM needs you! Every year, the FOSDEM team is assisted by an enthusiastic team of volunteers to help out with various tasks and make the event a fun and safe place for all our visitors. Although we’ve become pretty good at organising a large conference, we’re a small team and can not be everywhere at once. Which is why we enlist volunteers from among our visitors every year.

Extra hands are especially welcome during buildup on Friday, starting at noon, and more so during cleanup on Sunday evening. In case you’re worried about missing lunch, free pizza will be provided for volunteers so nobody will have to go hungry.

A short overview of the tasks:

• Setting up the venue on Friday: this mostly involves carrying tables to their destination and setting them up, putting up signage, covering the walls in brown paper, …
• Deploying the network on Friday: rolling out, neatly securing and crimping UTP cables. People with experience crimping cables are very welcome to help out!
• Manning the infodesk: help out fellow visitors who have questions, sell T-shirts, … Must be a good English speaker, but if you know other languages besides that it certainly won’t hurt.
• Moderation: make sure all talks end on time by giving speakers cues near the end of their time slot. Keep an eye out on room security and report potential issues such as overcrowded rooms before it becomes an issue.
• Safety: keep an eye out for potentially hazardous situations such as patches of ice that could trip people up, overcrowded rooms, … This also involves barring entrance to rooms that are at full capacity so we can keep the conference safe for everyone. This can be combined with moderation.
• Teardown and cleanup on Sunday evening: collecting beer bottles, tear down the network, pull brown paper off the walls, take down the signage, stack the rental tables in neat heaps, broom the floors, …

If you would like to help out and give back to the community, please come join the ranks. You can do so by subscribing to the volunteers mailing list. This is where we will coordinate tasks so the event can run smoothly. We promise it’ll be fun!

In addition to general volunteer work, we are also looking for volunteers specifically to help out with video-related work. This involves:

• Operating a camera in one of the five rooms which will be recorded by the FOSDEM video team;
• Regulating the audio in one of the rooms;
• or operating the DVswitch station.

While A/V experience is of course always welcome, all that’s really needed is that you’re interested; on-the-job training will be provided.

People interested in helping out with the video team should subscribe to the video team mailing list before the event where important announcements will be made, and be prepared to join us on IRC during the event.

Note that it’s perfectly okay to subscribe (and volunteer) to both; just make sure to let the respective coordinators know when necessary.

https://fosdem.org/2013/news/2013-01-14-call-for-volunteers/

Coming Up – FOSDEM 2013 – http://fosdem.org – Don’t miss it!

On December 1st and 2nd, we organize the third Random Hacks of Kindness event in Belgium.

RHoK is a  rapidly growing global initiative encompassing a community of over 5,500 innovators in over 30 countries making the world a better place by developing practical, open source
technology solutions to respond to some of the most complex challenges facing humanity.

If you feel like joining us on December 1st and/or 2nd, register at our website: http://www.rhok.be

It’s a project of the ICT2Act npo, like the BruJUG :-)

In this last session of the year we will speak about JavaFX and HTML5 … which might look like we are going to speak about apples and belgian fries in one session. And we will have a RaspberryPi and a Pandaboard to show as well… even more confusing, isn’t it?

I hope you are intrigued – then the only way to find out what this is all about is to join the session… :-p

• Price: Free like Free Beer
• Time: November 28, 2012, Start 19:00
• Place: HU Brussels, Room 2201
• Registration: http://jugevents.org/jugevents/event/47961
• Speaker: A very good presenter with a touch of English humor!
• Details: http://wiki.brussels-jug.be/doku.php?id=events3:2012_11_session1

This session is brought to you by our sponsors TRASYS, Oracle, Structure 101, CTS and Mega Banner and of course your humble Brussels JUG team!

Last tip: Don’t miss this! :-)

Android Meetup

Our next session is planned for the 25th of October 2012. This time, we have Cagatay Civici, aka Optimus Prime, the maker of Primefaces, and Rudy De Busscher from C4J as guests. Topic: “Java EE 6 overview and what’s new in JSF 2.2″.

Details: http://wiki.brussels-jug.be/doku.php?id=events3:2012_10_session1

As usual, the event is free, but please register here: http://jugevents.org/jugevents/event/47009

Important modification: as of this event, we start the sessions at 19:00 (instead of 18:30). Location as usual HU Brussels. End time 21:30. 3rd halftime in a nice bar after the event.

Many thanks go to our sponsors: TRASYS Group, Oracle, Megabanner, Structure 101 and CTS.

A special thank you goes to Contribute4J, which proposed to make a session for you during the time Cagatay stays in Belgium for PrimeFaces and JSF trainings. Speaking of this, if you are interested in catching one of these trainings, have a look here: http://www.c4j.be/web/guest/primefaces-training

We hope to see many of you! Don’t miss this chance to meet great people, learn fancy stuff and just have a nice time.

HU Brussels, ROOM 3107

The Belgian JBoss User Group organises its next event on Tuesday, October 9th 2012 from 18:30 in Kontich.

Topics of the talks are JBoss Application Server AS7 and the brand-new JBoss Enterprise Application Platform EAP 6.

Presented are these hot topics by Karoly Nagy, EMEA Senior Solutions Architect, Red Hat/JBoss.

Entry is free and no registration is required.

Address:
CRONOS n.v.
Business Park King Square
Veldkant 33A – 2550 Kontich

From October 23 to 25, 2012 the Eclipse Foundation will hold the 6th edition of the annual European Eclipse Conference.

EclipseCon Europe is all about community – learning, exploring, sharing and collaborating on the latest ideas and information about Eclipse. Contributors, adopters, extenders, service providers, consumer, business and research organizations alike, gather to share their expertise and learn from each other.

Networking activities lead to synergies in the community, from giving and receiving help on specific technical issues to generating new business opportunities. Sponsors of Eclipse Summit are an integral part of the entire event, participating in an exchange from all areas of their organizations from technical to management.

Last year we celebrated Eclipse’s 10th anniversary together with more than 550 attendees at EclipseCon Europe. This year the conference theme is open innovation: how enterprises, researchers and other organizations use Eclipse to develop innovative products and solutions.

We are also co-hosting the European OSGi community event and are extending a special welcome to the International OSGi community. And, again we are proud to have a solid technical program, but we won’t just be networking and listening to technical talks. Let us surprise you with our evening program! Details will be published in the early part of October.

For more information, please visit the conference website http://www.eclipsecon.org.

Software Freedom Day 2012 at Hackerspace Brussels, the 22th of September 2012 as of 10:00. A lot of animations, talks, fun and more … to celebrate your freedom!

Join them here: http://www.hackerspace.be/Software_Freedom_Day_2012

Play! Belgium is extremely proud to announce its first Play dojo at the beginning of October 2012, hosted by Cegeka (so you know who to thank for the tasty beverages). In the space of one evening, the goal is to collaborate and produce a full Play application.

When: Wednesday, October 3, 2012, 7:00 PM

Where: Cegeka, Interleuvenlaan 16, 3001 Leuven

Registration: http://www.meetup.com/play-be/events/78580712/

Web: http://www.meetup.com/play-be/

Novices and experts alike are welcome!

It’s time to awake from our hibernation and restart freshly into a new JUG season. Our first session is announced for the 19th of September.

Stephane Epardaud, currently on EU JUG tour, joins us in Brussels to speak about Ceylon. Stéphane works for Red Hat on the Ceylon project and is eager to share exiting news about this new JVM programming language with us.

In some words, Ceylon’s design goals include:

• easy to learn and understand for Java and C# developers,
• eliminate some of Java’s verbosity, but keep its readability,
• improve upon Java’s typesafety,
• provide a declarative syntax for expressing hierarchical information (user interface, external data, system configuration)
• support and encourage a more functional style of programming with immutable objects and higher-order functions,
• great support for meta-programming,
• built-in modularity.

Let’s meet for another cool session to discover new universes :)

The location is not yet fixed but will probably at the HU Brussels in the center of our city, as usual. We keep you informed.

More info on our wiki:
http://wiki.brussels-jug.be/doku.php?id=events3:2012_09_session1

And the registration is open here:
http://jugevents.org/jugevents/event/46821