SCALE-6x

From Sfvlug

Preparation For SCALE-6x

It's now summer '07 's of this writing and while there is no official posting yet at the SCALE Website it is a good time to start thinking about the next event. I'll start here with a bit of history and then leave it open for suggestions about our participation at the next event. --Miasma 12:17, 11 July 2007 (EDT)

~ Under Construction ~

History

We have a spotty history at SCALE events. At times we have had terrific presentations and at other times we barely showed up. Our best presentation was the first presentation of Psyche, a Python based tool that basically glued together some speech recognition, some commonly use applications and speech synthesis. It was a big success and helped us provide one of the top booths on the floor. Unfortunately we haven't been able to reproduce the success of that presentation for various reasons.

We are not yet sure of the exact reason for the variability of our success. We had used Sphinx2 for speech recognition and Festival for speech synthesis. The problem was with the speech recognition portion of the presentation. With our first attempt we were able to have a 70 to 80 percent recognition rate. Since then, for unknown reasons the recognition rate dropped to 25 percent or less recognition rate. If we are to revive this popular presentation we will need to get the recognition rate back up to 70 percent or better.

Part of our problem is an apparent withdrawal of support for open source speech recognition engines. Apparently, now that speech recognition is getting better many of the best speech recognition developers seem to be concentrating on proprietary solutions and not opening their code to the community. To get better results we are going to need to either put a fair amount of effort into figuring out exactly why Sphinx2 is not working as it had or find another more capable open source speech recognition engine. Finding a new engine may not be a quick fix as it might also require a fair amount of work on our part to shape it for our needs.

At SCALEx5 we knew that we weren't going to be able to get Psyche back up to par so we concentrated in handing out flyers and talking to visitors about what our LUG is about. While our booth was not nearly as popular as the original Psyche presentation we wound up having more people coming to a meeting because of the personal contact and the flyer than we did based on our popular presentation. To be fair, I once handed out flyers in the parking lot at a computer show at CSUN (they wouldn't let us do it at the entrance) and we did not have a single person come to a meeting as a result. Since we did not hand out flyers when we were presenting Psyche we have no way of knowing if that would have resulted in even more people coming to meetings or not, but whether or not we have a popular presentation we should definitely be talking to visitors and handing out flyers again at the next event.

Ideas

I am taking it on myself to get the ball rolling for SCALE-6x but hopefully you will join me. I'll start out with a few suggestions. Please remember that at this point these are just suggestions. If you have any suggestions, ideas, or resources (printer, projector, copy machine, white board, etc.) that might be of use please let us know. Here are some ideas to use as a starting point, this list is not comprehensive or specific, please feel free to refine or add to this list.

Revive Psyche ~ it needs work but was highly popular

New Projects ~

Package Management (distro specific)
Bookmark Management
Demo Linux apps as replacements for proprietary applications
LiveCD remastering Settings and customizations SOHO uses Linux media Development tools

Education ~

Provide newbie resources
HOWTOs
Documentation
Install help

Advanced topics

Development
System Administration
Embedded Devices

Social ~ find others with similar interests

Support ~ get help & give help with specific problems

---