CELEBRATE INNOVATION WITH CHICAGO'S LINUX & OPEN-SOURCE SOFTWARE ENTHUSIASTS AT FLOURISH! 2012

*From March 30th-31st, Free Technology Conference Brings Sixth Year of Insightful Talks and Hands-on Workshops about Open-source Software, Technology, and Culture*

WHAT

An annual gathering of, for, and by enthusiasts of open-source software, technology, and culture, taking place at the University of Illinois at Chicago.

FEATURED SPEAKERS and TOPICS

Flourish! 2012 Speakers include:

- Brian Fitzpatrick, Engineering Manager at Google, on Data Liberation

- Bryen M. Yunashko, a prominent voice of accessibility, on the openSUSE project

- Chris McAvoy, Product Lead at Mozilla's Open Badges project

- Meg Ford, member of the GNOME foundation, on GNOME outreach efforts and opportunities to contribute to the project

- Jason Huggins, co-founder of SauceLabs, on extreme mobile testing...with robots!

- Phil Gomes, Senior VP at Edelman, addressing the outcome of corporate involvement in engaging Wikipedia

- Julie Samuels, Staff Attorney at EFF

...and more on our speakers page:

FEATURED WORKSHOP

Get some hands-on experience with soldering and electronics at our Beginner's Arduino Workshop. For the first time, Flourish! Conference has partnered with Pumping Station: One ( http://pumpingstationone.org/ ) to provide a workshop to learn how to program Arduino chips. Arduino has been used to create some cool projects ranging from a miniature

pocket piano to an RGB combination door lock!

WHEN

March 30th - 31st, 2012

March 30th, Afternoon Program

Reception 12:30pm-1:00pm

Keynotes start 1:00 pm

March 31st, Day-Long Program

Morning Reception 9:00 am - 10:00 am

Conference starts 10:00 am

Android Workshop starts 1:00 pm

Tentative schedule posted here:

WHERE

UIC Student Center East

750 South Halsted Street

Chicago, IL

WHO

Flourish! is organized by the Computer Science department of the University of Illinois at Chicago's (UIC's) College of Engineering, as well as the University's Linux user group and chapter of the Association of Computing Machinery (ACM). The conference is sponsored in part by fused.com, Google, Linux Journal, Linux Pro Magazine, Spantree Technology Group, Orbitz, Dotomi, and nextag.

HOW

Registration is free at:

SUPPORT

If you would like to become a part of us financially, we would be delighted. Sponsorship has helped us quite a bit in the past with providing attendees more interactive pieces to the conference, like social networking events, workshops, and other mini-events.

Do check out the sponsorship page here for more about what could be possible with any help in this vein:

CONNECT

Join us on Facebook at

as well as Google Plus:

Conference updates and conversation-starters on Twitter at