Project Introduction

What is the Ottawa Linux Symposium?

The Ottawa Linux Symposium (OLS) is a technically-oriented conference tailored to developers, not to the general public. This is an all-out technical conference, bringing together some of the finest developers involved with the Linux OS and various projects in some way related to Linux. The sessions at OLS tend to be quite technical; in every sense of the word. This is not a trade show.

What is the 'olstrans' project?

The OLS Transcription Project (olstrans) was started by Jacob Moorman in September of 2000. The primary goal of this project is to provide high-quality, technically-accurate transcripts of the audio recordings (FTP) provided by the OLS staff.

The benefit of these transcripts is four-fold:

• It is often more comfortable to follow along with a transcript when listening to a technical presentation. Those attending OLS had the benefit of seeing the speaker's hand motions, slides, etc. while those at home will now have the benefit of transcripts.
• One can review the transcript of the talk to decide whether or not the content is of interest to them, before listening to the audio recording.
• It is clearly much easier to propogate text content (text transcripts are much smaller than the audio recordings); the difficulty in conveying content from OLS to others is eased when the content is available in text form.
• Through the use of transcripts, content from OLS becomes available after-the-fact to hearing impaired developers.

How can I assist this project?

There are currently two ways you can assist this project. First, enjoy the transcripts we produce and report any bugs you notice. Second, consider joining either the QA team or the transcription team.