The first time I heard of ‘installation party’ was 2 months ago, in a pre-event meeting I had with Nir Simionovich, the CTO of Atelis. Apparently, the ‘parties’ were a known event at the Technion CS department, were the CTO graduated from, and drew a large crowd.
Anyhow, on March 27th IBM Forum Israel (IBM solution and conference center) hosted the first face-to-face annual event of Asterisk – open source for VoIP. The driving force behind the event, and the entire Asterisk community in Israel is Atelis, an ISV (independent Software Vendor) of IBM GTU (Global Technology Unit). The event drew over 80 developers, who came with their PCs/Laptops, to hear, share, network and install open VoIP clients.
The developers could install the new version of AsteriskNOW, which is a full communications solution, built on Web Services and AJAX, running Linux (of course), and allows for all the usual communication services of a switch board or call center.
I am not a technical person, but even for me, it was inspiring. It showed the true power of the community – this was the first face-to-face event, and all the developers knew each other from previous events and meetings. There were kids, around 16-19, configuring systems, explaining to the people the improvements in the new version – amazing.
I’m definitely buying my kid (still single, but thinking ahead…) a PC to play/break a part with.
You can read more on the Asterisk Developer Event here (Hebrew article).
