The first up will be our field trip to the NSA Crypto Museum & GnuPG keysigning on August 2nd and the events leading up to that. It starts with the July 9th meeting of the Columbia Area Linux Users group. There will be a presentation on the basic usage of GnuPG. This is a program used for encrypting your personal files and email. Following the main presentation I will be giving a short talk on how the keysigning event will work and what you will need to bring with you. The following week on July 17th the Ubuntu Maryland LoCo team meeting will be open to the CALug members and anyone else to bring their laptops and/or questions about GnuPG for a hands on help session. Then it will be the field trip itself about two weeks later!

Next up will be working with Celeste Lyn Paul on doing a usability study around Kubuntu. Currently she is working up the details of what will be tested. The job of the LoCo will be to coerce bring family and/or friends in to sit down and be observed. We have a target date of July 19th for this but are still awaiting confirmation of the space to run this at.

August 9th will lead us to our participation on the Ubuntu Global Bug Jam. We will be meeting up at 9am at the Loyola College Center for Community Informatics in Columbia, MD. To take full advantage of the day people will need to bring their laptops (or PCs if you want to go to that trouble). More details of the day will be coming on the wiki.

Then finally on the agenda is Software Freedom Day on September 20th. This is still a while off but we are in beginning talks about what will be happening. The idea right now is to have at least two rooms going. The first will be for demo machines and general social gathering. A place to hang out and talk and enjoy the day with friends. The other will be presentations on various aspects of Software freedom. From the ideals to the implementations in various software projects.

So things are going to be a bit busy with the team over the next few months. This is a good thing!