[14:09] <belkinsa> Hey there, balachmar.  Welcome to the channel.
[14:11] <balachmar> Hi belkinsa, read the post :)
[14:11] <balachmar> To be clear, I read the your post :)
[14:12] <belkinsa> I figured that you have.
[14:12] <balachmar> :) but I didn't yet quite get what the goal is
[14:12] <belkinsa> Oh.
[14:13] <balachmar> Do you want to help scientists find FLOSS alternatives, or do you want scientist to be more involved in Ubuntu, or actually try to convince scientist to make a career in FLOSS development?
[14:14] <belkinsa> All three of them. Really.
[14:14] <balachmar> Or none of the above? Then I completely misinterpreted the mail
[14:14] <balachmar> ok, then I did get the idea
[14:15] <belkinsa> And I will edit my blog post with what you said.
[14:15] <belkinsa> Thanks for asking.  Feedback is key.
[14:15] <balachmar> I agree
[14:16] <balachmar> But the three goals are quite different. For example trying to get scientists to switch to FLOSS, will probably mean that you need/want to address the universities and try to convince them to not only teach Matlab (in my case) :)
[14:18] <belkinsa> Good point.  But that can be done, right?
[14:20] <balachmar> It can be done, but convincing them will be difficult, since they will have material available for what they are currently using. And is they themselves use it in research, then they will not want to change. (At least not easily)
[14:21] <belkinsa> Right, duh.
[14:22] <balachmar> But if we would target specific audiences, we could create some material ourselves, which would relieve the first issue, not the latter, but that might at least entice them to show it to first year students.
[14:22] <belkinsa> Good idea.
[14:23] <balachmar> I asked why they were spending lots of money on matlab, and not just use octave.  And then they said, octave doesn't have library X. And the FLOSS thing would obviously be to then use the money you spend on the proprietary software to build out the FLOSS software. But that would mean they will be missing out for a while...
[14:24] <balachmar> I am really interested in this as well. My background is Biomedical Engineering/Bioinformatics.
[14:24]  * belkinsa is a biology major
[14:25] <balachmar> Luckily now I am working for a company who specialises in using R (an open source statistics scripting language).
[14:26] <belkinsa> Good to hear.  I was going to a intership at a small company that uses FOSS but they didn't have any projects that was geared towards what I study.
[14:26] <balachmar> Well, most biologists I know try to stay away from the computer :)
[14:27] <belkinsa> I see.
[14:29] <balachmar> Biology major, is that college or university? I am not from the US, I always get confused by that school system :)
[14:29] <belkinsa> I understand.  It's undergrad.  I'm in my Sr. year and two more terms to go.
[14:29] <balachmar> Just curious on where you are specialised in, of you are already specialising.
[14:30] <balachmar> because in the more genetics/cell biology field, it will help you a lot if you can do some scripting
[14:31] <belkinsa> Thanks for the heads up because that is where I'm going and I need to learn how to script sill.
[14:31] <balachmar> As a bioinformatician (or computational biologist) it is somewhat my field as well.
[14:32] <balachmar> And I see that a lot of the scientists there are struggling with computers, they use Excel for everything
[14:32] <belkinsa> I been wanting to tie in my hobby (computers/Linux/FOSS) to my career path.
[14:35] <belkinsa> And that's why I created this team to connect with others and maybe recruit in others.
[14:51] <balachmar> I will have to go now, but I will join the team first :)
[14:51] <belkinsa> Alright, thanks for your feedback.
[14:51] <balachmar> you are welcome!
[14:51] <belkinsa> Make sure to join the mailing-list and introduce yourself.  ;)