Transcript:

Matt Bernius, Visiting Professor: "Well, the Open Publishing Lab is a research group that we're starting up this year. [holds logo] Check it out. Open Publishing Lab. Open Publishing Lab. Open! The world is changing. The world of content is changing. And so we're moving from a world where things were atoms, you know physical objects, books, to a world where more and more of this information is going to be stored online. People are creating more content than ever before, but it's in the form of blogs, in wikis, all these Web 2.0 applications. And what we're interested in doing is figuring out how can we take that content that's right now sort of trapped in those forms and open it up. Make it cross-platformable, take it to print, take it to your cell phone, take it to your email - just move it all across in every direction possible. And so what the OPL is, is a collection of students and faculty who are working together to tackle really interesting publishing problems that have spun out of the internet and all of this wealth of new content development that's out there.

Patricia Albanese, Gannette Professor: "Well first and foremost to me, a goal is to have interesting and challenging projects for our students to work on. Projects that allow and encourage, really, cross-disciplinary thinking, critical thinking. Developing the kinds of applications and awareness, curiosity, creativity. Hopefully to have students who look at the world and how they live in the world and what problems they see in the world that might be great if they could be solved, and bring those into the lab for us to try to work on. So, for me that's a goal - is getting students some place to work on practical, sort of edge-stretching projects that combine skill sets that they might not have themselves. And I think I agree, ideally, and I know Matt, Professor Bernius and I laugh about this but our goal is to have several millionaires come out of the lab."

Abdul Matsah, Student: "One of the projects I actually can talk about is the Social Networking Game. It's a game that was, it's an idea that was developed to help socially connect people in the Innovation Festival on May 3rd. It started out with a general idea - of having variable data and stuff like that - but then it went in deeper. And now we are trying to develop a software with, that links to a database that you know, goes to a whole new level. The different people that are working in this project are, we have two software engineering students that do programming and I guess troubleshooting. And we have an IT major who does databases and setting up the backend. We have a design student who is in charge of design. And we have a print media student who manages all this because, who manages not actually all of this. They work together, but he manages the printing side, the connection side and that stuff."

Michael Riordan, Faculty Contributor: "The Innovation News had very similar, but because of the scale of the project had more people involved, by the end of it we had over fifty people involved as either student writers, photographers, editors, faculty and staff members helping to make sure it worked. And with that many more people, we had that many more problems - like communication, coordination, just the basics there. So we learned to talk about the technology and enabling the system to work, but we also learned alot about how to get everyone on the same page."

Patricia Albanese: "Well, you know, what I'd like the OPL to be in five years is a place that students, transfers and students who are coming to RIT want to be part of. That it's seen to be a reason to come to RIT. I want to be bold. I'd like people to want to come to RIT because of the OPL, and to come to our program because of that. I'd like to see students in other programs. I'd like a waiting list of students wanting to work with us and bringing us ideas, and faculty bringing us ideas that they want to work on with us in the lab. That to me would be really an incredible success."