News & Events

Community Connections

At the Clinic for Open Source Arts, we host summits, clinics and other events, inviting local and national scholars and experts to engage with us on open-source programs, arts and languages. We enthusiastically support events that encourage communication, collaboration and improvement of open-source tools and their accessibility.

Event Types

Summits

COSA hosts summits that connect DU students and the broader Denver community with a diverse group of users, developers and educators who are experts in particular tools, languages or types of creative coding practice. Our summits include workshops, class visits, conversation and training for anyone who wants to become a contributor.

Clinics

Our smaller clinics focus on improving how open-source tools function. Drawing on expertise from creatives at DU and around the globe, these clinics explore how new directions and tools can respond to changes in the field.

DU Campus

DU scholars and students share their knowledge at similar events at other institutions and we learn with the DU community through small events including hackathons and doc-sprints on campus.

Woman gesturing to video screen at a COSA event

Previous Events

  • OpenFrameworks Contributors Conference 2019

    In early October 2019, 27 people gathered in Denver, Colorado at the University of Denver to discuss the current state and future of the open-source C++ library, openFrameworks (OF). Over five days, a group of new and old contributors had intense discussions around the code, the community, sustainability, documentation and educational resources of OF, assessing what it is doing well and how it could be doing better. From this, the Roadmap v2.0 was developed to guide OF into the next five years. The event was led by a steering committee made up of Chris Coleman, Christopher Baker, Caroline Record and Samantha Ticknor, with consultations and guidance from Arturo Castro, Theo Watson and Zach Lieberman. The event was hosted by the Clinic for Open Source Arts, an initiative form the Emergent Digital Practices Program at the University of Denver.

  • Processing Community Day Denver 2019

    On February 9, 2019, COSA organized and sponsored Processing Community Day in Denver, Colorado. PCD @ Denver was an inclusive event that brought together people of all ages to celebrate and explore art, code and community. The day-long event featured workshops, community sharing and a lot of inspiration! The event occurred in downtown Denver at the Commons on Champa and was made possible with volunteers, teachers and students from 4 area universities. This was the first Processing Community Day in Denver and was part of more than a hundred such events that happened around the world in early February, initiated by the Processing Foundation. PCD @ Denver was a huge success, bringing together more than 60 people from across Colorado, ranging in ages from 10–60. A wide range of workshops helped people brand new to creative coding get started, and explored specific topics like sensors and sound in hands-on settings. The community had chances to share their work in formal and informal ways, and we also had two keynote speakers there to inspire people.

  • OpenFrameworks Education Summit 2016

    In 2016, EDP hosted 18 artists, designers and educators (half of them women) from around the world for the first-ever OpenFrameworks Education Summit. The summit focused on improving the accessibility and the teachability of the free and open-source tool, OpenFrameworks, while increasing the diversity of people involved in its support.

    Over the four days of the summit, participants worked to refine the educational documentation (the explanations of what each command does and how to use it) and write numerous tutorials for new users.

  • Processing Development Sprint 2014

    In 2014, the University of Denver's Emergent Digital Practices (EDP) program hosted the six primary members of the Processing development team for almost a week. Processing is a free and open-source language, developed at the MIT Media Lab, focused on enabling visual artists to create with code.

    In the 15 years since it was created, Processing has been downloaded millions of times all over the world and is part of nearly every university-level digital art curriculum in the USA. During their time at DU, the Processing team completed and published their third major version of the software. At the first Processing Community day at MIT in October 2017, they cited their time together in Denver as one of the most important since the inception of the project.