This past week/end I was fortunate to be able to attend Seneca College's awesome annual Free Software & Open Source Symposium ( FSOSS for short ). This year marked ten years of FSOSS, and I was really impressed with the diversity of talks presented, as well as the irrepressible energy of the Seneca students participating and volunteering. I'd like to thank all of the students and staff for putting in the time to produce a great event; I know how gruelling this can be but it was totally worth it!
On Friday I arrived early and met up with fellow Mozillian Armen Zambrano to set up and man the Mozilla table:
See all that swag on the table? It was gone quite quickly, especially the hacky sacks. Armen and I were at the table all day talking to students and attendees, engaging with them on questions ranging from Thunderbird UX and rapid release schedules to Mozilla's various student-focused programs such as internships, recent-grad positions and Student Reps. Rarely was it quiet:
On Saturday we decided not to man the table - because we were out of swag! Also, Armen and I were both speaking in the morning. For Armen's perspective, please check out his blog post here:
http://armenzg.blogspot.com/2011/11/how-fsoss-was-for-me.html
At 10AM I gave a talk to about 30 people introducing them to the SDK and it's various features. If you're curious the slides are here:
http://talks.canuckistani.ca/fsoss/
FSOSS volunteers recorded the talk, so hopefully I'll get a copy back to hook up with my slides using popcorn.js. As well, the demos included in the talk will only work if you are running Firefox 7+ and have installed this helper add-on:
http://talks.canuckistani.ca/fsoss/addon/fsoss-example.xpi
There were a number of other talks by Mozillians:
- Ehsan Akhgari: How Web Browsers Work
- Lawrence Mandel: XBMC
- David Seifried: Popcorn.js & Popcorn-Maker
- Armen Zambrano: How to ship Open Source software to half a billion users
On Saturday afternoon Ehsan, Lawrence and I helped facilitate a Mozilla-focused BOF session during the 'unconference' section of the schedule. The conference was interesting and free-wheeling, covering such topics as #OWS, rapid release, enterprise support and how Mozilla works with Linux distributions.
The thing that impressed me the most about FSOSS was learning more from the Seneca students & faculty about their programs; I wish more educational institutions would follow their lead and get their students working on open source.
