Vanier FLOSS Day - Fall 2023 ​

The second edition of Vanier FLOSS Day happened on October 14th 2023, on a Saturday, just after the school Fall break. All Vanier community was invited, through MIOs and a printed poster, as well as the outside FLOSS community, since the event was posted at Agenda du Libre.

Registration ​

An online form was setup and 29 people were registered prior to the event. On the day, 21 people checked in, plus 1 baby and 1 accompaning family member, which participated in their own capacity.

Checked-in participants ​

21 participants in total:

• Vanier community:
  • 4 Computer Science and Technology (CST) students
  • 2 CST graduates
  • 4 Computer Science and Mathematics students
  • 2 Software (Continuing Education) students
  • 1 Social Science - general student
  • 1 Liberal arts student
  • 1 Pure and Applied Sciences student
  • 1 Computer Science teacher
  • 1 Computer Engineering teacher

Outside from Vanier:

• 1 High school student
• 3 professionals / general population

Swag ​

All participants took home a FLOSS Day 3-D printed keychain as well as a USB stick with a Debian live image to try out - live images allow running the OS directly from the USB, and can be used to later install it to disk.

Unconference ​

The meeting was run in an unconference style. We started the day with an introduction to FLOSS and licenses, then we built the schedule with topics collected from the registration form, plus some requets and offers of topics on the day.

To define the schedule we had a show of hands on the proposed topics and sessions were ordered taking into consideration its popularity as well as a few requests to accomodate when people had to leave.

Covered topics:

• Intro to FLOSS, Open Culture and Licensing (Tassia)
• Git, github & profile (Giuliana)
• Improving Security using RPi (Justin)
• Intro & contributing to Debian (Tassia)
• Fediverse (Tony)
• Intro to Devops (Giuliana)
• Video Game emulation with RetroPie (Tony)
• Projects in electronics (Andreea)
• Radio Pyo: Free music written in Python (Tiago)
• Personal weather station with Raspberry Pi (Tiago)
• 3D printing: the process to print the FLOSS Day key chain (Tony)

[FIXME: ADD PIC SELECTION]

Lunch and snacks ​

At the beginning of the day, a snacks station was setup with coffee/tea/juice, fruits and pastries. For lunch, once more we had pizza, since it was the easier way to handle dietary restrictions - this time we had a wide variety: vegetarian, gluten-free, halal and kosher.

Testimonials ​

What did you learn? Did you have fun? How was the logistics (e.g. food)?

Justin: From what I've seen, the day seemed to have started off great! I never attended an unconference-style meeting, but having a dynamic schedule that adapts to everyone who shows up is really the best way to do things, even though not every participant seemed to be sure what to do at first.

Andreea: It made me want to get involved.

Lessons for future events ​

(add here what you think could go better the next time...)

Justin: Don't forget to take a group picture! Also next time try not to have a hackathon the same day... (note to myself)

Orga Team: Vanier FLOSS Club ​

• Anthony Nadeau
• Giuliana Bouzon
• Tassia Araujo
• Justin Bax
• Samuel

Acknowledgement ​

This event would not be possible without the support and participation of many, so many thanks to...

• Vanier College, STEM Center for hosting us
• Faculty of Science and Technology for providing lunch
• The Debian Project for USB stickers and snacks
• Debian contributors for Debian Bookworm live image
• All speakers for the content delivered
• All participants for coming on a sunny Saturday
• FLOSS Day orga team for the day 😉