Seneca’s 6th Annual Free Software and Open Source Symposium takes place October 25-26th, 2007 – 9:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m. on the Seneca@York Campus in Toronto.
The Symposium is a two-day event aimed at bringing together educators, developers and other interested parties to discuss common free software and open source issues, learn new technologies and to promote the use of free and open source software. Sessions at the symposium include:
- Drupal under the hood with James Walker, Director of Education, Lullabot
- Facebook’s Thrift: Scalable Cross-Language Development with Mark Slee, Technical Lead, Facebook, Marc Kwiatkowski, Senior Software Engineer, Facebook, David Reiss, Software Engineer, Facebook
- Product and User Experience Design in Open Communities, Mike Beltzner, Director of User Experience, Mozilla Corporation
- Community as A Core Competency: Microsoft and Open Source, Bryan Kirschner, Director of Platform Community Strategy, Microsoft Corp.
On first blush, anyone unfamiliar with the spread of Open Source and Opens Source tools and programs might wonder how something like an Open Source Symposium can apply to a startup. The truth is that the lessons that Open Source Software advocates have learned in the last 10 years are critical to understand as a startup. Grassroots marketing, low cost development, and community participation are all critical components of getting a startup off the ground. Ryan from Unspace gave a great talk there last year.
Registration is open and you can register here.