It's been an honour and a pleasure to host FUDCon Toronto 2009 at Seneca College.
A number of FUDCon attendees have asked me about the "Seneca@York" name and what it means, so let me introduce our school: Seneca College is Canada's largest College of Applied Arts and Technology, with over 20,000 full-time students and 80,000 part-time students. Seneca@York is one of Seneca's campuses and is located on the corner of York University; this campus hosts our School of Computer Studies, which offers 2- and 3-year diplomas as well as 4-year bachelor degrees and graduate certificates in software development and in system and network administration.
The School of Computer Studies has been teaching the use of open source software for over 15 years. In 2001, all of our labs were converted to dual-boot Windows and Linux, and we started introducing students to open source software during their first week of classes. Over the past three years, we have been offering professional option courses (electives) in which we take students into open source communities such as Mozilla and Fedora and teach them how to effectively collaborate with other contributors, using a model I presented at LinuxSymposium 2008. You can read about our courses and what our students are doing on our wiki and blog planet (where you'll see aggregated posts from students working at a number of different levels).
My warmest thanks to the Fedora community for making the trek to Toronto in the middle of a cold but almost snow-free December. Our doors are always open and we'd love to have you back for another FUDCon someday (or have some of you attend or present at our annual Free Software and Open Source Symposium). In the meantime, our faculty and students will continue to work alongside you in Fedora and in various upstream open source communities.
