So I’ve been following some FOSS/linux software groups around the world like GPUL in Galicia and Chaos Computer Club & Modal Collective in Germany and I’m a little jealous of what they’ve been able to build in their associated cities/regions. For example GPUL is organizing GUADEC (The GNOME community’s annual conference) this year in A Coruña, and they regularly run workshops to get people into FOSS software development at their local university UDC. They’ve also organized (or helped organize) previous events like XDC (The X.Org developers conference for wayland/x11/mesa and related technologies).
Likewise the Chaos Computer Club (CCC) promotes open source software and runs similar events including the annual Chaos Communication Conference. What they put together seems like a great "CS Club" but outside of a university and open to the public. The Modal Collective in Berlin hosts a regular (every 3-4 months) un-conference + hackathon event (called Boiling the Ocean) working on a few different open source projects like GNOME, Postmarket OS & p2panda.
I'd love for something similar to exist in Ottawa. I've followed some groups here like OCLUG (Ottawa-Canada Linux user group), and Ottawa Systems (https://ottawasystems.xyz/) and they meet some similar goals but not exactly what I'm thinking. (I have some notes below on those events)
To me it would be awesome if we could have something like the Boiling the Ocean events in Ottawa. A semi regular event where there is presentations about FOSS tech and a hackathon to contribute to the related projects. I'd love to know if there are more people in Ottawa that would be interested in similar events. Perhaps if there is enough of us we can try to organize something. Ideally there are some people in Ottawa already familiar with some of these technologies. I spoke with some of the organizers of Boiling the Ocean and they told me the original group started with ~5 people who were already GNOME, PMOS, and Linux contributors but now they have a regular group of ~15-20 people.
For some additional context, I professional work on Mesa3D (https://mesa3d.org/) on a few different graphics drivers like turnip, anv, broadcom, lavapipe/llvmpipe. I would be happy to try and introduce people to working on graphics drivers (in fact I tried to do a little bit of that at Ottawa Systems with my own presentation https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ohdT2ic39HA). I'd also like to learn more about Linux kernel development, I'm really interested in the new "Mobile Linux" stuff like Postmarket OS. I think it would be fun to work on getting Linux running on mobile phones and making the Mobile Phone experience on Linux better. I'm also a regular GNOME user and would be interested in contributing to some of the software I use regularly.
Besides people who might be working on FOSS on their own I know we have a few companies (big or small) working on stuff that touches FOSS like:
- Ciena runs Linux on a lot of their networking hardware
- QNX runs Linux on top of their hypervisor and have been contributing to the linux graphics stack to support virtualisation in this setup
- WindRiver has their own Linux distro
- Xilinx/AMD does linux work in Ottawa (I think mainly on the kernel side for xilinx HW, not for AMD GPUs / CPUs)
- There is Credil (https://credil.org/) in Gatineau who seem to be an open source consultancy
- Shopify to my knowledge works on a few open source projects related to their frontend and backend
- like mentioned above we have people from Anubis and Mozilla in the city
- Also from OCLUG know we have people from Redhat and Lenovo who work on Linux
Maybe you already work on FOSS, you work at one of these places, or you know someone who does he might also be interested in this idea :)
About the other groups: OCLUG from what I've seen focuses more on the Linux user side not really on the developer side. They also used to be a larger but seems to be shrinking now (from an outsiders perspective). The group runs a monthly meeting that centres around a presentation and discussion, typically on more Linux user like topics.
Ottawa Systems is a little closer to the other groups I've mentioned, running a semi-regular event. But its just presentations and its not strictly focused on FOSS. The event has been great for meeting people in the developer community in Ottawa though, like I found out the developer of Anubis (https://anubis.techaro.lol/) is from the Ottawa region here, and we also have Mozilla developer here too!
I also saw hack613 runs some events at the maker space that could be similar to what i'm suggesting here but the schedule seems pretty sparse right now.
Perhaps there is some existing groups in the city that are closer to what I'm thinking about.
