Archive:FUDCon:Toronto 2009

Toronto, Ontario :: December 5-7, 2009 - General event owners: Paul W. Frields, Mel Chua

General Information

Quick Links
PRE-REGISTRATION Lodging information Technical sessions Hackfests FUDCon area map
Administrivia
Poll data Logistics Budget Planning meetings

Location and Dates

FUDCon Toronto 2009 is located at Seneca College, Seneca@York campus (map), from December 5-7, 2009 (Saturday-Monday). Each day's activities start at 10:00 a.m. sharp. For best results, arrive around 9:30-9:45 so you have time to get situated, find out where you want to go, and so on.

Outreach

We will be doing specific outreach to the following groups:

• Greater Toronto Area Linux Users Group (GTALug, aka TLUG)
• The Red Hat office in Toronto
• Seneca College and other area EDU's

We hope to provide one or two tracks of new-user training that will help people get the most out of Fedora, while showing them some of the benefits of getting involved in the wider open source community.

Event Details

Pre-registration

Please add your name to the list if you will attend. Also, please indicate the following:

• Put an X in the $$$ column if you need funding to attend. We'll use these answers to help figure out budgeting for the event.
• Put a V in the Veg column if you would like vegetarian fare for any meals that we provide during the event. If you prefer vegan fare, please mark that column VV. We will do our best to make sure everyone is accommodated!
• Put your T-shirt size in the Size column, so we can have an idea about what sizes to have available.
• If you are looking to share a room, mark an X in the "Roomshare?" column.

Use the Comments section for anything else you think organizers need to know, or to offer or ask for space or rides.

Budget is tight!
We typically cannot fund everyone who wants to attend. You can save quite a bit of money by carpooling or bussing, and sharing hotel rooms. We will make every effort to have FUDCon be as affordable as possible.

Are you a Seneca College student or faculty member?
For Seneca registration instructions, please see http://zenit.senecac.on.ca/wiki/index.php/FUDCon_Toronto_2009

No./Nr.	Name	$$$	Veg	Size	Roomshare?	Comments
1	Paul W. Frields			XXL		Canadians are cute, they spell things funny. :-)
2	Andreas Thienemann			XXL
3	Tim Burke			M
4	Bill Nottingham			XL	sure
5	Chris Tyler			XL		We spell funny, eh?
6	Peter Jones			L
7	Peter Robinson			L	sdziallas
8	Dennis Gilmore			XXL
9	Anthony Green			XL
10	Andrew Overholt		V	M		You mean neighboUr, Paul :P
11	Kevin Fenzi			XXL		pending passport and travel plans, but will most likely make it.
12	Paul Wouters		V	M		Local event for me, ask me for local information
13	Elliott Baron			XL
14	Kent Sebastian			L
15	Edward Kirk			XL
16	Mel Chua			S		overholt, stickster: n7r?
17	Michael Ploujnikov			M		I'm a meatatarian and I live close enough to drive to the event.
18	Máirín Duffy		V	S	depends if halfline is coming or not	I'll be bringing a portable usability lab :)
19	Seth Vidal		V	XL
20	Ricky Zhou			XL	Sure :-)	If it doesn't completely conflict with finals (which is pretty likely).
21	Ian Weller	$$$		L	why not?	overholt, stickster, mchua: n31ghb0(u)r
22	Adam Miller	X		XL	X	inode0 for roomshare if possible
23	Steven Parrish	$$$		XXL	Sure	Pending passport, Got flight covered
24	Clint Savage	$		XXL	Sure	Possibly coming early and staying long to save money
25	Tom "spot" Callaway		V	XXL	dgilmore	I'm not your buddy, buddy.
26	Ray Acayan			XL
27	Mike McGrath			XL		I can't wait to see America Junior!
28	John Rose	X		L	maxamillion?
29	Yaakov M. Nemoy	helpful		M	roomate possibly needed	will be nice to go back to the US for a bit, even if it's canada
30	Jeroen van Meeuwen			L
31	Fryderyk Supinski			XL
32	David Duncan		V	XL	Most definitely require a roommate or two or more
33	David Nalley	X		XL
34	Roland Grunberg			L
35	Charley Wang			S
36	Matthew Daniels	X		M	Sure (Please)	Just got to make it back for that Tuesday morning final...
37	Martin Duffy			L	sharing w/ mizmo
38	Jon Stanley	X		XL	yes
39	Sebastian Dziallas	X		L	pbrobinson
40	Xavier Lamien	X		S	yes
41	Scott Sullivan			L		GTALUG Point of Contact, Great to have FUDcon in my own Backyard!
42	Toshio Kuratomi			M	yes
43	Jon VanAlten			XL
Number	Name	$$$	Veg	Size	Roomshare?	Comments

Border Crossing

• Information on entering Canada including documentation requirements and restrictions on firearms and other possessions.
• Information on entering the USA - note that US citizens now require a passport or other approved documentation to return to the USA regardless of the mode of transportation.

Lodging

Lodging will be at the Hilton Garden Inn, Vaughan. The nightly rate for a single or double occupancy room (1 king/2 queens) is CA$105; the group rate is good for Friday through Sunday nights; reserve here (short link here) before November 13. Breakfast buffet vouchers will be available for CA$6 each (regular price $14.95) during check-in.

Air Travel

Toronto Pearson International Airport (YYZ) is served by most major carriers.

Alternately, you can fly into the Toronto City Centre Airport (downtown) from Boston, Chicago (Midway), New York (Newark), Montreal, Quebec, Halifax, Thunder Bay, or St. John's via Porter Airlines. Rates are fairly good, e.g., $95 each way to/from Boston, plus taxes.

From most US locations, it is significantly cheaper to fly to Buffalo Niagara International Airport (BUF) and then take a low-cost bus carrier such as Megabus (under $20 each way)

Ground Transportation

The FUDCon campus location is well-served by public transit -- over 1700 vehicles a day stop at the adjacent transit loop. For more information:

• Toronto - TTC website - MyTTC trip planner
• Southern Ontario - GO Transit
• York Region, North of Toronto - including the Hilton Garden Inn hotel - YRT/VIVA

For specific transit instructions between the campus, hotel, airports, and coach terminal, see FUDCon:Toronto 2009 Transportation.

Parking

Parking in the Student Services parking garage adjacent to Seneca@York is abundant but costs $14/day.

Parking at the hotel and FUDPub is free.

Networking

Campus: The Seneca@York campus has wireless networking (802.11b/g) and web authentication information will be available at registration. Wired access will also be available in some rooms (bring an ethernet cable).

Hotel: Wireless access (802.11b/g) is available in all public areas and guest rooms; wired access is also available in guest rooms. No authentication is required.

Agenda

Refereeing for technical sessions
Note that this FUDCon, technical sessions may be referred or decided by panel or other means. However, we do require material for all sorts of experience levels, so do not worry about competition. Simply propose something you think would be of interest to attendees.

Technical sessions - Saturday

Technical sessions
ANYONE can propose a session, including you. Just pick a topic near and dear to your heart and propose it here.

For Audience Level, indicate whether your talk is appropriate for a beginner, intermediate (current skilled contributor), or expert level.

Session Name	Description	Audience Level	Owner
Effective Bug reporting	The what and why of bug reports	Beginner and up	Steven Parrish
OLPC, Sugar and Fedora Oh My!	How Fedora contributes and how you can help	Beginner and up	Steven Parrish
How I Got Started with PyGTK	SSIA, a gentle introduction to tools and making sense of toolkits. Helpful to know a little about Python, but not strictly required.	Beginner	Paul W. Frields
Eclipse and You	An introduction to the Eclipse SDK, the CDT, Mylyn, and the Eclipse Linux Tools project	Beginner and up	Andrew Overholt
Designing UI Mockups in Inkscape	Inkscape is the ultimate UI mockup creation tool. Learn some tips, tricks, and suggested workflows to create awesome mockups in it.	Beginner and up	Máírín Duffy
Design Eye for Frightful UIs	Do you need a design eye for your frightful UI? Are you a developer or maintainer of a free & open source application and are not sure where to start in improving your application's usability or how to get design help? Learn some of the basics you can do on your own to improve your application's usability, and also learn what kind of prep work will make it easy for designers to help you before you approach them.	Intermediate and up (emphasis towards devels)	Máirín Duffy
Fedora Electronic Lab in Action: The Moxie Experience So Far	This talk will provide an accessible introduction to rolling your own Linux-capable microprocessor from scratch using only the Free Software tools provided by Fedora and modern FPGA technology. This talk will be based on the presenter's experience with the Moxie project, and no special knowledge of electronic design will be required to enjoy (although a sense of wonder and adventure is mandatory!).	Beginner and up	Anthony Green
Teaching Open Source	We'll have a session related to http://teachingopensource.org and Fedora's involvement in it, and how this can help you build capacity in your project or bring real-world learning into your classroom (or both!) Placeholder description until we figure out exactly what that is. ;)	Beginner	Mel Chua
Bootstrapping Puppetmanaged	Puppetmanaged can be used to manage your entire IT toolchain, from provisioning with cobbler to managing puppet itself. Come learn how to deploy your entire infrastructure from a USB stick. (Pending success at work, namely, if a actually finish this in time)	Intermediate - Advanced	Yaakov M. Nemoy & Jeroen van Meeuwen
Puppet Common Modules	Why, and how to create modules for Puppet that you can share.	Advanced	Jeroen van Meeuwen
Session Name	Description	Audience Level	Owner

Hackfests - Sunday & Monday

Add a hackfest!
ANYONE can run a hackfest, including you! Just pick a topic near and dear to your heart which you'd like to improve with a little elbow grease.

Session Name	Session Leader	General Plan	Prerequisites, if any
Zikula	David Nalley	the proposal so far	None.
Session Name	Session Leader	General Plan	Prerequisites, if any

Other Scheduled Meetings

Session Name	Session Leader	General Plan
Project Board F2F	Paul Frields	As many members of the Fedora Board as possible will gather face to face for discussions about the previous term's work, elections, and the road ahead for the Fedora Project.
Usability Testing	Máirín Duffy	Come check out our open source portable usability lab and help us out by running through a quick usability test. We'll be running tests on Fedora Community and the upcoming www.fedoraproject.org redesign.
Session Name	Session Leader	General Plan

Social Events

Saturday, December 5

Following the day of technical sessions, we'll be moving the fun to Dave and Buster's. We'll provide food, pool and snooker tables, and non-alcoholic beverages for all pre-registrants. There's also a full bar available for those so inclined, and a midway full of other entertainment options!

Sunday, December 6

On Sunday 6 December after the day's hackfest sessions, we will be taking a group down to Nathan Philips Square (in front of Toronto City Hall) where there's an outdoor skating rink. Skate rentals are available for something less than $10.