[TOS] Feed-back of the FOSSa conference in Lyon (France)

[Ivaylo Ganchev]

Hello,

I was the last week in Lyon (France) where I assisted at the annual Fossa
conference. The first panel was Education and it had 5 presentations. I
will try to give you a brief feed-back of the this panel.

It started with a presentation usually held by Roberto Di Cosmo, but he
couldn't came and it was presented by his colleague Albert Cohen. The
presentation was about a tool developed by Roberto and colleagues called
Mancoosi that deals with the complexity of the package management in
modern operating systems. More about it over here :
http://www.mancoosi.org/.

Albert also gave a brief overview of the activity of Research and
Innovation Initiative on Free Software (Initiative pour la Recherche et
l'Innovation sur le Logiciel Libre http://www.irill.org). It is a project
between the  Universities of Paris 7, Paris 6 and Inria. It's main goal is
to bring together researchers that do work on subjects close to the
free/open source world.

After this talk, a talk by Benjamin Nguyen from Inria was given. He spoke
about the experience in training high school CS teachers at the university
UVSQ (http://www.uvsq.fr).  This initiatives was a consequence of the
decision of the French education administration to create a CS class in
the last year in the science grade in high-schools in France. Due to the
lack of teachers in CS, some universities offered such a training for the
wanna-be CS teachers.

Benjamin discussed the difficulties that they had during the training
(organizational, methodological etc...) and spoke a bit about the
continuation of the program. He was a bit skeptic about the way it is
organized and about the final benefice for the teachers. The
administration decided for the next year to substitute the (around) 240
hours of training with a 60 hours online training. For Benjamin it was
quiet scarce -- he sad that this year in 240H they just managed to give
them the absolutely necessary basics and that with less than that, the
success of such a training is highly suspicious.

The next talk was one by Thierry Stoehr. He is involved with the promotion
of Free Software technologies in his university (Paris 7). He is also a
CEO of the Center for Free Software Training (Centre de Formation aux
Logiciels Libres -- CF2L), a public structure which goal is to provide
training on FLOSS technologies to the employees of the universities of the
Paris region --
administrative workers and teachers/researchers. The center is open for
more than a year now and offers training courses in different technologies
-- Mozilla (Firefox, Thunderbird), Libre/Open Office, LaTeX, Gimp,
Inkscape etc... They also offer on demand training if sufficient number of
people want to be trained on given technology.

His speech was mainly on the FLOSS technologies used in his university.

The next one was a talk by Olivier Ricou -- a member of the EPITA, on of
the famous "Ecole d'ingénieurs" in France. He gave us a feed-back of his
involvement with the Francophone Open School (Ecole ouverte Francophone --
EOF) and the OpenSE program.

Finally Albert Cohen put an end of the Educational panel with a
presentation of his experience on an Android teaching and his idea to
create a Semester of Code program (SoC) inspired by the Google's Summer of
Code. His main wish is to have
more students involved in FLOSS development. His proposition is to
organize a Semester of Code in two flavors. For those who would like to
work on a FLOSS project and thus validate a course it would be possible to
choose a not-so-difficult projects from a list.  Otherwise for students
that wish to spend a whole semester to code on a full-time basis on FLOSS
they can do it
instead of their internship (mandatory in the last 3 years in French
universities).

The efforts of Albert for now are focused in finding people to work with
him on this initiative, to find companies that would like to provide some
grants to students that wish to work on FLOSS projects and to create a
web-site that would list FLOSS projects available to students.

You can find more information about the FOSSa conference on their web
site: http://fossa.inria.fr

For now not much of the slides are online, but I hope that more of them
would be made available.

Best Regards,
Ivaylo Ganchev