The 9th Flourish! conference was held at the University of Illinois in Chicago (UIC) on April 1-2. During this time, I staffed the FreeBSD booth, gave a presentation about ZFS, and participated in the speaker panel.
This event is organized by UIC students and is free to attend. The ~300 attendees were a mix of students and technologists from the Chicago area. Chicago has a vibrant technology scene and many user groups ranging from LUG/UUGs, various programming language groups, and an IoT (Internet of Things) group, as well as several maker spaces. The conference was held over two days, with 2-3 concurrent presentation tracks and time between sessions to mingle in the expo area.
The ZFS talk was well attended and most attendees were either already using ZFS (usually with FreeNAS) or had heard of it before and were interested in learning more about it. There were many questions from the audience about various technical aspects of the file system.
The FreeBSD booth had the most interesting swag and was quite busy during breaks. Attendees came by to pick up Foundation pens, various stickers, informational brochures, and copies of PC-BSD and FreeNAS. While many were familiar with FreeNAS, most had not heard of PC-BSD or PFSense. Many of the students were interested in open source internships and had, surprisingly, never heard of Google’s Summer of Code. There were some interesting conversations about ZFS, the history of Unix, and what’s happening in Chicago with regards to open source.
The conference ended with a speaker panel consisting of 5 speakers. They fielded a wide variety of questions from the audience, ranging from how to get started in open source, how to encourage diversity within open source communities, how to get open source into middle school, high school, and college curriculums, and what safeguards are needed to prevent the Zombie apocalypse in a world comprised of self-driving cars.
If you are in the Chicago area (or interested in travelling there), I’d recommend watching for the Call for Papers for next year’s event as this conference is well worth attending either as an attendee or speaker. This year’s sessions were recorded and should be available online once they have been processed. The slides for the ZFS talk are available at http://www.slideshare.net/dlavigne/flourish16.
Dru Lavigne
Technical Documentation Specialist
