SWH Community Day
I have mix feelings about Paris. In general, I go there to work, so for different reasons, I never managed to enjoy the city. This time has been no different, or almost. I went to Paris to attend to the Software Heritage Community Day on Jan 31st and the Symposium the following day, as a pre- FOSDEM trip. I spent half a day sightseeing around Paris in an unusually nice winter day.
This has been my first experience at a SwH event. I became Ambassador of this organization earlier this year therefor, this event was a great opportunity to meet other ambassadors, SwH contributors and staff. The SwH Community Day was well organized, including a professional facilitator, who helped to keep everyone focused and productive. We went through several activities where we needed to listen at each other, discuss and reach out agreements. In addition, there were several workshops planned. We all had lunch together in a food market close by. It was overall an interesting and productive day.
The SwH Ambassadors program is structured in verticals. I am assigned to the industry one. My initial goal as ambassador has been to build use cases that the communication team can create collateral from. I organised one of the workshops during this edition’s Community Day, which I focused on building use cases for the SwH archive to be used in commercial environments. The workshop intended to show the methodology I am following to create those use cases, so SwH staff and other fellow ambassadors can collaborate in this common goal. I am really happy about the energy and the results we got. The preparation work paid off and we managed to define the backbone of three use cases.
SwH SYMPOSIUM
The Symposium took place at the Unesco HQ in Paris. The introduction of the Symposium was done by Marielza Oliveira, Director Communications and Information – Division for Digital Inclusion, Policies and Transformation, UNESCO, Gilles Matthieu, representative, French Ministry of Research and Higher Education, Jean-Frédéric Gerbeau, Inria Deputy CEO for Science, India and finally, Roberto Di Cosmo, SwH CEO. There were interesting dissertations and statements related with open science and the essential role that SwH plays in promoting it at scale.
Two ideas cam immediately to my mind during this panel:
- The message of this panel is complementary with the popular campaign “Public money, public code ” from the FSFE.
- Another idea that came to my mind was the benefits of having SwH Archive mirror in countries like mine. Archiving and making all the source code available and consumable by anyone is a huge challenge, a matter of first class research. ENEA is hosting the first SwH mirror. More mirrors will be created in the coming years. It would be outstanding to see one or several institutions in Spain interested in hosting a SwH mirror, collaborating with the matrix organization, and other mirror hosting organizations, in research activities.
In this 2024 edition of the SwH Symposium, the program included some technical content which were very well received. Mixing such content with presentations and panels focused to a wider audience is always a good idea. In this case the presentations were about the SwH History Graph, including its transition from Java to Rust, and the BigCode Project, a project that is building LLMs for coding in a collaborative way. The datasets used to train this models were created by BigCode from the SwH’s archive, using source code permissive license only, making them popular very soon among AI research projects. Such datasets were released and published by the project and a community has raised around them.
FOSDEM 2024
I arrived on Friday Feb. 2nd to Brussels by train from Paris. The weather was good for FOSDEM standards which allowed me to walk around more than usual. I invested that first afternoon working with Bitergians on Delivery Performance Analytics, in a relax environment. We had dinner together and the night ended with waffles, a FOSDEM tradition among Bitergians. This has been my first FOSDEM attendance as independent consultant so most of my conversations has been about what I am currently doing. It has been a very different event for me compared with previous editions. I am still adapting to this new role.
I spent the morning of the second day (Sunday) at the SB0M track. The room had no ventilation so it was impossible for me to stay for long. The talks I attended to were short and to the point. I liked the format.
I learnt about the current state of OpenRail Association, I could chat with several of my former colleagues at Eclipse Foundation, I attended on Saturday night to the Embedded Automotive track dinner, were I could chat with former colleagues and fellow contributors on different projects I have been involved with, I chatted there with several open source enthusiasts from Málaga and the Canary Islands, I had lots of interesting conversations with people involved in different projects and organizations, ah, and I managed to buy a FOSDEM T-shirt.
I passed by most, if not all, the booths. The AGL booth was very busy which is good to see. The KDE booth, which had no merchandising left when I arrived, included several cool devices showing Plasma Mobile and pre-released versions of Plasma 6. If you are into embedded, you have to pay attention to KDE.
Summary
In summary, it was a very busy week, as expected. After a year without attending to international events, it was good to be back. The farmer strikes did not affected me much, there were no delays on my flights and the weather was good for that time of the year.
I managed to talk to a lot of people about the new service I have been working on the the past few months, together with Bitergia, called Delivery Performance Analytics, as well as how I am going to help SCANOSS in the coming months to increase their involvement in different communities and ecosystems. I will write about this last topic in the coming weeks.
Thank you to the Software Heritage Symposium and Community Day event team for inviting me and to FOSDEM organisers for another great edition of this veteran event.
toscalix 