We are happy to share with you the news we received today: our proposal to present OSIS at FOSDEM was accepted! That’s the first time we present the project to the Open Source community, fortunately, in the most important free software conference in Europe.

Copyright Christophe Villeneuve, Mozilla

We are going to present our experience on the development of OSIS at Université catholique de Louvain (UCL). The presentation will take place in room H.2215, Ferrer (H) building at the ULB Solbosch Campus in Brussels, on Sunday, February 5th at 13h40.

We intend to share with the community the joy of building OSIS, the transition from proprietary to open source, the cultural and technical shift, the engagement of students, teachers and employees on the improvement of their own user experience, the costs implied and the productivity gains.

For us, offering a reusable system is not the only advantage of being open source. It also means:

  • fully transparent operations for the entire academic community;
  • inspiration for entrepreneurs to build integrated services to improve students academic experience;
  • empower departments, endowed with the necessary expertise, to fulfill their particular needs by extending OSIS;
  • build up students’ experience on real world projects to boost their chances when applying for a job; and
  • reduced maintenance cost for the University thanks to the range of reliable open source products required by the application.

Copyright Hildeberto Mendonça, UCL

But the path to open source was not simple. It required lots of discussions to finally find a realistic long term formula to meet the institution’s major goals. Now that it is our reality, this history cannot be kept aside, but shared with FOSDEM’s community. We are going to answer the following questions during the presentation:

  • Why we are sharing our core business applications before any other higher education institution.
  • How the academic community persuaded us to use Python/Django/PostgreSQL instead of JavaEE.
  • How we are adapting to this new reality that requires much more discipline and high quality craftsmanship work.
  • Why there is no doubt we will succeed in this entrepreneurship.
  • Why we need your help to better manage and write this open source software.

The presentation will be given by Hildeberto Mendonça, who is leading the team of developers at UCL. Hildeberto has a Ph.D in applied sciences and has been in the software development industry since 1998.

We have been participating as attendees over the years and we are glad to speak this time. The friendly and intellectual mindset of the community is a great source of motivation for free software users and contributors. We expect an active and challenging audience to push our ideas further and eventually gain more contributors and adopters. Looking forward to meet you there.