Episode: 592
Title: HPR0592: FOSScon: An interview with CrissiD and Charles
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr0592/hpr0592.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-07 23:37:47

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Hi everyone, this is Klai 2 and I'm at the Foscon event up in upstate New York and I'm
talking to Chrissy, one of the organizers of the event.
So Chrissy, how are you doing?
It's almost the end.
So how do you feel?
I feel good.
I mean, you know, first year off the ground, we definitely have learned a lot about what
we want to provide for the local area and the people in the community that we're really
trying to reach and kind of seeing what they are wanting us to provide for them.
And so that's been a real learning curve for us in this year's process and planning
and actually executing the day today, just learning a lot about that.
Overall, I mean, I think that people have really enjoyed the content, the speakers, you
know, people that have just come in, all of our speakers, man, I really am just so grateful
for them because they have traveled some from overseas all the way to here, just to be
here and give, you know, these talks to the people that come and enjoy it.
But we definitely are pumped, I mean, ready to start planning next year's event.
I mean, we're going home, take a week off, and we hit the ground running for next year.
So that's definitely like how we're feeling.
Yeah, no, cool.
I mean, it's been a great event.
The impression from the people here is that everyone's really, really enjoying all the
content and they're really, really getting a lot out of it.
So I mean, if that was the goal, then it was a great success.
What about, I'm just curious as to how many, what was the planning team?
I mean, how many people did you have working on putting this together?
Well, in various aspects, we had people just really, we divided up and conquered collectively.
We have, I'd say, a good solid core of maybe about 10 people that really took ownership
of different areas that we needed to just get going and, you know, we reached out for
people that had the knowledge and the experience to be able to do that and kind of show us, you
know, this is, you know, this is what I am thinking and this is what, you know, you want
to put that together and come up with something that can really work for what we have.
Half those, I mean, we have, I mean, a lot of people just that have come in and given
us ideas in the Foxconn channel on free note, I mean, we definitely have enjoyed retaining
the information.
It is becoming such a large following just online and talking about, you know, we'd like
to do this and we'd like to do this and we would like to see this, but this year definitely
has been interesting coming from, you know, all these people have helped us put this
thing on and just the support from the community, which is such a huge deal when you are a first
year conference and attempting to provide something to the software community to have that
backing has been really, really encouraging to the planning team and knowing that, you
know, people really do want this and that's what's happening here, but we definitely have
even have more people now who just keep wanting to add in and help and so it's never
growing community, which means our momentum is definitely building and so hopefully we'll
see even, you know, just a greater conference even next year.
I mean, we had such a good conference this year and just excited to see where we can go
in the future with everything.
Is Foxconn itself married to Rochester Institute of Technology in terms of location?
Are you going to be looking to have it elsewhere?
And either way, how did it end up in Rochester?
I'm just curious because as far as I know you and a lot of the other organizers don't
actually live in Rochester.
Right.
Well, we definitely love the area up here.
It has just a good community around here and the people that we would like to reach out
to and definitely get involved in the Fox community.
Rochester Institute came up.
We basically got together and talked about, you know, in the Northeast, if this is what
we want to provide, what are some key locations that would be conducive to hosting a conference
and not only that, but would kind of be a new place, a fresh place for people, you know,
we looked at doing in the bigger cities, in New York City and other areas like in the
dry state area, but you know, a lot of that is just really, really heavy duty.
So being a little bit out of there has been nice, but we definitely are in an area where
there's lots and lots of people to reach.
And I think that's a big, big key moment for us.
We are so grateful to RIT for just letting us use their facilities.
It's such a beautiful facility.
We definitely have enjoyed being here.
Yeah, we definitely hope to continue and see where it takes us from there.
Yeah, the location is beautiful.
I mean, the surrounding area, the drive up here for me was gorgeous.
So I was really happy actually to get a chance to come to upstate.
So the local community, do you feel that's one of your primary audiences?
Or are you hoping, I mean, I guess you're hoping, obviously, for people to come around as
well.
But I mean, is there a lot of local involvement with the planning and stuff?
From Rochester directly, I think we have about three people that were on the ground.
Definitely just hands on involvement with everything that needed to be taken care of here.
And then the rest of the team, you know, just collaborated with them as we went on and
on and on to produce what we, what we could make happen for this year.
But yeah, that's kind of how we just got connected with them and went on from there.
All right.
I mean, it's been a great vessel and I think you all for it and it's been a lot of fun.
Thanks for talking to me.
Oh, thank you.
I hope you guys come see us next year.
Hi, everyone.
This is Kwatu.
And I'm at Foscon.
Great, great, great event.
Upstate New York.
Beautiful.
Upstate New York.
And right now, I'm just chilling with Charles from, I think, the local Ubuntu community.
Is that Crack Charles?
Yep, I'm with the local Ubuntu community, actually the leader of the New York State
Ubuntu logo and also help organize the local log here.
So what part, because I know that you had some part in organizing all this, so what did
you do?
Well, the first step was someone made me aware on IRC that there was a group looking to
put on a regional Northeast Foscon.
And I went to the Wiki, went ahead and edited the Wiki and put in all of the great things
about Rochester, New York, highlighted the fact that we had Kodak and we had Xerox here.
And of course, RIT, which is where we are today.
Right.
Technical school, computer science oriented school, that also had some Fos programming going
on in their courses.
Cool.
And eventually, our site was selected.
And here we are.
What involved, are you involved at all with RIT, the Rochester Institute of Technology?
No, I'm kind of just a squatter at RIT, the Lou Gore, which is the Linux user's group
of Rochester.
They meet here at RIT, so that's my only real connection, other than that, I just live
in Rochester.
Yeah, I got the impression that a lot of attendees had some affiliation with Lou Gore or the
school, or both.
Yeah, I think most of them are going to be Lou Gore.
There's also a group in Rochester called Interlock, which is a hacker space, which I think
a lot of people are familiar with.
Of course, what you find out is a lot of the people that are involved in the open source
type groups, whether they be software groups or open community or open information.
A lot of the same members are in both groups, like a lot of the Lou Gore members are interlock
members, our Ubuntu logo members, etc.
Yeah, yeah, there's a lot of, I guess you could say, cross-pollination among all those
different kinds of interests.
Definitely.
So how's the Ubuntu community up here?
The Ubuntu community, I think, is pretty strong.
We're growing.
We just got approved last year as far as being an official logo.
And this is the New York State logo.
New York State logo.
Okay.
I think there's only a few logos that are actually city-based for Ubuntu and the United
States, and everything else is statewide.
So we have activity, a very large user-based in Rochester.
We've got some folks in Syracuse who put on events.
We've gone to New York State-wide educational events.
There's one here in Rochester.
There's one down in Ithaca called Ed Tech Day that we go to.
We're actually hoping to have our first install fest in conjunction with another group in
Ithaca.
Nice.
So we're trying to grow and expand and get the word out about open source and Ubuntu.
Okay.
Cool.
Stuff like that.
So how do you feel?
I mean, how did the festival go?
I think it went really well.
It's the first year, so it's not going to be something where it's huge, like something
that's established for five or six years.
I think the most amazing thing about this event is we didn't have any major vendors.
Lionode was a vendor that did actually paid.
Everyone else was pretty much an open source group.
So the members are not the members, but the attendees that paid, and it was a small
fee of $30.
Really demonstrated that principle that it's free about liberty, free about freedom,
not free as in beer.
They paid, and that's who enabled this convention to actually take place.
Yeah.
I mean, it was for $30, you get a day of really, really cool classes and talks.
Yeah.
I think there was a lot of good information.
An educational track, a business track, a really broke it up to make sure, if you're
interested in education, you're going to be going here, and then they had the two rooms
with workshops going on all day.
So there was a lot of activity, a lot of choices for people to choose from, and right now they're
wrapping up the day with lightning talks right before the keynote.
And I think it's a lot to say that we had Mel Chua from Fedora.
We had Luke Mackin from Red Hat, and we had George Castro from Ubuntu.
So we had some people here that did make the trip from Detroit, from Boston.
The furthest person away, I actually found out, originally, I thought it was the person
that came all the way from Scotland, but it was actually a person that came all the way
from Denmark.
It's Denmark's a little bit further from Scotland.
All right.
And they came all the way to Rochester from Denmark to be here, and they were actually
a speaker.
So I thought that was really, really good.
Yeah, that's really neat.
Yeah, I mean, it's been a great festival, so I mean, you can't tell you guys how much fun
I've had, and I've definitely gotten the same impression from all the other attendees.
You know, this has been really educational, and just kind of been all around fun, some
gig.
So, you know, just thanks to all you guys who put it together.
Well, you're welcome, and hopefully we'll have more people coming back next year, including
yourself.
I love it.
And we'll keep growing and make it bigger and better.
Yeah, cool.
All right.
Well, thanks for talking to me.
Thank you.
Thank you for listening to HACCLE public radio, HPR, sponsored by Carol.net, so head on
over to C-A-R-O dot-E-C for all of us in here.
