Our Vision

Improve lives with open source.

Our Mission

• Provide outreach related to open source technologies.
• Promote open standards and interoperability.
• Provide a vendor neutral and safe place for newcomers to learn.
• Record and share online videos of great lectures, presentations, and demos.
• Help people find gainful employment.
• Support open source communities, projects, foundations, and start ups.
• Help educators be more effective teaching using open source technologies.
• Help companies, communities, academics interested in open source to connect.

History

FOSSLC was founded in January 2008 in Ottawa, Canada. It began with an invitation from Andrew Ross to local Universities and Colleges to participate in a training bootcamp for new employees and interns. The invitation was accepted and support provided by Rowland Few from the Talent First Network based out of Carleton University. After up-sizing the room a few times, the first bootcamp had 75 people attend a 3 hour session.

Since 2008, FOSSLC has continued to grow. FOSSLC has now held dozens of events around the world. The videos served by FOSSLC have been viewed over 100,000 times. And web traffic to FOSSLC's site has passed 1/2 Million visitors per year - doubling roughly every 6 months.

In 2009, FOSSLC incorporated as a non-profit organization and began establishing local chapters. Alex Thiem established an incorporated chapter in Germany.

FOSSLC's relationships with other foundations, Universities, Colleges and others continued to develop leading to more events and partnering to record other great conferences such as OSGeo's FOSS4G, Seneca College's FSOSS, PGCon, BSDCan, Eclipse's democamps, and more.

In 2010, FOSSLC developed Freeseer, a portable presentation recording station. This software, licensed under the GPL license (v3) dropped the cost of recording presentations, demos, and lectures by well over an order of magnitude. This facilitated recording more content for a much more affordable rate.

FOSSLC continues to grow until this day. If you are interested in working with FOSSLC, please contact questions at fosslc dot org. Read What the heck is FOSSLC? for an update.