[FACIL] Salon du Logiciel Libre du Québec 2016 - Compte rendu (anglais)

[gabriel.cossette at gmail.com]

Recently, I attended Salon du Logiciel Libre du Québec (https://s2lq.com)  
organised by the APELL association (http://apell.ca). Here are my notes:

Blockchain
https://s2lq.com/Blockchain-revolution
The revolution is coming! Can lower infrastructure costs a lot (especially  
relevant to small/medium businesses). Traceability is difficult though and  
can be a showstopper for financial institutions. Virtual currency is a  
popular use case (e.g. Bitcoin) but many others too. E.g. contracts, energy  
sharing (e.g. solar energy pooling in a community), remote education  
(prevent reproduction of content, certify test results), etc.

Information and decision making management tool deployment in Quebec  
provincial department (Ministère du Travail, de l'Emploi et de la  
Solidarité sociale)
https://s2lq.com/MTESS
https://www.drupal.org Web OSS CMS was chosen to replace a 25-year terminal  
based information system, along with Apache Solr (search) and Piwik (usage  
analytics) OSS components. To be used by 3000 agents and with over 50 000  
pages of content. Quebec provincial departments must consider OSS options  
(it's in the law) and they were very glad to do so in that case. They  
compared SharePoint, WordPress, Typo3 and Drupal on over 200 criteria. PoC  
was done with WordPress and Drupal. They managed the code in Quebec  
provincial source code forge (https://www.forge.gouv.qc.ca). Single Sign-On  
was implemented between Linux and Windows servers. Project was completed in  
record time, DevOps fashion ;)

Archeology digital library for Quebec provincial department (Ministère de  
la Culture et des Communications du Québec)
https://s2lq.com/bibliotheque
The project was to evolve a traditional library (on-site access of physical  
material) to a fully digitized one (remote access of digital assets). The  
scanning of the documents (with OCR) was done by Quebec gov. shared  
services and the importation was done using CSV files. 10 000 reports, 6500  
plans, 2000 DVDs, 45 000 slides, 20 000 negatives, 731 booklets  
(archeological notes)... for a total of 2.2 TB (including index). They  
chose https://omeka.org platform because it was simple to use, fast,  
inexpensive to implement and because they didn't need workflow or rental  
support. PHP frontend with MariaDB database and Solr + Elasticsearch for  
search. Project took 11 months total = 8 for digitizing, 3 for deploying  
the Web platform. For the Web platform, they went sole source because the  
contract was less than 25 000$.

Open Source Software in Space (Canadian Space Agency)
https://s2lq.com/node/202
Regent L'Archeveque from CSA presented their relatively new OSS project:  
Apogy. Its purpose is to provide a generic environment for command and  
control of remote systems such as rovers, robots, machine vision and  
satellite systems. There is growing interest in this space (e.g. orbital  
systems, which are usually expensive, are getting increasingly used by  
private companies). The project is hosted by the Eclipse Foundation (they  
happen to have their HQ in Canada). So far, they received external  
contributions from universities and the European Space Agency.  
http://www.ghgsat.com reused Apogy in their greenhouse gas emissions  
detection project.

Personal note: It's an exciting project for students to work on and I think  
adding it to the https://maisonlogiciellibre.org initiative would attract  
more contributors :)

Geomatics Open Source Tools
https://s2lq.com/node/188
There's a lot of mature OSS tools in the geomatic world! One reason is  
because of established open standards (e.g. file formats). The "Centre de  
géomatique du Québec" (http://www.cgq.qc.ca) non-profit organization is  
using them heavily in projects. The http://www.osgeo.org initiative  
supports many popular OSS tools in this field. Apparently, QGIS desktop OSS  
covers about 95% of what the most popular proprietary software in this  
field does...

OSS project for a Meals-on-Wheels organization
https://s2lq.com/Santropol
http://santropolroulant.org is a popular Meals-on-Wheels organization in  
Montreal and they decided, with Savoir-Faire Linux, to collaboratively  
develop an OSS Web application that can help organizations to plan and  
deliver meals, and to manage clients files: Sous-chef  
(https://github.com/savoirfairelinux/sous-chef). The first final version  
should be ready this month. They expect it to have a significant impact in  
other similar organizations.

Linux-Meetup
https://www.meetup.com/Linux-Montreal/events/233890727/
After the conference, there was a Linux-Meetup led my Martial Bigras,  
longtime leader (it was the 13th year anniversary!) of these regular  
informal gatherings (every first Monday of the month). It was opened to  
everyone, including people who didn't attend the conference.

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Overall, I really enjoyed the conference and learned a lot on the latest  
OSS projects and trends. One thing I noticed is that, compared with  
previous editions of the conference, there were even more sessions led  
by "non-IT" professionals like lawyers, economists, etc. This is a good  
sign for the industry :)


Gabriel Cossette

Conseiller technique, Architecture d’entreprise
Services partagés Canada / Gouvernement du Canada
gabriel.cossette at canada.ca / Tél. : 418 254-8558

Technical Advisor, Enterprise Architecture
Shared Services Canada / Government of Canada
gabriel.cossette at canada.ca / Tel: 418 254-8558
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