HELMo talk about Debian

About a month and a half ago, I got an email from someone studying at the HELMo institute for higher eduction in Liège, Belgium, inviting me to talk at their conference which was held today. In the email, they asked me to talk about "Debian and Open Source", which is such a wide subject that I could talk about it all day; and then they gave me 20 minutes to do it. So I picked "Debian", and focused a bit more on that, only to find out when I saw their schedule that they'd put "Open Source" there instead. Hrm. Oh well.

The talk itself went pretty good. I believe I managed a good balance between introducing Debian to those who've not heard of it before, and explaining to those who have, how this Debian thing works (or is supposed to work). The fact that the audience consisted of first- and second-year IT students made this easier (in case you were wondering: the third-year students, who're supposed to graduate at the end of this eyar, organized the thing). I got some interesting questions afterwards (which is always a good sign), and only positive comments as well (which is even better).

After me, Lionel Dricot held a talk which was titled "Pirate Party", but which could be summarized as his personal history into the open source world, followed by some parallels between the open source world and the pirate party.That, too, was an interesting talk, even if I'm not sure I'd vote for the pirate party (which isn't even possible in Mechelen, but ignoring that).

All in all, a nice use of my time.