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==Preface==
FSOSS 2011 was the first time I had gone to any sort of software symposium or conference of any kind (okay actually well, that’s not entirely true; I had just gone to AndroidTO a day earlier, and that was my first software conference, but I was still very new to the whole thing!) In any case, I had no idea whatsoever what to expect from an event like this; I did not know whether the workshops and seminars would be interesting and relevant to me, a student still taking his first of many steps into the world of software development. Even if the topics were applicable to me, I remember asking myself, “What could I possibly learn from going to FSOSS?” Well, after attending workshops on Thursday and going to presentations on Friday, I can safely say that I wish I had the time to go to more presentations on Saturday! The learning experience, in my opinion, was far above and beyond what I was expecting.
In terms of presentations, I was able to attend four interesting presentations on Friday – the first was on Building a Commercial Game Using Processing.js for Cross-Platform Delivery; the second was titled “Site Building Extravaganza (using Drupal)”; the third was on Free and Open Source Strategy as Practice; the final presentation was on XB Pointstream and Rendering Point Clouds Using WebGL. While each presentation was an excellent experience, I found two of them to be particularly illuminating on the topic of open source in general: the presentation on Free and Open Source Strategy as Practice by Mekki MacAulay, and Site Building Extravaganza by Emma Jane Hogbin. I would like to take the opportunity to elaborate on my experiences with the two.