SkyCon Computer Society Best Society Event SkyCon Computer Society

Overview SkyCon was organized to celebrate the 15th Anniversary of the UL Computer Society. The 25 speakers flew a total of 100,000 miles speaking on all topics from laptops to server clusters to mobile network to the social side of software development. Over 100 people attended the event, from UL, Ireland and abroad.

Background Planning started in April 2006 and the event came to fruition 10 months later: last February. SkyNet wanted to bring together world renowned open source and computing gurus to UL, to be at the hub of the open source movement and to demonstrate our involvement in the open source community.

The Event During the days, some of the talks included the following: Psychology of Kernel Developers Electronic Voting in Ireland Social Engineering: How to Herd Cats and Influence People Linux on Laptops "But I don't code" (non-programmers) Future of Mobile Internet In the evenings, attendees, speakers, and present and past committee members socialised over dinner and drinks.

Conclusion SkyNet brought together the founding members of the Computer Society to show them how far their society has come over the 15 years. SkyCon has brought our society into the open source world, bringing renowned people in this field to UL so anyone and everyone could learn together and benefit from the social networking experience.

Conclusion SkyCon provided excellent opportunities for students to get a glimpse of their future careers and employers: with companies such as HEAnet, Red Hat, Microsoft, Intel, Ericsson and Google. SkyCon resulted in our admin team receiving training opportunities and certification from Red Hat. Only for the hard work and help from C&S, the UL staff, our sponsors, and especially Laura Czajkowski (president) and Cian Davis (VP), who without which, this event would not have been possible.