Everything CUSEC

This blog post is cross-posted from http://www.geekflex.net/2009/03/10/cusec-2009-retrospective-part-1-the-city/

This January marked the culmination of a year’s worth of hard work, as I was the co-chair of the Canadian University Software Engineering Conference (CUSEC). Throughout the organization process we had to make a lot of tough decisions. Overall, the conference was a huge success. Including our speakers and sponsors, we had over 400 people attending. The talks (I’m told) were amazing, and people felt inspired.

As with any large undertaking, some things we wanted to do inevitably got left out, and other things that we tried failed miserably. In this series of blog posts I want to share some of my experience from organizing CUSEC 2009. I’m not trying to defend the decisions that were made, but merely explaining the thoughts and reasoning behind them. The bottom line is that this was a learning experience for me, and I want to share what I’ve learned with you. I encourage you to discuss and leave constructive criticism in the comments.

This first installment is about why we hold CUSEC in Montreal.

You may have noticed that each year, with only one exception in 2005, CUSEC has been held in Montreal. I often get asked why we don’t move CUSEC around, specifically I’ve heard the question “Why not Toronto?” at least twice each year for as long as I can remember. There are a number of reasons we keep CUSEC firmly planted in Montreal, and why we will continue to do so for the foreseeable future.

The first reason is student density. Montreal has more post-secondary students per capita than any other major city in North America ¹. This includes four major engineering schools each with Software Engineering programs: Concordia, McGill, École de Technologie Supérieur, and École Polytechnique. Concordia alone sends more delegates than any other school, with over 70 students each year.

The second reason is that Montreal is fun, and it most certainly has that reputation. To the students coming from quieter university towns, CUSEC is a good excuse to come to Montreal and party. The one year CUSEC was held in Ottawa, attendance dropped tremendously, and the increased cost of transportation and lodging was enough to discourage Concordians from coming out in their usual numbers. The fact that CUSEC includes a trip to Montreal is actually a very big draw for a lot of students, and a lot of them like to take the time to tour the city while they’re out here.

Then there’s real reason we keep CUSEC in Montreal: The legal drinking age in Quebec is 18. If we were to host the conference in Ontario, a significant portion of potential delegates wouldn’t bother to attend — especially those students are still 18 years old and hail from Quebec. Why would they travel to spend a weekend at a conference and be forced to skip the inevitable parties?

CUSEC is primarily an educational conference, and it always will be. However, even though the main focus of the conference is on content, we take the fun factor very seriously. I strongly believe that you will learn more from sitting down and having a beer with one of our keynote speakers than you would from being lectured at. That’s why the pub night has become such a tradition. I would feel terrible for anyone who had to miss out on a social event like that simply because they were underage. It’s also a fantastic opportunity to meet and network and socialize with students from other schools (and something I don’t think we did a great job with this year, but more on that in a future post).