I have been in Canada now for about a month and a half, enough time to have got my bearings and to make some decisions about where I’m headed.
First off, let me say that it is good to be home. Home, I know, is a state of mind. While I lived in Oxford and London, I quickly settled on those locales as home. Because I really need to feel like home is where I’m living. Maybe that’s just me. I don’t function well with divided loyalties, the constant longing to be somewhere else, somewhere that isn’t here. I always want to be precisely where I am. And that’s why home is a moveable feast for me. So I can say again, with as many layers of meaning as you like – it’s good to be home.
Home is now Waterloo, Ontario. It is half of the Kitchener-Waterloo conurbation. The Waterloo half has two universities (University of Waterloo and Wilfrid Laurier University), the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics, Research In Motion (RIM), an excellent repertory cinema – The Princess and its sister cinema The Princess Twin, and enough Tim Hortons coffee shops to make me think I might be back in Hamilton again. It’s a nice town. It has a thriving Uptown area of shops, an excellent public library, a vibrant arts and music scene with plenty of free festivals throughout the summer, and a scattering of parks and cycle routes. All this and yet mere minutes drive to some of the most lovely countryside in the province, complete with an industrious Mennonite community about which I have much to learn.
There is a bit of an open source and free software community in the region. For example, I’ve already been to a meeting of the Kitchener-Waterloo Linux Users Group (KWLUG). But with plenty of universities within a short drive (e.g. the University of Toronto is only 90 minutes drive away) there are numerous opportunities for those with a background in open source development, free software deployment, and a bit of drive and determination. Even RIM periodically advertises for individuals with open source experience.
What there isn’t is anything like OSS Watch. Indeed there isn’t anything like the numerous significant advocacy groups that I knew in the UK. Maybe I just haven’t found them yet, but if I haven’t then they are well hidden.
What there is, however, is oodles of potential and buckets of opportunity. It’s a cliché, I know, but everyone here in Canada has been ever so nice. You get the impression that if you put forward a good idea, there will be lots of hands to help out straight away. It’s a place where community isn’t just a word.
And finally a word for family. I’ve seen more of my family (parents, sisters, nieces, nephews, etc.) in the past month than I have in the past 10 years combined. And that turns out to be a good thing too.
It’s nice to be home.