It’s been a few days since BrainShare 2008 wound up, and I thought I’d try to put up a quick summary of the event for those in the community who didn’t have the opportunity to attend this year.

Now, BrainShare isn’t an open source “community” show per se — it’s primarily about Novell’s enterprise products and partners, and lots and lots of sessions for Novell’s customers to dig in and learn about various technologies from Novell and its partners.

However, there was still a fair amount of interest in openSUSE at the counter in the Technology Lab, and the two sessions Adrian Schroeter and I did on KDE4 were fairly well attended. The openSUSE booth was primarily staffed by Adrian and Martin Lasarsch this year, and they did a great job of answering questions about openSUSE and the openSUSE Build Service.

Thanks much to Will Stephenson for putting the KDE4 presentation together — sorry you couldn’t attend, Will, I hope you’ll be there next year! (Will proposed the session in the first place…)

In general, in the tech lab and away from the tech lab, I found that a lot of BrainShare attendees were very interested in openSUSE and understanding how openSUSE relates to Novell’s enterprise products. The simple elevator pitch I settled on for those brief conversations is that openSUSE is the foundation for Novell’s enterprise Linux. Or, as Josh Dorfman likes to say “openSUSE is the lifeblood of SUSE Linux Enterprise.” Also found a lot of people within Novell who are interested in helping openSUSE, which is quite encouraging.

BrainShare from the inside

So, this was my first BrainShare as a Novell employee — I attended in 2006 as press, but seeing it from behind the scenes is something else entirely. Like a lot of week-long conferences, if you’re going to attend BrainShare (as an employee, attendee, or partner) plan to get plenty of rest before and after the event.

If you try to do even two-thirds of the stuff on the agenda, plus going out in the evening with other attendees and to the sponsored events (like the Collective Soul concert Novell hosted at the Energy Solutions Arena Wednesday night…) you’re going to be pretty well wiped out by the end of the week.

Hack Week keynote

My big focus while at BrainShare was putting together the Hack Week portion of the keynote for Friday. Novell has a tradition of displaying new technology and such on Friday, and a lot of attendees seem to really look forward to that part of the show. It’s also a little more casual than the Monday and Wednesday sessions.

I definitely owe Guy Lunardi a big thanks for his help putting together the Hack Week presentation, and a big thanks to all the presenters who did demos:

• Srinivasa Ragavan and Rob Luhrs — who did the Evolution and Teaming + Conferencing demo (Srini came all the way from India to show off his work from Hack Week, integrating Evolution and Teaming+Conferencing.)
• Frank Rego and Ranjan Gupta — They demoed some work Novell is doing on embedded virtualization.
• Boyd Timothy and Calvin Gaisford — Boyd and Calvin showed off Tasque and some integration with Giver and Tomboy.
• Guy Lunardi and Brady Anderson — they did the “threefer” demo, with OpenOffice.org improvements, GNOME Conduit, and a look at Banshee 1.0 that included some very last-minute improvements courtesy of Aaron Bockover.

You can find some awesome pictures from BrainShare Friday on Eric Ward’s photo set on Flickr. I wish my pictures turned out as well as his… great stuff.

I was pleased that the demos went off without a hitch during the Friday keynote. Also, a little surprised since at least one demo would blow up each time we’d rehearse… of course, that’s why it worked during the live show — if the demos had functioned properly during rehearsals, everything would have suffered from massive fail during the show.

Now, what the BrainShare attendees didn’t see is all the work that went on behind the scenes to prep for the keynotes. For example, for Friday’s demos we started talking about and planning the demos in late February. We had help from a number of people like Scott Hayes, Janice Hill, Mike Morgan, and Troy Monney to organize the demos, prepare all the slides and help us with staging… they worked some long hours before and during BrainShare to make sure that the show went off without a hitch.

I have to say, I thought it was a really good show, and I’m looking forward to having more time to plan for BrainShare 2009.

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