I can’t believe OSCON is over already. It seems like the week flew by, probably because there was almost zero downtime from the time I arrived in Portland until the time I went to the airport.

Tuesday we put up the booth. Well, to be completely accurate, Alexia and Kelli did most of the work, I “supervised” and provided helpful input in the form of “yeah, I think the counters look good there,” and actually installing openSUSE on the stock show machines we had at OSCON. Wednesday and Thursday were the exhibit days, and the openSUSE booth was continually busy — we gave away all of the openSUSE DVDs we had on hand (probably could have done with at least 100 more… which is a first, we usually have extras) and talked a lot about the new release.

Had our booth next to the Kablink guys, which was fun. I always enjoy hanging around with Brent, and I’m glad they had a chance to really show off their latest release with the new workflow features. I got a bit of a preview before the show, and it looks really good. (Also annoyed that it wasn’t around several years ago when I could have used the workflow features in publishing…)

Also spent some time talking to reporters, giving a talk about openSUSE, and moderating the “Evolution of Community” panel. The panel was awesome, we could have gone another hour easily, but the OSCON slots are tight. (The biggest downside of OSCON? The fact that you can’t possibly attend all the sessions you want to attend, and the slots are a bit on the short side with very little buffer between them. Usually just 5 minutes, which is just not enough time to get from point A to point B, especially if the session runs the slightest bit over — which they usually do!)

We discussed the various roles that community managers play, mistakes that companies make when interacting with the community, and whether it’s more difficult to be a community manager for a distro or for a single project. (It probably goes without saying that the distro community managers and single project community managers did not agree on this… :-))

Since I was moderating the panel, I didn’t really chime in too much on the answers, instead preferring to let Jono, Ross, John Mark, and Jeremy take the mic and give the benefit of their experience. I think it’d be good if we can continue the discussion on our respective blogs, though — and maybe rope a few more folks into the discussion. One thing’s for sure — things have changed over the past few years, and I’m sure they will continue to do so. Companies are taking their communities more seriously, and the communities can now communicate much more effectively with the the companies that interact with them.

Had a great time catching up with people that I only tend to see at conferences. As always, not enough time to have all the conversations I’d like to. Big thanks to Greg K-H for introducing us to Voodoo Donut. I was afraid I’d go through life without ever having seen a donut with breakfast cereal topping, but my life is now complete.

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