If you weren’t in Salt Lake City last week for the Utah Open Source Conference (UTOSC), you missed out big time! UTOSC was one heck of a community show, and it seemed like all who attended had a really good time.

I had a really good time at the conference. It drew, I’m guessing, about 500 people. Lots of students, and also a number of IT professionals that wanted to check out some of the talks. The traffic to the booth was steady, but because of the location of the exhibits (which was not chosen by the organizers, as I understand it, but by the school) it wasn’t heavy. However, we gave out hundreds of openSUSE DVDs, t-shirts, and some penguins as well.

The final day of the conference was “family day” — I think that was a great idea, and I saw a lot of people bringing their kids to the conference and handed out a lot of penguins to youngsters. Start ‘em on Linux young, that’s my motto. Or one of them, anyway.

On Friday afternoon, I had the opportunity to deliver the Friday keynote. It was my first time out with a new talk, “How to bootstrap a community,” which fit well with their theme of “HOWTO” for 2008.The video will be online at some point, but the gist of the talk can be boiled down into the following:

• Why a company might (or might not) want to attempt to build community around a project.
• Despite lots of enthralled attention paid to community management in IT, the concept of community is old as dirt — and we should remember that the idea of community is not new. It’s just new to businesses…
• It’s crucial for commercial interests and open source communities to work together for widespread adoption of open source.
• A well-functioning community takes a lot of work, and doesn’t happen quickly.
• Some of the things community managers do as part of the job. (Not just my experience, also some of the work done by other people I know that wear the community manager hat.)

I had a really good time doing the keynote, surprisingly enough. One of the organizers told me we had more than 200 people in the room, but less than 300. (I didn’t take the time to count…but I believe the room capacity was 300.) The audience was great — some terrific questions after the talk, and it went by (for me) in the blink of an eye. I finished with the talk and questions pretty much right at the one hour mark, which surprised me — it only felt like about 20 minutes.

Update: I meant to mention the first time around — spent quite a lot of time re-working my slides and decided to use the sexy Rochade transition that’s in OpenOffice.org 2.4… very, very nice. Got some oohs and aahs from the audience on that one, so a hat tip to the OO.org folks!

The UTOSC organizers were awesome — they worked their tails off to make UTOSC the best conference it could be. In particular, I’d like to thank Stephen Shaw for all his assistance with the openSUSE booth and our participation in UTOSC, Trevor Sharp, Clint Savage, and everyone else who helped put it together. I had some really good conversations with Clint and Trevor, albeit too short. Also had a chance to talk to fellow Novellites and openSUSE contributors, like Andrew Jorgensen and “crazy French” Hubert Figuere. Hub’s a really fun guy to talk to, even more fun than his blog.

I also spent some quality time talking to Paul Frields while at UTOSC. I think there’s a lot of room for Fedora and openSUSE to work together, not just on the “Dairy Council” idea I’ve had, but also with RPM and other shared infrastructure areas. (I’ll be blogging about the “Dairy Council” idea separately.)

I have a few pictures under my UTOSC set on Flickr. There’s also a UTOSC set on Flickr for the attendees at large. In particular, I love the one of Fedora’s Paul Frields in the Banshee t-shirt. (And somewhere in the blogosphere, there is no doubt a picture of me and Paul together, with me wearing a Fedora polo… I loved the puzzled looks and wide grins I got walking around UTOSC with that!)

So very glad I went to UTOSC. I’m really looking forward to UTOSC 2009. With the experience of two successful conferences under their belts, I think 2009 is going to be even better.

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