Has it really been a week since the openSUSE conference kicked off? The time passed far too quickly!

Since I didn’t have a chance to participate in the “what I learned” lightning talks, I thought I’d write a few thoughts down on my blog. I’ve taken a few days to reflect on the conference while I was attending the Linux Foundation’s initial LinuxCon (more on that later).

As with any major event, I’m feeling glad that it’s behind me and it appears to have been quite successful. I’m also a bit sad that it was over so quickly and I didn’t have quite as much time as I wanted to talk to many of the contributors who attended. Of course, with more than 200 kick-ass people at the conference, it was impossible to spend much time with every openSUSE contributor I wanted to talk to in greater depth.

It was fantastic to meet so many people in person for the first time. Putting faces to names (or IRC nicks) was a lot of fun. Funny how people so rarely match up with the mental picture you form of them over a network connection!

No Network

The only consistent complaint I’ve heard about the conference was the lack of WiFi. We knew that would be missed, but unfortunately the choices were either no network or a very crappy network. We opted for no network so that the speakers could still have a wired connection for their presentations, if necessary, and a “email garden” where a limited number of connections were available.

I know that there’s quite a lot of withdrawl for contributors when they’re separated from email and so forth — and some sessions benefit from connectivity. However, in general, I think that the lack of network was additive to the conference rather than a problem. Seriously, it forced everyone at the conference to mix and talk to one another and give primary attention to the presentations and the people at the conf.

Over the last ten years, I’ve attended more conferences than I care to count. It’s been my experience that the better the network, the more likely it is you lose attention to whatever is on the other side of the network — be it Twitter, email, IRC, or whatever. Yes, it’s inconveient to be disconnected. But you don’t fly across the planet to do email — you go to meet with folks face to face.

To sum up: I think the advantages of focusing attention outweighed the problems associated with no WiFi network. Next time we do this we’ll probably have better acccess to a faster and more robust network. We need to think hard whether we want to utilize it, though.

Format

I think there was some skepticism around the BarCamp/unconference format prior to the conference, but it looks like the format proved very effective. For the most part, the unconf sessions and BoFs were booked solid and seemed to be very productive.

I wish I could have stayed Sunday for the lightning talks. I’ve seen the photos of the talks, but I would liked to have been there to see how well they went over.

The keynotes seemed to be well received, so we should probably look at doing something similar next time around. Maybe we should add more keynote slots? I’d love to hear suggestions for future keynotes.

Thanks!

The openSUSE Conference couldn’t have happened without a lot of hard work and planning. I’ve been involved in planning conferences before, but not as directly as this. I learned a lot in the process, which is to say that I had many assuptions about planning a conference that were corrected during the process of putting on the openSUSE Conference.

I’d like to thank (in no particular order) Michael Löffler, Alexia Henrie, Jacqueline Junghanns, Ulrike Beringer, Robert Lihm, Karl Cheney, Henne Vogelsang, Jan Blunck, the openSUSE Board and everyone else who volunteered their time and effort in organizing the conference. Each of you brought a great deal of energy, talent, and enthusiasm to this endeavor and it’s hard to overstate how important your contributions were to the project in general and the conference in particular.

I’d also like to thank our sponsors, B1 Systems, Linux Magazin, Aeroaccess, and (of course) Novell.

Finally, I’d like to thank all of the contributors who not only showed up, but jumped in with both feet and participated while having a lot of fun. Without you, none of the planning and organization would have made a difference. It was a distinct pleasure seeing so many openSUSE contributors together and getting to know one another. I have no doubt that we should do it again and again. Speaking of which…

Next Year

We don’t have an exact date for the next conference, but the current plan is to co-locate the next openSUSE Conference (we still need a snappier name!) alongside Brainshare Europe in May, 2010. We will publish additional details as soon as we have them.

And, of course, we’ll continue to attend and participate in other events like FOSDEM, LinuxTag, SCALE, and other important FOSS events.

The openSUSE Conference kicked off yesterday in Nuremberg. We had more than 150 people in attendance the first day, with Lenz Grimmer’s keynote on “Working in a virtual community” kicking things off.

Aside from the lack of network at the venue (something that, unfortunately, simply couldn’t be helped) things have been going amazingly well. Actually, the lack of network may have been a benefit in some cases because people have actually been talking to each other rather than just staring into their computers. But it’s also a challenge for some of the unconference sessions and so on, so we’ll be sure that the next event will have a rock-solid and beefy network.

Thursday was fantastic, we had great sessions and tons of great conversations. It’s been fun to meet community members I haven’t yet had a chance to meet in person, and catch up with all the contributors who’re attending. Thursday night’s party, pulled together by Henne and others, and sponsored by B1, was a blast. Great food (though a little less than we expected) and drinks (plenty), and fun. Thankfully, no dancing, but a great deal of fun.

Really impressed by the folks who’ve turned up — we have a great mix of Novell employees and community contributors, and the conversations and sessions have been very productive. It’s amazing what you can accomplish when you get people face to face.

Today, for example, we had an excellent session on openSUSE governance with stakeholders from pretty much every aspect of the project: Novell developers paid to work on openSUSE, developers paid to work on SUSE Linux Enterprise who have an interest in openSUSE, members of the openSUSE community, and the board. Note that nothing final was decided in the meeting so community members who were unable to attend the conference will have the opportunity to weigh in later.We took two hours to talk through some of the recent decisions and how decisions are made with the openSUSE Project, and how things should be done.

We have several tracks at the conference — two tracks of pre-planned discussions, two rooms for the “unconference” which have been consistently lively and full, and the “hallway” track. More on those later, but I wanted to say — if you haven’t made it over to the conference yet, you’re missing out. We still have two days of awesome and room for more.

Tomorrow we have the Open Day track, in German, for Software Freedom Day — new users more than welcome! Tell your friends, your family, even your enemies if they need to learn Linux.

It has been a year since the first-ever elections where the community voted in a new openSUSE Board. Replacing the bootstrap board selected by Novell, the Community elected, as its representatives, non-Novell employees Pascal Bleser and Bryen Yunashko and Novell employees Federico Mena-Quintero and Henne Vogelsang. In May, due to overwhelming work responsibilities, Federico stepped down and runner-up Stephen Shaw assumed his position. Michael Loeffler was appointed by Novell as Chairperson of the Board.

As agreed upon, prior to last year’s elections, the highest vote-getters in both Novell and non-Novell positions would assume a two-year term, and the second vote-getters would get a one-year term. This was a one-time arrangement, with the intention of ensuring there would be an election every year for half the electable board positions. As such, we will be holding elections again this year. All winners this year and subsequent elections will have a two-year term.

The Board has several announcements to make regarding the upcoming elections.

• The Board has recently agreed that as our community continues to grow, it is important that the diversity of voices of our community needs to be adequately represented and heard during Board discussions.  As such, we are adding a new elected non-Novell position to the Board, effective immediately with the next election. This position will also be for a two-year term. The new Board makeup will be two Novell employees, three non-Novell employees, and a Chairperson selected by Novell. The Board grows from 5 seats to 6 seats.

• As the number of openSUSE members has seen a strong increase over the last 12 months we won’t have the “Nomination of second voters” again.

• We are proud to see some returning members of last year’s Election Committee along with some newcomers. New members Kevin Dupuy, Sascha Manns, and Thomas Schmidt join returning members Claes Backstrom and Andrew Wafaa.

• The Election Committee has begun initial discussions and will make their own announcement in the near future regarding campaign guidelines and timelines.  With this, effectively all discussions, planning and announcements pertaining to the election will be handled by the Committee and the Board steps out of further election discussions.

At this time, the Board would like to remind you that only Members of the openSUSE Community are eligible to vote in the upcoming election. If you are not currently a member and have actively participated in the Project as a developer, packager, tester, advocate, evangelist, or some other form of active participation, we urge you to apply for membership at users.opensuse.org before the Election Committee’s announced deadline for application.

See you all in Nuremberg for the openSUSE Conference this week!

The SCALE folks are looking for a few good speakers. The 8th annual So Cal Linux Expo (SCALE) will be held in Los Angeles on February 19th through 21st, 2010. Once again, SCALE will be held at the Westin LAX, which is just minutes away from the airport.

If you’re thinking about speaking at SCALE, check out the Call for Papers here and be sure to submit your proposal by the deadline: December 15th.

We’re also going to be looking for local ambassadors to help run the openSUSE Booth at SCALE. If you’re interested, drop me an email or speak up on the openSUSE Marketing mailing list.