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.

If you’re wondering where everybody has gone this week, it’s probably Portland, Oregon, where O’Reilly is holding its 10th Open Source Convention (OSCON).

This will be my third year attending OSCON, my first as an exhibitor rather than as a reporter. I’m going to be doing one talk (on openSUSE, natch), moderating a panel on “The Evolution of Community,” and hanging out at the openSUSE booth quite a lot.

OSCON is one of the bigger gatherings of open source folks, and it’s always a lot of fun. Plus, Portland is a fun city to visit, not least of which because it’s home to Powell’s book store, the largest independent new and used book store in the world. If you’re in the Portland area for OSCON (or any other reason) I heartily recommend dropping by Powell’s if you have a couple of hours to kill, some money to burn, and extra room in your carry-ons. (That last one is vitally important…)

If you’re at OSCON, you also won’t want to miss Nat Friedman’s talk “The Future of Linux is Software Appliances,” Joseph Hill’s talk on writing Rich Internet Applications with Moonlight, and Brent McConnell’s presentation on Kablink, “The New Architecture of Collaboration.”

See you at OSCON!

OK, “summer tour,” might be stretching it a bit, but it sounded nice in the headline. However, we’re going to be out and about this summer and the next two events are OSCON and LinuxWorld Expo in Portland, Oregon, and San Francisco, California, respectively.

We’ll have booths at both shows, and we’ll be doing the openSUSE Day at LWE, with a ton of great talks and openSUSE 11.0 DVDs, some door prizes not to be missed, and lots of fun in general. We’d love to see an enormous crowd at LWE, so bring your friends, family, co-workers, ameniable strangers… you get the idea.

This is a bit of a coincidence… I’m prepping to do a presentation over the phone/Web in a few minutes and ran across this post by Ross Brunson on the SUSE Linux Enterprise in the Americas blog about “12 tools for kick-ass Web meetings.”

The only problem is, most if not all of the tools are not open source or even necessarily compatible with Linux.

I’d like to be able to do more multimedia presentations for groups that I can’t meet in person, or at least can’t meet at a given date — and I think it’d be a good thing to have a list of online meeting tools for the openSUSE community in general.

I’m not just talking about IRC or IM — though those are very effective as well, and conference calls tend to be a bit lacking without some visual components.

So, I’m throwing this out to the lazyweb: What kind of online conference/collaboration tools do we have available for Linux users that might make it easy to meet and collaborate online? I’m thinking of tools that are useful for one-to-many conversations (presenations) and many-to-many collaboration sessions. Bonus points for tools that are located in the openSUSE repos…

It’s Freitag already? I’ve been in Berlin since Tuesday evening, and busy with LinuxTag since then. The first two days of LinuxTag have been a lot of fun and really interesting. We’ve had a lot of traffic in the openSUSE booth, and I’ve been walking around and talking with some of the people from other projects and companies. The booth directly next to us is full of embedded Linux projects, including some motorized critters that look like fun to play with. In back, we’ve got the JackLab booth, so we’ve been getting some interesting music to accompany the openSUSE discussions…

Martin Lasarsch did a great job planning for the show and getting everything set up. It’s a shame the car was too full of swag for me to ride with him to Berlin… the train ride was great, though. Had a great talk with Robert Lihm, who speaks English, German, and Czech, about language.

Spent some time talking with Max Spevack about how openSUSE and Fedora might work together and about a few projects that are also underway (like using Smolt with openSUSE as well). Also wanted to give Max a look at Zypper, but the network didn’t want to cooperate… Zypper’s blinding speed was, sadly, foiled by an uncooperative network. (It doesn’t matter how fast package management works if you can’t, you know, actually download the packages. Don’t get me started on show networks…

The downside to shows, of course, is that you usually just see the hotel and show facility, and not much of the city where the show is being held. That’s a shame, because Berlin looks really interesting, and I wish I had some time to go out and explore the city a little bit more. From what little I’ve seen of Berlin so far, it looks like a really cool city.

But, I’ve been having plenty of fun and interesting conversations here at the show, and I really enjoy being able to talk to openSUSE contributors and users in person rather than on the phone, via email and IRC. Until they perfect a “beer over IP” protocol, shows are still much more fun…

Tomorrow, we have a full schedule of openSUSE sessions starting at 10:00 a.m. Martin Lasarsch will start off the day with the “state of openSUSE,” and then I’ll be up to talk about some of the things coming up in 2008 and 2009, plus a look at openSUSE 11.0 with Stephan Kulow.

Adrian Schroeter will be giving a presentation on the openSUSE Build Service, Henne will be covering multimedia with openSUSE, Beineri will be talking about KDE4, and we’ll also have talks on Wine and virtualizing Mac OS X on openSUSE.

And, of course, the openSUSE booth has demos of 11.0 and we’d be happy to show off the new features and answer questions about openSUSE 11.0 and the openSUSE Project. Or just stop by to say hello and let us know what you think about openSUSE!

Now I’m off to see Nat’s keynote… should be very interesting.

I’m at the Nuremberg office today, getting set to head to Berlin tomorrow for LinuxTag. This will be my first LinuxTag, so I’m pretty psyched about the show — I’ve heard about LinuxTag for years, so I think it’s pretty exciting to finally have a chance to see what all the fuss is about.

Don’t forget that, in addition to the booth at LinuxTag, we also have an openSUSE Day at LinuxTag on Saturday. We have some excellent talks — Adrian will be discussing the build service, Stephan Binner is going to be talking about KDE4, Henne Vogel is going to be talking about Multimedia with openSUSE, and quite a bit more — be sure to eyeball the schedule on the LinuxTag page to make sure you don’t miss something good!

And, of course, we will be at the openSUSE booth each day at LinuxTag, giving sneak peeks at openSUSE 11.0, so please be sure to drop by and say hello!

The FOSSCamp idea is, from one angle, fairly dicey — you take a bunch of people interested in topics that are generally similar (in this case, free and open source software), mix well, and allow them to come up with an agenda that’s their own and which will (one hopes) be productive.

I’ve always been an advocate of a strong “hallway track” for shows — i.e., ample opportunity for attendees to mix it up outside of a structured set of sessions. I’ve been to too many shows where you start to feel like a hamster on a wheel — too busy running from one session to the next to actually stop, breathe, and chat with the other attendees and presenters.

Yes, it’s wonderful to listen to experts talk about the topics they are expert in, but one can only stand so much being talked at without any time to talk with people. At least that’s true for me — maybe I’m just scarred from too many years in college.

But FOSSCamp is essentially all hallway track, right? Maybe that is pushing it a bit too far in the other direction.

In some cases, that might be true. However, it seems that this FOSSCamp managed to get the balance right. I attended several sessions that seemed very useful — including one where the original session didn’t happen due to the session leader not showing up, so we eventually just wound up having a discussion (mostly) about communication between projects, how best to provide software to a community for testing (I admit it, I couldn’t help slipping in several plugs for the openSUSE Build Service here…), and the best ways to credit other projects for work included in a distro (for example, the need for acknowledging where features come from, and how best to give credit).

So, big bonus for the FOSSCamp model of allowing attendees to build their own conference — this works when the attendees are motivated to be involved and share knowledge.

(In the interest of giving credit, I should mention that FOSSCamp was sponsored by Canonical/Ubuntu, prior to their developer summit this week.)

We also had good planned sessions Saturday morning around Packagekit and Saturday afternoon around distro collaboration. There were also good sessions on Friday, but I think Saturday was the better day — after all involved had one day to get acquainted and (for me) a day to overcome jet lag a bit.

In general, I think the FOSSCamp model is a really good one. I’d like to see more conferences have at least one FOSSCamp style day — probably best if served up in the middle of the conference so that attendees have an opportunity to get settled, get acquainted a bit, and confer a bit on what sessions most people might benefit from/like to attend.

Getting ready to head to Europe for a couple of exciting events: FOSSCamp Prague and LinuxTag. FOSSCamp is Friday and Saturday, at the Corinthia Towers Hotel in Prague.

LinuxTag will be at the end of the month in Berlin, at Messehalle Funkturm. I’ve never been to LinuxTag or a FOSSCamp, so I’m really looking forward to these events — I’ve been hearing about LinuxTag for years, so I can’t wait to see what it’s like in person.

As always, I’m going to be looking to spread the word about openSUSE and meet as many openSUSE users and contributors (as well as potential users) as I can. If you’re at LinuxTag, be sure to drop by the openSUSE booth and say hello. There’s no booth at FOSSCamp, but I suspect it won’t be too hard to spot me at the event, or one of the other openSUSE folks who will be there.

It takes a pretty good event to make it worthwhile to cross the country to attend, but LinuxFest Northwest lived up to the challenge this weekend. The last time I made the trek to Seattle it was to see Robyn Hitchcock and the Venus 3 at the Crocodile Cafe, and I have to say that LFNW was almost as much fun — but it lacked Peter Buck on guitar.

LinuxFest Northwest took place at the Bellingham Technical College in Bellingham, Washington — which is about an hour and a half from Seattle, assuming traffic is good. Apparently, that’s a faulty assumption, though, as it took me about an hour and a half just to get a few miles out of Seattle on Friday after I landed at the Seattle-Tacoma airport.

But it was well worth the trip. I had a chance to meet a lot of Linux users — and openSUSE users in particular. Dave Herman, Wesley Taylor, and James Mason showed up to help staff the openSUSE booth, as well as Novell’s Frank Rego.

Thanks to Dave, Wes, and James the booth was very well covered during the entire fest — I hope we can continue to draw great volunteers like them at other shows.

I was impressed by the number of attendees that showed up for LFNW this year — the “official” count is, I think, about 750 people — but that is only based on the number of people who came by and took a schedule each day, which is sort of a lossy measure for the number of attendees. I am pretty sure the actual number is closer to 1,000 or more attendees.

The show was chock full of awesome — there were plenty of sessions going on most of the time, the exhibit floor was laid out really well so that people had plenty of space to get around and see the various vendors and projects exhibiting at the show. The organizers also leveraged the location, and had the culinary students at the college put on a nice salmon BBQ on Saturday that was very good — and absolutely stellar when compared to the standard convention food.

The facility is excellent for the fest — it has plenty of classrooms that are well suited for technical presentations. The location is very nice as well — and Bellingham is an inexpensive city to travel to, though it is a bit of a haul from Seattle.

The crowd that showed up for LFNW was really fun and I enjoyed meeting and talking to openSUSE community members and potential community members and users.

Sunday, at the end of the conference, we had a room to host a birds of a feather for openSUSE users — and I’m really pleased with the turnout, considering that it was the final slot of the day on the second day of the fest. (The turnout for Sunday was lighter than the first day, but still a good crowd.) We talked about a lot of interesting topics — pain points with openSUSE, what we could be doing better, and how to help promote openSUSE. I am really glad to see strong interest in promoting openSUSE by the community, and that so many people turned out to talk about openSUSE.

I’m really sorry that LFNW isn’t a longer show — the atmosphere of the show was really laid back and fun, and I had a lot of great conversations. I also really enjoyed meeting all of the fest organizers, and talking to them about how the show comes together and the tools that they use to organize the show. We also discussed how to spread those ideas, and you’ll be hearing more about that in the near future. There’s a lot of collective wisdom (and beer drinking, but mostly wisdom…) among the LFNW folks and other fest organizers I’ve been talking to over the past few years (notably the Ohio LinuxFest organizers and the SCALE group) that needs to be shared so that other groups can benefit from their experience.

Sitting in the Seattle-Tacoma airport now waiting for a flight, I’m wishing the weekend hadn’t flown by quite so quickly. I look forward to being here again next year.

Just a reminder, LinuxFest Northwest is this weekend in Bellingham, Washington. It should be a great fest, and I’m really looking forward to finally getting to check it out.

I’ll be speaking at the ‘fest, and so will fellow Novell employee Frank Rego. I’ll be talking about KDE4, Frank will be talking about the state of Mono. We’ll also have an openSUSE booth, manned by several local volunteers, myself, and Frank.

See you in Bellingham!