Hi all, I went to LCA ;-) Did blog about it - pictures can be found on my picasaweb: http://picasaweb.google.com/jospoortvliet/LCA2011Brisbane Event Report LCA 2011 * LCA 2011 happened from mon 24 to sat 29 of Januari 2011. * openSUSE Ambassadors: Jos Poortvliet, Tim Serong * Event Details o It is a well organized and quite professional conference. Biggest sponsors HP, IBM, Intel and Google. Budget about $700.000, entry fee from $60 to $600 (depending if you're student, hobbyist or professional and if you get early bird registration (50% off). There are about 1000 people there, mostly semi-regulars, few students. Most of them quite technical and experienced. o Arrived Tuesday night, Wednesday first day of the conference. o Was 'fairy penguin' sponsor (A$ 1500). This was noticed by a few people. o At professional networking meeting got to talk to a few people, got one in contact with Bretzn team to talk about payment systems for openSUSE's appstore and someone else on OBS. o Attended talks, among others by Red Hat/Fedora ppl Learned about Koji and how it is about 5 lightyears behind on OBS :D o Blogged daily about LCA & other stuff (blog aggregated on an LCA planet) and tweeted several times. Also linked with Facebook. o Got in contact with a few local (open)SUSE people, will work with them to set up more of a community in AU. o Realized many people want to spread openSUSE but don't know how. They used to have local Novell contacts but those disappeared (layoffs etc) and now they're stuck. I will try and get them motivated to become openSUSE ambassador. Need to expand our ambassador program, communicate it better and work with the local Novell/SUSE offices, integrate their work with local (open)SUSE people and the ambassador work! This is what Red Hat and Canonical do very well. o Spoke with keynote speaker Mark Pesce, will try to get him as keynote speaker for Desktop Summit (if not maybe suse conf!) o Had a meeting with Fedora Project Lead. We discussed cross-distro collaboration. There will be a discussion panel on that on FOSDEM lead by him and the Debian project lead, I will join them. o Gave a 90 second lightning talk (24 slides about SUSE Studio) during the closing ceremony which earned me a t-shirt (winner best lightningtalk). Resulted in ppl coming up to me all Saturday, both to compliment with talk and to say they would check out openSUSE and SUSE Studio again. o Held a booth on Saturday together with Tim, local Novell/SUSE employee. Answered many questions. o Created 1 A4 poster to get geeks' interest, gave away about 40 and used it in booth area o Gave away 150 DVD's, rest is with 2 local openSUSE ppl now. o This conference is certainly worth going to but needs more marketing materials and more people, a team! Common questions asked: openSUSE still alive? (answer: more than ever :D) Why would I use openSUSE and not XXXX? (because we're cool, see A4 poster) How is the takeover stuff doing for openSUSE? (see my interview with Jeff Hawn) I will put this in the wiki page of LCA 2011 too :D