On 2011-02-06 Graham wrote:
On Friday 04 February 2011 07:11:33 Jos Poortvliet wrote:
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!
To get more people requires timely preparation, those of us that have to pay our own way, need to budget months ahead, get early bird registration and book flights ahead of time so we don't to pay full price, especially when we have to cross the Tasman
Call for papers is usually in July and Miniconf proposals around the same time We need people submitting papers and making commitments to be there so we can budget for the early bird regos in October and so we can gather resources.
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)
Is this our only point of difference, that's a bit sad! :/
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
Glad to see it was a success and it has been noticed at last by OpenSUSE. sorry I couldn't be there but my budget wouldn't stretch with only a month to pull together the couple of thousand dollars it would have cost me to go.
We need to prepare earlier, I should have made more noise about it than just putting it up on the events list. I shall make a point of it for next year.
I see that LCA2012 is in Ballarat, let's make our presence felt there.
+100 Was unfortunate that you couldn't make it, would've loved to meet you :D Cheers, Jos
Cheers GL