On 2011-04-08 10:23:51 (+1000), Helen South <helen.south@opensuse.org> wrote:
Theme: What should be the theme of this year's conference? In yesterday's Project meeting on IRC it was expressed that we've already succeeded in using the collaboration theme and we should look beyond that for this coming event.
Perhaps it would be useful to return to an openSUSE-Centric theme and look at ways to strengthen openSUSE itself - find our unique qualities and tools and build on them. Also to identify weaknesses and target those. And looking at fundamentals of user experience, stability, security, integration, QA. Sometimes this stuff isn't as cool and funky as playing with new technologies, but like in good health, you can't neglect your basic diet and exercise!
Couldn't agree more. I'm the last one to complain about collaboration (I'm one of the organizers of FOSDEM and I'm the one who kickstarted the Cross-Distribution miniconference there after all ;)), especially across distributions, but I also believe that we need to keep a larger share of the time at the conference to concentrate on our own issues and initiatives. Isn't it a good occasion to present all our current projects and discuss them with peers, in order to 1) let the community (-> slideshare ;)) know what we're doing 2) collect some ideas, opinions and feedback ? Bretzn/appstream, connect, Build Service, webpin2, WebYast, zypp, security, marketing, ambassadors, tumbleweed, evergreen, studio, maintenance, factory, ... and that's really just off the top of my head in a couple of seconds. How about taking more time for those topics, time to present but also time to discuss, brainstorm, and potentially win active contributors for those projects. Make some tracks around our own projects. Or, to put it differently: more of a read/write conference than a read-only one. Theme: "rwxrwxrwx" (read, write and execute for the owner, the group, and the world ;)) Ok, "rwx³" is shorter ;) Starting from there, we could invite specific people who are working on projects that are, or could potentially be, of great interest to us (systemd, smolt, tomoyo, ...).
We've been making a lot of noise about our fantastic toolsets like OBS and projects like BRETZN which give a lot back to the community, and I "more than a distribution" is a catchphrase we have been using lately. It's good stuff..... But also at the heart of everything is a beautiful desktop distribution. I suggest a theme something like "I <3 openSUSE", with the focus on keeping the heart of openSUSE strong.
Why not. At FOSDEM 2010, our t-shirt design was "FOSDEM <3 me", so "openSUSE <3 me" would be a catchy option too :D cheers -- -o) Pascal Bleser /\\ http://opensuse.org -- we haz green _\_v http://fosdem.org -- we haz conf