-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 Kevin Donnelly wrote:
On Friday 13 January 2006 18:49, Christoph Thiel wrote:
The openSUSE project will be participating at FOSDEM with an openSUSE 'DevRoom' (Developer Room) and a small booth. This week we had a meeting to further coordinate our FOSDEM participance. The outcome is a tentative schedule for the DevRoom, which we would like to share with you.
Gosh - this program in itself is making me think it would be worth going there. It's particularly interesting to see the various talks on package building, which I would like to start doing, but don't know where to begin. Well done on this.
Note that there is a *LOT* more to see at FOSDEM.
More particularely, it's _the_ place to be to meet fellow FOSS activists, developers, project
leaders, get to see many interesting talks and projects, meet a lot of people.
It's really every year's favourite event for a lot of FOSS projects (such as Mozilla, KDE or the
various Free Java projects).
As far as openSUSE is concerned, the SUSE staff is really coming in numbers, so it's a great
occasion to get to meet the people behind our beloved distribution and, as I'm sure, have a lot of
very interesting discussions on several topics.
Unlike other events such as LinuxTag, the atmosphere is very relaxed, everyone is very accessible
and you can join into any development room.
For last year we had an estimated 2500 visitors over the weekend (although it's very difficult to
guess, given entrance is free), which is rather modest compared to LinuxTag and a few others, but we
really want to favour the quality of the talks that are only held by developers and project managers.
(BTW, I don't intend to bash other events, certainly not, it's just to explain why FOSDEM is so special)
I don't have the numbers for this year's edition as I don't have all the schedules yet (I manage the
devrooms & booths at FOSDEM), but last year we had 140 (!!) talks in the various devrooms alone,
throughout the weekend (1.5 days actually).
+ the 18 talks in the "main tracks" (this year: Security, Desktop, VoIP, Development, Systems, Web
2.0). And, as already mentioned, LPI organizes 4 exam sessions at a discounted rate of 50 EUR
instead of 100 USD, more information about that on the FOSDEM website.
Entrance/attendance is *free* for everyone. Of course, as Christoph mentioned, we gratefully accept
every donation and we do offer things in return (FOSDEM t-shirts, participation to a contest to win
various Linux/OSS magazine abos, O'Reilly books, ... - depending on the amount of money you donate
;)). Every contribution (even if it's just 5 EUR) helps keeping the event alive.
Although we have some sponsors (special thanks to O'Reilly), we're *very* careful of keeping that
event a place "by the community, for the community" and don't accept vendor/marketing talks like
those you get to see at other big Linux events. We don't want to have this event spoiled. And that's
what makes FOSDEM so unique. Last but not least: Brussels is a very nice place, not only for the beer ;)
What's a bit "special" about the openSUSE devroom is that all the talks are submitted and held by
the SUSE staff. The reason is pretty simple: noone has proposed something here ;)
And it's quite understandable: openSUSE is just getting started, involving us community members
takes some time and is going to gain a lot of speed with the release of the Build Server
infrastructure (which will probably be the main topic in the openSUSE devroom).
The next years at FOSDEM, I'm sure we'll have much more of a mix of talks held by SUSE staff _and_
by members of the openSUSE community. At the very least, that will be a good measuring point for the
health of the community (or the involvement thereof) of the openSUSE project.
Hope to see you at FOSDEM 2006 (we have a big room for openSUSE ;))
cheers
- --
-o) Pascal Bleser http://linux01.gwdg.de/~pbleser/
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